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Jul. 14th, 2018 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The Life and Times of Henry Louis Rey by Melissa Daggett. The "René Grandjean Séance Registers" are 35 volumes owned by the University of New Orleans, thousands of pages of handwritten notes in French, about the experiences and beliefs of a group of free people of color from 1858 to 1877 - in other words, from before the Civil War, through Reconstruction, and into the beginnings of the Jim Crow Era; obviously this is a potentially fascinating primary document, but one which is a bit hard to access for the average student, to say the least. Thankfully Daggett has written a wonderful description and analysis of these notebooks.
Specifically, the registers are transcriptions of seance sessions and what the various ghosts, mystical entities, and spirit guides had to say. You don't need to believe in Spiritualism to take this book seriously; Daggett uses these supernatural messages as a way of getting at what Henry Louis Rey (the leader and medium) and his social circle cared about, worried over, and wanted. The spirits included practically everyone, from dead relatives and spouses to international heroes like John Brown (of Harpers Ferry), Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Pocahontas occasionally gave her opinion, as did Père Chalon, a local priest who showed up after his death to complain that his successor charged too much money to perform marriages. My particular favorite was when deceased political enemies of Rey and his friends would appear to confess the error of their ways and beg forgiveness, as did Pierre Soulé, the former Confederate provost marshal of New Orleans: "I used to be the friend of the oppressed, my heart beat for Liberty, but soon pride and ambition took over, I forgot my sacred aspirations and I loved the lamb of gold. I sacrificed my republicanism on the altar of slavery. Forgive me, forgive me! Brothers!" That had to feel good.
The seance transcriptions are cool enough, but Daggett surrounds them with research on Rey's world, which is just incredible. Rey and his friends served in the army (both for the Confederacy and the Union), ran a school for orphans of color that had such a highly politicized curriculum that historians have nicknamed it the "nursery school for revolution in Louisiana", were associated with Oscar James Dunn (America's first black lieutenant governor, who may have been poisoned at the height of his political power), and helped organize Plessy vs Ferguson (the Supreme Court case which they unfortunately lost when the court decided to endorse "separate but equal", thus providing the legal framework for Jim Crow), among other events. It's quite the life.
Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans isn't a perfect book; the writing gets dry at times, particularly in the second half, and the seance registers eventually trail off without neat resolution, which is frustrating though hardly Daggett's fault. Overall it's an excellent microhistory of a compelling slice of American history.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Chasing the Devil’s Tail by David Fulmer. A murder mystery set in 1907, New Orleans – specifically Storyville, the neighborhood where prostitution was legal for twenty years and jazz is said to have been born, as the musicians working in the front rooms of brothel experimented with new styles. The fictional characters cross paths with real historical figures, the most-well known of which are probably E. J. Bellocq (a photographer of the Storyville sex workers, including this famous shot) and Buddy Bolden (sometimes called the "father of jazz"; certainly at least a hugely influential figure in the early days, though no recordings of him exist).
Valentin St. Cyr is a former policeman, current bouncer and general factotum in Storyville, and also a light-skinned black man passing for white. When several sex workers are murdered, the deaths linked by a black rose left beside each victim, St Cyr is given the job of stopping the murderer before the negative publicity effects Storyville's profits. Every clue seems to point to Buddy Bolden, but St Cyr can't believe his childhood friend would commit such violence.
The setting and historical research are well done, but I just didn't enjoy this book. St Cyr is too much the stereotypical tough-guy/cynical noir detective to be an interesting or sympathetic character. He even has the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold girlfriend and precocious street-rat sidekick that are somehow obligatory in every bad mystery novel. The writing around race (a necessarily hugely important feature in any book with this setting) felt a bit uncomfortable to me, though not in a way where I could put my finger on what exactly bothered me about it. The style in general was plodding and shallow, a half-assed imitation of hardboiled. I did like the eventual solution to the mystery, except that 95% of the book has absolutely no hints or even appearances of the character in question.
Chasing the Devil’s Tail is the first in a series, and I'd be uninterested in the sequels, except... I already bought one of them. Whoops. (It was cheap in a second-hand store!) So I suppose I'll be giving Fulmer a second chance.
What are you currently reading?
The Year of the Snake by M.J. Trow and Maryanne Coleman, which is really bad, but it's a NetGalley book so I suppose I'm going to have to push through and finish it.
Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The Life and Times of Henry Louis Rey by Melissa Daggett. The "René Grandjean Séance Registers" are 35 volumes owned by the University of New Orleans, thousands of pages of handwritten notes in French, about the experiences and beliefs of a group of free people of color from 1858 to 1877 - in other words, from before the Civil War, through Reconstruction, and into the beginnings of the Jim Crow Era; obviously this is a potentially fascinating primary document, but one which is a bit hard to access for the average student, to say the least. Thankfully Daggett has written a wonderful description and analysis of these notebooks.
Specifically, the registers are transcriptions of seance sessions and what the various ghosts, mystical entities, and spirit guides had to say. You don't need to believe in Spiritualism to take this book seriously; Daggett uses these supernatural messages as a way of getting at what Henry Louis Rey (the leader and medium) and his social circle cared about, worried over, and wanted. The spirits included practically everyone, from dead relatives and spouses to international heroes like John Brown (of Harpers Ferry), Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Pocahontas occasionally gave her opinion, as did Père Chalon, a local priest who showed up after his death to complain that his successor charged too much money to perform marriages. My particular favorite was when deceased political enemies of Rey and his friends would appear to confess the error of their ways and beg forgiveness, as did Pierre Soulé, the former Confederate provost marshal of New Orleans: "I used to be the friend of the oppressed, my heart beat for Liberty, but soon pride and ambition took over, I forgot my sacred aspirations and I loved the lamb of gold. I sacrificed my republicanism on the altar of slavery. Forgive me, forgive me! Brothers!" That had to feel good.
The seance transcriptions are cool enough, but Daggett surrounds them with research on Rey's world, which is just incredible. Rey and his friends served in the army (both for the Confederacy and the Union), ran a school for orphans of color that had such a highly politicized curriculum that historians have nicknamed it the "nursery school for revolution in Louisiana", were associated with Oscar James Dunn (America's first black lieutenant governor, who may have been poisoned at the height of his political power), and helped organize Plessy vs Ferguson (the Supreme Court case which they unfortunately lost when the court decided to endorse "separate but equal", thus providing the legal framework for Jim Crow), among other events. It's quite the life.
Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans isn't a perfect book; the writing gets dry at times, particularly in the second half, and the seance registers eventually trail off without neat resolution, which is frustrating though hardly Daggett's fault. Overall it's an excellent microhistory of a compelling slice of American history.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Chasing the Devil’s Tail by David Fulmer. A murder mystery set in 1907, New Orleans – specifically Storyville, the neighborhood where prostitution was legal for twenty years and jazz is said to have been born, as the musicians working in the front rooms of brothel experimented with new styles. The fictional characters cross paths with real historical figures, the most-well known of which are probably E. J. Bellocq (a photographer of the Storyville sex workers, including this famous shot) and Buddy Bolden (sometimes called the "father of jazz"; certainly at least a hugely influential figure in the early days, though no recordings of him exist).
Valentin St. Cyr is a former policeman, current bouncer and general factotum in Storyville, and also a light-skinned black man passing for white. When several sex workers are murdered, the deaths linked by a black rose left beside each victim, St Cyr is given the job of stopping the murderer before the negative publicity effects Storyville's profits. Every clue seems to point to Buddy Bolden, but St Cyr can't believe his childhood friend would commit such violence.
The setting and historical research are well done, but I just didn't enjoy this book. St Cyr is too much the stereotypical tough-guy/cynical noir detective to be an interesting or sympathetic character. He even has the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold girlfriend and precocious street-rat sidekick that are somehow obligatory in every bad mystery novel. The writing around race (a necessarily hugely important feature in any book with this setting) felt a bit uncomfortable to me, though not in a way where I could put my finger on what exactly bothered me about it. The style in general was plodding and shallow, a half-assed imitation of hardboiled. I did like the eventual solution to the mystery, except that 95% of the book has absolutely no hints or even appearances of the character in question.
Chasing the Devil’s Tail is the first in a series, and I'd be uninterested in the sequels, except... I already bought one of them. Whoops. (It was cheap in a second-hand store!) So I suppose I'll be giving Fulmer a second chance.
What are you currently reading?
The Year of the Snake by M.J. Trow and Maryanne Coleman, which is really bad, but it's a NetGalley book so I suppose I'm going to have to push through and finish it.
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Date: 2018-07-15 02:32 pm (UTC)Isabella Beecher Hooker, who was heavily involved with spiritualism as well as the suffrage movement, would rally the dead to her side during arguments with her husband. ("Your mother agrees with me! And so does dear dead Uncle Harry!") This is kind of hilarious although I suspect it was completely maddening to live with.