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Blogging on various readings and watchings this week.
Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton here.
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I’m almost finished with Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. I got within 30 pages at about 1 am and decided to save it for today – I tend to not remember what I’ve read at that late hour.
I was very interested to see that Sofia Coppola is in the process of developing a series for Apple TV on Wharton’s book. It certainly lends itself to dramatization, but, as I’ll explain when I write about it, I preferred House of Mirth – the central female character is a bit more complex. Undine Spragg is screenworthy, but she’s not very deep. So perhaps that does lend itself more to the screen than the page.
“Undine Spragg is my favorite literary anti-heroine, and I’m excited to bring her to the screen for the first time,”
One of the puff pieces about the project said, of course, that Coppola’s project will be judged against Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and Terrance Davies’ House of Mirth…implying that it’s a high standard, difficult to meet. Well, I watched half of The Age of Innocence and couldn’t take any more – Wharton’s subtlety was just….gone. I watched excerpts from House of Mirth and the miscasting was overwhelming. So I think a long-form adaptation directed by Sofia Coppola might not have a problem surpassing these standards.
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How about a woman’s suffrage board game:
This is a very well-preserved and rare example of a political board game produced in limited numbers in England in the early 1900s. The game, Pank-a-Squith, was named after Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), the suffragette leader, and Herbert Asquith (1852-1928), British Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916 and a strong opponent of women’s suffrage. The colours of the militant suffragette movement, green, white and purple, are prominent on the 50 squares of the game which are arranged in a spiral. The aim of the game is to reach the central square which represents universal suffrage. A number of political events are represented, including suffragettes throwing stones through a window of the Home Office, as occurred in 1908, and Emmeline Pankhurst slapping a policeman on the face in 1909 to ensure that she was arrested. On square 16 a notice says that ‘Any player landing on this space must send a penny to Suffragette Funds’. The game was produced in 1909 in Germany for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Britain as a fund-raising item.
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Also reading this week, due to finish in the next couple of days: Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. It’s very good, well-written history. I’ll have more about it over the weekend, I imagine.
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The link to that last book did not go to Amazon. I’ve been trying to radically minimize my linking to Amazon (I think I only do so for the ebooks I have on there, self-published) and as of a couple of months ago, I cancelled Prime. Haven’t missed it a bit, although I will probably change my tune in December. But then, on the other hand, there are, of course, other ways to get products quickly now, and not having Prime will undoubtedly force me to be more organized about gift-giving.
Why? Well, it’s something I should have done a long time ago. I’ve never been an Amazon fan, mostly because the rise of Amazon happened as I was starting to write and publish books, and I saw from the inside how Amazon put the screws to publishers, and by extension, authors. Not to mention what they did to local booksellers (although that’s certainly rebounding, thankfully).
How did they put the screws to publishers? A lot of ways but it comes down to the same thing that Wal-Mart does to suppliers: Give us the terms we want or we won’t stock your goods. In terms of books, it mostly came down to demanding a wholesale price for products that was way below what a brick-n-mortar bookseller would pay, enabling Amazon, of course, to undercut price. This costs publishers and then authors, whose royalties are based on net sales (what the seller pays the publisher – usually 50% of cover price. Amazon routinely demanded far “better” terms, which then decreases the the amount of author royalties). Over a barrel, yes, but then what do you do if Amazon doesn’t distribute you? An old story.
And then, over the past few years, Amazon’s selective censorship and then labor practices made it ridiculous that I was giving them over a hundred dollars a year for “free shipping” that really wasn’t free and in recent years, was less and less dependable, and for a video service which provided me with no original material I wanted to watch and charged me extra for every good movie on the platform, anyway. It took too long, and there’s no great virtue in it, for other corporations do the same in their own way. But once I shook the tentacles free, I saw how stupid it had been to not walk away sooner.,
Anyway, all that is a prelude to this story on the Amazon union vote in the Bessemer facility, which is just a bit west of here, It seems to be going Amazon’s way, which honestly surprises me. I’m also surprised that barely half of the workers seem to have voted at all.
The first day of the public count in the Bessemer Amazon union vote ended Thursday evening with substantially more anti-union votes but there are many ballots left to be counted.
When the count ended for the day at 6 p.m. CST Thursday, there were 1,100 “no” votes against the union, and 463 “yes” votes, unofficially.
The count resumes today at 8:30 a.m. CST.
Workers at the Amazon plant in Bessemer, Alabama have voted against unionizing, dealing a major defeat to labor organizers hoping for a galvanizing victory in the South.
The final vote tally: 1,798 against unionizing versus 738 in favor of union. About 500 challenged ballots were not counted, according to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, with most challenges coming from Amazon. Those disputed ballots are not enough to change the results.
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“The Mind of God? The Problem with Deifying Stephen Hawking:”
On a new biography:
What Hawking’s book did offer was a highly marketable grandiosity, summed up in its most famous line: “If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.” It established Hawking’s image of an amazing mind in a failed body. Hereafter it was not enough to regard Hawking (accurately) as one of the top 100 theoretical physicists in the world; he had to be—“in spite of it all”—a second Newton or Einstein. It was an almost Faustian bargain: Hawking wanted to be celebrated for his mind alone but craved fame too avidly to refuse the more compromised form of it that was on offer. To duck the truth about how much his celebrity depended on his disability colludes with society’s continuing discomfort about the whole issue….
….
Time and again Seife reveals Hawking to have been searching for any validation of his ideas rather than regarding them as hypotheses to be tested. Often he would only accept his intuitions were wrong when he had personally re-derived the results of someone else’s critique (and could thereby claim some credit for it). Scientists need some stubbornness, conviction and competitiveness; but too much of these attributes can hinder their science, as well as compromise the person.
To admit all this is not to deny he was a great physicist (he might have even got his Nobel had he not died in 2018), nor that he could also be kind, companionable and fun. Rather, it is to judge him as we would any other public figure. It is to grant him his humanity. What we did instead was an all too familiar response to disability. We created a kind of “compensation cure,” much as the struggles of people with autism are obscured by the stereotype of the savant. Hawking’s life is worth celebrating, but if we make it a myth then it becomes just a story onto which we can project our anxieties and fantasies. He deserved better.
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This coming Sunday is Divine Mercy Sunday. On St. Faustina, from the
The Gospel is from John.
Here’s a page or two from The Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories.
The story includes most of the post-Resurrection appearances, including the Thomas narrative, the focus of Sunday’s gospel.
Arranged, as I have mentioned before, according to the point in the liturgical year one would be most likely to hear that passage proclaimed in Mass (most Catholic’s point of encounter with Scripture).
And then, St. Faustina from The Loyola Kids Book of Heroes.
It is my understanding that a update of the Heroes book is forthcoming, and even more exciting, a Spanish translation of the Loyola Kids Book of Saints. I’ll let you know when those come out.
For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!