More Strangeness

This is now the kind of book where my dead relatives show up to deal with people’s mean in-laws. It was almost the kind of book where dead Ulysses Grant shows up.

WTF?!

The revisions on this are going to be weird, that’s for sure.

Strangenesses

1. I lost my voice. I was in the middle of a sentence and it just stopped working. No pain or anything. Just there was noise and then there wasn’t. It’s back now but it’s all weirdly squeaky. Again, no pain or anything. Just not quite right.

2. You remember my complains about the hypnotism book? Ugh. I had to stop reading it because he took a moment to address all the things I wanted him to address–He believes Mesmer was celibate and shockingly naive about the women orgasming, for instance–but then he posits that we can tell what kind of psychological issues Mesmer had by the shape of his body.

I repeat: A man who believes that one of Mesmer’s failings is that, toward the end of his life, he began to believe in paranormal phenomena, also believes we can derive insight into Mesmer’s personality through the exacting science of looking at his body shape. No, not even his body shape but the body shape artists gave him when they drew or painted him. But Mesmer’s the silly one?

Plus, it’s supposed to be a history of hypnotism, but actually it’s only a history of hypnotism in Europe.

3. Now I’m trying to read Bobby Lovett’s The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780-1930. There’s some great stuff in there. He says that our friend, Jack Macon, was never freed, that he was working in Nashville and sending buttloads of money back to Maury County. The sentence is footnoted, but the footnote seems to be the wrong source. So, I’m not sure how he knows that. But it seems to me that it might be right.

I’m more disturbed (not at him, just in general) by his claims that Nickajack Cave (and thus the dam and lake) was originally Nigger Jack Cave. Wikipedia doesn’t really clarify. I mean I don’t know how you get from “Ani-Kusati-yi” to “Nickajack.” Help, someone.

He also claims that Sherrod Bryant’s slaves were his extended family and that there were, in fact, many black people in Nashville and the surrounding area who owned slaves, because they owned their family members (apparently, depending on the decade, it could be more or less easy to get everyone freed, so just living together owned by the one free member of the family was the best of a bad situation).

This article says that Bryant owned 21 slaves in 1850. He also had a huge family. Holy cow. Anyway, the slave census is thus:

All Slaves Owned:

Age	Gender
50	Male
44	Male
25	Male
14	Male
14	Male
12	Male
8	Male
8	Male
9	Male
8	Male
7	Male
5	Male
1	Male
35	Female
30	Female
26	Female
15	Female
9	Female
5	Female
3	Female
3	Female
1	Female

His family in 1850 is thus:

Sherrod Bryant	68
Henrietta Bryant	44
Robt Bryant	23
Sarah Bryant	13
Ailsie Bryant	11
Jno Bryant	16
Zoneye Bryant	9
Laura F Bryant	7
Mary A Bryant	5
Geo M Bryant	0
Milia A Bryant	18

Now if one were me, one might indeed look at the ages of those folks and just how many children Bryant held as slaves and start to wonder if we’re not looking at a couple of his brothers, their wives, and children.

Here’s how Lovett claims Bryant came to be free. He’d been an indentured servant to a white woman in Virginia, earned his freedom, had a kid with her, came to Nashville, and had a huge family with a different woman and owned a bunch of people. In Nashville. According to Lovett, the white woman and her kid move to Murfreesboro and it’s Henderson Bryant, the son of Sherrod and this white woman, who founds Bryant’s Grove.

This is obviously much different than Fagan’s story, which reads–

Such was the case with Bryant, who was born into slavery in Granville County, N.C., in 1781 where his master actually provided him schooling within the household.

He relocated to the Tennessee frontier near the settlement of Old Jefferson on the Stones River and immediately began buying land, a guaranteed mark of wealth and power at that time.

The 1850 U.S. Census shows Bryant owning $15,000 worth of real estate and an additional $10,900 of property including slaves, farm implements and livestock.

He came to operate two large farming operations, one in present-day Donelson in Davidson County and another in northern Rutherford County, which was later deeded to his four sons.

Bryant owned 21 male and female slaves ranging from infancy to 44 years old by the time the U.S. Slave Census enumerator came knocking on Sept. 26, 1850.

So, either Bryant’s Grove was founded by this mysterious Henderson Bryant (who I did find in Mufreesboro in the 1860 census) or it was the Murfreesboro farm of Sherrod.

The Butcher and I were talking about this, though, because Sherrod is often held up as the “See! Black people owned slaves, too!!!!” example. But the moral room between “I can sell my children and my brothers and sisters and I do because I own them” (a position held by white slave owners about their non-white relatives) and “I own my brothers and sisters and their children so that no one can sell them” is huge.

So, I’d love to know Lovett’s source for the claim that those were Sherrod’s family members. I’d love to even know how to judge whether that was true.

It’s Worse than Being Uninteresting

I think I’m getting sick again. This weather has just been brutal on my ability to stay well. Seriously, I think I’ve had a “Spring cold” once a month since December.

And yet, we encourage old people to move south. Do they not get spring colds then all throughout the winter?

I got some work done on Sue last night. Good work? Eh, I don’t know. It’s a long digression on different occult traditions in the United States and the practicalities–in any of those traditions–of one lone person being able to conjure up a spirit and boss it around. We compare Bible translations (the gist being that behavior that’s clearly forbidden by the NIV is not clearly forbidden by the King James). We talk some about race and how it feeds into those different magical traditions. And then, right now, I’m at the point where I address the incredibly stupid shit people do with magic.

Not in the “This had repercussions I couldn’t have known” way, but in the “my powers outstrip my ambition.” Take Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard who conjured up Babalon, the Mother of Abominations. Weeks they spent performing the ritual that would bring her into our plane. Not to put the world back together after a world war with them on top. Not to get themselves a secret moon base. Not to get untold wealth. But to fuck her.

See what I mean? Like they were going to be so good at it–these mortal men–that she’d bend to their will in order to continue to get their sweet dicks? It doesn’t even seem like that. It seems like, really, all they could imagine doing with the being they brought forth was fucking it. Full stop.

That’s kind of like my bad guy–who has the power of time travel and who could have been spending the 20 years he spent in our time learning enough about the future of the past that he could go back in time and make himself a millionaire or more historically important than he actually was or whatever. And instead, all he wants is revenge on the girl who wouldn’t fuck him. A failure of imagination.

Later, Hubbard denied practicing magic, claiming instead that he’d been sent in to break up Parsons’ group by Robert Heinlein (?!) and end the powers of black magic over Pasadena. And my god, you can see why he’d rather have that story out there than “Yeah, I called forth this ancient evil during a time of great global flux and the most I could imagine myself doing with it is sticking my dick in it.”

But, I think that’s probably the honest truth of the matter. Most of us, if we had great powers, still wouldn’t be superheros. We’d just be ourselves, with all our shortcomings, but with that one power, which we would use for stupid ends.

And Heinlein?! I don’t know much about him, but I’m having trouble reconciling what I do know with a guy who’d be concerned about stopping a dude trying to get another dude to help him fuck the Mother of Abominations.

But I’m open to arguments as to why I’m wrong…

Yes, Another Collection of Links

I’m just not feeling incredibly interesting today, I guess.

1. The Carolina Chocolate Drops. I am completely stoked about their new album, which comes out next week. That link is a great article into the history of playing the bones.

2. I was sure this was a joke, then I wasn’t sure, then I was sure again. There are some problematic moments, and y’all know my feelings about “He’s just secretly gay!!!!” but as far as the incredibly problematic, “he’s secretly gay!” genre goes, this must be the best of it. I laughed so hard at the 26% of straight guys are named Doug statistic.

3. A good article on the future of the book. Note the mention of Franzen’s belly-aching.

4. Because, holy shit, Jonathan Franzen, professional belly-acher and weird-shit-sayer-abouter-of-David-Foster-Wallace-in-a-way-that-makes-us-all-wonder-about-his-inappropriate-feelings-for-Wallace’s-widow is belly-aching and saying weird shit about Edith Wharton. Luckily, Meg Foster wrote a great guest-post over at The Rejectionist about it, which you can read instead of reading Franzen’s original crap.

5. My cousin A.’s friend Mira has grown up to be an amazing writer. It’s weird that people you remember being the little friends of your little cousin grow up and become immensely talented writers, but there you go! It does happen. It’s as if time moves forward. Anyway, Mira wrote this great thing you can read at The Rumpus about being on vacation with the guy you married after dating for three months because you found out you were pregnant only to lose the baby but you still stayed married, to this guy who’s… you know… the guy you dated for three months.

Things that Delight Me

1. President Obama being urged by BB King to sing “Sweet Home Chicago.”

2. The back of the paperback edition of Meeting Jimmie Rodgers has a quote from the Scene, “If you write about music, you should read this book. If you are a fan of American music, you should read this book.” That’s me! I wrote that! Someone at Oxford thought my words would influence you to buy that book. That is hilarious and awesome. If I do have the power to influence you to buy things, I’m going to start talking a lot more about baked goods here at Tiny Cat Pants.

3. A story about the Blue Fugates! I’m sad that they’ve had to endure jokes about in-breeding. Really, anyone whose family has been here prior to about 1880 is probably “kin to themselves” so maybe we should stop being assholes about it.

4. I wholly approve of efforts to make the Tennessee Purple Coneflower one of our state wildflowers.

Oh, Right, Ben

Ha, I got so excited about how awesome the Lodge was that I forgot to tell you what handy things I learned about Ben Allen.

1. He was handsome in his younger years. I can see why Sue threw her lot in with him.

2. He was not sick for a long time before he died. He was very active with the Masons and apparently died suddenly and unexpectedly.

3. He was taller than I thought. I’m going to guess about my height, which seems pretty reasonable for a man born in the 1850s.

4. Calling him a hobbyist at jewelry making really seems now to be inaccurate. I mean, it was his hobby, but only because he didn’t need the money. He was incredibly gifted and skilled at it.

It’s Not a Mistake

Rihanna and Chris Brown have both released a remix today featuring the other on it. This is, I would guess, their public acknowledgment that they’re back together–a situation I find depressing and scary.

It’s depressing because it’s so predictable. People return to their abusers all the time. And some of the reasons “I can’t live without her” or “If I can just learn how to communicate better with him” will break your heart in one way. The other reasons–”He can’t live without me,” “I’m really the only person who understands him.” “She won’t do it again.” “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”–will break your heart in another way.

What’s scary to me is that, in the police report, Rihanna says that Chris Brown repeatedly said he would kill her. I believe him. I believe him because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, is that people always tell you the truth about themselves, eventually. Often without realizing it. Even the people who you think and who themselves think are so mysterious and inscrutable, they tell you the truth about themselves. The guy who tells you that he will kill you?

He’s probably not lying.

The thing about abuse is that, though the “excuse” for it is that you’ve brought it on yourself by being unreasonable or jealous or nosy or provoking, there’s really nothing you can do to deserve it. It’s not a matter of “deserve.” No one deserves to be abused. But accepting a dynamic of “it takes two to tango” or “he wouldn’t have done that to her if she hadn’t…” tells us that we all kind of think that there’s some better way of living that the abused person could take up that would end the abuse.

Tie this in with the “but she loves me! I know it!” notion–the idea that an abuser can value you enough that he or she will eventually understand that he or she is making you unhappy and making you feel unloved and therefore the abuser will change… Let’s just stop a moment to consider this, because it sucks. Here’s the thing. Abusers can love you very much. And they will still abuse you. In non-abusive people “love” has a huge “I want to keep you from harm” component. For abusive people, that connection is not there. How they abuse you has nothing to do with whether they love you.

This is why, though love is great, it sucks. We want it to be powerful enough to motivate people who harm us to stop. It just doesn’t work that way. We put a lot of faith in the idea that, if we can make a person feel loved, she will stop hurting us and, in return, love us. But again, those just aren’t the same thing.

People do change. But the idea that you can make of yourself a perfect negative of the love you wish to receive–that you can shape yourself into a form–that will cause the person you love to change her shape into a person who doesn’t hurt you in order to fill it is, at best, magical thinking.

It’s a superstition designed to make you feel like you have some control over a situation with an out of control person.

People are who they are. For better or worse. They can change, but you can’t make them.

Anyway, the situation sucks.  And I hope for Rihanna’s sake that Chris Brown is a liar. I just doubt it, you know? I think once you’ve crossed a line where you can do that and say that to someone you love, there’s only very rarely a coming back from that. And it’s not a chance I’d wish for my friends to take.

Everyone

I read this post over at Feministe and I want to say that I agree with her that it’s not clear that more men are being raped in this country than women. I also agree that that number is a lot closer than anyone thought, though.

And here’s the thing–those people eventually come home, most of them.  And we already do a shitty job of helping  rape victims reintegrate into society, usually demanding of them some admission of what they did wrong to deserve being raped. It’s impossible not to see similar attitudes in our society toward prisoners. Rape is basically seen as the inevitable outcome of going to prison.

I also read this article about how birth control is basically one of the biggest changes in human history and how it’s going to take a century or two for people to really work out what it means. I do sometimes thing that some guys feel like they were promised a world in which they’d be allowed to do whatever they want and some gals feel like they were promised that, if they were good, they’d be protected from the guys who are allowed to do really bad things to, you know, people who deserve it. And I think that some people are pissed that they’re being told “no” and I think some people feel like they’re being left unprotected. But turning on the rest of us isn’t going to get you what you were promised. It was always already a lie.

Ha ha ha. Score one for me for using “always already” in a way that doesn’t feel clunky. I won’t attempt a “problematize,” since there’s simply no way to make that word actually mean something more profound than “makes me have conflicted thoughts I haven’t organized.”

It Worked.

A City of Ghosts is $2.99 on Kindle and free for Amazon Prime members to borrow, however it is that you do that. It’s still $14.99 at Amazon for the book, but the price change has already taken effect at CreateSpace–just $12.99.

And The Witch’s Friend is $1.99. If you buy it, please let me know if the table of contents works.

If you’ve already bought A City of Ghosts and now it’s two bucks cheaper, I am sorry about that. I promise to be two dollars’ more grateful to you than I am to anyone who buys it from here on out.

I Get to Live Here

You can’t tell it in this picture, but this morning was another morning when the frost on the plants on our walk was sparkling like tiny jewels. Like natural Christmas tree lights.

I still can’t believe this is a place I get to live, that this view is right out my back door and I get to gaze on it whenever I walk my dog. That this is a place in the world and that I get to live in it is still a miracle to me.

My new secret fantasy is not to move into town. But to build a replica of Ben and Sue Allen’s house on my lot. I could fix some drainage problems while I’m messing with the yard and have me some big tall windows. I could see this hill from my second-floor bedroom window…

I could have seances and invite the Masons.

Ha ha ha ha.

Argh, Toby Keith!!!!!

Yes, the song is rock-stupid. Yes, the video features a dude drinking another dude’s pee. Yes, it is filled with smug people, including Toby Keith, doing smug shit.

But here’s what drives me crazy about this song. This is a novelty song. It is literally a piece of shit song you poop out when you have a little studio time and the musicians booked and nothing important is ready to record. This is the musical equivalent of Cheetos. And, like Cheetos, I expect to not have to think about it too hard.

But I will be damned if Keith’s voice doesn’t sound simply beautiful here.  It’s such a dumb song. A literal time-burner and his voice is clear and lovely and just perfect.

It’s like he’s just flaunting it. “I can even make a shitty song better than you can, Nashville.”

I roll my eyes and admire it at the same time.

Busy Sunday

I reviewed my park. I saved an asshole’s unleashed dog from Mrs. Wigglebottom. I wrote a post on the apparent death of 287(g). I revised a piece on the Masonic Lodge. I lowered the price of the Kindle Version of A City of Ghosts to $2.99. I lowered the price of thebook book to $12.99. I struggled but finally got The Witch’s Friend formatted and uploaded to Kindle. It’s off the web, so I hope you guys already read your fill of it. Otherwise, it’s going to cost you $1.99. I wrote a thank you note to the Masons. And I ate a bunch of cookie dough.

The only thing left on my to-do list is dishes. Not that saving asshole’s dogs or eating cookie dough were on my to-do list, but you have to have a little flexibility when the day calls for it.

So, yes, formatting your own book for Kindle. You know all that stuff that Microsoft tries to make Word do automatically for you that any reasonable person tries to immediately shut off? Formatting your own stuff for Kindle is basically an exercise in giving yourself over to all that nonsense–style sheets, automatic tables of contents, etc.–then saving it as HTML, uploading it, trying to guess, based on the preview, whether any of those things have actually taken, reworking things, uploading, and previewing again.

I’m sure it looks like crap, but it’s up. And will be available at Amazon as soon as they do all their processing.

Weirdly, I’ve been selling about a book a week on average in 2012. So, that’s nice.

Thank you, whoever is buying. I hope you’re enjoying it.

My Day with Micajah Harpe’s Various Resting Places

I will say that, while there have been times when I have been embarrassed that my hobby is driving around looking at things, today is not that day. The dog and I drove up to Kentucky to look at the place where they stuck Big Harpe’s head and then the place where they threw his body, after cutting off the head in order to remove it to the place where they stuck it.

We went to look at Big Harpe’s head’s final resting place (well, final if you discount the stories of a witch grinding it up and feeding it to her nephew, which was the inspiration for “Sarah Clark.”) first because it was the farthest north, about five miles north of Dixon, Kentucky on 41A. The landscape is very hilly, but that is an old main thoroughfare (and the sign, which you can’t read because all the gold lettering is worn off says it used to be a crossroads. I couldn’t see anything in the landscape now that gave evidence to that.) so you can understand why, if they wanted to scare the shit out of other bad guys, they would have stuck the head there.

Where they threw his body isn’t too far away–about 35 miles, I’d say. Neither spot is especially far from Madisonville. But holy shit! To see it, you kind of understood exactly what was going on. The posse chasing the Harpes at that time is made up mostly of men from Kentucky and Tennessee. Speculation is that the Harpes were trying to escape to their hideout in Southern Illinois. So, where they were in Muhlenberg County, there’s this huge open flatland and then, to the east of this flatland there’s the hills–one of which is about to become famous as Harpe’s Hill. And north of the flat land is an enormous swamp. I mean, enormous. Like I can’t even tell you how big. It’s like, if you were crossing the Ohio just above river level, but it was only wetlands; the river never happened. So, like the Ohio and all the Ohio’s flood plain wide.

So, if the story is true, when the Harpes split up, Big Harpe headed toward the hills. So his brother and their “wives” had to have headed into the swamp. No other place for them to go.

And don’t get me wrong. The Harpes are some sick fucks. Big Harpe especially. But you have to appreciate how he must have judged the men who were following them. Who wants to chase into a swamp? You give the men something they can almost catch (or, sadly for him, catch) that’s headed for high ground, of course they’re going to chase it.

I read that Muhlenberg County has often been the biggest coal producing county in the world. I guess I thought that Kentucky Coal Country was farther east and more mountainous. But when I saw those swamps! Man it made sense that there’d be coal there. I mean, I know swamps today are no indication there were swamps there millions of years ago. Intellectually I know that. But my heart said “Oh!”

My Morning with the Masons

I can barely describe it to you. It was so awesome. Everyone was kind and smart and helpful. They not only knew who Ben Allen was, but they had a ton of his stuff. And they let me see it! His ring he got when he made the thirty-third degree, a sword he made his friend, a picture of him when he was young and it’s easy to see why Sue would have fallen for him. And the Buddha. I didn’t immediately recognize its provenance, but I am betting one of you will look at it and say “Oh, that’s a Thai Buddha” or whatever.

I’m guessing the Professor will know.

My camera is so crappy. I could not get it to focus on the sword. But I think some of the pictures are at least good enough that you can get a feel for what a talented jeweler he was.

It was nice to know that, at least among Masons, Ben Allen is not forgotten. It also made seeing the sword on the top of his grave more meaningful in retrospect.

And the Masonic temple… People I don’t even know what to tell you. It was both a hair weird (just because I don’t really know anything about the Masons, other than that they rule the world behind the scenes, which turns out is not true!) and breath-takingly awesome at every turn.

I wanted to take a million pictures, but I felt like they were being so generous in allowing me there in the first place that I didn’t want to impose.

Plus, they showed me this little video that explained what “Free & Accepted Masons” meant and about how they’d ruled the world behind the scenes. Ha, no, not really. But kind of, in that a ton of important historical figures were Masons and the Masons believe that their Masonic values of equality and freedom shaped those historical figures’ political values.

So, it was cool. I swung by the Scene‘s offices so I could pick up the Halloween issue so that I can send it to them. Man, I am stoked. I feel like I got to peek into one of the most mysterious places in town, only to find it full of really cool people.

Here’s the Question

Do you think this man:

Resembles the man in the suit in this picture?

No matter how much I try to convince myself that I’m seeing things, I feel like I do. Nose, cheeks, mouth.

I’m going to have to ask my dad.

The top photo is one of Philip Phillips’s descendents. The man in the suit is my Grandpa Phillips (that’s my uncle Blain next to him and my dad playing the drum.)

Edited to add: Okay, I sent it to my dad and my dad’s first question is “Is this one of my dad’s relatives?” And I said, “That’s what I’m wondering.” And he said, “That’s for sure my dad’s nose and his ears. I can’t tell if he has dimples, but those could be our cheeks.” So, that’s Joseph Reno, who died in Kalamazoo, who is the son of Hannah Phillips, daughter of Jeruel Phillips, son of Philip Phillips.

If this is Luke’s family, he could either be the youngest son of Philip and Elizabeth, though his birth in 1808 would put his mom at 44 when he was born (not unheard of, but late) or the son of one of Philip and Elizabeth’s oldest sons–James, Reuben, Augustus, and Benjamin were all born around 1790.

Based on this picture of Joseph, I’m moving the odds of these Phillipses being our Phillipses from 25/75 to 50/50.

My dad, I think, is more convinced. He thinks this makes sense of why he was always told that the Phillips family wasn’t close–the white Phillipses didn’t want the black Phillipses discovered by their kids.

The Buddha

The Masons have it. And other items from Ben Allen. I am so excited I can hardly sit still. I’m going tomorrow morning to look at them. The man I talked to on the phone says they learned that Ben Allen and his buddies had seances in the basement of the Old Scottish Rite building–had a special room for it. They also learned that the Buddha was left on Allens’ front step, and not given to him by a Persian or picked up by him on some overseas trip.

That makes sense. Still, holy cow, I can’t wait to see it. He says they also have a jewel-encrusted sword Ben made for one of his friends and some other good stuff.

And he invited me to lunch.

Good lord, people. Between the Masons and the gun nuts, I am having to revise a lot of my prejudices.

Oh, plus, I had a nice conversation with my uncle all about the Masons, of which he is one, though he and Grandpa weren’t Scottish Rite, they were/are the other one, because they prefer the more mystic ceremony stuff.

From here on out, I am asking people about guns and their ties to the Masons, because those are interesting conversations. I will probably make some government watch-list or be on Ancient Aliens, but it will be worth it.

“This Song of Love”

This is absolutely one of my favorite songs sung in the shape note fashion. But I think it’s because it almost sounds like calliope music. If you’re not familiar with shape note singing, what you’re going to hear at first is them going through the song singing the names of the notes–Doe, Ray, Me, Fah, So, La, Tee, Doe–as they get the tune worked out. It sounds like there’s four parts–the women, the lead singer, and then maybe a couple of basses and a tenor. Then they’ll start to sing the words.

It’s a really incredible example of shape-note singing, but what I really enjoy about it is the way the melody flits between the lead singer and the women, with the other men sometimes reaching in to further it along.

I think because it sounds so strange to our ears, shape-note singing is often described as primitive, but honestly, if you just listen to everything that’s going on in that song–which, yes, sounds strange–that’s a sophisticated arrangement.

Anyway, I like it. It’s such a catchy tune, too, that I was hoping to hear what different gospel singers had done with it. But I can’t find any other version of it but this one on YouTube. Maybe it has another name?

Hit By a Wave of Fretting

I know I’ve said it before, but one of the hardest things for me at this stage in my life is that I’ve believed, for my whole life prior to my late 30s, that, if something is not right–either externally or internally–if you can figure out why it’s fucked up, even if you can’t fix that it’s fucked up, its fucked-up-ness cease to affect you. The explanation will be the solution.

But as I’m getting older and more used to the rhythms of my own quirkiness, I realize that “the explanation will be the solution” is just false. I mean, I can tell you why I get such vertigo in high open spaces, why certain stairways are just off-limits to me, but that doesn’t mean I still didn’t have to find a libertarian to haul me across the catwalk to Radley Balko’s talk.

And I know I didn’t used to have problems with something at that height even when I was in grad school, because I navigated the library just fine. But I also know that, with the exception of Monday and my trip to the Nashville Room, that it’s been many, many months since I’ve had problems at all. So, it’s worse than it was way back when and better than it was a while ago. But it’s not resolved, you know?

So, all day I was feeling good about “Sarah Clark” and proud and then, like fifteen minutes after I got my revisions turned in, I got this massive anxiety about myself as a writer. I spent the evening getting the final version of “The Witch’s Friend” copied from the website into a Word document because I am overcome by the need to “do the right thing” with it.

Oh, fuck. “The right thing.” Much like “deserves” it’s a boogeyman of a concept that floats around after me, often compelling me to good things, sometimes compelling me to waves of fretting that cannot be soothed.

I couldn’t work on Sue last night, which also caused me great fretting. I sat down to write what should be the most fun scene to write of this whole section–a full, formal seance–and I just finked out.

But anyway, I’m thinking about selling “The Witch’s Friend” on Kindle if I can figure out how to get it from a Word document into an ePUB. I’m not preserving all the links, but I would like the table of contents at the beginning to work. I guess this is going to require either a brief foray into XML or a long trip into Amazon’s website to see if they have directions.

A City of Ghosts is about 80,000 words, I think, and it’s $4.99 for Kindle. “The Witch’s Friend” is just about 20,000, so I’m not sure if I should just price it at $.99 or if I should price it at $1.99, so it seems like it’s a little more than just fishing for readers. But I am fishing for readers! I don’t know. Feel free to fret with me about this. I think $.99 is probably right.

“Sarah Clark” Revisions

I’ve been doing revisions on “Sarah Clark” which is going to have an interesting life, which I will tell you about when I can. Meanwhile, I’m left thinking that it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written.

I’m excited and proud of it.

It’s good to have small good thing to sustain you while you’re waiting for the big things to decide if they’re going to amount to anything.

The John Henry Question

NooooooooOOOOOOOooooooo! This is really a position more than one historian is going to take?!

What next? Shall we ban singing at museums because we don’t know if John Henry’s wife was really named Polly Ann? Or because “Frankie and Johnny” should really be “Frankie and Albert?” Or because we can’t for certain identify the House of the Rising Sun?

I think that advocating that cash-strapped museums should not take the money of people who want to give it to them just because they object to the historical beliefs of those people is weird. And I’m not sure what the difference between letting a known-ghost hunter pay the regular entry price for your museum and wandering around there all day is different than having him pay over $100 to wander around it all night.

That doesn’t seem to be about the legitimacy of his historical knowledge. That seems to be about the comfort or discomfort you feel about his beliefs.

And speaking of beliefs, a belief in ghosts, who can be contacted by talking to them and having them communicate back, has long historical precedent in the U.S.

Oooh, it does make me wonder–are historians okay with people going to the Hydesville Memorial Park as long as they ignore any strange noises they hear while they’re there?

Let’s just let people love history, in whatever weird ways they want to, and let our jobs be to clarify the history parts and leave the religious/spiritual parts un-judged.

Miranda Lambert is Not a Feminist, But…

She’s the only celebrity I’ve heard of who objected to Chris Brown at the Grammy’s.

Country singer Miranda Lambert doesn’t get why controversial R&B star Chris Brown was allowed to perform twice at the Grammys on Sunday.

She tweeted on Monday: “He beat on a girl…not cool that we act like that didn’t happen.”

But, you know, if they’d said “We’re not going to bring up on stage anyone who’s a known domestic abuser,” it would have made the Glen Campbell stuff very strange.

Heh. Maybe instead of not letting them up on stage, the Grammy’s should have just taken a moment to invite them all up on stage–anyone who’s known for violence against women. Just to illustrate the depths of the problem.

That would have been interesting.

Anyway, if “I’m not a feminist” means a willingness to speak out against domestic violence, then I welcome “I’m not a feminist”s to the feminist fold.

“Success”

Coble sent me a link to this really interesting article over at Wired about the competing interests in the “obesity as a health issue” arena. The hook is a little trite, but the article is actually much more complicated than just “75 million Americans may have something called metabolic syndrome. How Big Pharma turned obesity into a disease – then invented the drugs to cure it.”

This is the part I want to say something about, though:

Diet and exercise? It’s easy to recommend, and it’s good in theory, but there’s surprisingly little proof that lifestyle intervention actually works as a weight-loss strategy. In the late 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiated its Diabetes Prevention Program, a $174 million study hoping to prove that behavioral changes can induce weight loss. To make the point, the program went to extremes. The 3,000 participants received gym memberships and personal trainers, had their food provided, and were coached with daily phone calls from nutritionists – all for two years or more. After all that hand-holding, patients lost an average of 7 percent of their body weight.

The CDC hailed the study as proof that diet and exercise work, but it just as readily proves the opposite. After all, how likely is the average American to stick with – let alone be able to afford – such an intensive program?

Two or more years to lose on average seven percent of your body weight.  If you’re a three hundred pound person, your gym membership and your personal trainer and your food and your nutrition coach lost you about 21 pounds. Over two years or more. A three hundred pound person who’s ideal weight is around 150 would need at least seven years to lose that weight, assuming the CDC’s plan doesn’t lead to plateaus. I’m with the Wired writer. Who can afford that? You’re basically limiting weight loss to the wealthy, who are, by and large, not obese anyway.

Never mind that there’s nothing here about whether those people were able to keep the weight off once they didn’t have the CDC paying for the gym and personal trainers and providing food and a nutrition coach.

It’s basically admitting, without being upfront, that thinness is a class marker, reliably available only to the wealthy.

But the other thing I wanted to address is how whiplash-inducing it is to hear “Oh my god, you have the death fat! You must lose weight immediately!!!!!!” and then to hear that even studies touted as proof that diet and exercise work take a long time. I think that’s where the needs of the commercial weight-loss industry dangerously obscure the medical realities, even to the point where medical professionals somehow think that “needing” to drastically lose weight means that you should be able to lose weight drastically and, if you’re not, that you’re lying or just not trying hard enough.

I have mixed feelings about turning obesity into “metabolic syndrome” but when I think of the potential it has to turn the tone of the discussion away from moral panic and toward medical issues, I kind don’t mind it.

I Love Them Already

People, I am having to ban myself from Phillip Phillips’s family. I just wasted half of my lunch hour looking up his descendants, trying to figure out if there were rhyme or reason to which ones “became” white and which ones “became” black.

I do NOT want to do that much work on people who might not even be my family.

And yet, my desire to slip Jeruel’s census records to my racist relatives is at an all-time high. Come on, history! Give me relatives that will scandalize my other relatives! I found a bunch of Reuben’s descendants (Reuben is Jeruel’s brother, Philip’s son) in Kalamazoo at the same time Jeruel’s people are in Barry and my people are in Charlotte, Marshall, and Battle Creek.

Bridgett found mention of Augustus in the history of the place they lived in Ohio (Augustus is Reuben and Jeruel’s brother): “1817 Augustus Philips, said to be a descendent of the Indian chief King Philip, settled on the south half of Lot 53, sharing the property with F.A. Abbott. Philips’ parents arrived in 1820.” If this is the case, it means that there there isn’t just the English Phillips family (centered around Windham and Pomfret) in Connecticut, but that Phillips was a last name adopted by Philip’s descendants.

At the least, it means that I can’t take for granted that anyone named Phillips from Connecticut with a layover of a generation in New York who’s now in the midwest is related to the huge Phillips family. Unless, of course, in Phillip’s case, where he married into that family.

I despair a little of ever finding Luke’s parents, but I am having a blast learning about all the Phillipses that are probably not them.

Things, Secret Things

1. The gun guys I’ve been emailing with have been so helpful. I can’t even begin to tell you. Yesterday, they were teaching me all about sighting a rifle and how you come to learn at which distances your rifle is going to put a round right where your sight is aimed and at which distances it’s going to be a little higher and a little lower. Everything else about our discussion has been appealing to me as a writer. I’m not sure how much of it is going to be visible on the front end of the book, but by god, it’s going to make that character better. But something about learning the arc the bullet makes… oh, that appeals to me just viscerally. Like the way you learn your car and its quirks, you learn your rifle and its quirks.

Seriously, there’s a good argument for birth control giving women unprecedented freedom, but I think I’d like to argue for the machine first.

2. Yesterday I stumbled upon a plausible reason why Luke Phillips’s parents might be so impossible to track down. I had been operating under the assumption that the Phillips family that was in Connecticut and then came to New York and then came to the Midwest was one family. And then I found Phillip Phillips married to Elizabeth Phillips and they both were born in Connecticut, had at least one kid who was born in New York, and then they came to the Midwest–the standard arc for Connecticut Phillipses. Elizabeth’s maiden name was Phillips and she’s clearly a part of the large Connecticut Phillips clan I must also be related to in some way. But there’s NOTHING on Phillip’s family. I thought I’d find him as a cousin in there some place, but no.

Here’s the census entry for his son, Jeruel (or Jeruth) and his family, living in Barry, Michigan in 1860. Note how close Barry is to Charlotte, Marshall, and Battle Creek, where my known branches of Phillipses are.

I think there’s a small, but meaningful possibility, that something similar could explain why Luke’s parents can’t be found (or that, perhaps, Phillip and Elizabeth were Luke’s parents). I’m still 75% sure I’m eventually going to find his parents among the branch of the family that is full of other Almyras and Franks.

But, in the meantime, I have been asked to not share this with any family members and, if I find definitive proof that this is Luke’s branch of Phillipses, that this is the census record of one of Luke’s brothers, to not share it, ever, with my aunt.

Ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, U.S. history, you make people try to keep some weird secrets.

Radley Balko

I went to see Radley Balko at Vanderbilt tonight. He was taller than I expected. I’m going to write something up for Pith, but I wanted to say, on the side, that I was in awe of his ability to engage ill-phrased questions that had some nugget of something interesting at their core while just shutting down some of the conspiratorial nonsense about like 9/11 and Pat Tillman.

I would never in a million years have the finesse to pull that off.