It’s finals week at Penn State, meaning that I am spending most waking hours reading senior theses, grading final papers and projects, and reporting marks — all by the Friday deadline.
As a result, I will not likely update the blog until the weekend.
I apologize for the absence, and I hope you will check back soon!
Last week, All Things Considered announced the winner of this year’s “Poetry Out Loud” contest. Some 200,000 high school students participated in the competition, each reciting by memory a poem of their choice.
Shawntay Henry from St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, is the 2008 winner. Shawntay read “Frederick Douglass” by Robert Hayden. You can listen to the reading here. I’ve posted the full text of Hayden’s poem below:
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
– Robert Hayden
Those who have visited the Ambrose Bierce Project know that I use the domain www.ambrosebierce.org. “.ORG” is the extension of choice for most humanities computing projects, since academic sites aren’t part of the commercial world. Such sites only rarely employ the “.COM” extension.
The other day, I received an email from an online squatter company — that is, a company who buys up attractive domain names and then offers to sell them for ridiculously high prices. This company recently acquired the domain “ambrosebierce.com” and assumed I would want to purchase it. “If you’d like to own ‘ambrosebierce.com,’” they explained, “you can buy it now by covering our acquisition costs and a modest profit.” I laughed when I saw their notion of a modest profit. They wanted $457 for a domain that would normally cost about eight dollars. I ignored the email.
Yesterday, the company contacted me again — this time offering a “24 hour discount.” The domain could be mine for $207. (At this rate, the domain will cost about $20 next week.)
The sad thing is that a perfectly good domain is being wasted by a squatter company who has no interest in it whatsoever. The same is true of thousands of other domains that might otherwise be of value to those with an interest in a particular writer, historical figure, novel, or event. For example, have a look at www.abrahamlincoln.com — a site that initially looks appealing, but which is really just intended to sell goods until a wealthy buyer comes along and bids on the domain. Even worse, visit www.ernesthemingway.com. “Papa” Hemingway would not be proud.
“The Picket Guard” is surely one of the most famous poems of the Civil War era. Even those who have never read the work will recognize the first line, which has developed an ironic meaning in connection with George B. McClellan’s generalship.
I find Beers’s poem fascinating for a number of reasons, and intend to post a brief analysis of the piece in the near future. In the meanwhile, here is the work itself:
THE PICKET GUARD
All quiet along the Potomac “they say,”
“Except now and then a stray Picket”
Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
‘Tis nothing — a private or two, now and then,
Will not count in the news of the battle;
Not an officer lost, only one of the men,
Moaning out all alone the death rattle.
All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
Where the soldiers lie peacefully dreaming;
Their tents in the rays of the clear autumn moon,
O’er the light of the watch fire are gleaming.
A tremulous sigh, as the gentle night-wind
Through the forest leaves softly is creeping;
While stars up above, with their glittering eyes
Keep guard, for the army is sleeping.
There’s only the sound of the lone sentry’s tread,
As he tramps from the rock to the fountain,
And thinks of the two in the low trundle bed,
Far away in the cot on the mountain.
His musket falls slack, his face dark and grim,
Grows gentle with memories tender,
As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep –
For their mother — may Heaven defend her.
The moon seems to shine just as brightly as then,
That night when the love yet unspoken,
Leaped up to his lips, when low-murmured vows
Were pledged to be ever unbroken.
Then drawing his sleeve roughly over his eyes,
He dashes off tears that are welling,
And gathers his gun closer up to its place,
As if to keep down the heart swelling.
He passes the fountain, the blasted pine tree,
The footstep is lagging and weary;
Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light.
Toward the shade of the forest so dreary.
Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves?
Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing?
It looks like a rifle — “Ha! Mary, good by,”
And the life blood is ebbing and plashing.
All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
No sound save the rush of the river;
While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead,
The Picket’s off duty forever.
— Ethel Lynn Beers, Harper’s Weekly Magazine (November 30, 1861)
Today I spent some time on a message board devoted to Civil War history and memory. Within one contributor’s rant, I was surprised to see this blog named as an anti-Southern site: “In every story there is always a mean statement shown about my Southern Ancestors and slavery with never an explanation of the why or wherefore.”
Now I don’t believe I contribute actively to “the PC castration of the people of the South,” nor do I think this blog is especially “mean.” But I do think it’s odd that any negative reference to slavery should be labeled as politically correct. Political truth and moral truth are not one and the same.
Philip D. Beidler, a Vietnam veteran and Professor of English at the University of Alabama, has recently published a new book of essays titled American Wars, American Peace: Notes from a Son of the Empire. The book takes as its subject the U.S. armed conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, reflecting on how those actions have shaped — and been shaped by — American popular culture and politics.
American Wars, American Peace may be of great interest, and value, to readers of this blog — especially those whose interests extend beyond the Civil War to the nation’s later conflicts.
CONFEDERATE FLAG POEM
In the same way cloud and morning moon
ride a river’s back, somehow hanging on
to the slippery saddles that slide beneath,
so the image of the good flag lingers,
rippling red and starry over years.
How the clenched heart aches to be lifted
once again in such a wind to glory,
raised like a fist above the head
not from loser’s rather winner’s stand.
But no real battles left, just daily work,
the only struggle not to bite
the boss’s finger when he sticks it
in your face. Yes, how good
the blood of such a victory would taste.
– Charles de Gravelles, Callaloo, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter 2001)
Today I came across a Harvard Gazette story about playwright Tony Kushner, who has spent the last two years working on a filmscript about Abraham Lincoln. As part of a series of lectures at Harvard, Kushner explained the challenges posed by the sixteenth president. Apparently the playwright finds the issue of Lincoln’s sexual orientation rather uninteresting, but he has struggled mightily with how to capture the president’s speech patterns and gravitas.
Something I found especially interesting: according to the story, there hasn’t been a studio film about Lincoln since 1939. Do screenwriters and filmmakers avoid Lincoln because of the complex subject matter, or because he’s just too sacred for popular movie-making? Perhaps I’m naive, but I think a Lincoln film would do quite well at the box office — especially with the Civil War as a backdrop.
Below is a link to the full story:
Some of you may remember the controversy, a few years back, over the decision of the Australian leg of Project Gutenberg to put the full text of Gone with the Wind online. Although the novel is still under copyright in the U.S. (and will be until 2031), copyright laws in Australia declared the novel to be in the public domain as of 1999. The discrepancy concerns the fact that, in Australia, any text is free of copyright fifty years after the death of the author. Mitchell’s literary estate was none too pleased by Project Gutenberg’s decision, especially as readers all over the world — not just the Aussies — could access the website.
At first, the e-version of the novel vanished from the web. (Here is a New York Times article that discussed the controversy, and possible lawsuit, back in 2004.) Four years later, the full text of the novel is back up at Project Gutenberg. Either litigation is slow, or the Australians have decided to challenge the American legal system.
Meanwhile, how do U.S. universities handle the controversy? I was amused to see that the website of the University of Pennsylvania Library warns readers NOT to download or read the book online, but then goes ahead and provides links to the full text of Gone with the Wind and many other works still under copyright in the U.S. The page reads: “Do NOT download or read these books online if you or your system are in the United States, or in another country where copyrights for authors with the dates shown below have not expired. The author’s estate and publishers still retain rights to control distribution and use of the work in those countries.”
I guess a lot of Penn’s students study abroad? Hmmmm.
