What if every decent person in the USA went for a walk in a hoodie?

Maybe we could have a campaign to wear hoodies in walks until the states with STAND YOUR GROUND laws backed down.

Sabrina and Dalyon

D, Z, & A

Charles Dickens should have been in the title of this piece on Simon Morley

Monday, December 26, 2011 reposted 19 March 2012
Simon Morley's review of THE POWELL PAPERS in TLS 11 November 2011
My luck with the London TLS has been pretty erratic. They gave FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS to a Scottish versifier who had no idea at all what it was about. Then in 1997 there was ecstatic praise of the first volume of the biography by a man who had stolen the Hayford-Parker textual lists from our Norton MOBY-DICK years before. The 1997 review was for sale in all the book stores and news stands in London while we were there working in the British Library at Colindale, so it made for good ID. Later reviews have been pretty perfunctory. TLS gave THE POWELL PAPERS to a grad student, Simon Morley, who did not take time to read it, as his errors show. He was a Gloomy Gus who had absolutely no sense of fun. A reader of his review would gain no sense of its structure and never guess that the book contains much new material on topics such as Powell’s precipitating an American national re-evaluation of Dickens and pushing Herman Melville toward defining himself against Washington Irving. In one chapter, newly discovered documents show just how mercilessly, in the lack of international copyright, the Harpers exalted their cheap serialized Dickens while arguing that American writers like Melville must be sacrificed for the “public good.” The reader of the review would not guess that four pages of the book are devoted to a small comic masterpiece, Thomas Butler Gunn’s satire of Powell in his 1873 Paul Gower, the existence of which I discovered in 2008. There “Mr. Bowles” (a scatological pun Robert Browning also employed) is “an Englishman of whom there existed a curious tradition in the ranks of New York journalism: namely, that he had involuntarily set to Mr. Dickens for the portrait of Wilkins Micawber, or rather supplied the raw material for that immortal character.”

I had hoped reviewers would be entranced by the informative rogues’ gallery of an Index which features such figures as Augustus W. Clason, Jr., who beat the Scottish-born editor of the Herald with a dog whip; Valorous P. Coolidge, the Waterville, Maine, physician who murdered young Edward Mathews then took pay for performing the autopsy on him; David Russell Lee, the diminutive, febrile English-born reporter on theatre and law; and John Andrew Jackson Neafie, the carpenter turned actor who played Othello and toured with Forrest. Had he read this highly enjoyable Index, Morley, instead of referring to “the American novelist Thomas Gunn,” might have identified Thomas Butler Gunn rightly as belonging to the bustling cadre of British-born journalists and artists who flourished in late 19th-century Manhattan. Despite Morley’s gloomy report, I would like to recommend the sparkling Index and the rest of The Powell Papers as a tonic for the dark winter to come as well as an early contribution to the celebration of Dickens’s bicentennial?

Another appeal to the Bandy family

Bandy Family of Perry, Tennessee 1830-1850
Notices on blogs like this one seem to produce results.

Does anyone know the parents of Annie Bandy [I think she was a Bandy] born in Perry Co. Tennessee 1823-1825 who became Annie Rogers or Rodgers and who in 1850 had living with her and her husband, John W. Rodgers or Rogers, a boy, George Bandy, 10; and also living with them Emily Cagle 10 and Nancy Cagle 40. When she and her husband, John W. Rogers or Rodgers, moved to Arkansas, they took young George Bandy with them; he was with them in 1860 in Franklin Arkansas.

Dharun Revi and Marc Bousquet; the Spy-Cam and the Blog affiliated with the Chronicle of Higher Education

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/censoring-mark-twains-ghost/30789

What follows is a note signed by "marcbousquet":
marcbousquet - January 5, 2011 at 12:17 pm

I for one welcome this edition–I wouldn’t describe this substitution as “censorship,” but more simply as “editing.” There’s room for lots of editions, especially in hypertext: one can provide dozens of different editions and toggle back and forth between them. I see no harm and much good in adding another edition to a work widely available in a variety of ways.

For perspective, consider the work of textual scholar Hershel Parker, whose romantic theory of editing has been applied under the imprimatur of many distinguished grant-funded projects. Believing that author’s revisions frequently represented pressured reconsiderations (concern about the public’s reaction, an editor, spouse or friend’s bad advice, etc), Parker often reversed authorial revision in an effort to reconstruct what he contended was the author’s inspired original intention. There were often many choices for Parker to revert to: multiple crossings out in a manuscript, multiple alterations in successive lifetime printings, etc: which was “right,” even by Parker’s loose standard? See Parker’s role in producing the text of the Library of America Melville edition, for example.

We give Parker millions to reconstruct what Melville would have published if his editor or friends hadn’t interfered. We happily watch performances of Shakespeare in altered or redacted language–there’s a whole essay in acting as translation here, even when the “original language” is used. We routinely expect the Supreme Court (ok, not this one!) to navigate “original language” for us. In the end, I think the best comparison to this kind of editorial work is translation: the editor is translating the work into a language in which aspects of the work can be better understood by some readers. As in all translations (and other editorial decisions, right down to typography), things are both lost and gained. Translation is additive; “censorship” is repressive.

End of quotation from marcbousquet.
That was last last year. We give Parker millions. I sacrificed myself on the Melville Project 1965-1968 for $9000 a year up to $9500 the next year (half the promised thousand) and $10,000!
What have we learned from the conviction of Dharun Ravi this week? Will reckless rough-riders of the Internet and the social media learn to discipline themselves on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, text messages, emails, and think twice about where they aim their webcams? Will the Chronicle of Higher Education think twice about what it is sponsoring? Dharun Ravi may, just may, go to jail.

Will the "Chronicle of Higher Education" ever be sorry it has been so very very trendy?

Robert Bales and William Calley

My first thought is that Robert Bales is not William Laws Calley.

My second thought is that maybe William Laws Calley was not William Laws Calley.

W managed not to go to Viet Nam and Obama was too young to go and neither one of them learned the lessons they should have learned.

Maybe we should have felt profoundest pity for Sergeant Calley while feeling all the emotions of horror and shame which we felt over the victims.

In 2012, it seems to me that any of us might have snapped after all that we should have learned from Viet Nam and after all that Bales had been subjected to.

How could we have let W get us into this and O keep us in it?

Robo-call just now offering a free ocean cruise

Is it true that ocean cruise ships are populated by people who can't find anywhere else except Vegas to smoke in every area, drink themselves into stupors in public, pig out on fattening foods, and spend money wildly?

What else am I missing out on?

Pride of Madeira

Hershel Parker and Ziah Packer

23 November 2000, on Bench up the Slope, with Stray Cat that had Hung Around for the Past 20 days

A picture of exhaustion. At 65, this week in 2000, the question was whether (while enduring surgeries and postponing others) I could revise the Norton Anthology of American Literature while completing the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick in time for the Sesquicentennial (and in time for Hayford to be able to hold a copy) and still have the energy left to complete the second volume of the Melville biography. This was not a sure thing--look at William Manchester's inability to complete the Churchill.

The stray cat, Scalini, is alive and well and in command. The other two are alive and well and obedient.

The Power of Fredson Bowers to Suppress Criticism

Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography ns 6.3&4 (1992), 216-217.

A&EB in the 1970s had a chance to print the MAGGIE article. My first letter correcting Bowers's false statements in A&EB (1988)was ignored. One day, clearing the decks, I, as a former Illinois student, professor, and taxpayer, wrote the the president of Northern Illinois University about my plight. My original letter was thereupon rediscovered
and I was allowed to write this little piece, all belatedly. The miracle was that this letter got the article published, two decades after it might have made a tremendous difference to textual work. The texualists at Monash University were not afraid.

The culpability of Richard Brodhead, destroyer of reputations

Richard H. Brodhead is now defending himself from lawsuits in North Carolina as well as James Van de Velde's reinstated lawsuit in Connecticut. Duke is trying very hard just now to keep the truth coming out in Discovery. It's time to tell again about my experience with him.

Richard H. Brodhead excused himself for not defending the falsely accused lacrosse players by saying the facts kept changing. He was trained to get away with acting as if the truth kept changing—the truth was whatever you wanted it to be at a given moment.

I have had the personal experience of being the victim of a gigantic, devastating lie by Brodhead, one apparently designed to destroy my reputation. I want to review the facts again while Duke is trying to prevent the Discovery process from producing anything incriminating. Brodhead as a great Yale literary critic and putative Melville “scholar” was hired by the prestigious New York TIMES to review Hershel Parker’s HERMAN MELVILLE: A BIOGRAPHY: 1851-1891 in 2002.

Now, one of the problems of Melville’s loss of fame in his own lifetime was that in the 20th century scholars had to piece together facts and rediscover episodes in his life. The 1921 biographer Raymond Weaver did not know that in 1860 Melville had sailed for the Pacific with his brother, the Captain of the METEOR, leaving behind a collection of poems for publication. The next year, Meade Minnigerode published a book called SOME PERSONAL LETTERS OF HERMAN MELVILLE AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY. In Ch. 9, “An Unpublished Manuscript,” Minnigerode published several documents he had found in the NYPL, Melville’s 21 May 1860 request to Evert Duyckinck to do him a favor—to help see into print a manuscript which would arrive in NYC “in the course of two weeks.” His wife, he explained in a second letter, was still not finished with copying the manuscript. Among the documents in the Duyckinck Collection at the NYPL was Melville’s 22 May 1860 instructions to his brother, Allan, which survives in his wife’s hand, perhaps as he dictated it: “Memoranda for Allan / Concerning the publication of my verses.” There are 12 detailed points. Then subsequently he added a 13th. The 6th point is “Let the title-page be simply / Poems / by / Herman Melville.” He was specific to the point of explaining, in the 9th point, “In the M.S.S. each piece is on a page by itself, however small the piece. This was done merely for convenience in the final classification, and should be no guide for the printer. Of course in printing two or more pieces will sometimes appear on the same page—according to length of pieces etc. You understand.” Here I am quoting from the spelling and punctuation in Minnigerode (1922.

This was big news, and Lewis Mumford used the new information a little in his 1929 critical biography, where he corrected a guess by Minnigerode that the book might have been something that went into the 18,000 line poem CLAREL (1876): “Melville’s concern, in his memoranda for Allan, that each piece should be printed on a page by itself . . . shows . . . that it could not have been” CLAREL. Then in his widely used classroom text in 1938, HERMAN MELVILLE: REPRESENTATIVE SELECTIONS, Willard Thorp summarized what was known, and concluded: “But the book found no publisher. We do not even know for certain what there first poems of Melville’s were. They cannot have been the long poem Clarel, as Minnigerode supposed, for the “Memoranda for Allan concerning the publication of my verses” . . . prove them to have been a collection of short poems.” Everyone who wanted to know anything about Melville henceforth knew about POEMS. Leon Howard (1951) summarized what was known about the volume, stressing that Melville sailed thinking his family and friends would arrange publication in his absence. Jay Leyda had given Howard documents to work with, and in 1951 published THE MELVILLE LOG: A DOCUMENTARY LIFE OF HERMAN MELVILLE 1819-1891. There Leyda added a new document, Charles Scribner’s rejection of POEMS, and quoted (sometimes condensing) all the 12 point memoranda. This memoranda was of course included in Merrell R. Davis’s and William H. Gilman’s 1960 THE LETTERS OF HERMAN MELVILLE. Once again anyone could look at a new book and see Memo #6: “Let the title-page be simply, / Poems / by / Herman Melville.” Everybody knew about POEMS. The Memoranda are printed, of course, in the Northwestern-Newberry CORRESPONDENCE (1993).

Parker’s treatment in Ch. 18, “The Poet and the last Lecture, ‘Travel’—Summer 1859-Early 1860,” was by far the most detailed. It deals with Melville’s reading of poetry and his annotations of poetry and of criticism of poetry as no other study had done. In particular, it draws on Melville’s marginalia that no other scholar had seen, such as his detailed annotations in his father’s copy of SPENSER. And of course Parker printed, on p. 424, the 12 points of the Memoranda, although condensing some of them. The middle of page 424 very clearly has point 6: “Let the title-page be simply, / Poems / by / Herman Melville.”

Now, there is a related problem of another book which Melville completed but which was never printed (as far as we know) and has been lost. Davis and Gilman made it clear on the basis of a November 1853 letter that Melville had completed a prose book in the Spring of 1853. Merton Sealts confirmed their conclusion, as did others. In 1987 I discovered the title, THE ISLE OF THE CROSS, and thereafter Sealts, in 1990, said, “Hershel Parker, working with Augusta Melville’s correspondence as recently added to the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection, New York Public Library, has established that this [1853] work was in fact ‘completed under the title of The Isle of the Cross.’” Now, Sealts and Parker assumed that The Isle of the Cross was the book Melville told Hawthorne in December 1852 that he was going to write, himself, rather than trying to persuade Hawthorne to write it. We can’t prove what the content of The Isle of the Cross is, and of course critics have guessed irresponsibly, but there is no disputing that the book was completed in May 1853 and entitled The Isle of the Cross. Brodhead in the New York Times for 23 June 2002 disparaged “Parker's surmises about works Melville never published that did not survive”:

He makes the case that in 1852-53 Melville wrote a novel based on materials he shared with Hawthorne about a sailor who deserted his wife. If this is true, then the theory that Melville renounced writing after "Pierre" is just wrong . . . . Parker is also convinced that Melville prepared a volume of poems in 1860 that failed to be published. If this is so, a stretch that had seemed empty of literary strivings was instead a time of new effort and new failure--a black hole Parker alone has the instruments to detect.


Now, what are Parker’s surmises? Not that Melville finished a book in May 1853. That is a fact, although it has been known as an absolute fact only since the 1960 LETTERS (Leyda did not have the November 24, 1853 letter that makes it clear). It was treated as fact long before Parker found the title in 1987. And as for POEMS, what possible justification can there be for asserting, not implying, that Parker was the only one with (this is ironic) instruments to detect POEMS? Everyone since Minnigerode in 1922 had known about POEMS.

Even to mention the treatment of THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS mean that his eyes had to see documents quoted, including “Poems / by / Herman Melville.” Yet Brodhead put all of his authority as a Dean at Yale in this assault on Parker’s reputation for accuracy.

He was sure he could get away with lying, and he did, and went on to bow down in the gigantic K for the coach, to fire Michael Pressler, to defame the lacrosse players (“Whatever they did was bad enough”), to refuse to meet with the parents of the lacrosse players, to refuse to look at evidence of their innocence, to refuse to make a judgment on Potti (there must have been some “intermediate explanation” for the falsifications on the vita and the falsification of the results of research into cancer causes and possible cures . . . .)

A Bell athlete--Emma Bell's grandson, Jim Miles--Played with the Denver ROCKIES

Protestant Oklahoma Goes for Santorum

How strange this is.

I remember when Southern Baptists believed (believed devoutly!) in the separation of church and state.

Jefferson was revered as the man who articulated the importance of the separation of church and state.

That was then.


Does anyone know the stages by which all this changed? Where in the sequence do W's "faith-based initiatives" fit in?

Reposted after Don Yannella's death on 3 March 2012: Stanton Garner, Yannella, Hershel Parker

Stanton Garner died on 20 November 2011 at 86.
Yannella 3 March 2012 at almost 78

Heddy at Corn Fence at U of GA

Bandy Family of Perry, Tennessee 1830-1850

Notices on blogs like this one seem to produce results.

Does anyone know the parents of Annie Bandy [I think she was a Bandy] born in Perry Co. Tennessee 1823-1825 who became Annie Rogers or Rodgers and who in 1850 had living with her and her husband, John W. Rodgers or Rogers, a boy, George Bandy, 10; and also living with them Emily Cagle 10 and Nancy Cagle 40. When she and her husband, John W. Rogers or Rodgers, moved to Arkansas, they took young George Bandy with them; he was with them in 1860 in Franklin Arkansas.

Bride leading the second line in the French Quarter

That Bell mouth and chin

Bill Shields and I are not all that much kin, especially if we don't make a connection betwen his Shields family and mine. But look at those thin Bell lips and the chin. Genes.

At Sonia's wedding in New Orleans

University of Georgia ironwork--old and new beauties all over the campus

We had never been to the University of Georgia. We found it a really wonderful campus to walk about. This corn-fence was a favorite discovery. The new buildings are made to harmonize with the older buildings, sometimes by architectural features that cleverly allude to an older building nearby. We were led on one walk to a really remarkable art museum, much richer than you would expect to find on a university campus. The students were astonishingly trim and vibrant--kept thin by climbing the many little hills on the campus! We were impressed.

Jennifer Eckel's item in the HANDBOOK OF TEXAS online, Texas State Historical Society--on Francis M. Dougherty

This Frank Dougherty, son of Isaac Dougherty and Rachel Schlemp, is great uncle by marriage to Lyndon Baines Johnson.


DOUGHERTY, FRANCIS M. (1826–?). Francis (Frank) M. Dougherty, also spelled Daugherty, merchant and Texas legislator, was born in Florence, Alabama, on February 13, 1826, son of Isaac Dougherty. Francis M. was raised near Oakland, Mississippi, in Yalobusha County. At eighteen he came to Texas and settled in Hopkins County where he worked at various jobs, including as a hand on a cattle ranch and as a clerk in a store.

After 1850 Dougherty relocated to McKinney in Collin County where he ran a mercantile business and began to accumulate a fortune. While in Collin County Frank Dougherty was elected to the Texas House of Representatives; he served one term from 1855 to 1856. One historian lists Dougherty among the dozen candidates elected in 1855 with the support of the American Party or Know-Nothing Party. On November 6, 1856, Frank Dougherty married Louisa Huffman in Collin County; the couple had four children.

In 1858 Dougherty moved to Gainsville, Texas, and sold goods there until 1861 when the Civil War began. Although he had not supported secession, Francis Dougherty enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1862 and was elected captain of Company A of the Sixteenth Texas Cavalry. Dougherty fought with the Sixteenth Texas in the Red River Campaign at the battles of Mansfield, Pleasant Hill, and Jenkins' Ferry. He remained with his unit throughout the war. Following surrender Frank returned to his mercantile in Gainsville where he remained until he sold the business in 1878. Dougherty then turned his attention to farming, ranching, and a career in banking. He also served two more terms as a Democrat in the state legislature from 1879 through 1881 as a representative of Cooke County.

Dougherty was an investor in the Denison and Pacific Railway and reportedly donated to several charitable causes. In 1904 Dougherty had a house built for him in Terry County near Brownfield, Texas, a town founded by Dougherty's son-in-law. The Old Daugherty House still stands and is a recorded Texas historic landmark. Although his headstone does not list a death date, Frank Dougherty was buried in Brownfield Cemetery sometime after the first burial occurred there in 1905. Dougherty in southeastern Floyd County, Texas, is named for Francis M. Dougherty.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:

William S. Speer and John H. Brown, eds., Encyclopedia of the New West (Marshall, Texas: United States Biographical Publishing, 1881; rpt., Easley, South Carolina: Southern Historical Press, 1978).
Jennifer Eckel

Jennifer Eckel, "DOUGHERTY, FRANCIS M.," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fdo64), accessed March 01, 2012. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.