Published in time for the celebration of Alabama’s bicentennial, Early Alabama invites readers back to when the Heart of Dixie was still a wilderness, save for settlements in its extreme north and south. The first hundred pages of the work deliver a history of the state from the organization of the original Mississippi Territory (then including most of the areas of both Alabama and Mississippi) to the move of the state capital to Tuscaloosa in 1826, and the second half includes photos of sites related to or illustrative of colonial Alabama history, including spots in Mississippi since the territory was initially governed from Natchez. Although the United States legally gained this territory from Britain and Spain through both war and diplomacy, in the early years Americans were only allowed to settle in the extreme north and extreme south, along the Tennessee river and around the Mobile river and bay area. The rest remained the province of various Creek tribes, who ranged from allies who embraced aspects of European culture, to factions like the bellicose Redsticks. Altercations between settlers just above Mobile and the Redsticks led to a more general conflagration, however, and in 1814 the actions of the US Army forced the Creeks (allies included) to cede over all remaining territory. “Alabama fever” then followed, as ambitious men of varying means from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia were soon planting their stakes along the fertile fields of the Blackbelt and other now-open territory. Although the state’s politics were initially dominated by the ‘Royal Party’, a group of elite planters, there was not as yet a firmly-rooted planter-patrician class, and the constitution created after Alabamians petitioned for statehood was fairly egalitarian – far more so than the 1901 constitution the southern bourbons would impose a century later. The seat of political power shifted constantly in the early years, with the temporary capital in Huntsville testifying to north Alabama’s (the Huntsville-Florence area) initial status as a counterweight to the planters of the coastal plain. Although the book is generously supplied with photos, they don’t overwhelm the narrative, and are illustrative of the text rather than constituting the mass of the book. Alabamians will find this little volume serves them well, both for its survey of early Alabama, and as a guidebook to colonial sites. It’s certainly redoubled my interest in visiting old Natchez!
Today’s top ten list is ‘Favorite Heroines (or Heroes, If You Prefer)”. I started doing that one and realized it was mostly the same as my “Top Ten Characters I’d Save the World With”, so I’m going to be rebellious and pretend it’s a top-ten freebie day. Since tomorrow is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, I’m going to do Lent-appropriate books I may reading between now and Easter.
Top Ten Lenten Reads Ordered in the Likelihood of My Actually Reading Them Most of these are from Mount Doom.
That is, you might count, only eight. The other two possibles are Purgatory, Anthony Esolen’s translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, and a biography of Joy Davidman titled And God Came In. Now, for something completely different: our Tuesday Tease is from The Four: The Hidden DNA of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
While a tomato couldn’t outrun her, the gatherer woman still needed to develop the skills needed to assess nuances such as ripeness, color, and shape for signs of edibility or disease. The hunter, by comparison, needed to act fast when the opportunity for a kill presented itself. There was no time for nuance, just speed and violence. Once the prey had been killed, the hunters needed to collect the merchandise and get home, pronto, as the fresh kill and even themselves were both attractive targets. Observe how women and men shop and you’ll see that not much has changed. Women feel fabric, try on shoes with a dress, and ask to see things in different colors. Men see something that can sate their appetite, kill (buy) it, and get back to the cave as fast as possible.
I thought it was an interesting observation, but I wonder if the dichotomy between spear-and-seize shopping and browse/study/gather shopping varies depending on what is being hunted for. Most of my shopping as a man is indeed the spear-and-seize variety: I pride myself on my ability to snatch things from the shelf without even even slowing down, freezer units excepting. On certain products, though, like electronics, I’m much more deliberative. The cost and nature of the item is also part of the dynamic, though. For me, the brand of milk doesn’t matter a whit so long as it came from a cow. The motherboard I choose, though, is not only pricier but will determine what CPUs & memory I can use in the future.
“The Harmony Club is a labor of love that will probably be in progress until the day I die. There is always a project that I’m working on, but best part is that I call the place home.” – David Hurlbut, 2012.
For the last few years, I’ve had the good pleasure of hanging out at one of Selma’s more remarkable downtown buildings, the Harmony Club, as its owner treated one of its downstairs rooms as a clubhouse and BYOB bar. In warm weather we’d gather on the sidewalk in folding chairs and watch the traffic; in colder months, we’d huddle inside, bellying up to the bar itself and warming our bones with chili or burritos. The space has all the appeal of a bar — a convivial space to meet with friends to drink and talk — without the pricetag, since we bring our own. The building was sold in 2022, and its new owners will soon begin finishing the restoration work begun by a friend of mine in 1999: those of us who gathered there several times a week for company, movies, and the sharing of grub and gossip will, within the year, find ourselves “Third Place” orphans. Before the HC as I knew it passes into history, I wanted to share what I know of the building, and to reminiscence about my time in it. I like distinctive Places, and the Harmony Club is the most unique in Selma.
The building is so named because it was created to be the headquarters and social hub of the Jewish social organization of the same name. They’d existed in town for forty years before opening their new building on November 4th, 1909. The two upper stories were used by the club, and featured a ballroom, a dining hall, and a smoking lounge: the lower story was split into two spaces, both of which were rented out to local businesses like the Selma Times-Journal, or to insurance companies. By the 1930s, the building had passed into the hands of the local Elks Lodge, who hosted community dances and recitals in the third story ballroom. These owners left their marks on the building: if one studies the floor, marks made by poker table chairs, illicit game machines, and dropped cigarettes are apparent. The deteriorating front balcony was removed in the late fifties, possibly precipitated by an auto collision with the supporting pillars. The Elks abandoned the HC’s upper stories in the 1960s, which became a pigeon-roost and rat-warren, until in 1999 an industrial architect with a passion for preserving unique structures arrived in Selma. David J. Hurlbut brought the place back to life, attacking both pigeon droppings and dropped ceilings, and created bar and restaurant spaces downstairs while he and friends lived upstairs. (The third-floor ballroom was turned into an epic private movie theater, with four king-sized sheets sewn together as a screen.) For David, the Harmony Club was a cathedral and a castle. The long bar itself was created by David, who used wood from a bowling alley, and rented the space to a commercial bar who wanted to relocate from their cramped quarters elsewhere in town. That renter eventually moved on, intending to buy her own building, and the long bar and its space became David’s architectural-artifact showroom.
It’s impossible to succinctly describe the sheer variety of stuff in that room, which used to be packed with oddities. To be found there were old toilets, sinks, doors, and pillars – but also X-ray machines used by shoe stores who used them for sizing fits, and first-generation television sets, along with more expected antique items like older chairs, tables, and lamps. David bought and sold these antiques on the side as his private passion; they were ‘beer money’, as he exclaimed whenever he made a sale. The space, big as it was, was filled with these elements – but there were also the oddities, as he was passionate about art and made his own ‘steampunk’ pieces, in addition to occasionally showcasing pieces from local artists. These showings gave life to an official organization, ArtsRevive, which acquired its own building – but the HC continued to collect and show more eccentric pieces. These pieces and the place’s general decor make it a place unlike any other, and over the years I’ve grown to genuinely love it as a physical place, even aside from the good times I’ve had inside: its bizarre collection of found-and-created articles, of random decor, slowly grew over time into an ever-changing but reliably weird mosaic of space. When I began looking through my photos to find some appropriate ones to share here, I was amused by the multitude I’d taken, and of areas that aren’t picturesque, like the exposed ceiling beams made of old-growth oak. The bar area has this unique feel to it: the brick, old wood, and dark interior always make me think of an old-fashioned men’s bar, but the random furniture and crazy art put a light twist on a space that might have seemed intimidating otherwise. Especially dear were the oddities that had stories connected with them: a strange sign employed in a prank from fifteen years ago, for instance, or a petit four box decorated with Jane Mansfield.
The bar at Restotonica on the day of David’s funeral
The bar-turned-showroom, which David called Restotonica, occupied the left side of the HC’s first story. The right side, separated from Restotonica by a staircase and walls, was rented by several restaurants, the last of which was Charlie’s Place. David developed the habit of sitting outside the Harmony Club and yakking with tourists or visitors to the restaurants, sharing facts about Selma history or architecture, and inviting them in to take a look at his antiques. David’s friends often joined him at this, and it became a salon of sorts – a weekend drinking-and-yakking circle, where people of all kinds would stop and talk. This made it a refuge for me in 2020: when everything else was closed, the Sidewalk was open. The Sidewalk gang had its regulars and semiregulars, though the circle grew smaller and closer after David died in early 2022. He’d sold the building not long before, though the closing was a year away – so the Sidewalk has continued meeting in his honor, and by the grace of the building’s new owners and David’s last roommate, who has been the building’s steward in its last year or so. I’ve spent many a happy hour outside or inside – enjoying breakfast with friends on Saturday mornings, watching movies on Wednesday nights, or just holding down a bar stool on Friday and Saturday nights and yakking with whomever comes in while listening to music from across the world. We’ve watched parades and drunken karaoke across the street, gotten to know Secret Service agents who’d pop in for a chat during a visit from DC , watched brilliant sunsets, bizarre traffic and pedestrian goings-on, and sent off a flying lantern in memory of our departed. I don’t know when we’ll watch our last movie, share our last meal, or use the bottle-openers David screwed onto the utility pole for the last time, but I intend to savor every moment that I can until the Sidewalk closes for good. The building’s new owners intend to complete David’s twenty years of restoration work, culminating in the recreation of the old covered balcony. If that happens, I’ll be all the happier for Selma, and for David’s memory: he’d beam to see it, I’m sure. However glorious it turns out, though, I suspect part of me will always want to come back to the Sidewalk and the long bar as I knew it — this crazy, colorful, intimate and storied spot where I rode out hurricanes and heartaches, celebrated birthdays, and heard too many wonderful stories to remember.
It’s déjà vu all over again. Sergeant Jack Tanner, only recently arrived back in England from the doomed British defense of Norway, has been sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force – only to find the BEF forced to conduct a fighting retreat, let down by French allies who are led by old men paralyzed by indecision and stupefied by Blitzkrieg. To make matters worse, an old enemy and Cain-like brother in arms named Blackstone is his company sergeant major, and he’s arguably more dangerous than the Wehrmacht – at least, to Tanner, who has a talent for small-arms action that makes The Darkest Hour a superb work of military fiction.
I was introduced to Tanner via The Odin Mission last year, thanks to Cyberkitten’s tip, and enjoyed it so much that I sent for the other two books from England itself, and enjoyed it enormously – appreciating the way Holland made his hero Tanner confront personal and military challenges at the same time, by having him fight continually with an absolute ass of a French ally while their isolated group attempted to make its way through the Norse winter and avoid falling into the hands of Hitler’s army. That formula is replicated nicely here, and suffers nothing for it: again, Jack’s group is cut off from the main body of troops, this time because they attempt to save an incredibly ungrateful crashed airmen, and Tanner is continually sabotaged, undermined, and outright attacked by a malicious, cowardly, and criminally industrious officer who knows Tanner is a threat to his career and blackmarket schemes. To make things more interesting, there’s a very embittered Waffen-SS major who Tanner’s men succeed in humiliating by knicking four trucks from under their noses, and then taking POWs – and he’s out for revenge, nevermind the whole establishment of the Aryan world empire thing.
Darkest Hour made for excellent reading, especially since I’m familiar with the evacuation at Dunkirk but not of the often confusing retreat that led to it. Holland’s subtle use of little historic details (the peppering of slang, enough to add flavor but not enough to make the reader conscious of it), imminently sympathetic and admirable main character, and the varied action all work to make this a solid hit. The SS-man borders on being an over-the-top villain, but this is the SS. If you’re wearing comically evil skull and crossbones and black uniforms, you can be an over-the-top villain.
One could argue that the great breakthrough of industrial agriculture occurred when most farmers became convinced that it would be better to own a neighbor’s farm than to have a neighbor, and when they became willing, necessarily at the same time, to borrow extravagant amounts of money. They thus violated the two fundamental laws of domestic or community economy: You must be thrifty and you must be generous; or, to put it in a more practical way, you must be (within reason) independent, and you must be neighborly. With that violation, farmers became vulnerable to everything that has intended their ruin.
You have got to farm with both plants and animals in as great a diversity as possible, you have got to conserve fertility, recycle wastes, keep the ground covered, and so on. Or, as J. Russell Smith put it seventy years ago, you have got to “fit the farming to the land”—not to the available technology or the market, as important as those considerations are, but to the land. It is necessary, in short, to maintain a proper connection between the domestic and the wild. The paramount standard by which the work is to be judged is the health of the place where the work is done.
A young man faces an enormous choice at a presumed-to-be-uneventful prayer meeting, and at this crossroads of his life, the reader experiences the choices of his kin whose lives brought him there. Go Tell it on the Mountain is a semiautobigraphical novel by James Baldwin, which follows a family from the Deep South to Harlem, who are grounded, inspired, and dominated by fervent Pentecostalism. It’s a story where the characters, not a predefined plot, dominate – in their personalities and in the intensity of their struggles. The Baldwin figure, John Grimes, is coming of age – newly distracted by women, at odds with his father (his stepfather, we later learn) over the patriarch’s strict religiosity, and torn between the expectations demanded on him as the oldest son and what he wants to do. He is of age, and must begin to choose, for himself, whether he will follow the straight and narrow – or the winding, winsome Broadway down into hell. This is is a choice faced by others before him and alongside him, and much of the novel shifts to telling the stories of John’s mother, father, stepfather, and aunt before returning to him again. These characters are linked by race and religion, frequently combining hatred for whites with burning religious zeal – something decidedly odd for me to read, having grown up in a mixed-race Pentecostal church. Hypocrisy is a common element, especially in the life of John’s stepfather Gabriel, who attempts to transform himself from a skirt-chasing drunk into a man of God – but is taunted by his sister, who declares that a man’s heart is never changed, but remains as it was. As we’ll see, a zeal for preaching holiness doesn’t necessarily translate into living I don’t know enough about Baldwin to understand fully what he’s driving at in his treatment of character, morality, and religion, but anyone who has a few decades under their belt can appreciate that the way of discipline and virtue has no guardrails: it is very easy to wander off the path, even for those who want to stay on. I found Gabriel the most sympathetic character in the novel despite his mix of severity and moral cowardice.
Kindle Highlights:
“Now you just remember,” Elder Peters said, as kindly as before, “you’s talking to your elders.” “Then it seem to me,” he said, astonished at his boldness, “that if I got to look to you for a example, you ought to be a example.”
“Ain’t no such thing,” said Sister McCandless, “as a little fault or a big fault. Satan get his foot in the door, he ain’t going to rest till he’s in the room. You is in the Word or you ain’t—ain’t no halfway with God.”
“I thought I married a man with some get up and go to him, who didn’t just want to stay on the bottom all his life!” “And what you want me to do, Florence? You want me to turn white?” This question always filled her with an ecstasy of hatred. She turned and faced him, and, forgetting that there was someone sitting in the parlor, shouted: “You ain’t got to be white to have some self-respect!”
“Deborah,” he asked, “what you been thinking all this time?” She smiled. “I been thinking,” she said, “how you better commence to tremble when the Lord, He gives you your heart’s desire.”
And because it was stuck in my head the entire time I read this novel, here’s Mississippi John Hurt’s “You Got to Walk that Lonesome Valley”.
Now mother walked that lonesome valley Now mother walked, she walked it by herself Well there ain’t nobody else could ever walk it for her She had to walk it, she had to walk it by herself
You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley Well you gotta go by yourself Well there ain’t nobody else gonna go there for you You gotta go there by yourself
An orphaned young boy and a young girl from another country arrive together in the Nebraska prairie, forging a friendship from their shared status as strangers in a new land despite their difficulties in communicating. They will play and work together, often butting heads and eventually taking different paths – but the past, and their love for the land, bind them. This is a story written from the rearview, as the adult boy – Jim Burden – is looking back on his life after a recent visit back home to see what remained of his childhood. Precious little, as it turns out: he grew up in a Nebraska so frontier that some of its homesteaders still live in sod homes, and the future city of Black Hawk was a far humbler town. Burden’s memoir details the little stories that made up the lives of he and his friends – adventures involving snakes, and the quiet tragedy of suicide. These stories take place against a rich background, that of the prairies. Having never been to Nebraska, I must admit that my mental imagining of it is fairly superficial, thing that resembles more an illustration on a milk carton than a place where people actually live. Cather, though, paints such beautiful descriptions of the land and changing skies that one has to read them several times – the first to know what’s there, the second and third time to savor the details. Not as dramatic as Ed Abbey’s descriptions of the Southwest, but more intense in the smaller details. One particularly powerful passage describes the Sun and Moon as two luminaries, hanging in opposition – making the personal drama happening at the same time, Jim engaged in earnest conversation with Antonia, even more resonant. Although I found the first parts of the story interesting, it wasn’t until Jim drew closer toward adulthood, and the diverging paths of he and his friends became more important, that I was totally sucked into the story — and never more than when Jim made his return to Black Hawk to see his Ántonia one more time. Quite stirring on all fronts.
Related to today’s posting of The Human Experiment. Biosphere-2 has been modified somewhat since the original eight did their two-year stint, but it’s mostly the same. Worth watching just for the “lungs”, the scale of boggles the mind. 40,000 lbs of metal rising and falling to allow the Biosphere to “breathe”…
From this patch of desert in sunny Oracle, Arizona, eight Americans are beginning the trip of a lifetime. Divided into two tribes and locked into a 3-acre, hermetically sealed building, they must work together despite their differences to grow food, reintegrate their waste, and overcome lethal challenges to survive. Nothing goes in…nothing comes out! 730 days, eight people, One Survivor!
Well, not quite. It’d make a heck of a TV show, though. Jane Poynter is one of eight people who took part in a two-year experiment, living in a self-contained project called ‘Biosphere 2’. Designed to be a self-sustaining world, the experiment set out to see if it was possible for humans to create an independent ecosystem that could sustain itself and them for a prolonged period time — something that would be necessary were we to move into space, or attempt to colonize other worlds. This was not an official government-created mission, but one that originated from the Ecotechnics Institute, an…..interesting group of people who called themselves Synergists, and looked for ways to combine technological progress with natural systems of ecological maintenance. Although that might sound like just a promising nonprofit, the Synergists were more complicated than that,living together on a ranch like a commune, and incorporating art heavily into their group projects. (“A hippy theater group” is one word used to described them: “Cult” is another.) Young Jane discovered this group while visiting an art gallery, and was soon sailing with them aboard the Heraclitus, conducting experiments at sea. Despite not having any formal training, when the Institute advanced the idea of creating a self-contained, self-sustaining Biosphere, she became one of its principal designers and a member of the two-year crew. The Human Experiment is her story of how she came to be involved, a history of the project and its creation, and then her recollection of those two troubled years themselves, when interior stress and outer drama created running conflict within the group.
I don’t know if there exists any experiment more interesting than this — a two year endeavor to see if humans could create a separate biosphere, in effect a self-contained world, and live in it for two years. I’m sure experiments performed at the Large Hadron Collider might reveal physics-changing information about life, the universe, and everything — but this is locking eight humans up for two years and seeing if they survive. The ambition of it is staggering, even thinking about the engineering required to maintain separate biomes, each with a distinct climate — nevermind the mountain of ecological variables, as a diverse array of animals , plants, soils, bacteria would need to be selected and integrated. In a sealed environment, the crew would need to be able to grow its own food, but not only that — they needed to be able to live off of the oxygen the project’s plants were creating, and find ways to recycle their urine and other waste projects to make the biosphere project a closed circuit. Although there were smaller-scaled experiments to see if a human in a sealed environment could live on the oxygen emitted by the plants sealed in with them, they always concluded in a matter of hours, at most a weekend. The jump to two years, and the added complication of having to grow food for a large crew, made things far more complicated. There was also the problem of the unknown. What ecological or environmental factors weren’t known about? What unforeseen problems might occur? Sure enough, there were: from El Niño oscillations drastically reducing the amount of sunlight the Biosphere received, to infections from a previously-unknown bacteria that destroyed the white potato crop, to the unexpectedly fecund soil bacteria that gobbled up far more oxygen than expected. (This lead to more C02, leading the crew to begin panic-modification of the vegetative environment, leading to additional problems.) This forced the crew to become subsistence farmers, who instead of reaping an easy boon and devoting free time to art, became fixated on finding enough food to get by. Those were merely the technical problems, to say nothing of the drama from outside the Biosphere — from the Institute’s internal politics — that split the increasingly malnourished and oxygen-starved crew into two fractious parties, who might enjoy one another’s company with booze on special occasions, but otherwise studiously avoided the others despite their mutual dependence. Part of the tension was dispute over how to proceed once they realized the Biosphere would become unlivable if the oxygen problem were not solved.
This is an absolutely fascinating story all around, from Poytner’s personal story — a well-heeled British young lady searching for purpose in her life, stumbling upon this group, sailing the world with them and then becoming a key member of an extraordinary project — to the challenges and sheer weirdness of life under glass that she documents. I’d seen clips of this on the news as a kid, and trailers for the Pauly Shore movie that used it as a backdrop, but never really dug into the project properly. Frankly, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m under a book-buying ban, I’d check out other crew memoirs — as it is, I’ll have to settle for watching Spaceship Earth, a recent documentary. If you’re at all interested in the Biosphere-2 project, this is definitely a solid read!
Reading Freely 