Bits and pieces

"Whatever the Europeans may actually think of artists, they have killed enough of them off by now to know that they are as real--and as persistent--as rain, snow, taxes, or businessmen"--James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

I was going to see Anne today and waited at her apartment building's reception for almost an hour, but it turns out she thought I was coming tomorrow!  Oh well, I got to catch up a bit on my Lapham's Quarterly reading.

Wednesday night was the History Discussion Group, with the Belgian Empire its subject.  We talked for over two hours, but not much of the discussion was actually about Belgium! (I'm easygoing about those details...)

Today I read the Classics Illustrated comic of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha.  I really want to read the whole poem!  There's an article in Salon about Native Americans creating Indian superheroes for comics, yet Hiawatha and the Micmac Glooscap are pre-Columbian superheroes in themselves. (I've also read two Robert Louis Stevenson comics: Kidnapped and Treasure Island.)

Ken Burns' The Vietnam War is getting better and better!  It does seem odd that the American planners counted on North Vietnamese morale being broken, but it didn't occur to them that American morale might break sooner. I have a feeling that his writer Geoffrey C. Ward is the real genius in these documentaries...