coldhearted scientist وداد

Here is a bronze statue of one of my ancestors. I could visit it in Vicksburg. That is one of those places where, when I go through, I can hardly believe I am there. It serves espresso now but Mark Twain would recognize it. Like Natchez it stands on bluffs above the Mississippi, on U.S. Highway 61.

Highway 61 was apparently planned in 1926 and not finished until the early 1940s. The blues were created in the 1890s and were in development while Highway 61 was being built. They are itinerant songs and songs of solo itinerants.

Songs and stories are what the Lincoln film, which I have achieved seeing, got me to think about. This film of course engages questions about nation and state and who gets to be a citizen. I never relate to the usual U.S. patriotic songs but I notice I quite relate to the Battle Cry of Freedom.

Here I was going to show off a book by another of my ancestors, Mrs. Stowe, but I see that there is an 1852 response to it entitled The Cabin and the Parlor, or, Slaves and Masters. Did Gilberto Freyre know of this text? Did he realize he mimed its title? The more famous response is this one, and I know people who would write that book now.

It is quite odd to think about these things while rereading María. I have not read a great deal of discussion on this novel but it appears so far that people do not realize, may not have the experience to realize how perfectly slavocratic it is, to the core. The love story and the rewritings of St. Pierre and Chateaubriand distract attention from the preoccupation with race and the simultaneous denial of and insistence upon its importance, which in turn draws the eye away from the harder issues like plantocracy, slavery, patriarchal authority, and Christian psychology and of course regret at their fading.

This is just an intuition but what if one read some of these Latin American national fictions in the context of Confederate apologies like some of those just mentioned?

Axé.