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Reading Wednesday
Jul. 27th, 2016 02:39 pmWhat did you just finish?
Heaven's Ditch: God, Gold, and Murder on the Erie Canal by Jack Kelly. A nonfiction book about the building of the Erie Canal and the boomtowns (a word actually invented for this time and place!) that sprang up as it came into operation.
Kelly has three main strands running through his narrative, as seen in his subtitle. First, gold, which I suppose mostly symbolizes the planning, construction, and eventually use of the Erie Canal, which was both hugely costly and hugely profitable. This was by far the least interesting of the three strands, but does provide the necessary background for the rest of the book.
Murder: William Morgan was a man living in Rochester – one of those boomtowns – in the 1820s. He decided to write a book on Freemasons which would reveal some of their secret rituals. Freemasons, unsurprisingly, were not down with this, and shortly before publication a group kidnapped Morgan, who was never seen again. Freemasons at the time were hugely influential, counting as members everyone from George Washington to the current president Andrew Jackson to, most relevantly, local sheriffs and magistrates, who refused to even investigate the case until ordered to do so by the governor. This didn't go over well, leading to a public outcry and eventually an entire political party, the Anti-Masonic Party, America's first third party and the inventor of holding conventions to nominate candidates and announce the party's platform. Very appropriate reading for this week!
And finally God, the third strand and the reason I wanted to read this book. The 1810s to 1830s, the time period Heaven's Ditch is most focused on, are the moment of the Second Great Awakening. This was a time of massive religious revivals, and upstate New York was one of the centers for the extravagant conversions and new religions. In fact the area became known as the "burned over district" for the frequency and intensity with which religious frenzies swept across the local people. Heaven's Ditch focuses on several of the most prominent figures in this movement, including: Charles Finney, celebrated and notorious (depending on who you asked) for his camp revival meetings and promotion of an evangelical style of Protestantism that is still hugely influential in American religion and politics. William Miller, who claimed to have proof that the world would end in 1843; when it (obviously) did not, his followers eventually evolved into today's Seventh-Day Adventists. And, most famous of all and given the most page time, Joseph Smith, prophet and founder of Mormonism/The Church of Latter Day Saints.
Kelly is very respectful of the beliefs he describes, in my opinion – though I may be a bit biased because personally I would have been much more sarcastic in recounting visions of angels or biblical number conspiracies. The book is written in an engaging, almost fictionalized style, similar to Erik Larson or Tom Reiss. My one complaint is that the narration jumps around in time a great deal, specifically going back and forth to the building of the canal (1817-25) and the culture after it opened (mostly late 1820s, 1830s, and some of the 1840s). That occasionally made it hard to remember when events were happening in relation to one another. I do think that it probably would have been impossible to organize the whole book with a straightforward chronology, but section headings with prominently displayed dates would have made the various narrative strands a lot easier to follow.
I am resisting the urge to just go off listing various cool facts and stories that I picked up from reading this, since you'd be better off just reading the book and not my summary of every single thing in it. And it is absolutely worth reading! If you like weird historical escapades, I cannot recommend this highly enough.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle. YOU GUYS THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD. READ IT, READ IT NOW.
H.P. Lovecraft invented Cthulhu and other creepy monsters, hugely influenced the horror genre, and, oh yeah, was totally a racist. Even by the standards of the 1920s (generally a low point for racism in America) he was considered over the top. And one of his most xenophobic stories is "The Horror at Red Hook", a charming tale in which "illegal immigrants" (an oddly modern phrase, to my ears, for something published in 1927!) kidnap white, "blue-eyed" babies for a ritual which almost succeeds in destroying the world. Red Hook (a neighborhood in Brooklyn not that far from where I'm currently sitting) is described as "a maze of hybrid squalor", where "the population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements impinging upon one another" and "the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky". "Visible offences are as varied as the local dialects", and you may overhear "a swarthy squinting hag teaching a small child some whispered patois" or witness those immigrants with "their squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing". You get the idea. The general impression is of a horror story in which the real monster is the multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual nature of New York City, an evil greater and more insidious than any dark magic or cosmic powers.
The Ballad of Black Tom is part retelling and part twisted mirror of "The Horror at Red Hook". Instead of that mass of undifferentiated and unknowable foreigners (a ridiculously explicit vision of The Other), we have Charles Tommy Tester as our narrator, a young black man who works as a low-level hustler to care for his widowed father. His job has brought him into contact with the mystical element of 1920s New York City, which he treats with a charming nonchalance; sure, he might have been hired to transport a book of unspeakable dread, but it's just another day's work. At least until his world is torn apart by an evil far more banal than Cthulhu, but no less awful.
In Lovecraft's stories, our world is a fragile veneer of civilization over a bottomless pit of indifference and gods who don't care for humanity; in The Ballad of Black Tom the very civilization that Lovecraft prized is, in fact, the worse of the two evils. If Red Hook was a place of horror in the original because its foreign, "hybrid" nature challenged Malone, the white policeman who was the center of that story, Ballad's New York is equally horrifying for the racism that constantly threaten Tommy. It's a place where police brutality, poverty, his own inability to travel freely, and causal assumptions of white superiority conspire to drive him into the arms (or tentacles) of Cthulhu, the only possible source of agency left for a black man. As he says at the moment of making his choice:
A fear of cosmic indifference suddenly seemed comical, or downright naive. Tester looked back to Malone and Mr. Howard. Beyond them he saw the police forces at the barricades as they muscled the crowd of Negroes back; he saw the decaying facade of his tenement with new eyes; he saw the patrol cars parked in the middle of the road like three great black hounds waiting to pounce on all these gathered sheep. What was indifference compared to malice?
"Indifference would be such a relief," Tommy said.
But there's not only the very smart critique of Lovecraft's racism to enjoy here. This is a genuinely scary book, particularly in the eruption of violence at the climax, with some shocking plot twists. Tommy is an incredibly engaging character, and I would have happily read an entire series of books about him (The Ballad of Black Tom is, alas, more of a novella, only 150 pages long). The writing is lovely and enthralling. I do think it works best if you read "The Horror at Red Hook" first, or at least are familiar with Lovecraft's style and usual tropes, but whatever it takes, I want you all to read this book. IT'S JUST SO GOOD.
What are you currently reading?
Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine by Sarah Lohman. Another NetGalley book, this one about the history of American food.
Heaven's Ditch: God, Gold, and Murder on the Erie Canal by Jack Kelly. A nonfiction book about the building of the Erie Canal and the boomtowns (a word actually invented for this time and place!) that sprang up as it came into operation.
Kelly has three main strands running through his narrative, as seen in his subtitle. First, gold, which I suppose mostly symbolizes the planning, construction, and eventually use of the Erie Canal, which was both hugely costly and hugely profitable. This was by far the least interesting of the three strands, but does provide the necessary background for the rest of the book.
Murder: William Morgan was a man living in Rochester – one of those boomtowns – in the 1820s. He decided to write a book on Freemasons which would reveal some of their secret rituals. Freemasons, unsurprisingly, were not down with this, and shortly before publication a group kidnapped Morgan, who was never seen again. Freemasons at the time were hugely influential, counting as members everyone from George Washington to the current president Andrew Jackson to, most relevantly, local sheriffs and magistrates, who refused to even investigate the case until ordered to do so by the governor. This didn't go over well, leading to a public outcry and eventually an entire political party, the Anti-Masonic Party, America's first third party and the inventor of holding conventions to nominate candidates and announce the party's platform. Very appropriate reading for this week!
And finally God, the third strand and the reason I wanted to read this book. The 1810s to 1830s, the time period Heaven's Ditch is most focused on, are the moment of the Second Great Awakening. This was a time of massive religious revivals, and upstate New York was one of the centers for the extravagant conversions and new religions. In fact the area became known as the "burned over district" for the frequency and intensity with which religious frenzies swept across the local people. Heaven's Ditch focuses on several of the most prominent figures in this movement, including: Charles Finney, celebrated and notorious (depending on who you asked) for his camp revival meetings and promotion of an evangelical style of Protestantism that is still hugely influential in American religion and politics. William Miller, who claimed to have proof that the world would end in 1843; when it (obviously) did not, his followers eventually evolved into today's Seventh-Day Adventists. And, most famous of all and given the most page time, Joseph Smith, prophet and founder of Mormonism/The Church of Latter Day Saints.
Kelly is very respectful of the beliefs he describes, in my opinion – though I may be a bit biased because personally I would have been much more sarcastic in recounting visions of angels or biblical number conspiracies. The book is written in an engaging, almost fictionalized style, similar to Erik Larson or Tom Reiss. My one complaint is that the narration jumps around in time a great deal, specifically going back and forth to the building of the canal (1817-25) and the culture after it opened (mostly late 1820s, 1830s, and some of the 1840s). That occasionally made it hard to remember when events were happening in relation to one another. I do think that it probably would have been impossible to organize the whole book with a straightforward chronology, but section headings with prominently displayed dates would have made the various narrative strands a lot easier to follow.
I am resisting the urge to just go off listing various cool facts and stories that I picked up from reading this, since you'd be better off just reading the book and not my summary of every single thing in it. And it is absolutely worth reading! If you like weird historical escapades, I cannot recommend this highly enough.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle. YOU GUYS THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD. READ IT, READ IT NOW.
H.P. Lovecraft invented Cthulhu and other creepy monsters, hugely influenced the horror genre, and, oh yeah, was totally a racist. Even by the standards of the 1920s (generally a low point for racism in America) he was considered over the top. And one of his most xenophobic stories is "The Horror at Red Hook", a charming tale in which "illegal immigrants" (an oddly modern phrase, to my ears, for something published in 1927!) kidnap white, "blue-eyed" babies for a ritual which almost succeeds in destroying the world. Red Hook (a neighborhood in Brooklyn not that far from where I'm currently sitting) is described as "a maze of hybrid squalor", where "the population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements impinging upon one another" and "the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky". "Visible offences are as varied as the local dialects", and you may overhear "a swarthy squinting hag teaching a small child some whispered patois" or witness those immigrants with "their squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing". You get the idea. The general impression is of a horror story in which the real monster is the multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual nature of New York City, an evil greater and more insidious than any dark magic or cosmic powers.
The Ballad of Black Tom is part retelling and part twisted mirror of "The Horror at Red Hook". Instead of that mass of undifferentiated and unknowable foreigners (a ridiculously explicit vision of The Other), we have Charles Tommy Tester as our narrator, a young black man who works as a low-level hustler to care for his widowed father. His job has brought him into contact with the mystical element of 1920s New York City, which he treats with a charming nonchalance; sure, he might have been hired to transport a book of unspeakable dread, but it's just another day's work. At least until his world is torn apart by an evil far more banal than Cthulhu, but no less awful.
In Lovecraft's stories, our world is a fragile veneer of civilization over a bottomless pit of indifference and gods who don't care for humanity; in The Ballad of Black Tom the very civilization that Lovecraft prized is, in fact, the worse of the two evils. If Red Hook was a place of horror in the original because its foreign, "hybrid" nature challenged Malone, the white policeman who was the center of that story, Ballad's New York is equally horrifying for the racism that constantly threaten Tommy. It's a place where police brutality, poverty, his own inability to travel freely, and causal assumptions of white superiority conspire to drive him into the arms (or tentacles) of Cthulhu, the only possible source of agency left for a black man. As he says at the moment of making his choice:
A fear of cosmic indifference suddenly seemed comical, or downright naive. Tester looked back to Malone and Mr. Howard. Beyond them he saw the police forces at the barricades as they muscled the crowd of Negroes back; he saw the decaying facade of his tenement with new eyes; he saw the patrol cars parked in the middle of the road like three great black hounds waiting to pounce on all these gathered sheep. What was indifference compared to malice?
"Indifference would be such a relief," Tommy said.
But there's not only the very smart critique of Lovecraft's racism to enjoy here. This is a genuinely scary book, particularly in the eruption of violence at the climax, with some shocking plot twists. Tommy is an incredibly engaging character, and I would have happily read an entire series of books about him (The Ballad of Black Tom is, alas, more of a novella, only 150 pages long). The writing is lovely and enthralling. I do think it works best if you read "The Horror at Red Hook" first, or at least are familiar with Lovecraft's style and usual tropes, but whatever it takes, I want you all to read this book. IT'S JUST SO GOOD.
What are you currently reading?
Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine by Sarah Lohman. Another NetGalley book, this one about the history of American food.
