Book Report: All the Sinners Bleed

10. S. A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed (2023) (7/7/24)

This is Cosby's third book (I reported on the other two here and here), and it's a doozy—but I've grown to expect that from this writer, with his complex plots and imperfect, striving protagonists.

This story, set in coastal Virginia, begins with two killings: first, of a well-liked geography teacher at the Charon County high school, and then of his killer, a young Black man who is spouting religious mumbo-jumbo, clearly out of his head. It turns out, the teacher had his (very) dark side—and there is yet another man who, as events play out, appears to be responsible for many, many murders of Black youngsters. Into this morass strides our hero, Sheriff Titus Crown, who has demons of his own from his time as an FBI agent. As a Black man, he also suffers the racism of this very Southern locale. In the course of his investigation we meet various characters—uppity good ol' boys, various ilks of preachermen, Titus's love interests both present and past, his father and brother, a local county supervisor, Titus's own deputies—all of whom fill in the complicated nature of this rural county. (Though I did sometimes grow confused as to who was who, there were so many characters.)

As with Cosby's other books, it's a mystery/thriller, but it's also much more than that. Titus has a strong moral center, but he is also a flawed human being, and both those sides play against each other. That is what Cosby does so well.

Here's a passage I flagged, a conversation between Titus and his girlfriend, Darlene:

     "I guess a lot of people are scared. Not just people that voted against me," Titus said.
     "Daddy getting those shells ain't like him saying he don't think you gonna catch this guy, Titus. But this is Charon. Stuff like this doesn't happen a lot. People don't know what to do," Darlene said.
     "I'm so sick of people saying 'this is Caron' like everyone around here is a goddamn virgin and no one has ever stepped on a sidewalk crack or stole a grape from the Safeway. Let me tell you something I learned in the Bureau. Doesn't matter where you are from or where you live, people are people. They can be jealous or hateful or twisted and sick. They steal and they lie, and lie about stealing. They fuck each other's husbands and wives or sons and daughters. They go to church every Sunday and hoot and holler about brotherhood and living in Christ, then they come right out and call you or me a porch monkey before they go home to beat their kids. Then have the nerve, the unmitigated audacity, to point at somebody else, at some other town, and say, 'No, those are the sinners, those are freaks, not us, not Charon.'"
     "Titus, I didn't—" Darlene tried to say, but Titus ignored her.
     "Flannery O'Connor said the South is Christ-haunted. It's haunted, all right. By the hypocrisy of Christianity. All these churches, all these Bibles, but it's places just like Charon where the poor are ostracized. Where girls are called whores if they report a rape. Where I can't go to the Watering Hole without wondering if the bartender done spit in my drink. People say this kind of thing doesn't happen in a place like Charon. Darlene, this kind of thing is what makes places like Charon run. It's the rock upon which this temple is built," Titus said. He tossed back the rest of his drink and stomped into the kitchen.

6 of 100: End-of-the-trail libations

Just a quick little something today because I have nothing substantive, plus I made this yesterday and I have nowhere else to put it. It references the walk my friend Lynn and I did across England in May—a chronicle of sorts of our end-of-the-trail beers (me) and gin & tonics (Lynn), or at least all I managed to remember to shoot a picture of. Plus the one pot of tea, in Patterdale. And (center shot) our infinite games of Rummikub, using two miniature decks of cards. Good times!

5 of 100: Slime mold

"Slime mold" is such an ugly term for what is in fact fascinating and beautiful. Let's call them myxomycetes instead—their technical name (though yes, that translates essentially to "slime fungi"). Or multinucleate plasmodia—plasmodia being, according to Merriam-Webster, "a motile multinucleate mass of protoplasm resulting from fusion of uninucleate amoeboid cells." 

Okay, we'll go with slime mold for short. But seriously, these organisms are amazing, neither plants, animals, nor fungi, but sharing characteristics of all three. That puts them in the Hydra-headed kingdom of Protista, or (M-W again) "any of a diverse taxonomic group . . . of eukaryotic organisms that are unicellular and sometimes colonial or less often multicellular and that typically include the protozoans, most algae, and often some fungi (such as slime molds)." (The other kingdoms, to remind you, are Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, and Monera, or single-celled non-nucleated prokaryots, such as bacteria.)

As one website explains, "Slime moulds are peculiar protists that normally take the form of amoeba but also develop fruit bodies that release spores, and are superficially similar to the sporangia of fungi." An article from the Smithsonian Magazine offers a good description of the life cycle of plasmodial slime molds:

The taxonomy of myxos depends on what the fruiting bodies look like: size, shape, color and their "complexion" (smooth or warty), as well as microscopic characteristics detected back at a lab. They are found in rotting logs, stumps, bark and similar microhabitats on all continents. A myxo begins life as a microscopic spore. After it’s shaken out like a salt grain from its "parent" fruiting body, it germinates to produce a cell that in turn joins another of its fellows to form a zygote. The zygote devours bacteria found in decaying wood and elsewhere, increases its size by nuclear division, then masses into a blob called a plasmodium. The plasmodium—which can be clear, a preppy khaki, hot pink, or a flashy yellow, orange or red—acts like a giant amoeba, gorging on its prey of bacteria, spores and even other myxos until it runs out of food, whereupon it hikes off at about 1/25 of an inch per hour to a suitable location to sprout the fruiting bodies. The ideal spot is high enough to catch a passing breeze and dry enough to avoid fungi. Then the whole program repeats itself.

And if you should want to read more about myxomycetes, Mount Rainier National Park has a friendly but thorough discussion (60 different types of slime mold are catalogued within its boundaries). 

But okay, I promised photos. That's because photos are what attracted me to this slimy subject in the first place: the macros by Barry Webb that you see above. I discovered these on Facebook, in a group called—I kid you not—Slime Mold Identification & Appreciation. (It's groups like that that keep me coming back to FB...) Barry kindly allowed me to feature his work here. Click on them to see them large. They're worth a study. (Scroll to the end for a couple more.)

Here are some in situ (unless otherwise noted, by Crow Vecchio, from the MRNP site mentioned above):

Fuligo septica (familiarly known as dog vomit slime mold
or, more appetizingly, scrambled eggs slime mold)

Caratiomyxa fruticulosa var. poroides

Trichia decipiens

Leocarpus fragilis

Stemonitis splendens (photo by Oniroid)

Stemonitopsis typhina

Lycogala epidendrum (commonly known as
wolf's milk slime mold)

Tubifera ferruginosa

And a couple last Barry Webb close-ups. Amazing!

4 of 100: Alex Webb, photographer

A friend of mine blogged today about photography—his own photography, and the photography of an artist he admires, Alex Webb. I'd never heard of Webb, who is known for his street photography, his use of color, his layering of emotion. Here are a few of Webb's images. I want to learn more about him, see more of his work. As he puts it, "I'm always playing along that line: adding something more, yet keeping it short of chaos." Thanks for the introduction, Greg. (The following are chosen entirely at random from what appears to be an unending corpus.)

Mirror self-portrait

Guanajuato. 1987. Child and statue.

Kampala, Uganda. 1980.

Tehuantepec, Mexico. 1985.

Sancti Spiritus, Cuba. 1993. Baseball fans.

View of lower ­Manhattan from a Brooklyn Heights
rooftop, New York City, September 11, 2001.

Santo Domingo. 1980

Haiti. Bombardopolis. 1986.

Istanbul. 2001. View from a barbershop near Taksim Square.

Oaxaca. 1990.

USA. San Ysidro, California. 1979. Mexicans arrested
while trying to cross the border to United States.

Merida. 1983. Circus lion.

3 of 100: Interactive art

Yesterday I referenced a very pleasing interpretative analysis of the W. H. Auden poem "Musée des Beaux Arts," from the New York Times. Turns out, it is part of a whole series of such "Close Reads" of a few poems, a lot of paintings, a photograph, and a 15th-century book of hours. Only sixteen works are covered, and the last entry was from last August, so that may be it. But I will be exploring each of those sixteen. The series is very nicely done.

That, of course, got me wondering—about other interactive/online features on art. And I found a couple, which I haven't looked at beyond the splash page, but I will.

The Met 360° Project, an "award-winning series of six short videos invites viewers around the world to virtually visit The Met's art and architecture in a fresh, immersive way. Created using spherical 360° technology, it allows viewers to explore some of the Museum's iconic spaces as never before." It includes the Great Hall, the Cloisters, the Temple of Dendur, the Met Breuer, the Charles Engelhard Court, and the Arms and Armor Galleries.

The National Gallery of Art has three online exhibits with an interactive sort of interface, courtesy of Google Arts & Culture:  Before the Mona Lisa: Leonardo’s Captivating Ginevra de’ Benci, Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, and Fashioning a Nation: Drawings from the Index of American Design. 

The Musée d'Orsay—one of my favorite museums—has a similarly constructed online exhibit, From Station to the Renovated Musée d'Orsay. As does the Van Gogh Museum, featuring the books Vincent read, his love life (or lack thereof), and his beloved brother Theo.

You can get a pretty good look at the Sistine Chapel through its virtual tour.

The Smithsonian features an Online Exhibitions page—or rather, dozens of them, each listing dozens of exhibits: a ridiculous wealth of culture, science, art, innovation, and history.

There: there's a start. The Smithsonian alone could keep one happily occupied for months.

And finally, and completely by coincidence, today I stumbled on an article, published yesterday in the New York Times, about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the "Ode to Joy" that certainly counts as interactive, even if only aurally: "Why We Still Want to Hear the 'Ode to Joy, '200 Years Later." It's worth a listen.

2 of 100: Fall of Icarus

I keep encountering references to Icarus lately: in particular, two friends have invoked the myth in in-progress essays, and one of them also mentioned a poem by Jack Gilbert that similarly references it. Which sent me searching for other poems on Icarus, a couple of which are ekphrastic, inspired by paintings of the boy-bird. So I thought I'd share some of that shebang. I appreciate the variety of perspectives they offer on the myth.

Failing and Flying
Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Chagall’s Fall of Icarus
David Moolten

He doesn’t fall into the sea, but back
Towards Russia, a shtetl’s chicken coop houses,
Crowds clutching children who point and wave.
They’ve cleared a space for him among their donkeys,
A boy in shades of gray, of wood fire ash
Coughed from chimneys, with a weak spiked sun
Like a circle around a star of David,
Which a dove easily passes over.
He might be an angel except for his dark wings
Flicking off feathers as he floats a moment,
As he flies in the forever of falling
And of the painting. He might be an angel.
Except he’s not, just a boy who’s gone
Too far, maybe crossed oceans, forty days
And forty nights of typhus in steerage,

High fever and delusions, sodden resilience
Maybe to live in Hoboken, sweat out
A shoe factory then a Dutchman’s farm,
Never come home. Only in his mind,
Does he revisit those antique relatives,
Colorful extensions of what he is
That let him rise through the world. And when
Their abandoned faces begin to shrivel
In memory like a picture thrown on a fire,
He still has his tall tales infectious as rumors
Of the old country, Yiddish he can’t leave
Well enough alone, squawking at his kids.
But unable to hover above the rooftops, play
On a breeze like the Klezmer fiddlers,
Maybe he flies too close, burns up in the warmth
Of this childish levity and weeps. Wracked
At the end, usurped by the ground reaching up
As a hospital room’s soft bed clothes, he’s just
A man with an unfamiliar name. Now nothing
Remains of the old days except pictures
In books and paintings. In them, no one hears
The shrieks of a violin nor of a boy
As he plunges back towards his sketchy village,
A native son humbly doing as he was told,
Thrashing about the midair of exile, dying
Only in his dreams, only in the myth of leaving.

Here is the painting in question:

Musée des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

        December 1938

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

And that painting:

Here is a very nice piece by Elisa Gabbert in the New York Times that parses the poem (multiple times, variously), gives some pictorial background on Auden, and explores Pieter Bruegel to boot. 

And finally, here's a view of Icarus from his father's point of view, after the fall:

Daedalus, After Icarus
Saeed Jones

Boys begin to gather around the man like seagulls.
He ignores them entirely, but they follow him
from one end of the beach to the other.
Their footprints burn holes in the sand.
It’s quite a sight, a strange parade:
a man with a pair of wings strapped to his arms
followed by a flock of rowdy boys.
Some squawk and flap their bony limbs.
Others try to leap now and then, stumbling
as the sand tugs at their feet. One boy pretends to fly
in a circle around the man, cawing in his face.

We don’t know his name or why he walks
along our beach, talking to the wind.
To say nothing of those wings. A woman yells
to her son, Ask him if he’ll make me a pair.
Maybe I’ll finally leave your father.
He answers our cackles with a sudden stop,
turns, and runs toward the water.
The children jump into the waves after him.
Over the sound of their thrashes and giggles,
we hear a boy say, We don’t want wings.
We want to be fish now.

1 of 100: Origins of fascism (a reading list)

I am considering taking up my 100 Days self-challenge again. (In the past I've done a couple of 365-day challenges, but that's clearly too much. By about day 100 I'm out of ideas... So: 100 it is. This'll be my third or fourth one, assuming I actually get going.)

Today, given the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity (I am trying to write those words calmly, without sarcasm or invective) and Sunday's French election results, I thought: hm, maybe I should start learning something about the rise of fascism. Since it seems to be ever more upon us.

And so, here is a list of books that I might make into a project—though the subject matter is so depressing, I expect just the relatively short 1995 essay by Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism," will suffice. But in case I feel like suffering more, here are some suggestions I've gleaned from the internet, starting with a few written at the time of and shortly after WWII:

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941)
Friedrich Reck, Diary of a Man in Despair (1947) (the author died in Dachau in 1945)
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

More recent treatments:

Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996)
Michael Mann, Fascists (2004)
Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2007)
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)—which I reported on here
Daniel Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2019) and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (2023)
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2020) 

And for a couple of more specifically about what's going on here, now:

Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (2023)—and here, by the way, is Heather speaking today about this and other recent Supreme Court decisions, which she calls "very bad": bad decisions, and very bad for our democracy, constituting, essentially, a legal coup
Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight against Fascism (2023)

There is, of course, fiction:

Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here (1935)
George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949)
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and its sequel, The Testaments (2019)
P. D. James, The Children of Men (1992)
Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir (1993) (and here's a New Yorker piece about Kerr)
Philip Roth, The Plot against America (2004)
Robert Harris, Fatherland (2006)

And finally, here's a book I might just order right now: Arundhati Roy's Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. from 2020. A collection of essays.

I'll try to be a bit more upbeat tomorrow. In parting, here are some African wild dog puppies. And if that wasn't enough for you, here's some more: