Surprised by Joy

Posted on March 20, 2017 by smellincoffee

Surprised by Joy
© 1955 C.S. Lewis
252 pages

“When I first read Chesterton, I did not know what I was in for. God is, if I may say it,  quite unscrupulous.”

Mention the name C.S. Lewis and the image of a prolific author comes to mind, secure in reputation as a scholar of medieval literature and author of Christian apologetics.  Surprised by Joy reveals a Lewis far removed from the pedestal of memory. A brief autobiography, it tells the story of how he came of age, losing and refinding faith as the world destroyed itself around him. Here is a Lewis outside the university, unguarded by coats of tweed; he is a man, struggling with  fear and doubts, spurred on by hope and far more entertaining than I would have ever expected.

The Lewis of expectations is here; an introverted, bookish, and supremely thoughtful boy with a rich imagination fed by a love for classic and mythic literature.  Lewis’ gift for storytelling is not limited to fiction, evidenced by the side-splitting account in which he recounts his father  — an orator who could be intoxicated by verbosity once he’d gotten started —  subjecting five year old boys to momentous speeches full of pomp and storied prose, all for ordinary  errors like getting one’s shoes wet in the grass. Beyond the story of an early-20th century English childhood, however, this is the coming of age of a profound   man, who sees his life as driven on by a search for “Joy”, which he experienced in brief stabs of ecstasy at various points in his young life. Such joy was not to be found in his childhood religion, which as as badly taught as everything else. He experienced shades of ecstasy when stumbling upon the Nordic myths, and despite his later materialism had a strong interest in the occult.  Later, he would come to see these experiences as momentary glimpses of something greater, and the book ends with his return to theism.  He doesn’t make arguments to the reader, only outlines of the philosophical questions and themes he grappled with in his youth.  This can tend toward the heady, as Lewis’ tipping point is the moment when he begins to understand the universe as some sort of cosmic mind, an Absolute, and another author (Chesterton) forces him to call a spade a spade. When Lewis is being philosophical about the writing can get heady — ‘thinking about thinking’ always does, and Lewis’ attempt to understand consciousness appears to have been a major factor in his rejection of a purely material universe. Here the difficulty is further complicated by frequent mentions of intellectual movements that Lewis was arguing with and flirting with that have since faded not only from the intellectual scene, but from memory altogether.

I’ve read this book several times in the last two years, partially out of affection for the author and partially to understand his experience.  The latter still eludes me in part, but epiphanies aren’t a mental commodity that can be packaged up and transferred from brain to brain. However much some of his experience may elude me, there’s still so much about him to appreciate: his contempt for authority, his imaginative passion and curiosity, his dogged efforts to wrest understanding from old books and new friend,  and his utter delight in simple things like country walks and stolen mornings spent with a pipe in the library.  He’s one of those authors who I spot on a bookstore display  and have  a sudden burst of affection for, as though I’d spotted a friend out of the window. (Wendell Berry  has a similar effect, but Lewis has that old-fashioned  Oxford don aura about him.)

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Podcast of the Week: Science Fiction, Liberty, and Dystopia

Posted on March 15, 2017 by smellincoffee

“One of the great things of it, Tom, and this is where Orwell was such a genius —  in looking how language was being used as a form of manipulation. Orwell is always interested in propaganda and makes the point that propaganda is a habit.  It’s a long-run game. Propaganda isn’t a matter of convincing the current generation that the propaganda is right, but repeating things so often that you’re limiting the way they think at all.”

On Monday, Tom Woods sat down with historian Brad Birzer (American Cicero)  to talk about early science fiction and to discuss the political themes explored by Thomas More, George Orwell, and C.S. Lewis. In general,  Woods and Birzers appraise SF as anti-authoritarian and subversive.  Birzer opened by mentioning that Catholic and Jewish authors played a large part in early science fiction in part because they were discouraged or prevented from participating in ‘mainstream’ culture; publishing outside the New England/WASP stronghold also allowed them to be critical voices.    The discussion doesn’t go past Orwell,  which is too bad because Bob Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress is an obvious example of libertarian themes in SF.

A quote from CS Lewis’ piece, “On Science Fiction”:

That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape’. I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers. The charge of Fascism is, to be sure, mere mud-flinging. Fascists, as well as Communists, are jailers; both would assure us that the proper study of prisoners is prison. But there is perhaps this truth behind it: that those who brood much on the remote past or future, or stare long at the night sky, are less likely than others to be ardent or orthodox partisans

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China: An Introduction

Posted on March 15, 2017 by smellincoffee

China: An Introduction
© 1984 Lucian W. Pye
400 pages

Lucien Pye was born in China and later returned there to advise the US government. China: An Introduction is written in that spirit, being a review of the making of Communist China and its attempts to find policies to modernize China from the inside out.

The volume opens with a hundred pages covering Chinese history,  with an emphasis on the  philosophical schools which contended for preeminence in the old Empire: Taoism, Confucianism, and Legalism. That drama is applicable to the more extensive coverage of the evolving Communist party in China, for  Confucianism so under-girded China that it continued to influence the expression of communism in China even after every aspect of the old civilization was set ablaze.  For instance, Chinese communism did not view itself as supremely scientific and inevitable; instead,  Mao and others believed that a cyclical model would continue, and China would ever be tugged between communism and capitalism.  The Confucian emphasis on perfectibility and self-sacrifice in pursuit of social virtue also lent themselves to early propaganda, in which people were expected to labor in hardship and poverty not for themselves, but for the good of the communist experiment in China.

 Pye devotes the bulk of the book to covering the rise of the Communist party, and its internal politics through to the end of the 1970s.  The book indicates to me that Mao was a singular figure, not simply for his role in the revolution but for his conceits in office: intriguingly, Pye writes that Mao scorned cities,  viewing them as hotbeds of capitalism. I also didn’t realize how quickly the Chinese learned from Russian mistakes: as early as 1959, they reintroduced privatization in agriculture,  creating private plots that remained unmolested even amid the nightmare of the cultural revolution.

While I am not particularly interested in Communist party politics, I found the discussion of China’s early philosophical debates fascinating — especially because while Confucianism was not a religion, it permeated every level of society and shaped China in the manner that a religion would.  Pye has engendered in me an excitement for reading about Confucianism proper a little later on.

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China Road

Posted on March 11, 2017 by smellincoffee

China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power
© 2007 Rob Gifford
352 pages

National Road 312 spans the breadth of China, connecting its sparsely settled and scarcely developed rural interior with the port city of Shanghai,  the largest in the world and the proud symbol of Chinese modernity.   Before ending his decades-long period studying and working in China, Rob Gifford decided to take a farewell trip across the country following this Asian ‘Route 66’,   absorbing the stories of China’s tumultuous 20th century through the personal lives of men and women he interviews along the way.  Some interviews were planned in advance, others spontaneous and candid – but all are unique, and indicate to Gifford that now more than ever,  individuals are going to drive the story of China, not Confucian tradition or Communist orthodoxy.  While a travel book, China Road is also a collective memoir of the rough road that Chinese civilization has traveled as it continues trying to find its way.

China endured hell in the 20th century; beginning it in civil war and at the mercy of both Western colonialists and Japanese imperialists, some measure of peace was not to be had until 1949.  The triumphant Communists, however,  were not done waging war, and in the Cultural Revolution they let loose the furies to kill and burn everything not modern and Maoist.  At long last another generation came to power and begin creating some measure of stability, and even liberalization and subsequent economic growth.   China’s constant struggle to find itself is not told through one author’s narrative, but rather through the lives of an array of Chinese citizens:  truck drivers, businessmen, rural villagers,  young urban Party members in search of their next set of high heels; political dissidents in hiding, teenagers on the cusp of going to college,  weary elders who have seen China destroyed several times in their lives;  Tibetans,  Muslim Uighurs, and still more.    Through their lives Gifford reflects on various aspects of China in mid-transformation:     the withdrawal of the Communist party from everything but political power,  the  government’s awe-inspiring attempts to build not just a country, but an entire continent;  the on-going problem with corruption that he attributes to a lack of checks and balances that was present in the Confucian-imperial state as well;  the economic growth that is allowing the majority of Chinese citizens to live better lives, and so on.

Gifford introduces early on a concept he returns to several times: as much as they are controlled politically,  at a deeper level,  China’s people now drift loose. The old moral order was destroyed wholesale by the Communists, who attempted to recreate a new socialist civil culture.  Virtually all of that has been quietly retired, however, aside from admonishments on billboards to keep the poor in mind. So long as people don’t interfere with the party’s political supremacy, they are in turn left alone.  They are left to wrestle with questions of purpose and identity: what does it mean to be Chinese,  when  so much was earlier condemned to the fires, but what replaced it has retreated?  In one of the first chapters set in Shanghai, Gifford encounters two young Party members out shopping,  and both of them confirm that there’s little guidance to them as to what sort of life they should be looking forward to. One exults in the material freedom, but the other seems struck by some malaise of modernity,    directionless and unsatisfied. Later on, a young woman engaged in a self-destructive career struggles to articulate what exactly she’s desiring, and can only conclude — “It’s..difficult being human, isn’t it?”

Although China Road is ten years dated, its human stories  make it engaging reading, and provide  easy exposure to China’s history and future.

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Robert E Lee

Posted on March 9, 2017 by smellincoffee

Robert E. Lee: A Life
© 2003 Roy Blount Jr
272 pages




They say that God in heav’n 

is everybody’s god

I’ll admit that God in heav’n
Is everybody’s god

But I tell ya John, with pride,
God leans a little on the side
of the LEES! The LEES OF OLD VIRGINIA!
(“The Lees of Old Virginia”, 1776)


Recently a patron returned this biography of Robert E. Lee to the library, complaining that as much as he enjoyed it, Lee remained…distant, unknowable, aloft. “Like Washington?” I suggested, and his eyes lit up in recognition, for both men share the same unimpeachable aura in the South.  It’s an aura of old words — honor, humility, grace, dignity — that has long departed politics, and was rapidly dissipating even then.  I decided to give the biography a try myself,  partially out of deference to its subject (of whom I’ve read nothing except for military histories) and partially because the author’s name rung a bell.  I found this Penguin books biography to be short, surprisingly fair-minded, and..a little weird.

Lee’s life in brief:  born to a dashing Revolutionary War hero who died in disgrace,  Lee joined the military to support himself and continued serving even after he married into another elite family, this one with money and a close connection to George Washington.  He served with distinction in the Mexican War as a scout and aide to General Scott,   and traveled throughout the southern and western parts of the country shoring up fortifications and fighting Indians. Lee’s sympathies were not with the Confederacy, and he shared the attitude that the Virginia legislature displayed when it voted against secession. However, after Lincoln inaugurated civil war by calling for troops to invade the South, Virginia turned about completely — seceding and organizing its own defense.  After turning  down an opportunity to lead the northern army against the South, Lee resigned his commission and went to Virginia’s aid.  Within a year’s time he would be given command of the Army of Northern Virginia,  and there wrestle down a series of generals until Grant and material exhaustion defeated the cause.   In the postwar years, he served a the president of a college and then passed away before reconstruction ended.  

Roy Blount Jr’s name is not one I have heard associated with Civil War history, military history, southern history,  law, politics, or anything that would suggest connection to writing about a Civil War personality.  He is a humorist, a fellow I’ve only heard on NPR.    His literary nature comes out strongly here, with numerous digressions in which Blount chats about grammar or Lee’s connection with men of letters .  Stranger are the Freudian digressions in which Blount speculates Lee charged the high ground at Gettysburg to psychologically overcome his father’s beating at the hands of an anti-British mob in 1812.  Media personalities are allowed a bit of eccentricity in their writing, I suppose.    What I did appreciate is that Blount admires Lee’s character without lionizing him, and admits his faults without condemning him.  Specifically, Blount writes that Lee had been born into a morally compromised position:  as much as he might detest slavery, he never forthrightly condemned it.   Blount attributes this to authentic paternalism of Virginia’s old blood, in which they earnestly believed that people held in American slavery were better off than living in a state of nature in Africa.  A letter written by Lee in 1856 expressed his hope that Providence was guiding America to be able to free itself of the burden of slavery, though he objected to the abolitionist’s desire to do it immediately by force.  This was not an effort by Lee to protect his ‘property’, for he began working to free his father-in-law’s slaves as soon as he inherited them.  It was rather Lee’s attempt to keep himself conciliated with his home, for who wants to regard their own culture and country as vicious?  Hope allowed him to serve Virginia’s defense.   While the ruling planter class initiated secession to protect slavery from Republican abolitionists,  the war itself was fought by men like Lee and the common soldiery for more universal motives: duty to home and brothers-in-arms; sheer cussedness, and because they had to. (Drafts were forcefully used by both the ruling classes in both states, union and confederate.)

Blount’s cover of Lee is thus a very general biography, one that should suffice if a reader knows nothing about Lee at all. Most of this I had absorbed through various Civil War histories, but enjoyed the narrative even with its Freudian quirks.

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Florida Under Five Flags

Posted on March 9, 2017 by smellincoffee

Florida Under Five Flags
© 1945 Rembert Patrick
160 pages

Note: I read from the 1st edition. This cover is from the 5th edition,  which has been updated and presumably revised.

The State of Florida entered the Union in 1845; in 1945, presumably as a centennial celebration, Florida Under Five Flags was published to provide an outline history of the state, from its beginnings as a Spanish frontier post through to the ‘present day’. It is a history which can be enjoyed in a single evening, and is amply illustrated with historical art depicting cities like St. Augustine and Jacksonville; photographs of street scenes and prominent personalities are also included.

Florida titular historical accomplishment is having been an object of contention between virtually every European power with an eye toward American colonization. (Fernandina Beach cheekily claims to be the city of eight flags.)  The Spanish arrived first, though Ponce de Leon perished amid his explorations. The French were the first to plant a settlement, though the Spanish bloodily drove them out and began establishing a fuller colony, one with several towns and a network of missions. While Florida was expensive for the Spanish to maintain, its forts were crucial in protecting access to Mexico and the rest of “New Spain”. The English quickly took an interest in Florida, but despite capturing the city of St. Augustine, were unable to triumph over its fortress, the Castille de San Marcos. What eluded them in combat was won in treaties, however, and Spanish Florida became British-controlled West and East Florida — governed from Pensacola and St. Augustine, respectively. Florida flourished under British rule, but would be ceded back to Spain following the American Revolution. Amid the turmoil of the Napoleonic years, Louisiana and Florida were both juggled by France and Spain, and the aggressive interest of the nearby United States made selling the land more feasible than defending it into the poorhouse.

Florida, having been depopulated virtually every time it switched hands, began attracting settlement from the Southern coast; the multitude of planters from Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas who took a part in creating a new American state meant that despite Florida’s radically different climate, in culture it was part of the South, and would follow where the southern states led. That meant secession only twenty years after becoming formal members of the Union. Florida’s ports were immediately targeted by the Union navy, falling before the war was even a year old, but Florida itself was spared most of the devestation of the conflict. Only a few minor skirmishes occured within the state, mostly over the control of salt-works. Florida was still subjected to Reconstruction, but plagued by corruption that set back genuine progress for decades. Florida soon recovered, and as railroads unified the state and linked it more firmly to the rest of the county, its cities began growing all the more. A once economically-sleepy peninsula home only to rude huts and subsistence agriculture had been transformed into a prosperous State, one which played an important role in the Spanish American war and which was poised to participate even more fully in American life.

I read this principally interested in colonial Florida. While it is only an outline history, the narrative is perfectly enjoyable as a story. I suspect parts of it would be rendered differently were it published in the modern era, particularly the author’s mere mild condemnation of slavery. I didn’t realize how long Florida took to become fully “settled”; the author writes that Florida’s frontier wasn’t closed until 1920. A book published so long ago is arguably irrelevant for understanding modern Florida, considering how radically it has changed in demographics, culture, and in its standing with the rest of the Union — but as a survey of Florida’s early history, it is perfectly enjoyable and helpful.

Original cover:

A scene from colonial St. Augustine.

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Classics Club Spin Challenge

Posted on March 7, 2017 by smellincoffee

On Friday, the administrators of the Classics Club challenge are going to post a random number from one to twenty. Those of us enrolled in the Classics Club Challenge( reading fifty classics of our choosing within five years) have been asked to list twenty of the books left on our to-read list.  We are then challenged to read that number on our list which matches the random number posted on Friday.

Here below are my twenty possibilities!

  1. The Aeneid, Virgil
  2. The Histories, Herodotus
  3. The Conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar
  4. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, Edward Gibbon
  5. One Thousand and One Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy
  6. The Prince, Machiavelli 
  7. The Seven-Storey Mountain,  Thomas Merton
  8. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  9. The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
  10. The Swiss Family Robinson, Johann David Wyss
  11. Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
  12. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
  13. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
  14. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
  15. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  16. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  17. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  18. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
  19. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  20. Love Among the Ruins, Walker Percy
I’m working on one of these presently, so perhaps I’ll get wildly lucky and get it.  I am doing well on my challenge,  staying right on target: I’m hovering at the 50% mark with two and a half years left.   
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Real Music

Posted on March 6, 2017 by smellincoffee

Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church
267 pages
© 2016 Anthony Esolen

In his book Out of the Ashes: Restoring American Culture,  Anthony Esolen devoted an entire chapter solely to music. Here he does one better! To sing is to pray twice, wrote St. Augustine, and Real Music demonstrates that emphatically. There is nothing quite like the musical tradition in Christian liturgy; a newcomer to an Anglican or Catholic church may first appreciate the mere sound of the organ or harp, but when time is invested in these services — when one attends throughout the year, for several years — the real beauty and power of its hymns, offertories, anthems, etc. reveal themselves. These hymns are not merely pretty lyrics put to pretty music, but are themselves poetic articulations of the Church’s theology and scripture. The Christian music tradition can do much more than make a listener feel “nice”; hymns can fill the soul with beauty and the mind with poetry. Esolen attempts to convey this experience not over a course of years, but into one book, devoting different chapters to distinct areas of the tradition. He here covers Eucharistic hymns, hymns of glory and penitence, hymns celebrating life and challenging death. Esolen does not merely present hymns to the reader and comment on their theology; he guides the reader through how the hymns’ very meter and grammar strengthen the meaning. This book is a treasure for Christians who love traditional hymnody, or who have heard it on the wind before and yearn to know more about it.

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In Spite of the Gods

Posted on March 6, 2017 by smellincoffee

In Spite of the Gods: the Rise of Modern India
© 2007 Edward Luce
400 pages


In Spite of the Gods appraises India’s culture as its ancient civilization enters the 21st century as the world’s largest democracy and one of its largest economies.  Its author, Edward Luce, lived in New Delhi for years as the bureau chief for the Financial Times, and traveled throughout India for reports and interviews.   While This Brave New World  evaluated how quickly and thoroughly India was approaching the ‘standards’ of modernity (public health, political and economic participation, etc),  In Spite of the Gods  looks more broadly at how India’s deeply-rooted culture is digesting the momentous changes of the 21st century.  I say digesting because the author holds the view of many that India’s culture has the strength of the ages; it is ancient, diverse, and resilient. It does not collapse in the face of change; it incorporates aspects of change while preserving itself, rather like Buddhism was digested into Hinduism, changing it but not prevailing over it.

  This book is never far from the person and work of Jawaharlal Nehru, who jokingly referred to himself as the last Englishman to rule India.   Nehru was India’s first prime minister after independence, and because so many of the other founding generation died within a few years of achieving their goal, he played an outsized role in shaping the legacy of independence.   Nehru’s statement can be considered seriously not just because he was educated in England, but its modernity shaped his mind and character;  while Gandhi’s vision for India was framed within its own tradition, Nehru’s was more of an English intellectual, a westerner: his view of progress involved massive factories, a state-administered economy, secularism, and so on – not village anarchy and Hindu tradition.   Nehru lives in India not simply through his family, who are invariably involved in national-level politics, but because his legacy is continually tested.

 Nehru’s economic legacy is slowly but surely being discarded, for instance, plank by plank; the “license Raj” that he and his descendants established to ensure that India’s economy didn’t become another outpost of western capitalists has indeed done its work of preventing outside investment in India…but that is increasingly not something people want, and had the further effect of squelching growth within India.  Only when the Raj began being dismantled in the early 1990s did India join China as one of the “Asian Tigers”.     Nehru’s secular vision is likewise being tested by the healthy support of Hindu nationalist organizations.   The essential problem there, Luce maintains, is ethnic-religious nationalism set against India’s diversity will create nothing but partisan reaction and more trouble.  This book was published years before  the election which brought Prime Minister Modi  — representing a nationalist party – to power.   While Luce presents the BJP as only an ethno-nationalist party, whom he likens to the fascists in their focus on  the tribe and their gods,   another author (Manuel, This Brave New World) attributed the BJP’s success to Indians’ desire for more economic freedom.

Luce covers much else;  the persistent influence of caste, for instance,  which Gandhi deplored and which the ‘untouchables’ continue attempting to escape from via politics and religion.  Likewise, he devotes a chapter to the mythic important of The Village in the Indian imagination, where it is not simply an artifact from the past but infused with the same spiritual importance the west used to place in families and the polis.  Luce notes that much of India’s economic growth has in fact been nurtured by cottage firms that don’t necessarily need metropolises and big factories, and that Nehru’s fixation on massive capital hobbled India with debt at a time when her people  didn’t have an economy to handle it. There is much else to say,  but in short – In Spite of the Gods is compelling for outside audiences who are trying to understand India’s role in the global community. It’s more personal and gossipy than Brave New World, but I would read the two books in tandem.

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Selma 1965: The Photographs of Spider Martin

Posted on March 4, 2017 by smellincoffee

Selma 1965: The Photographs of Spider Martin
© 2015 University of Texas; photography Spider Martin
128 pages, 80  photographs

During the 50th anniversary of the Selma March back in 2015,  one of the more popular exhibits in the city was a public showing of Spider Martin’s photography. Martin, named for his skinny, agile frame — and perhaps his ability to clamber up a tree for particularly engaging shots — covered  all three march attempts in 1965,   taking some unbelievably  close to the action.   Selma 1965: The Photography of Spider Martin collects Martin’s best material to present a visual history of the entire campaign.   Although virtually all of the shots are available in an online gallery,  here they are presented with both a historical introduction covering the Selma movement, and with captions which explain what is happening  and who is involved. The editor emphasizes John Lewis’ role, pointing him out in every picture he appears in.   For those readers who have only seen the movie Selma, Lewis was one of the young Selma leaders who reluctantly ceded the leading position of the local movement to King and his organization.    While the photographs are utterly remarkable first for having captured one of the pivotal moments in Civil Rights history, they also have artistry to them; one challenging photo has Brown Chapel mirrored in a man’s sunglasses as he stares at the building. Others capture fleeting  instances. While most photos of Martin Luther King depict him in his role as a Civil Rights Leader,  full of confidence and courage,  in one shot he is caught in a more humbly human expression, one which is  curious and anxious,   Martin’s gallery is utterly worth looking at, and below is a selected list of links, the title of which describe the moment for those who need a caption.

1. Lewis and others praying before starting the infamous first march which was attacked in Selmont by State Troopers and a county posse.
2.  The first march, descending to meet a line of troopers.
3. The moment in which charging troopers hit the first ranks of the marchers
4.  The marchers flee for their lives, leaving many of their number behind injured. There were no fatalities, however.
5. State troopers pursued and harried the marchers across the bridge and for several blocks back to Brown Chapel
6.  The Tuesday following, King arrived to lead another attempt. Again troopers met them  at the bridge,  reading out a Federal injunction legally forbidding King to march on the state highway until questions of legality and safety were addressed. King here listens as the injunction is read.
7.  After the first bloody march was broadcast on television, King issued a national call to link arms, asking members of the clergy nationwide to join him. The city was flooded with outsiders, much to the horror of those not interested in the movement.  Here Selmians and those who joined them clear the bridge and  start the long three-day trek to Montgomery.
8.  To ensure the marchers’ safety, the Alabama National Guard was used by LBJ to stand guard. This highway is now a much wider link between the cities.
9.  The three-day journey would have been a challenge for anyone, but this man apparently did it on crutches.
10. King delivers the “How long? Not long” speech at the State Capitol building, facing Dexter avenue

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