Football is Fleecing All of Us

The country, most of it, is going nuts once again. Football is back. College and pro. It's no news that this country is beyond enamored with football, and I would argue overly so, because as Gregg Easterbrook, the author of a recent book The King of Sports:Football's Impact on America, argues, the game is ripping us off right and left. If you pay taxes, you're being fleeced, even if you don't ever go to a game. Even if you don't like football. It's another manifestation of the power billionaires and millionaires have to shape and frame things to their own benefit via an ignorant public and a corrupted political process. (That last part was mine.)

Below is an interview with Easterbrook, only about 8 minutes long or so in which he delivers several telling blows against the way football has muscled into the education dollars and the absurdity of a law that declares professional football a non-profit enterprise.

It's really hard to believe that intelligent people would put up with this kind of abuse, but we do . . . and we glory in it.
 

My Kind of List

Of course, it's patently ridiculous that I should be getting ready to recommend books to you. I, who have scads of books here on my shelves that I have yet to read, about a half dozen of them only partially read . . . and yet, that's exactly what I'm about to do. Reason is, this is a list of really necessary books. I'm happy to say, I've probably read about ten percent of them already, but I got the idea for a whole bunch more to see if I can download to my Kindle for free. (One of the advantages of being an Amazon Prime member is one free Kindle book to "borrow" every month . . . with no time limit to return it.) My guess is there are a number of these that are downloadable.

The list is from Counterpunch, another of my regular-read blogs. The list is the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century and Beyond in English. Of course, everybody would come up with a different list, and these, mind you, are from Counterpunch. So by definition they're going to be edgy, counter-cultural, progressive . . . and scintillating. They run the gamut of Ida Tarbell's early 20th century expose of the monster that was and still is Standard Oil (Exxon) to the 2nd Edition of The Oxford English Dictonary. From Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire through Francis Yates's The Art of Memory, you are bound to find a bunch of treats for the mind, heart, and conscience here.

Knock yourself out. If you don't find several things on this list that fire you up, then maybe, as one of my old history mentors used to say: "you have reptile blood."

Something New and Extraordinary

A couple of weeks ago, completely out of the blue, I got an email from the CEO of a publishing house Savas-Beattie, a guy named Ted Savas. Here's their website. Savas-Beattie is a going concern which has published many books. It's no mom and pop operation. So to get back to the story. Basically what this guy wanted was to recruit me to work for them as a writer/editor on a book project. To wit: a complete rewrite of a book co-authored by a couple of guys who . . . well, let's put it this way: their strong suit is not writing. The book is about the second day of the battle of Gettysburg, the attack on the left center of the Union line. If I agreed to do this work, I would be listed as a co-author with the other two guys and share equally in royalties.* I jumped at this chance to not only get my name on the spine of another book, but a Civil War battle book at that. To be identified with that particular genre is a desirable cachet for a historian of the Civil War, because interest in the battles is steadily considerable and battle books sell.

In the course of the email he indicated that there is a lot more work for me where this came from. A lot more. So I'm basically hired on as an employee of this company for as long as I care to be. 

This is an amazing thing that's happened. First of all, I am an excellent editor/writer, it's probably one of the few things I do really well. In fact, this kind of stuff, reworking other people's stuff (not to mention writing history) is something I've done for my whole working life: in my regular job as historian in the DoD and as a friend and colleague to other historians who get me to edit their stuff. People keep coming back to have me do it for them again, so that's pretty good indication that they are pleased. Ted Savas is thrilled with the 25-page sample I've submitted on my work for this book.

So, bottom line: I'm just tickled plumb to death with this. Fantastic that something like this just falls into my lap. If I were to design a job for myself, this would be it. And I have to mention that I have my dear friend Larry Hewitt to thank for this. He mentioned me and my work to Savas. Thank you, bro! I really owe you for this one.

*Indeed, this book manuscript is going to undergo a huge make-over. Let's put it this way. I will fully earn the right to be on that title page.

Rocking in the Book World

English: Neil Young in concert in Oslo, Norway in 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I read in the USA Today that my man Neil Young is going to be coming out with a memoir entitled Waging Heavy Peace. I've never been a big consumer of rock 'n roll literature – at least not the book variety – but I think this is one book I'm probably going to have to get. This tome, after all, is about my man, a guy have been following since the beginning of his career back in the 1960s when he was with Buffalo Springfield, even before he went out solo.

As you can see, Neil is looking a little ragged these days; of course it's nothing but getting old. That process isn't very kind to any of us, but it doesn't – at least shouldn't –affect our integrity, something that Neil Young has kept throughout his entire career. The man is simply not cared about what the critics thought about what anybody thought really when it came to his musical choices in the various experimental paths he's gone down over the years. I'll be interested in what he has to say.

I'll be similarly interested in what Pete Townsend of The Who has to say in his new book. It's called Who I Am and is supposed to be released a few days after Neil's book on October 8. 

It's kind of interesting what the younger people's take on this is:

"There's a growing sense of the mortality of these people, not to mention the mortality of the readers," says Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone contributing editor. "As they get into their 60s, they think, 'If I don't do it now, I'm not going to do it.' Readers feel a sense of urgency, too. This might be the last time they hear from this person directly." 

Geez, I hope that's not the case.

Related articles

• Randy Bachman On Neil Young: 'He's Writing His Memoirs From My Brain!' (myq105.cbslocal.com)
• Neil Young Explains Buffalo Springfield's Aborted Reunion (snspost.com)

And One More Thing . . .

. . . this Writing Handbook I've been talking about. The last half of the book is full of information that writers need once they've gotten past the necessary stuff like parts of speech, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, abbreviations, and so forth. And that would be things like these sections: Unity, Coherence, Emphasis, Variety of Development, Interest and force, Exposition, Description, Narration, Argument (there's a whole section of this section about logical fallacies!) Now, I ask you, do kids in English classes ever get exposed to logic at all?  Would "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" make the slightest bit of sense? Judge for yourself. Illogical thinking is normative. Logic is a dying concept.

Would they learn the proper way to define things? "Define a word by giving (a) its general class and (b) the characteristics that make it different than other things in that class."

Would they learn about emphasis . . . in sentence, paragraph, theme?

And on, and on, an on.

I'm beginning to sound like a real geezer, but I'll tell you, brothers and sisters, the basics are still the basics. And I think we have more than enough proof that neglecting them when we're teaching kids is a guarantee that you're going to end up with a generation or more of people who at best achieve a barely functional literacy. Look around you. Does it fill you with confidence?

Related articles

• 10 Commandments of Logical Fallacies

  ---

• Informal fallacy file

  ---

• A few fallacies, for your consideration

  ---

And While We're on the Subject . . .

We All Love Him: Why?

. . . of our worship of the military, here comes one of the military gods in chief with a book that will doubtless sell hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies and further enrich another of that privileged class who don't pay enough taxes. There's his sainted countenance on the cover of the book in question. I will never read it, of course, because ever since the Vietnam War I have know that Colin Powell is a snake. He was directly in the chain of command that covered up the My Lai massacre in that despicable war. Do we really need to say any more about him? His hands are as bloody as any in that murderous platoon that blew all those innocent people away.

But this is the sort of thing, this engagement in war crmes, that fades quickly into the mist when you talk about figures lionized for their probity and honor. Powell has toted both around on his four-star, secretary of state shoulders like a birthright for lo, these many years.

This piece doesn't talk about Vietnam for Powell; it talks mostly about Powell as secretary of state and the infamous speech before the U.N. which justified the heinous war we launched against Iraq in 2003. But it's the same guy who lied through his teeth throughout his career. He's the kind of guy Americans just fall over themselves to worship.

A Majority of Simpletons

My problem is there simply isn't enough time for me to read, and I spend better than half my waking life reading. Not always books. I read magazine articles, I read stuff on the Internet--blogs and other interesting stuff, of which there is no end. I read the newspaper every day. And I read books. Both books for fun, which are most of them, and books of my profession, which is to say history and of which I sometimes have to write reviews. I cannot imagine life with books. I'm surrounded by books as I type this. I am inordinately fond of books. I have to sigh sometimes because I know I will not be able to read all the books I want to read right here in this room. I won't last long enough. And that's the books in this room, this study. It doesn't count all the books I'm going to acquire that are not yet in this room.

Which makes essays like this one stick with me. Not that what he says is surprising. I've been talking about the basic illiteracy of this society for a long time. The writer, one Jon Talton, an economic writer for the Seattle Times, writes a piece called "Men Don't Read."

I have a unique problem among men, it seems, without enough time to read. In fact, I have a problem that most men would not even recognize. It's truly sad . . . and what's worse, the problem with all those other guys that never read books . . . well, that ain't gonna get any better at all.

Here's a flavor of the article. Read the whole thing. It's pretty good.

My parents' generation was perhaps the high-water mark of this broad literacy that the founding fathers knew was essential for self-governance. Now it's gone.

It died in our society's abandonment of the public schools, and the screwing around with curriculum in even good schools (and for this latter, liberals can shoulder some blame, too). . . . Today, teachers must "teach to the test" and normal boy behavior is something to be medicated early. Today many schools don't even have libraries.

It died in a specialization society, where the Renaissance woman is rare and the Renaissance man below the age of forty is nearly non-existent (as is the public intellectual). Now even the brightest are channeled into silos of the mind early. The lucky ones are software engineers or neurosurgeons. Others are financial hucksters or diesel mechanics. They know a great deal about their very narrow field, along with an enthusiasm here and there . . . But they lack the knowledge of even a middle-brow polymath in the mid-20th century. At its worst, this "culture" merely places people into their Matrix pods as workers and "consumers."

It died with our electronic distractions. This baffles me: I spend my work day sitting before a computer screen; I need the tactile pleasure of a book when off-duty. I don't need my public library to have digital dazzle. But the damage was already well advanced, where thirty-year-old men were "reading" "graphic novels" (i.e. comic books) and living with their parents. Probably the first nail in the coffin was television, of which the average American watches 34 hours a week. And it died with the Southern-ization of our culture, where being "redneck" and "country" are high aspirations. [I would certainly mention the pernicious influence of the mindless hip-hop nation, which is far more pervasive than "Southern-ization," which I don't think really exists to any great extent anyway.]

To be sure, some people are never going to be readers. We used to feel sorry for them. Now it's the norm. With the extreme right, it's a point of pride. Don't need no book-learnin' when Rush and Sean and Bill will tell you the truth. . . . 

How a nation with a majority of simpletons faces the most complex dangers in history will be tragedy and farce. I just wish we didn't have to live through it, too.

 It already is tragedy and farce . . . it's just going to get worse. It will end in catastrophe.

If You Like Books . . .

. . . you will probably like this web site: Bookshelf Porn. What  a great name! I sent the link to this site to a good friend of mine in Louisiana who used to own a bookstore just off College Drive in Baton Rouge. I used to frequent the place when I was in graduate school. The big chains, Barnes & Nobles and Borders, put him out of business. He's in the history department now at the Univ of Southeaster Louisiana in Hammond. Anyway, I sent Charlie the same link I'm posting here. Can't wait for his reaction. Can't resist posting one of these amazing pictures.

How cool is this?

Related articles

• TodaysLouisiana.com: A Blog About What to Do in Louisiana and Louisiana News (prweb.com)

Indexing

I don't know what people who do this for a living get paid for doing, but whatever it is, it probably is not enough. I've encountered, as I'm sure you have too, book indexes that are simply worse than useless. (The only thing I can think of worse is a book that's not indexed at all.) There's nothing more frustrating to someone seeking information between two covers of a book who cannot do it because a good tool has not been provided to help him. That's what the index is. There's no sense in having one at all if it's crappy. The only kind acceptable is one that's complete and accurate. I've been working on building one now for several days. And I've got several days more to go.

Some observations. First, it is damned tedious and hard work doing this. You must comb every page of your galley proofs to find items that should appear in the index. You're constantly having to make decisions. Does this belong in the index? Does it have to be cross-referenced? Which category identifies it? Are there other words or phrases that should be indexed under this entry? And so on and on. Nobody gives much thought to the fact that somebody has to make these decisions, and the quality of the finished index is directly related to the quality of countless decisions like this. Second, electronic indexing until we have real AI is never going to be in the same league and good ole human brainpower. Finally, thankfully we have some electronic tools that ease the burden somewhat. The page proofs I'm working with are both hard copy and an electronic .pdf file. A free .pdf file reader called Foxit will search the entire manuscript for certain words or phrases and give you a list. So at least you don't have to work entirely with hard copy, like I had to do years ago with book on Stephens.

But this is a hell of a lot of work no matter how you do it.

Surely You Jest

Well, you betcha. I have to report that Infinite Jest, the magnum opus of the late lamented David Foster Wallace is simply terrific. I'm well into it now. Approaching page 200 (which still leaves a long, long way to go), but I have to tell you, I've laughed out loud several times. Several. A couple of times, I found it difficult to stifle the laughter. The Boston terrier, unused to such behavior from me, gets up in my face and licks. I guess she thinks something's the matter with me.

A quick check with my daughter, who's reading, and with a nephew cousin who has read the book, confirm that this is indeed a book that invokes belly laughter. It's apparent that the book is going to be a hell of a lot of fun. I've decided that it is going to remain ridiculous the rest of the way. Oh boy! And I'm in total awe of this guy's creativity and talent. Amazing.

Cheaters Never Gain . . .

Latest issue of The New Yorker has a piece about a guy named Quentin Rowan, a writer who produced under the pen name Q.R. Markham. I used the term "produced" advisedly, because Rowan stands alone at the pinnacle of the mountain called Plagiarism. This debut novelist, who had published a number of works before, was discovered to have copied virtually the entire text of a forthcoming novel Assassin of Secrets (for which he had been given an advance and of which 6,500 copies had actually been published) from dozens of already-published sources. The amazing thing about this guy is that the plagiarism was so wide-reaching, the book is constructed "almost entirely from other people's sentences and paragraphs . . . a singular literary artifact," according to the New Yorker article. What's more, Rowan, 34, has left a train of plagiarized works stretching out ten years behind him. Examples of the plagiarized passages can be found here. 

I note this for a couple of reasons: first, it's fascinating to me as a writer how much effort this guy used to cheat . . . probably much more than would have been required to write the thing himself. The second reason is much more personal. I don't teach at the university level any longer because plagiarism was so rampant and even when it was exposed, it was tolerated and students were not disciplined. What happened was I was disciplined, i.e., not allowed to teach anymore when I made too much noise about letting cheaters get by with cheating.

Cheaters never gain is a quaint expression, but there's no true in it.

Related articles

• Inside The Mind Of A Plagiarist (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• Salon debate: What is plagiarism? (salon.com)
• What I Think About the Latest Plagiarism Scandal (slog.thestranger.com)

Going Gopher

To my left sits a neat, fairly thick stack of paper. About two inches high, I would estimate. It's a book manuscript. It contains a dozen essays on subjects connected to CSA General Robert E. Lee, which manuscript I co-edited with a colleague. It will be published in May by the University of Tennessee Press.  By March 1, I have to have constructed and completed the index for this volume. The last time I did an index was years ago for my book on Alexander Stephens. I'm probably going to be going underground for the next couple of weeks to get this done. It's hard work, and the only good thing about it now is you can use the computer for some stuff, and you don't have to do everything by hand. My guess is that it is going to take all of the two weeks I have to do this before I can finish. We'll see.

Infinite Jest

It's the title of a massive novel by David Foster Wallace. It is also his last completed novel. I think he left an incomplete one upon his death. Self-inflicted, alas. Apparently the man was crushed completely by depression. How bad does it have to be for you to hang yourself in your 40s? But that is not the point of this entry. I started reading Infinite Jest a couple of weeks ago, and to be honest, I undertook this considerable task because my daughter was reading it and had blogged about it herself. This was too much of a challenge to overlook. I don't know how she came about deciding to read this book. Apparently, from what she says in her blog entry about it, her brother, my son Bernard had something to do with it. Sounds like some kind of shaming device at work. Well, I have to tell you, shame works on me. I could not let my daughter read this book when just recently I had been talking to not one but two people about David Foster Wallace and how I wanted to read some more of his stuff. I've encountered essays in a couple of magazines, and was always entertained. Hence, Infinite Jest. I am now about 130 pages in, and the book is getting better and better. (Something my daughter confirms after being well over 200 pp. in).

This guy is a massive talent but the vocabulary can be damned daunting. But I have found the solution. A whole Wiki devoted to the book that has a page-by-page that has a massive page-by-page annotation collection that pretty much obviates the maddening task of either/or/or both jotting down the latest word you have no idea of what it means and looking it up with an online source like Google, or my favorite dictionary, Ninjawords, the speediest online look-definition-up tool hands down. This is what the iPad was made for. Having that Wiki right there next to me while I'm reading IJ.

I've got a feeling this will not even be my last entry on this subject.

Related articles

• David Foster Wallace's 10 favorite books (csmonitor.com)

JFK Intel

Hope everyone had a great holiday. I took a little break for family events. Back now and ready to ring in 2012. In the meantime, some interesting information that I was not fully aware of, and I thought you might not be either.

Both during the campaign and his presidency Jack Kennedy was a walking pharmaceutical crash dummy. Recent biographer, Robert Dallek--An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (2003)--reports that "JFK was routinely injected with drug cocktails that included painkillers, amphetamines, steroids, cortisone, procaine, testosterone, codeine, and Ritalin." (Quote from Andrew J Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War [2005], 294 n.4). More from this great book tomorrow.

(I'll betcha J. Edgar Hoover's file on JFK was 6 inches thick. JFK was randy as a goat and three times as active, as is well known.)

Avalanched III

How many times this many? I have no idea.

So all those books on my shelves that are in the category of bought to read but not read yet. As you might imagine, some of these volumes have been in this status for years, in some cases, quite a few years. In this category would be books such as The Hour of our Death by Philippe Aries. It's a history of changing attitudes about death in the West for the last thousand years. It's a dense book, a commitment to read. But I still want to read it. Let me emphasize that all the books I'm going to mention here are books I still want to read. Whether they ever make it up the queue for that actually to happen . . . well, we'll see.

An even bigger read is Bob Sptiz's The Beatles, but my daughter has read this--I think she said more than once--so I feel like I have to read this one. These unread books are in all kinds of categories. Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics; Will Bunch's Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future--this was written before the great crash of 2008. Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (serial killer at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair). The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection (guide to best murder mysteries). Three books in the "everyday thing" category: Cod, The Box (shipping containers), Salt. Somewhat akin is Steve Almond's Candyfreak. This one, like several others mentioned here are gifts. I made a pledge--as yet unfulfilled--to read all the books that have been given me as gifts, which is no small number. If I did just that, I'd probably have at least 50 books to read.

• The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems--one of many books I've started and didn't finish. Not because the book was bad, but because I got distracted by another book.
• Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Daniel Boorstin's magnificent trilogy: The Discoverers, The Creators, The Seekers. I'm almost finished with Discoverers, but not yet.
• Shall I mention the baseball books that need reading? Biographies of Ty Cob, Lou Gehrig, Billy Martin. Team histories: Senators, Dodgers, Reds, Tigers, more. Sabrmetric tomes such as The Numbers Game and Baseball Between the Numbers. And some fat semi-reference works such as Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Blunders, Big Book of Baseball Lineups. The book he did with Bill James on pitchers. Bill James's Guide to Managers. A couple of books about umpires. And more.
• Multiple books in the following catgories: Middle Ages, Reformation, both World Wars, Ancient history, Civil War biographies and battle books, poetry, and so forth.
• And on and on. This is just a tiny sample.

If I never borrowed or bought another book, I have enough to read here to see me to the grave. But I know that ain't gonna happen. I'll always be distracted by something else good. For example, I'm going to quit this now and go continue reading With the Old Breed, a memoir of the Pacific War by a Marine. It's a book from the Norman library.

Avalanched II

I couldn't pick her out of a lineup.
This is Flannery O'Connor.

So I'm looking around now at the shelves for books that are in the I-intend-to-read-and-that's-why-I-have-them category. I'm sorry to say, there are sooooo many of them. First off, I should tell you, that if you really like fiction, you probably would not be all that impressed with my library. My tastes in reading have always been much more tilted to non-fiction than fiction. Which, I suppose, is natural for a historian. There's a pitiful little section of a top shelf that has half a dozen (count 'em!) forlorn little books of fiction floating in this huge ocean of non-fiction books. There are three James Michener up there, one Tom Wolfe (I've read everything by this guy.)--I Am Charlotte Simmons--a collected works of Flannery O'Connor, one William Faulkner. Need I tell you that those books are up there because I have not read them?

I hasten to tell you that I do read fiction--my God, I'm not a Philistine!-- it's just (obviously) not my first choice. I'm thinking now about whole boxes of fiction that I got rid of on the moves. I wish I had the sf books back, although I had read all of them.

But it's really depressing to look around at the shelves and seeing all these books that I've got sitting here that I was hot to read at some point (or they wouldn't be here), but that have now melted into the scenery, no longer with that read-me-read-me look they have when they first go up on the shelf. Lots and lots of really good stuff. Just at random, a very tiny sample of this category, and let's not even mention history books, by far the largest category of books in here.

Have I mentioned the categories? I think so: poetry, reference, chess, baseball, religion, biography, and history, and miscellany. A lot of the fun books are in this latter category. In American history I've gotten rid of almost everything but stuff in my specialty--19th century South, slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction. I've got basically nothing in early American history anymore and a smattering of books in 20th century. There are unread volumes in all these history categories. Some of the ones I really want to get to are Civil War battle books, mainly because I'm writing more and more about generals and the military aspects of the war. I've got history books on other stuff too, the stuff that interests me: World War I, Nazi Germany, WWII, Middle Ages, Reformation. (I've gotten rid of tons of this kind of stuff too.)

Guess what? I'm going to let this topic spill over into another post yet again. Which is not good because it keeps you in suspense (ha, ha) but is real good for me because it's a ready-made topic, and I won't have to struggle to come up with one. I have to tell you that coming up with something to write about that I figure you all won't consider utter tripe is the biggest challenge I have to deal with with this blog. So if you think some of the crap I write about is boring, you should see what I reject.

Avalanched

Kind of in keeping with a theme I developed yesterday--the amount of work that's burying me at this particular time--I look around me and see something else, another task (or maybe that should be tasks)  in my life that I will never come near to completing. Reading just the books I have on hand that I want to read. I work from a study; I'm surrounded on three sides by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. No, I've not counted them. My best estimate is something like 1,300 volumes, give or take. Now, admittedly, a number of these volumes are reference works: quote books, various dictionaries and thesauri, specialized encyclopedias (military/world/US history; supreme court cases, etc.), writing and usage books, guides (science, physics). Then there reference works within the specialties: baseball encyclopedias, record books, guides, etc. and in chess there are game collections, tournament books, opening/ending/middle game guides. Several Bibles and various theological works--I've read quite a few of these, but not all.

This leaves a huge number of books that are just book books. Books that I have acquired over the course of a long and lengthening lifetime. Which were acquired for either one of two reasons: 1) I needed them for research; or 2) I intended to read them. Books in the first of these categories, necessary for research, are pretty much unobtrusive as far as my conscience is concerned. I got them for research, I see reminders of projects long since or recently finished, remember using the books and being happy I had them here in my library.

And as I scan the shelves I see quite a number of books in the second of these categories, the ones I got to actually read, that I actually have read. But depressingly, quite a few more in the second category that sit accusingly on these shelves reminding me of how fickle I can be when it comes to my reading tastes, much less my reading commitments. Take poetry collections . . . some of these Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, Stephen Dobyns, Bob Hicok, others I have read whole and entire. Quite a few other collections, I've read a few or several poems. Others, hell, I've never even opened them. And there are a depressing number of books in all subjects that join James Schuyler Collected Poems in the category never even looked at.

It makes me sad to see how many there are in this category, nestled sometimes up against a book I read, but sometimes abutting several more that are likewise unread.

I'll talk some more about this tomorrow. This going on longer than I thought it would.

Buried

A forbidding-sized pile . . . and I wish I had the cat, too.

Man, a ton of work has just fallen upon me. It appears I'm going to be buried in history stuff for some time. I received the copy-edited proofs of a book I'm co-editing with a friend today via UPS. I'm looking at this big pile of over 400 pages, each of which must be read very carefully because this is really the last time you get to catch any errors and make corrections. After the page proofs, the next step in the process, no changes except factual errors and typos. That means hardly any changes. I am also responsible for building the index for this hummer, which can't begin until the page proofs. And I've got a sinking feeling that I will have to do the indexing by hand, unless some way can be found to either perform electronic indexing on a pdf file or have a Word file to work.

And this is just one thing on the plate. I have also received another 400+ page manuscript for a book about Confederate generals in the Trans-Mississippi theater. This one is for the initial edit. I've already encountered one chapter that is just awful. It needs a  lot of work before it gets into our book. My co-editor and I are like good cop-bad cop. Guess who the bad cop is?

Invincible Ignorance

"Are we never going to learn that the flotsam of our invincible ignorance will always come back to haunt us on a rising tide?"

A quote from Paul VanDevelder's book Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Territory, which won the 2011 Oregon Book Award.

How many ignorant things of the nation variety can you think of that have been done in your lifetime? I can think of several, but the first that comes to mind is getting militarily involved in the Middle East. Those wars will haunt us . . . and our children's children.

What's yours?

An Ocean of Real Blood

Confederate dead at Sharpsburg MD, September 1862

Talking about Little Aleck yesterday and all this preparation I've been doing has gotten me thinking about "the Wah," as they put it down South. Although the days are gone down there when "the Wah" referred only to the Civil War, with the sesquicentennial upon us, whether we really like it or not, we're going to be exposed to a lot of Civil War material over the next four years. One of the best things currently going is the "Disunion" series running daily in the New York Times. First rate articles by first rate people who know what they're talking about. Many, but not all of the writers, historians of the period.

Speaking of which, I've also just read a rather longish piece in Salon by Glenn W. Lafantasie, a working Civil War scholar. You might find it interesting. I don't know. It covers a lot of ground. He doesn't have much use for the so-called "reenactors," those (crazed, at least in my opinion) people who dress up as Union or Confederate troops and shoot blanks at each other and fire blank cannons at each other reenacting battles that happened 150 years ago. Basically, he objects to the prettification of what by any understanding was a horribly ugly, bloody, and tragic time in our history. As he puts it, a "war that should, by all rights, repel us and horrify us and send shivers of fright down our spines."

Exactly. Over 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War, a horrific number. This country bled a vast ocean of real blood during those four terrible years, but you would never know it from the way the war is thought about--if it's thought about at all--and portrayed and acted out by grown up boys, who like to dress up and play soldier. The guys in the picture above didn't get up and dust themselves off when the battle was over. The casualties at Sharpsburg were four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as died in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined. The casualties at the battle of Gettysburg surpassed in three days what it took over six weeks to amass at Iwo Jima during the second world war. Casualties in the Civil War are more than the total of casualties of all of America's other wars combined, and, yes, that includes the world wars and the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The essay includes a few paragraphs about Civil War books that he likes and recommends. It's a tricky business, this. I can't say I agree with all his choices, but I will say it's nice to see Bruce Catton's marvelous trilogy on the Union Army of the Potomac getting a shout-out. This (and being born in Vicksburg MS with its glorious national military park) was what turned me on to the Wah when I was a teenager, those many long years ago.

Related articles

• Some causes should remain lost (dailykos.com)
• The 150th Anniversary of The American Civil War - Reflections By Bruce Catton (disquietreservations.blogspot.com)
• The Best Civil War Books (thedailybeast.com)