An' there ain't no 'busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay

I didn't get as much sleep as I was hoping, because around the usual time the dawn came up like thunder out of Arlington across the Reservoir and there are no curtains or shades on the louvred glass windows of the summer kitchen, but I got it in company of two small cats, one at my shoulder, one at my feet, and that's what matters.

Off to doctor's appointments.

And you are going to get yourself together now, aren't you?

Back from doctor's appointments. I don't know if it was an orientation event or if the plaza outside Harvard's science center just spontaneously generates these things, but on my return trip I discovered a live musical performance [edit: Grace Morrison], a game of human chess, and a small petting zoo. I stopped for five minutes and spent some time with a small white kid which liked to be scritched around its ex-horns and left my hands smelling strongly of goat. The nearby potbellied pig was also receiving a lot of love.

I detoured briefly from catching the bus into Raven Used Books, where I checked in with a couple of books I have been considering for the last month and left with an unexpected free copy of Robert D. Ballard's Mystery of the Ancient Seafarers: Early Maritime Civilizations (2004). I spotted it on my way out, an oversized National Geographic companion volume to a PBS special of the same name; it was on the two-dollar shelf and the bookseller just waved me out the door with it. I am delighted. It has a fresco from Akrotiri on the cover—the terracotta-skinned young fisherman with a string of mahi-mahi in either hand, their backs and sides the same Egyptian blue as the shaved scalp of his head—and full-page photographs everywhere. It's a little of the sea in a summer I didn't get enough in.

[The remainder of this post substantially delayed by Autolycus climbing into my lap, then onto my chest—purring insistently all the while—and falling asleep for something upward of an hour. Previously he had been prowling the sills of the summer kitchen, tempted by the sound of birds in the trees outside; Hestia was the small breathing croissant-lump in the blankets beside me, having burrowed her way in for an afternoon nap. I gave up, put aside the computer, and napped with cats. I regret nothing.]

On the bus I finished Jonathan D. Sarna's When General Grant Expelled the Jews (2012), which I bought last week from the basement of the Harvard Book Store—the last book-purchase of my month on the outskirts of Harvard Square—because my reaction to the title was when what happened where now? I recommend it highly; it's a compact and fascinating study of a wartime event I had never heard of and its repercussions for both the American Jewish community of the mid-nineteenth century and Ulysses S. Grant during and following his two terms as President of the United States, as well as a book about intersectionality. The title refers to Grant's infamous 1862 "General Orders No. 11," a military measure intended to combat the black-market cotton trade in the Department of the Tennessee but leveled directly and explicitly at "Jews as a class," who were given en masse twenty-four hours to lekh-l'kha it out of Union-controlled Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Sarna has some ideas about what Grant was thinking when he wrote the order, but it very obviously did not include foreseeing the firestorm that promply hit the public sphere. There were letters, telegrams, newspapers taking sides, a delegation to the White House led by Cesar Kaskel, a Jewish merchant from Paducah who had left Prussia to get away from exactly this kind of anti-Semitic nonsense. By personal command of President Lincoln, the order was revoked within a month. Grant's reputation with the Jews of America plunged straight into the toilet—you don't get called "Haman" for being a great ally to Jews—and he spent quite possibly the rest of his life trying to get it back. The degree to which he succeeded, the choices he made toward reparation and his expressed or inferred feelings about his behavior, make up the majority of the book and are actually more interesting than the fact of the order itself. Sarna is very good at the nuances of identity, politics, and the ways that ethnic groups are complex within themselves and complicated in their interactions with other groups, here meaning primarily Jewish, Black, and Native Americans; he knows that no one is monolithic, not even individuals. I never took any classes with him at Brandeis, but he was the advisor of friends of mine: I like knowing, even more than a dozen years later, that they were studying with someone good. The same press has published a biography of Emma Lazarus, so I will be looking for that.

I know Gene Wilder died on Monday and I haven't had a chance to write about him. I saw him last in The Frisco Kid at the HFA. It's an uneven film, but a favorite of mine, and I think one of Wilder's best characters. I'll see what I can do.