OTV stands for “Orbital Test Vehicle.” Officially, the Air Force deploys the 29-feet-long X-37B robotic mini-shuttle to test out new technology. But it’s obvious that the Boeing-made space plane is capable of much more than that.
Indeed, the X-37B seems to have a lot in common with some of the latest Chinese and Russian space weapons.
OTV-6 is scheduled to launch atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on May 16, 2020. The unmanned X-37B de-orbits on its own and lands like an airplane.
The X-37B blasted off for its first mission in April 2010. Where many satellites can function for up to a decade in orbit, the X-37B typically remains in orbit a year or two.
The Air Force operates two X-37Bs. While one is in space, the other is undergoing refurbishment.
The first X-37B mission in 2010 lasted 224 days. The second, beginning in March 2011, went on for 468 days. Mission three starting in December 2012 lasted 674 days. The fourth mission, which launched in May 2015, set a new record of 717 days. Mission five beginning in September 2017 broke that record when it reached 779 days.
The X-37B’s increasing endurance is testimony to its design and careful planning by its operators. The vehicle once in orbit deploys solar panels for powering on-board systems. It also packs liquid fuel for its maneuvering thrusters.
The Air Force as a matter of habit does not disclose the X-37B’s payloads. The service made an exception to that practice for OTV-5. The X-37B on that mission carried the Advanced Structurally Embedded Thermal Spreader built by the Air Force Research Laboratory.
According to the Air Force, the spreader helped to “test experimental electronics and oscillating heat pipe technologies in the long-duration space environment.” The X-37B itself, with its longer and longer missions, is driving demand in the United States for spacecraft components that can survive for years at a time in orbit.
The X-37B is capable of so much more. It’s worth noting that OTV-5 was the first X-37B mission to launch and land from a high inclination.
A spacecraft’s orbital inclination is equal to the highest north-south latitude it passes over. The X-37B previously flew between 37 and 43 degrees, according to Brian Weeden, a space expert with the Secure World Foundation in Colorado.
Extending the X-37B’s inclination expands “what it can collect information on, assuming that’s its mission,” Weeden told The Daily Beast. It’s worth noting that almost all of Russia lies north of the X-37B’s previous inclination range.
The fifth X-37B mission might have sent the mini-shuttle over large portions of Russian territory for the first time.
The X-37B is highly maneuverable, meaning it can quickly and repeatedly change its orbit. Russian and Chinese inspection satellites, which can double as weapons, also are maneuverable.
While inspection sats technically are non-military vehicles whose primary mission is to keep tabs on friendly spacecraft, in wartime the same vehicles could tamper with enemy satellites.
David Axe is defense editor at The National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels War Fix,War Is Boring and Machete Squad.
I just took a walk through my apartment. On the way out of the kitchen I touched a deck of tarot cards next to my laptop playing a Youtube video. I turned the light on in my darkened bedroom and saw two tarot card boxes and then on the book shelf behind a tiny 2 inches by 3 inches tarot deck.
I moved into the front room, or in the antique colloquialism ‘the parlor,’ and looked to the large card deck I had left in a cardboard box with my tarot dice. The box was on top of a tarot mat that has thirteen places for the divination and explanation of what the thrown tarot dice mean.
I have taken pictures of my ‘future’ as pictured by a simple cut of the deck. Lately, under COVID-19 quarantine, I have been divining my future by simply cutting the deck each day.
But… I believe none of it. I am an atheist when it comes to Hindu Gods, or Chinese Demons, or Middle Eastern celestial dictators and their wayward Sons who are just dying to be punished. So… I am also a tarot card atheist. The cold hard fact based science that I use as a method of understanding reality sees no way tarot cards can predict the future.
An astronomer can predict an eclipse of the sun by the moon a thousand years in advance and tell one where to go exactly in the world at exactly the right time. Astronomers can predict the future. No Tarot Card Reader can make accurate predictions that are verified in any way. The tarot readers are actually counseling people and offering psychological insight into the human condition. The tarot reading can actually help people deal with life’s problems because it allows them to see things in a certain way, or to see things in a different way.
A woman who wrote a book called ‘Kitchen Table Tarot’ said
Tarot cards are pieces of paper with a series of symbolic art on them. That’s it.
Tarot READERS, though, now there’s some magic.
I’ve been reading tarot cards for 30 years (well, 29.5 technically) and I can tell you that they’re not magical, mystical or otherwise. The cards are cards, and you’re the one who makes them amazing.
My first book, Kitchen Table Tarot, provides a down to earth, common sense approach to reading tarot cards. It also won the Independent Publisher Award for Best First Book, so that was cool.
I got a deck of tarot cards for free after joining an ‘Occult Book Club’ and buying the Egyptian Book of the Dead as the first book of the month. The Book of the Dead was pretty dry reading, mostly chants to the gods or sun, or something. But the tarot cards were interesting.
I thought the designs for each card was a little amateur in drawing style. The drawings seemed like Illustrated Classics from the 1930’s or 1940’s.
Over the years I have taken the deck of cards off the shelf and looked through the images. I looked up the history of tarot. Apparently the cards were popularized in Northern Italy in the early 1400’s. People used them to play games and pass time, and as humans seem to do in every age they tried to predict the future. The cards were not designed to be fortune telling cards. The modern deck of 52 cards evolved from the tarot decks of the Renaissance in Europe.
The tarot deck has 78 cards and a large number of ‘picture cards’ that are not found in the modern deck of cards. For hundreds of years the tarot deck was very similar to modern playing cards in the ‘suits’ of ‘clubs’ and ‘wands’ that were represented by a number an not much of a picture. The seven of clubs might simply have a number seven displayed and a drawing of seven clubs.
(Pamela Colman Smith from the October 1912 issue of The Craftsman Illustrated Magazine.)
Pamela Coleman Smith designed a modern tarot deck that seems to have influenced many many other modern tarot decks when she created a detailed 78 card set in 1909.
The posters and trailers for today’s films and TV series generally look awful to me. I occasionally give them a chance, against my better judgment, and find I have wasted my time. All these pope dramas and even Emir Kusturica’s documentary with Uruguayan President Peje Mujica: meh.[1]
So I look to the past. I’ve recently indulged in watching some Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now there is a homey show. It’s remarkable in a number of ways. Two striking ones for me: the decidedly optimistic cosmopolitan setting, which represents a kind of idealized fruition of the whole liberal-internationalist outlook, and the personality of Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the starship Enterprise, as a rare TV portrayal of a wise commander.
Star Trek is fundamentally a projection of contemporary liberal-internationalist assumptions 300 years into the future. As such, it’s an interesting show to analyze to understand the liberal idealism, for there is such a thing, which has underpinned the world’s basic evolution since the Second World War.
Star Trek portrays humanity the way the writers feel we should be if we could get passed our pettiness and bickering. The technological level is simply fabulous: effortless interstellar travel, materialization of objects from nothing, teleportation, a “holodeck” where any fantastical setting can be realized . . . The travels of a military starship through space work very well as a pretext for an adventure-a-week. The Enterprise encounters mysterious happenings, hostile aliens, and surprisingly common (invariably passionate and unenlightened) demi-gods.
The show’s basic idealism and optimism is, significantly, reflected in the crew’s personalities. Everyone is just so good.
As usual, each member of the diverse crew reflects different aspects of the human personality: the android Data is emotionless and childlike, the Klingon Worf is an impulsive hot-head steeled by discipline, the telepathic psychologist Troi is full of empathy, and so on. However, the crew always fundamentally collaborates as a community under the leadership of Picard.
Picard is a model of philosophical leadership. When there is a problem, he takes his time, hears out every opinion, and remains dispassionate and prudent. When a decision is finally made however, he is firm and decisive.
A typical TNG episode works as a morality play. The antagonist (there are rarely enemies) is not usually destroyed an epic battle of laser blasts in all directions. Rather, he is usually misguided, and can be brought back to reason through dialogue and moral example. This is where Picard excels: Socratic dialectic, explication, compassion, and moral self-control are his weapons of choice.
And you know what? It works. While there is often a soppy element to TNG, Picard’s wise leadership comes across as convincing and plausible. It’s not often we see a wise man in command: a few cameos of Marcus Aurelius here and there, the Gandhi biopic starring Ben Kingsley . . . hard to think of much else. Ned Stark provides an interesting contrast with a fundamentally good, too good, man in a Machiavellian world.
Star Trek’s social organization and politics are rather telling. Inevitably, every series’ idealized setting says a great deal about the social assumptions of the people who made it at the time.
In The Original Series produced in the 1960s, the cast is strikingly multiracial, including a black woman, an East Asian man, as well as a Russian (not to mention the famously ultra-rational Spock, a half-Vulcan). The show is often comically macho and women are basically absent, with Uhura (the black woman) coming across as a sexy secretary.
In TNG, produced in the late 80s and 90s, the cast is much whiter and, as so often in liberal shows, demographically resembles 1950s America, the only minorities in the main cast being two black men (one of them being a non-human Klingon). What’s more, the men are still in charge. After the female chief of security is killed off in the first season (a rarity for a main cast member, the actress wanted out), women star as the ship’s psychologist, doctor, bartender, and love interests.
The Enterprise serves the Federation, a kind of interplanetary United Nations/United States which actually works, with humans making up the core. Again, the Federation is good, working for the harmonious development of all species.
Picard is wholly committed to the Federation and its generous and cosmopolitan guiding philosophy. He affirms “the right of all life to exist” and the ability of “intelligent beings of good will” to get along. The latter is Stoicism 101 (all “rational and social beings” should get along). Picard’s own ship and personal example are a testament to the truth of these claims.
While having a basically “humanitarian” mission, the Enterprise’s crew are animated by a decidedly heroic and even Promethean ethos. The crew are more than willing to risk their lives to, as Picard famously puts it in the intro, explore “Space . . . the final frontier . . . and boldly go where no one has gone before!”
TNG works as a kind of Stoic-cosmopolitan idealization of what humanity could be. There’s something charmingly innocent and elevated to all this and, as I say, it works.
That isn’t to say this is particularly plausible or is the whole story. The cracks and omittances of TNG are quite suggestive of underlying darkness.
Today, we rightly worry about human obsolescence as a result of automation. In TNG, there’s a whole space ship of people busy each working in their little sphere. Scarcely is anything ever said of the Federation’s (presumably democratic) politics and we only know the authoritarian hierarchy of a military vessel under a wise commander (a setting in which, by the way, multiculturalism can indeed work).
Despite the total lack of scarcity, the humans are still motivated to do things. The men are still interested in tactfully courting the womenfolk rather than being addicted to sexing virtual babes on the holodeck.
In terms of international politics and war, Star Trek rejects the suggestion of fundamental differences in outlook and competition between species. We can all get along and coexist. This is true, if each species lacks any great difference in their fundamental drive, if no species is basically . . . anti-social . . .
This is particularly striking in the case of one of Stark Trek’s most original principles: the so-called “Prime Directive” under which the Federation is not supposed to interfere with the development of more primitive forms of life. In one episode, a bronze-age race which has come to believe Picard is a god is told the truth and then, despite their equal cognitive abilities, left to flounder on their own.
In another, nanites self-reproduce as a collective intelligence and threaten to turn the ship into gray good. The problem is solved when the exponentionally-developing “nanite civilization” is dropped off on a planet. Everyone can have their safe space, it is implied, and there is no reason even a fundamentally distinct life-form might have a drive, an impulse, a way of life, which could fundamentally clash with that of others.
Liberal-internationalism and multiculturalism work much the same today. Human differences can be manageable if these are reduced to sterile folklore and we all become united by the shopping cart.
I don’t know how Jewish Star Trek is. Gene Roddenberry is a gentile and the whole show is permeated by a very Western idealism and earnestness. VariousJewishpublications report however that Jews have always had a great influence on the show.
I contend that there is something very French about Picard’s appproach and, specifically, pre-Revolutionary. Picard is supposed to have vineyards back home on Earth, but I suspect his family really made it big with that uniquely French expression of mass art de vivre: quality frozen foods.
Picard’s wisdom recalls that of that other chrome dome: Michel de Montaigne, the quintessentially French writer. Montaigne too is wise, detached, perceptive, reasonable, moderate, cautious, and fundamentally conservative in outlook. And all that is very good. The workplace might be a better place if more managers were to watch Picard at work. No doubt every human soul can be improved by reading Montaigne’s surprisingly humorous and approachable Essays. This is what philosophy – love of wisdom – is meant to be, delightful instruction on how to live.
History presents many examples of unwise and erratic monarchs. If I were a king, I would wish to be like Picard or Marcus Aurelius (the latter on a good day). But this is surely not the only valid style of leadership.
And . . . is the “reasonable” enough? Is that who we really are?
We live in an age of untold plenty and material prowess. Our scientific knowledge and mastery over matter is seemingly boundless. And yet, who could deny that humans are using this power to better express their follies? To better indulge, in particular, their petty-pride?
There are no feminists, no ethnic activists, and no transsexuals on the Enterprise. In our world, we know that ignorance of one’s nature and wounded egos have a seemingly limitless capacity to drive victimarian identity politics
There is untold darkness in every human soul. Above all, there is the vanity within each of us, that lowly self-love or amour-propre quite distinct from manly pride or self-respect. There is no doubt that being an apparently generous and reasonable reason broke down the traditional prejudice and poverty which kept vanity in check, contributing to unleashing this touchy beast which now rules supreme in our societies.
Is not appearing and thinking yourself good the best way of selfishly displaying your supposed superiority compared to the rabble or, indeed, to your betters?
Notes
[1] The Mujica documentary is informative in a few ways. Mainly: one is struck at how much these leftist political revolutionaries were willing to risk personally and how supportive their WAGs were.
I cut the tarot deck on the lectern. The card for ‘The Sun’ appeared. My fortune for today. I had just copied a drawing of stylized Mona Lisa someone had used to illustrate a tarot card. I wanted to go out into the sun to get a copy of my drawing on scrap paper with a worn old orange crayon.
I have a scanner, but it is not hooked up to the computer I use to put things online, so I go outside into bright sunlight to take pictures with my Iphone. I took the tarot deck with me and went to the back yard to find a sunny spot. Was ‘the sun’ in my future?
Yes.
I found a sunny spot at the bottom of the back stairs. Grey wood above gray rock. What could be better. Rough texture and smooth texture. I put my drawing down and reached for a rock to hold the paper in the breeze.
The wind blew three cards off the tarot deck and I scrambled across the yard to find my future.
I could see ‘The Fool’ face up under the stairs. My original top card, and today’s fortune come true, ‘The Sun’ was next. The card was on top of a black plastic bag filled with construction debris. Face down – I knew it – was ‘Death.’ Death does come to us all, and ‘us all’ includes me.
So I ended up taking a different picture than I had planned only a few minutes earlier. Funny how the future creeps up on us like that and blows our plans away. I wonder if there is a ‘Wind’ card in anyone’s tarot deck. Maybe time for me to draw my own tarot deck. Only seventy-eight images and a tradition to start with.
Around half of the world’s population are in some form of ‘lockdown’. It’s a tough time for many, but one classic novel, published over 300 years ago, offers hope, inspiration – and food for thought.
Daniel Defoe’s ‘The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York. Mariner’, celebrated its tercentenary last year, but who could have predicted that the centuries-old book would become so relevant to our lives just one year later?
For in a sense, we’re all Robinson Crusoe now.
There is a Librivox audio book provided copyright free – at Librivox, or on Youtube.
Just in case there’s anyone out there who doesn’t know the story: here are the basics. A shipwrecked sailor is washed up on a tropical island. He is alone and has to overcome solitude and the physical challenges of everyday life. But he survives. And we can survive lockdown too if we learn the same lessons Crusoe did.
First, we need to write down the comforts enjoyed against the miseries suffered as the world’s most famous shipwreck does. In the column entitled ‘Evil’, Crusoe puts down first “I am cast upon a desolate island, void of all hope of recovery.” Against that, in the ‘Good’ column, he writes: “But I am alive, and not drowned as my ship’s company was.” In 2020, in the Age of Corona we might begin our list with: “I am basically under house arrest, and can’t freely go out and mingle.” But against that, in the credit column, we can put “But I am alive, and not dead as sadly many people are from Covid-19.”
Crusoe also files under ‘Evil’: “I am divided from mankind, a solitaire, one banished from humane society.” We too are divided physically from mankind, and that is terrible, but unlike Crusoe we can still thankfully make telephone calls and keep in contact with each other via the postal service and social media.
His isolation also gives Crusoe plenty of opportunity to reflect on his life before his dramatic change of circumstances. Daniel Defoe was a religious man and frames Crusoe’s plight as a kind of punishment for his hero’s determination to defy his parents and go ‘wandering abroad’ in search of adventure and riches. The punishment is all the greater because Crusoe is by nature, sociable and gregarious. The violent storms which the boat he is sailing from twice encounter before he reaches London are ‘warnings’ from God, which Crusoe ignores.
Could what we’re going through at the moment be seen in similar terms? No-one here is saying that the spread of Covid-19 is ‘God’s punishment’, (God surely wouldn’t want so many to suffer in such a way), but hasn’t a certain arrogance, some would say hubris, got us to where we are today?
Most human beings, as Aldous Huxley once remarked, have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. We took it for granted that pandemics, which would kill lots of people, were a thing of the past. The UK government for one seems to have taken a very blasé attitude. Writing in the Guardian on March 25, the environmentalist George Monbiot made a cogent case for arguing that Covid-19 was “nature’s wake up call for our complacent civilisation.”
“We have been living in a bubble”, Monbiot wrote. “A bubble of false comfort and denial. In the rich nations, we have begun to believe we have transcended the material world.”
Crusoe uses his ‘lockdown’ to reflect on the things he did right and wrong in his life, and so should we, individually and collectively. Have we been too avaricious? In Angus Ross’s 1965 introduction to Defoe’s novel, he notes: “The religious overtones are seen in the immediate cause of Crusoe’s shipwreck, which was his greed, prompting him to ‘rise’ faster than ‘the nature of things admitted’ by going on a slaving expedition to Africa.”
Covid-19 has been called a disease of globalisation and the main driver of modern turbo-globalisation is greed. Declassified reported how the UK government saw China’s wet food markets (where Covid-19 is thought to have originated) and ‘food safety scandals’ as an ‘opportunity’ for UK exports.
Isn’t one of the main lessons of Covid-19 that we have to start to de-globalise a little?
In the last 20 years or so, everything has speeded up, arguably too much. Weren’t our lives before the ‘lockdown’ just a little bit too fast and furious in a 24-7 profit-maximising-obsessed world that never really gave us enough time to smell the roses?
Or time to grow as human beings.
Crusoe had never handled a tool before in his life, but by “labour, application and contrivance,” he manages to construct a table and chair. He learns new skills as he goes along. At first he describes himself as “poor miserable Robinson Crusoe,” but when he loses his self-pity, and comes to an acceptance of his situation, he actually starts to thrive. On the second anniversary of his arrival on the island he writes in his journal: “It was now that I began sensibly to feel how much more happy this life I now led was, with all its miserable circumstances, than this wicked, cursed, abominable life I led all the past part of my days; and now I changed both my sorrows and my joys… From this moment I began to conclude in my mind that it was possible for me to be more happy in this forsaken, solitary condition than it was probable I should ever have been in any other particular state in the world: and with this thought I was going to give thanks to God for bringing me to this place.”
It’s the kind of mindset we need to develop, not only to survive ‘lockdown’ but to actually turn it into a positive, life-changing experience.
I had a dream, I was in a stream, floating with a back pack full of books. I had heavy work boots on and could not swim. But I was bobbing on the surface comfortably enough in the warm water. It was twighlight and I could see the expanse of water in front of me after I had been pushed away from the brick wall I was holding onto before. I could not advance toward the dam.
I wanted to find an illustration for the visual I had in the dream. I thought of the dam at Lower Mills on the Neponset River where Baker’s Chocolate once had a processing plant. When I found the picture above on Pinterest I had a flash of recognition. This is the model of what I saw in my dream. I haven’t seen this view for decades. But I was familiar with the banks of the Neponset River when I was around 12 years old and a young explorer with my friends.
I guess I had a template for a watery scene stored in my brain cells.
If the photo above was darker it would illustrate the scene I was dreaming.
I wasn’t sinking; I wasn’t panicking or feeling I was drowning.
One evening last week I was listening to a number of versions of the Clash song ‘London Calling.’ I got a clear understanding of some lyrics that I had only half heard, or half understood when I saw the words onscreen.
In particular the line “London is drowning and I, I live by the river!”
With the COVID-19 pandemic and lock-downs and lack of work and money, I feel powerless. I might have work boots and a willingness to work; I might have a backpack full of books to guide many activities. I can see a destination, but the water and time and tide are pushing me in another direction. I’m not drowning, but, I’m not going anywhere.
Looks like my sleeping brain came up with a metaphorical situation to give me a graphic and tactile experience of what I am experiencing in the real world when not asleep and dreaming.
I never worried about the books on my back getting wet.
I have been listening to a lot of audio books on Youtube. The Youtube Home Page recommended ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ I had some familiarity with the 1950’s black and white movie, and also a remake in 1978. So, I decided to give the six hour audio book a try. Not bad. The writing comes across like the ‘film noir’ detective style of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Some wit in the words. So…at 3:00am on a Friday morning while cooking a pot of pasta to warm up the kitchen…. I listen.
The Body Snatchers is a 1955 science fiction novel by American writer Jack Finney, originally serialized in Colliers Magazine in 1954, which describes real-life Mill Valley, California (called in the original film by the fictional name of “Santa Mira”) being invaded by seeds that have drifted to Earth from space. The seeds, grown from plantlike pods, replace sleeping people with perfect physical duplicates with all the same knowledge, memories, scars, etc. but are incapable of human emotion or feeling. The human victims disappear forever.
The duplicates live only five years and cannot sexually reproduce; consequently, if unstopped, they will quickly turn Earth into a dead planet and move on to the next world. One of the duplicate invaders claims this is what humans do — use up resources, wipe out indigenous populations, and destroy ecosystems in the name of survival.
The novel has been adapted for the screen four times; the first film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956, the second in 1978, the third in 1993, and the fourth in 2007.
Unlike the first three film adaptations, which elected for darker, far more dystopian narratives, the novel contains an optimistic ending, with the aliens voluntarily vacating after deciding that they cannot tolerate the type of resistance they see in the main characters.
In 1967, Damon Knight criticized the novel’s scientific incoherence:[1]
The seed pods, says Finney, drifted across interstellar space to Earth, propelled by light pressure. This echoes a familiar notion, the spore theory of Arrhenius. But the spores referred to are among the smallest living things – small enough to be knocked around by hydrogen molecules…In confusing these minute particles with three-foot seed pods, Finney invalidates his whole argument – and makes ludicrous nonsense of the final scene in which the pods, defeated, float up into the sky to hunt another planet.
Horrifyingly depicts the invasion of a small town by interstellar spores that duplicate human beings, reducing them to dust in the process; the menacing spore-people who remain symbolize, it has been argued, the loss of freedom in contemporary society. Jack Finney’s further books are slickly told but less involving.
Galaxy reviewer Groff Conklin faulted the original edition, declaring that “Too many s-f novels lack outstanding originality, but this one lacks it to an outstanding degree.”[3]F&SF| reviewer Anthony Boucher found it to be “intensely readable and unpredictably ingenious” despite noticeable inconsistencies and its sometimes lack of scientific accuracy.[4]Astounding Science-Fiction reviewer P. Schuyler Miller reported that, once Finney sets out his premise, the novel becomes “a straight chase yarn, with several nice gimmicks and a not entirely convincing denouement.”[5]
Editions
First edition
Finney, Jack (c. 1955). The Body Snatchers. New York: Dell Publishing.
Finney, Jack (1978). The Body Snatchers. New York: Dell Publishing.
Photonovel
Finney, Jack (1979). The Body Snatchers. Los Angeles: California: Fotonovel Publications. It features 350 color stills from the 1978 remake
See also
The Day of the Triffids (1951), a science fiction novel by English author John Wyndham, involving tall venomous carnivorous plants capable of locomotion and communication.
The Puppet Masters (1951), a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein in which a trio of American government agents attempts to thwart a covert invasion of Earth by mind-controlling alien parasites.
It Came from Outer Space (1953), based on a Ray Bradbury‘s original story treatment “The Meteor”, which involves an alien invasion wherein humans are duplicated by the aliens.
“The Father-thing” (December 1954), a short story by Philip K. Dick, appearing in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, uses the ideas of pods duplicating humans and fire being the means of destroying the pods.
I was listening to La Peste by Albert Camus as an audio book. I got on a high stool and was flipping through French books I had bought when I was a student in Paris in the 1970’s.
J’écoutais La Peste d’Albert Camus comme un livre audio.Je suis monté sur un tabouret haut et je feuilletais les livres français que j’avais achetés quand j’étais étudiant à Paris dans les années 1970.
Three books seemed to have a connection to the current outbreak of COVID-19 and the lock down in this town and around the world. I put the books on the window sill to take a picture with some bright sunlight. The light faded, I took the photo on my phone and sent it to my email. On the kitchen computer I saw my picture in large size. I posted the picture on a number of subreddits on the Reddit social media website. I wanted to show the three books to people in France, so I posted the picture on r/france, r/paris, and then r/livresFr and r/livres.
Trois livres semblaient avoir un lien avec l’épidémie actuelle de COVID-19 et le verrouillage dans cette ville et dans le monde.J’ai mis les livres sur le rebord de la fenêtre pour prendre une photo avec un peu de soleil.La lumière s’estompa, j’ai pris la photo sur mon téléphone et l’ai envoyée à mon email.Sur l’ordinateur de cuisine, j’ai vu ma photo en grand format.J’ai posté la photo sur un certain nombre de subreddits sur le site Web des réseaux sociaux Reddit.Je voulais montrer les trois livres à des gens en France, alors j’ai posté la photo sur r / france, r / paris, puis r / livresFr et r / livres.
I got a lot of upvotes as the hours passed and when I woke up this morning there were over forty upvotes which is more than my posts usually get.
There were a number of comments in French .
J’ai eu beaucoup de votes positifs au fil des heures et quand je me suis réveillé ce matin, il y avait plus de quarante votes positifs, ce qui est plus que mes messages habituellement.
Il y a eu un certain nombre de commentaires en français.
Hello, je me permets de te corriger : La littérature a ce pouvoir de faire voyager l’esprit pour oublier ses problèmes.
‘Ce pouvoir’, le ‘ce’ sert à désigner ce dont tu parles, ‘se’ c’est pour désigner une action dirigée vers une personne comme par exemple ‘il se lave’, ‘il se dit’…
Pour ‘oublier’ tu peux changer le verbe par un du 3e groupe pour voir si ça sonne bien : ‘voyager pour prendre quelque chose’ ça passe, ‘voyager pour prenez quelque chose’ ça ne veut rien dire.
Hello, I allow myself to correct you: Literature has this power to make the mind travel to forget its problems.
‘This power’, the ‘this’ is used to designate what you are talking about, ‘se’ is to designate an action directed towards a person such as ‘it washes’, ‘it is said’ …
To ‘forget’ you can change the verb to one from the 3rd group to see if it sounds good: ‘traveling to take something’ is okay, ‘traveling to take something’ does not mean anything.
Je suis désolé, tu as dû mal comprendre. Les fautes d’orthographe sont volontaires, elles soulignent ici l’ironie du propos (les bouquins présentés, s’ils sont excellents, sont déprimants). Encore pardon
Ah ce n’est pas la première fois qu’une vanne me passe au dessus de la tête, les fautes étaient grossières j’aurais dû me douter !
I’m sorry, you must have misunderstood.The spelling mistakes are voluntary, they underline here the irony of the subject (the books presented, if they are excellent, are depressing).Sorry again
Ah it is not the first time that a valve passes me over the head, the faults were gross I should have suspected!
Très bon choix! Je suis entrain de lire La peste et les deux autres je les ai lu y a quelques années déjà! Ils font définitivement parti de mon top 10 des meilleurs livres!
Very good choice!I’m reading The plague and the other two I read them a few years ago!They are definitely one of my top 10 best books!
NEAR the ruins of Palmyra is a solitary cavern, so much dreaded by the Syrians, that they denominated it the Cavern Death. No man had ever dared to enter it without instantly receiving the punishment of his temerity. It is said that some intrepid Frenchmen, venturing to penetrate this place with arms in their hands, were all slain, and at the returning dawn their limbs were found scattered about the desert. When the nights are peaceful and serene, dreadful groans and tumultuous shrieks issue from the cavern. Sometimes it vomits forth volumes of flame and smoke, the earth shakes, and the ruins of Palmyra are rocked about like the waves of the ocean.
I had travelled over Africa, visited the coasts of the Red Sea, and traversed Palestine. Influenced by some secret and unknown inspiration, I was desirous of beholding that superb city where Zenobia formerly reigned, and more particularly that awful cavern which was supposed to be the abode of Death. I repaired there, attended by several Syrians. Its aspect had nothing terrific: the entrance, shaded over by the thick foliage of the wild vine, invited the traveller to rest himself beneath its cooling shelter. No monster guarded the passage; the terror which it inspired had rendered it inaccessible. . . .
. . . Suddenly I lost the use of my external faculties; my feet denied their office, and became fixed to the ground, like a statue. The air I was inhaling failed, and I felt as if I had been in a void space, where, existing without the power of action, I enjoyed entire repose. A pleasure unknown to human nature, and so exquisite that it surpassed the softest voluptuousness, insensibly overcame me. In an instant after, the thick gloom by which I was enveloped vanished, the pure light of day burst upon my senses, and I beheld the various objects surrounding me.
I found myself in a circus erected with fragments of the hardest rock, opposite a sapphire throne, similar in form to the famous tripod of the priestesses of Apollo. This throne was canopied by gold and azure clouds, which some invisible power held suspended. A volatile flame, free from smoke, sparkled on an infinite number of tapers, and the walls were hung round with magic mirrors, wherein the eye discovered a boundless horizon. On the right, at the foot of an adamantine column, a robust old man was chained down; his shoulders were mutilated, and he looked with an expression of melancholy at the fragments of a broken clock and two bloody wings, lying on the ground.
Then, without the agency of voice, and by means incomprehensible to me, a Spirit who dwelt in the tripod said, “I have punished with death the rash mortals who, scorning the fear my dwelling almost universally inspires, have fancied their temerity could force its entrance. Fear not the same fate, thou whom I have called into my presence. I am the celestial Spirit to whom eternal futurity is known.– All events are to me as if they were passed. Here Time is loaded with chains, and his empire destroyed.–In me behold the father of pre-science and dreams: I dictate oracles, and inspire celebrated politicians. The moment that a mortal has stained his hands with crime, I place before his sight the preparations of that chastisement which human justice has in store for the guilty, and, as an augmentation of his torment, I make him prophecy of his punishment and death.
“If I have conducted thy steps to this cavern, it was for the particular purpose of raising before thee the veil which conceals dark futurity from man, and to make thee a spectator of the scenes that terminate the destinies of the universe.– In the magic mirrors thou beholdest around, the last man will stand revealed to thy sight. There, as on a stage, where the actors represent heroes who are no more, thou shalt hear him converse with the most illustrious personages of the last ages of the world, read in his soul his most secret thoughts, and be the witness and judge of his last actions.
“Think not that I intend by this spectacle merely to gratify the wishes of thy curiosity; –a nobler design actuates me. The last man will not have any posterity to know and admire him. I wish before his birth that he may live in memory: I desire to celebrate his struggles and victories over himself,–to tell what pains he will undergo to shorten those of human kind, to terminate the reign of time, and to hasten the day of everlasting recompence which the just have to expect; I wish to reveal to men this history, so deserving of their attention. . . . . But attend! The great representation now commences, and will pass rapidly before thee!”
The celestial Spirit having explained his intention, the air returned with a loud noise into the rotunda where I stood. I felt it again circulating through my veins, and restoring to my frame the motion it had lost. In a similar manner did every thing change and move around me. The flame of the tapers was agitated, the fine clouds which overshadowed the throne formed themselves into graceful shapes, the old man broke his chains, resumed his wings, and flew away.
Immediately in the magic mirror placed before me arose a superb palace, the work of the most powerful sovereigns on earth, but which the hand of Time was beginning to destroy. Under one of its peristyles, I beheld a woman advance slowly, whom, from her graceful motions and the charms of her heavenly form, I should not have taken for a mortal, had not the melancholy depicted on her countenance induced me to think that she was unhappy. A young man was walking by her side; his eyes were directed to the ground, and, like her, he appeared plunged in deep sorrow. A voice, which seemed to issue from the tripod, then spake thus:
“The young man thou seest is named Omegarus: Syderia is the appellation of the woman, whose beauty already interests thee. They are the last inhabitants of the universe. This is the pair thou art to celebrate. The enterprise will frequently confound thee, and, deeming it superior to thy powers, thou wilt be tempted to give it up. Meanwhile, do not despair.– I will support thy courage; and, remember, there are no obstacles which may not be surmounted by perseverance.”
As soon as the voice had informed me that in Omegarus and Syderia I beheld the precious remains of the last race of man, I felt myself affected like a traveller, who, under a heap of thorns and briars, discovers the ruins of a celebrated city. I gazed again on the last pair with avidity. While my attention was absorbed by Omegarus, I regretted that I could not bestow it on the enchanting Syderia, and I regretted that I could not combine both under the same glance. Already I conceived an interest in their fate; their sorrows affected my heart, and, anxious to learn the cause of their sadness, I invoked the celestial Spirit in these terms:
“O thou, who allowest me to contemplate the latter days of the earth, I give thee thanks for having selected me to celebrate Omegarus and Syderia. To this object will I devote the remainder of my days. Inspire me, therefore, with thy spirit, shed the illumination of prophecy into my soul, and bestow on my voice the fierce sound of the trumpet!–But what do I ask?–Shall I require thy assistance to command the attention of men, when I unfold to them what will be the destinies of the earth and of their descendants!
. . . . . . . . . . .
from CHAPTER II. [Omergarus speaks]
MY father Sprang from the most illustrious house in the world, and which might have been denominated the Family of Kings on earth. They sat on all the thrones raised in the two hemispheres. and governed at such remote periods, that history has not been able to preserve the names of that long list of sovereigns who have swayed the scepter in succession. My father inhabited this place, the abode of his ancestors. Towards the middle of his reign, he remained a king without subjects, and Europe declined till it became one vast solitude.
When I beheld the day, marriage had for the last twenty years ceased to procreate. Men, painfully advancing towards the term of their career, and not followed by a young posterity to fill up their place, imagined that in them the earth would behold its final race of inhabitants. My birth was a phenomenon that excited equal surprise and joy, and it was celebrated with the most splendid festivity. Women, it is said, came from the remotest extremities of Europe to obtain a sight of the Manchild, for thus I was named. My father took me up in his arms, exclaiming, in a tone of rapture, “The race of man will not yet be extinct!–O God!” continued he, offering me up to the Almighty, “if an error do not deceive me, this child will be the father of a new progeny!–To me thou hast not given him, but to the earth, to the universe, whose only hope he now becomes. Preserve his life; he is thine! To thee do I consecrate my son!”
That happiness continued but a short time. I remained the only son of the old age of Europe and her fecundity.– I had scarcely attained the age when man begins to perfect himself, before I lost the parents who had given me life. Alone, in this place, I paid them the duties of sepulture, and dug with my own hands the grave wherein I deposited their cherished remains.
These rites over, I dragged on a solitary miserable existence, and experienced that a splendid palace, unenlivened by the charm of human society, is but a desolate waste. Weariness took possession of me, and my youth languished.
Tormented with the desire of imparting to my fellow-men my thoughts and sentiments, I resolved to abandon this solitude, and travel over Europe, to see if it yet contained a human being.
ry Shelley, which was first published in 1826. The book tells of a future world that has been ravaged by a plague. The novel was harshly reviewed at the time, and was virtually unknown – having been eclipsed by Shelley’s more popular works – until a scholarly rev
ival in the 1960s. It contains semi-biographical portraits of Romantic figures in Shelley’s circle, particularly Shelley’s late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.
After listening to Albert Camus novels over the last couple of days an audio book by Jack London was on the ‘recommended’ page of Youtube. So, I started listening to the book through Youtube on my laptop; I looked up the text on my desktop computer
Lately I have been listening to audio books on Youtube because I pay for Youtube Premium and don’t see any commercials. With Librivox audio books that are put on Youtube the advantage is that the entire book plays straight through. On Librivox each chapter stops at the end.
I love having the text read out loud on one computer while I gaze at the large text displayed on the other computer. I can drink coffee or move around the room or whatever.
I looked up book covers of the work. There were so many that I decided to make a slide show video and put it on Youtube.
Here is a the cover art of one magazine that published Jack London’s story in 1949. Somehow, the boys and men who bought these magazines, the people who sold them, the people who printed them, and the writers of the story, all knew that there was nothing about the woman on the cover inside the magazines. Somehow we all knew.
The story takes place in 2073, sixty years after an uncontrollable epidemic, the Red Death,[1] has depopulated the planet. James Smith is one of the survivors of the era before the scarlet plague hit and is still left alive in the San Francisco area, and he travels with his grandsons Edwin, Hoo-Hoo, and Hare-Lip. His grandsons are young and live as primeval hunter-gatherers in a heavily depopulated world. Their intellect is limited, as are their language abilities. Edwin asks Smith, whom they call “Granser”, to tell them of the disease alternately referred to as scarlet plague, scarlet death, or red death.
Smith recounts the story of his life before the plague, when he was an English professor. In 2013, the year after “Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States by the Board of Magnates”, the disease came about and spread rapidly. Sufferers would turn scarlet, particularly on the face, and become numb in their lower extremities. Victims usually died within 30 minutes of first seeing symptoms. Despite the public’s trust in doctors and scientists, no cure is found, and those who attempted to do so were also killed by the disease. The grandsons question Smith’s belief in “germs” causing the illness because they cannot be seen.
Smith witnesses his first victim of the scarlet plague while teaching when a young woman’s face turns scarlet. She dies quickly, and a panic soon overtakes the campus. He returns home but his family refuses to join him because they fear he is infected. Soon, an epidemic overtakes the area and residents begin rioting and killing one another. Smith meets with colleagues at his college’s chemistry building, where they hope to wait out the problem. They soon realize they must move elsewhere for safety and begin trekking northward.
Shortly, Smith’s entire party dies out and he is left as the sole survivor. He lives for three years on his own with the company of a pony and two dogs. Eventually, his need for social interaction compels him back to the San Francisco area in search of other people. He finally discovers a sort of new society has been created with a few survivors, who have broken into tribes.
Smith worries that he is the last to remember the times before the plague. He reminisces about the quality of food, social classes, his job, and technology. As he realizes his time grows short, he tries to impart the value of knowledge and wisdom to his grandsons. His efforts are in vain, however, as the children ridicule his recollections of the past, which sound totally unbelievable to them.
The Scarlet Plague was written in 1910 but not serialized until the May–June 1912 issue of London Magazine. It was published as a book in 1915 by Macmillan.
London published The Scarlet Plague in book form at a point in his career that biographers and critics have called a “professional decline”, from September 1912 to May 1916. In this period, he stopped writing short works and shifted to longer works including The Abysmal Brute (1913), John Barleycorn (1913), The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914), The Star Rover (1915), among others.[2]
Reesman, Jeanne Campbell. Jack London’s Racial Lives: A Critical Biography. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009: 267. ISBN978-0-8203-2789-1
Hammond, J. R. An Edgar Allan Poe Companion: A Guide to the Short Stories, Romances and Essays. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1981: 78. ISBN978-1-349-05027-7
Rosen, Elizabeth K. Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2008: 69. ISBN978-0-7391-1790-3
External links
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
What do you get when you forget to put the heart of a classic novel into its graphic adaptation? The Stranger by Jacques Ferrandez, based on the book by Albert Camus.
As this French graphic novel was part of the official selection of the Angoulême Comics Festival 2014, I was looking quite forward to reading the book.
In the right hands, Camus’ masterpiece of existentialism could lend itself quite easily to metaphoric imagery, where an artist can play with time and mood on the page – a big part of the novel. However, what I ended up with was a shorter version of the novel, free of subtext and atmosphere.
When the French Algerian Meursault arrives at a seaside town to witness his mother’s burial, he seems unmoved by the proceedings. After Meursault befriends his neighbor Raymond Sintés, the two get into trouble with Arabs, one of whom Meursault shoots for apparently no reason. Throughout the subsequent trial, Meursault refuses to show any kind of emotion, even when confronted by the girl he loves (or, at least, who loves him) or God.
The novel from 1942 is all attitude. In the philosophy of existentialism, the only sane response to a chaotic and absurd world is disorientation and bewilderment. It is this attitude that Meursault propagates, and it is the raison d’être for his distanced demeanor. This stands in sharp contrast to his surroundings, as his girlfriend is passionate and his friend Sintés prone to violent outbursts.
What a graphic novel of The Stranger absolutely needs to convey is this dichotomy between the outer world (as represented by Meursault’s friends) and the inner world (Meursault himself, the philosopher). And it is in this area that artist and writer Ferrandez fails so spectacularly.
Although there’s a nice ephemeral quality to the watercolour paintings Ferrandez spreads throughout the book, and the warm colours certainly evoke the Mediterranean, the body language and facial features of his characters are stiff and static, which is a shame because that is where the book should come alive.
While that style befits the stoic attitude of Meursault, the other characters should revel in life’s lighter and darker sides while the protagonist stands to the side, enhancing his own detached behavior. The passion he chooses to exclude from his own life should be made even clearer in other characters, embodying the philosophy that is the backbone of the book. Alas, that is not the case.
The Stranger by Jacques Ferrandez is a bland, concise retelling of the novel that fails to add any personal interpretation on the part of the author – surely a prerequisite of any visual adaptation of a literary book.
The author charged ahead and produced a fine looking graphic novel, but forgot to look for the soul of the original novel. One can only imagine how this would have turned out in the hands of a more allegorical artist such as Lorenzo Mattotti.
The Stranger by Jacques Ferrandez is published in Dutch by Blloan and in French by Gallimard. It is a full-colour 136-page hardback, retailing for €19,95.
The Plague – by Albert Camus – Audiobook (Part 1 of 2) Mp3 (5:19:32 min) The Plague – by Albert Camus – Audiobook (Part 2 of 2) (5:35:43 min)
As I listen to the audio book of ‘The Plague’ on Youtube I have looked at video wallpaper or holodeck.
I also looked up a French language version on Youtube
I find the French a lot easier to follow after having listened to the English translation a number of times. I also read along with a French text that is legal in Canada.
Using this method is really simple, but the mask looks really good. I couldn’t find any help on the internet when I was researching how to make one. I had the idea that I wanted my children to have a hands-on activity and then write a set of instructions from it. So, I set about making my own mask and here are the instructions of how to do it.
Materials You Will Need
2 x A4 pieces of card (Colour is up to you but I chose yellow)
1 x Toilet roll holder
Scissors
Stapler
Sellotape or masking tape
Anything you need to decorate it
How Do You Make a Simple Plague Doctor’s Mask?
For the Beak:
First, you take one of your A4 pieces of card. This piece of card should be folded in half along the longest side of the rectangle.
You then place it in the landscape position with the folded edge of the card at the bottom.
Starting at the bottom left-hand corner you need to draw a curve up to the top right-hand corner. (This is going to form the beak so a good round curve would be better here)
Once this has been done then you should cut along the line you have drawn. (If the children get this right then their beak should still be in one part)
Next, you need to secure this curved edge somehow – I used a staple and placed staples all the way down to the bottom of the beak. You could use sellotape or masking tape but I felt the staples would be more secure here. (Note the back edge of the beak where it is going to join the mask should not be touched at this point.)
Then instruct the children to place two fingers inside their beak. Model how they should then push down their fingers against the top of the table. This should create a 3D beak now but it will spring back into place once you let go.
The children should fold an edge along the line they have just created all the way down to the bottom of the beak.
If you tackle one side at a time this will be easier – staple along each fold they have created so the beak stays in the 3D shape. It is not necessary to go along the whole length; maybe 3/4 will do here.
Then do the same for the other side. You should now have three edges that have staples in and if you feel you want to staple the bottom of the beak then this will create a good effect too but it is not essential.
That is your beak made. Put this to one side until you need it again.
Harriet Tubman—fugitive slave, conductor on the Underground Railroad, and spy and military strategist for the Union Army during the Civil War—has had a checkered history at the hands of historians and biographers. A cottage industry of children’s books shrouded her in myth. Figures about the number of slaves she rescued and the amount of bounty on her head were inflated. One of her earliest biographies is filled with such inaccuracies (and is further stamped by racist paternalism). The makers of the 2019 movie Harriet, which garnered a best actress Oscar nomination for Cynthia Erivo, have added their own myth to the mix.
On the one hand, this Hollywood movie honors Tubman, with Erivo’s performance capturing the brave and fearless woman that she was. On the other hand, the fictional liberties taken by director Kasi Lemmons unfortunately undermined this portrayal. Lemmons turned Tubman into a kind of superwoman in a Hollywood action thriller. In the movie, Tubman, cornered by slave catchers, flings herself from a high bridge into a raging river. She is later seen confronting her former slave master and humiliating him.
Tubman’s real life was full of more action and drama than depicted in Harriet. One of her most courageous acts was the rescue of fugitive slave Charles Nalle, in Troy, New York, in 1860. Twice in the same day, Tubman led a crowd that freed Nalle from the clutches of the authorities about to send him back to bondage. In the course of the rescue, she was fired upon, beaten and bloodied, while herself choking a policeman and carrying Nalle over her shoulder along the way.
More significant than such omissions is the movie’s treatment of other heroes of the fight to smash the slavocracy. As in all superhero blockbusters, the role of everybody else is diminished. Among these is the outstanding abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. In one repulsive fabricated scene, Douglass, who himself escaped from bondage in 1838, is given a cameo of a few seconds in which he is humiliated, his militancy spat on and his commitment to freeing slaves questioned by Tubman.
Glaringly disappeared from the movie is John Brown, the heroic martyr of the October 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Brown sought to procure arms with which to free slaves in the vicinity and establish a liberated area in the mountains. The failed raid, for which he was executed two months later, was the real opening shot of the Civil War. In the movie, a figure who resembles Brown is seen standing passively on the Philadelphia docks, watching as fugitive slaves are boarding a ship to Canada. Tubman was key to recruiting followers for John Brown among black people who had settled in Canada. Showing deep appreciation of her leadership skills, Brown called her the “General.” Tubman fully embraced Brown’s insurrectionary plans, but couldn’t join the raid because she fell ill.
Tubman, Brown and Douglass stood on the revolutionary insurrectionist wing of the abolitionist movement, rejecting the non-violent philosophy of “moral suasion” espoused by William Lloyd Garrison. Tubman knew that freedom for the slave would come about only through blood and iron. As a conductor in the Underground Railroad, returning to slave territory some 13 times, she heroically rescued dozens of slaves from bondage during the bleak decade of the 1850s. As she once put it, “I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
Committed to the destruction of slavery, Tubman served in the Union Army, understanding early on that the war to “save the Union” must be a war to free the slaves. Like Douglass, she forcefully called for the recruitment and arming of black soldiers to fight in the Union Army, telling her abolitionist friend Lydia Maria Child that “if Lincoln would save lives and money—and the country—he must use the mighty black arm of the Negro on the battlefields” (as rendered by Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman: Negro Soldier and Abolitionist [1942]). As an advocate for women’s rights, Tubman was an active participant in the women’s suffrage movement.
Harriet Tubman was born a slave sometime in the early 1820s. From an early age, her slave masters routinely whipped her. As a young teen, she was nearly killed when struck in the head by an iron weight thrown by an overseer. As a result of the blow, she suffered headaches, seizures, hallucinations and spells of unconsciousness for the rest of her life. Fearing that she was about to be sold to a master in the even more brutal Deep South, against all odds, Tubman escaped bondage and reached the North in 1849.
Abolitionist Movement and Underground Railroad
The abolitionist movement was part of a broader bourgeois radicalism, a product of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals and the American Revolution. Although slavery was their primary concern, these radical bourgeois egalitarians also fought for many other pressing social and political issues of the time, such as free education and religious tolerance. The most deeply committed and politically astute of these revolutionary democrats, like Frederick Douglass, understood that the fight against slavery must be generalized into a struggle against all oppression.
The early women’s suffrage movement originated in the abolitionist movement, including when women fought to assert their role as leading anti-slavery activists. Women’s rights leaders, such as the Grimké sisters Angelina and Sarah, were staunch fighters for black freedom. As Angelina put it, “I want to be identified with the Negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours.” (For more, see “The Grimké Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women’s Rights,” Women and Revolution No. 29, Spring 1985.)
Few features of American history have so many legends and myths attached to them as the Underground Railroad. It has been instilled in the public memory through the folklore of mysterious coded quilts and secret tunnels. Fugitive slaves are cast as passive players saved by white abolitionists; their agency in their own emancipation disappeared. In truth, the Underground Railroad’s operations were secret only to its pro-slavery enemies. It operated openly and brazenly. A major focus of the abolitionist movement, the Underground Railroad was a loose network of thousands of men and women, black and white, who courageously trespassed the dangerous boundaries of race and actively subverted federal laws. Black people were instrumental in its development and operation.
Most escapes, including Tubman’s, could not have succeeded without the support of black communities, free and enslaved, South and North. As the Southern slaveholders had allies in many Northern cities, the threat of recapture and transport back South was constant. When fugitive slaves reached a Northern city, they found their first support from black “Underground agents” of the vigilance committees, like William Still in Philadelphia, David Ruggles in New York, Lewis Hayden in Boston, Jermaine Loguen in Syracuse and many others. Black sailors and stevedores assisted slaves, hiding them on ships sailing from Southern ports.
Free blacks were the main activists in the vigilance committees, which were initiated in New York and later sprang up in many other cities. The leaderships of the committees were generally interracial, but were sustained to a considerable extent, and in some places entirely, by black people. But these deeper truths of the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad have generally been suppressed. In a society committed to racism and segregation, the story of a militant, racially integrated movement, led in part by blacks, was seen as far too threatening. Harriet, too, dismisses these courageous activists, largely portraying them as comfortable and patronizing.
Tubman relied heavily on this intricate web of communication and support first to liberate herself and then to effect rescues of others. That does not diminish her heroism, but rather is a testament to her intelligence and ability to identify allies and gain their trust and support. In addition to Frederick Douglass and John Brown, she found allies and friends among other key abolitionist figures like William Seward, who would become Lincoln’s secretary of state; Gerrit Smith, a member of the “Secret Six” (abolitionists who financed Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid); Thomas Higginson, also one of the “Secret Six” and the commander of the first regiment of freed slaves during the Civil War; Ralph Waldo Emerson and many of the women’s rights activists of the day.
But Hollywood wants us to believe that Tubman accomplished her rescues singlehandedly with scant human assistance, and that she was able to evade slave hunters because she received divine visions while unconscious (leaving out the fact that the assault was the earthly source of her unconsciousness). Whenever slave catchers and their bloodhounds are closing in, Tubman magically goes into one of her spells and receives a vision that guides her through a safer route. In another fictional scene, Tubman tells Still that she doesn’t need maps; God shows her the way.
Harriet Tubman was indeed a deeply religious woman, and her religious fervor found expression in visions. As with many other slaves, her religion preached endurance and patience as a way to survive the cruelty of slavery, but also embodied the idea that deliverance would one day come. Her religion was based on a desire to drown the slave system in blood. But to attribute her successful rescues to divine intervention does violence to her brilliance, courage and cunning.
It is impossible to know how many slaves gained freedom through the Underground Railroad. Recent estimates by historians put the number at some 1,000 who made it North each year, hardly enough to make a dent in a slave population that approached four million in 1860. As Frederick Douglass recalled:
“I never did more congenial, attractive, fascinating and satisfactory work. True, as a means of destroying slavery, it was like an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, but the thought that there was one less slave, and one more freeman—having myself been a slave, and a fugitive slave—brought to my heart unspeakable joy.”
—Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882)
The significance of the Underground Railroad, and the broader abolitionist movement, lies in the fact that it was the first racially integrated social movement in American history. The Underground Railroad represented a rallying point in abolition work and allowed the crystallization of a black abolitionist vanguard in the North.
Fugitive Slave Act
In 1850, Congress passed the draconian Fugitive Slave Act, fortifying a 1793 law that itself was enacted to put teeth into the U.S. Constitution’s fugitive slave clause. Part of one of a long series of compromises between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern slave power, the 1850 act extended the tentacles of slavery to all Northern states, making it a national institution. Federal power would be wielded to defend slavery as the law “commanded” all citizens to “aid and assist” U.S. marshals in the capture of escaped slaves. It included severe penalties for harboring slaves or interfering with their capture. A further threat to the life and freedom of black people was the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, which stripped black people, free and slave, of citizenship in every state.
The Compromise of 1850, which also put conditions on the extension of slavery, was intended to mitigate the “irrepressible conflict” between two social systems. Instead, it drew the looming Civil War closer. The 1850s were marked by the North becoming aware that its continued development as a capitalist society was impeded by the Southern slave power, while the slaveholders increasingly realized that their political domination of the country was threatened.
In the North, the Fugitive Slave Act was met with fierce resistance, which the movie doesn’t address. John Brown formed a secret self-defense organization called the United States League of Gileadites to fight slave catchers. In several cities, including Boston and Syracuse, vigilance committees mobilized crowds that stormed courthouses and rescued fugitive slaves from federal agents and transported them to Canada.
In September 1851, William Parker, a black leader of a racially integrated underground operation in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was sheltering four fugitive slaves being pursued by a well-armed posse led by slaveowner Edward Gorsuch and accompanied by federal marshals. The slave hunters were confronted by over 100 armed men and women, led by Parker. Gorsuch was killed in the fray and his son and nephew were beaten senseless. Parker and two of his men fled to the Rochester home of Frederick Douglass, who greeted them enthusiastically. For Douglass, these were “heroic defenders of the just rights of man against manstealers and murderers.”
Douglass had put the men on a ship to Canada. Before they departed, Parker handed Gorsuch’s revolver to Douglass as a memento. “The gun was a symbol,” writes Fergus Bordewich in Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad (2006). “Both men knew, that the war against slavery had taken a new and deadly turn, and that more, perhaps much more, violence lay ahead. It was one of the great moments in the history of the Underground Railroad.”
Parker and his comrades were the kind of men whom Douglass had in mind when in 1852 he addressed the convention of the National Free Soil Party (precursor to Lincoln’s Republican Party) in Pittsburgh: “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.” Harriet twists this powerful declaration to portray Douglass as an opponent of the Underground Railroad in his cameo appearance. In that conjured scene, he and Still advise Tubman that the Fugitive Slave Act made any further rescue missions to the South too dangerous. When Douglass utters the famous dead kidnapper line, Tubman snaps back, “You been free so long, you forget what it’s like. You got comfortable and important.”
Tubman’s Civil War Years
The Civil War was America’s most formative and defining event, and the high point of black resistance to slavery, with 200,000 black troops helping to turn the tide of the war. But the Civil War is given short shrift at the very end of the movie. Tubman served for much of the war in the Union Army in various capacities—as a nurse, a cook, a scout, a spy and a military strategist.
In South Carolina, she played an important role in recruiting slaves to the Union Army. Tubman’s skills, honed in the Underground Railroad, enabled her to scout, undetected, behind Confederate lines, gathering information about rebel locations and movements. She established a network of spies among the slaves who were still living in Confederate territory. She organized black river pilots, who scouted the Combahee River area.
In this capacity, she was integral to the celebrated raid on the Combahee on 2 June 1863. Under the command of Colonel James Montgomery, a veteran alongside John Brown of guerrilla battles against pro-slavery thugs in Kansas in the 1850s, Harriet Tubman guided the raid deep into South Carolina. As the Boston Commonwealth (10 July 1863) reported: “Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy’s country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom, brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch.” Many of the liberated slaves were inducted into Montgomery’s regiment.
Just as the real history of the Underground Railroad has been buried, the significance of the short period of post-Civil War Radical Reconstruction has been distorted. The era of Radical Reconstruction was the most democratic period for black people in U.S. history, during which they acquired citizenship rights and the right to vote and to hold office, and gained access to education. The defeat of Reconstruction in the mid 1870s laid the basis for the rigid system of legally enforced racial segregation called Jim Crow.
Tubman got a taste of what would be in store for black people. While en route North after the Civil War, she was beaten and thrown into the baggage car by a train conductor who ridiculed her Union pass entitling her to free transportation as an army veteran. Shortly after began a decades-long battle for the pension owed for her war service. Tubman commented scornfully, “You wouldn’t think that after I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want in its folds.”
It wasn’t until 1895, after her second husband Nelson Davis, a war veteran, died that she received a widow’s pension of $8 a month. In 1899, when she was nearly 80 years old, the government finally gave some recognition of her service as a nurse. She received a full pension, much of which she used to establish a home for indigent elderly black people, named in honor of John Brown. Tubman died in 1913, over 90 years old.
The Civil War, the Second American Revolution, and the last progressive act of the U.S. capitalist class, ended chattel slavery and ushered in Radical Reconstruction. But the Civil War was not carried to its completion. The aspirations for full black equality went unfulfilled, as the victorious Northern capitalist class, in pursuit of its own class interest, made common cause with the vanquished Southern former slaveowners. The defeat of Reconstruction has left a lasting imprint on this society. Racial oppression remains at the core of American capitalism, with the black population consolidated as an oppressed race-color caste, the majority of whom are forcibly segregated at the bottom of society.
Back when I had cable television through a wire and a box I watched a number of episodes of ‘Hoarders.’ People who had homes full of stuff. Lots of stuff. Some had obvious mental problems and rotting food and rodents. Others were simply ‘hoarders’ who had lots of things, not so much trash as useful things perhaps at the right time but just too, too much. Sometimes I’d watch one or two episodes on a lazy afternoon and then get up and do a little cleaning of my own place. Maybe do those dishes piling up on the wrong side of the kitchen sink.
One of the sweetest and easiest to understand was a woman who was in her fifties and lived in an matriculate tidy home. She had worked as a secretary or bookkeeper and had been laid off. Her ‘thing’ was going down to the local thrift shop or second hand charity store and rescuing any cloth dolls. She sewed them back up and rehabbed them. She had hundreds of them neatly in closets and cupboards and in boxes under her bed. In her attic there were boxes and boxes of mended dolls. The ceiling was sagging from the weight of the dolls. How nice it would be to match that woman up with a doll museum or perhaps a doll design shop to use her extensive skill. I suppose she could design her own at home on a computer and have it produced.
That brings me to – myself. I am quarantined in my five room apartment. I am not alone. I have toys. Lots of toys. I have a few toys from my own childhood. I have toys from my son.
My two daughters and other girls have left me surrounded with doll houses. There are many worn out Barbie dolls around. Why do little girls like to cut Barbie’s hair?
I taught some middle school introduction to technology classes and have models and devices that are akin to toys. I taught technical drawing on draft boards with pencils and on computers with CAD and I have models in wood that were used in technical drawing.
I have a collection of wooden model sailing ships. (Note: Not my actual collection)
I have a collection of die cast model cars. A good bunch from the early days of automobiles and a sample of models from just about every decade. (Note: Not my actual collection)
I have a few model airplanes – the Spirit of St Louis – a small model of the Wright Brothers airplane.
I have a rag tag set of HO scale trains with a passenger car that lights up, but I have to push it around the circular track with my finger tips on the top because there is no motor car. (Note: not actual HO trains – a wish for xmas that did not come true)
When I think of all the events I’ve gone to on a subway train…
In the front room where the sun shines in the late afternoon I have a shiny wooden door from the th
ird floor clamped to the coffee table to create a vast battlefield for 2-1/4 inch plastic soldiers. There is a Marx company Fort Apache, actually, two.
(
Under the wooden table is the strategy board game Axis and Allies.
I haven’t played that game in thirty years. Thank goodness for computer games that have some similar elements. Still, nice to have the physical board game to set up and remember things past.
A few weeks ago I took out a plastic tub from the cellar that had a plastic castle from Germany that I got for my son in the mid 1970’s at Boston’s downtown Jordan Marsh department store.
I just went to see if I could find anything like the castle I have set up in the other room next to my stand up writing desk. My heart leaped when I saw the exact castle. I even have some knights like the ones in the picture above.
So I am stuck in a castle with toys looking out my window getting ready to say, “Who is stealing my roses?”
I just took a walk through my apartment. On the way out of the kitchen I touched a deck of tarot cards next to my laptop playing a Youtube video. I turned the light on in my darkened bedroom and saw two tarot card boxes and then on the book shelf behind a tiny 2 inches by 3 inches tarot deck.
I cut the tarot deck on the lectern. The card for ‘The Sun’ appeared. My fortune for today. I had just copied a drawing of stylized Mona Lisa someone had used to illustrate a tarot card. I wanted to go out into the sun to get a copy of my drawing on scrap paper with a worn old orange crayon. 
Here is a the cover art of one magazine that published Jack London’s story in 1949. Somehow, the boys and men who bought these magazines, the people who sold them, the people who printed them, and the writers of the story, all knew that there was nothing about the woman on the cover inside the magazines. Somehow we all knew.
The novel from 1942 is all attitude. In the philosophy of existentialism, the only sane response to a chaotic and absurd world is disorientation and bewilderment. It is this attitude that Meursault propagates, and it is the raison d’être for his distanced demeanor. This stands in sharp contrast to his surroundings, as his girlfriend is passionate and his friend Sintés prone to violent outbursts.
The Stranger by Jacques Ferrandez is published in Dutch by 
More significant than such omissions is the movie’s treatment of other heroes of the fight to smash the slavocracy. As in all superhero blockbusters, the role of everybody else is diminished. Among these is the outstanding abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. In one repulsive fabricated scene, Douglass, who himself escaped from bondage in 1838, is given a cameo of a few seconds in which he is humiliated, his militancy spat on and his commitment to freeing slaves questioned by Tubman.
One of the sweetest and easiest to understand was a woman who was in her fifties and lived in an matriculate tidy home. She had worked as a secretary or bookkeeper and had been laid off. Her ‘thing’ was going down to the local thrift shop or second hand charity store and rescuing any cloth dolls. She sewed them back up and rehabbed them. She had hundreds of them neatly in closets and cupboards and in boxes under her bed. In her attic there were boxes and boxes of mended dolls. The ceiling was sagging from the weight of the dolls. How nice it would be to match that woman up with a doll museum or perhaps a doll design shop to use her extensive skill. I suppose she could design her own at home on a computer and have it produced.
ings me to – myself. I am quarantined in my five room apartment. I am not alone. I have toys. Lots of toys. I have a few toys from my own childhood. I have toys from my son.
xenagoguevicene 
[–]European_Bitch 9 points
Je pense que nous avons un vainqueur pour “trio de livres le plus déprimant/sombre