A lazy day. I'm not going out for my afternoon ramble. It's just not very nice out: about 6C and windy, with solid cloud cover. We're used to better. The good new is, it's going back up to 12 tomorrow, with some sun.
I did get out for a run in the morning. We're still on the middle years of the Civil War in my audio book about Frederick Douglass. The focus is on race relations in the aftermath of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. It turns out the powers that be have lied to black enlistees. They do not get equal pay with white soldiers, and this rightly pisses them off. Some won't take any pay if it's not equal.
Douglass initially continues trying to convince blacks to enlist, but eventually ceases his recruitment work, citing the inequities. In the meantime, racist mobs in northern states are attacking blacks, especially abolitionists, and threatening lynchings. As Douglass says, it's as if the enemy were behind the lines.
The Massachusetts 54th deploys to South Carolina, where the Union army is besieging Charleston. In their first real action, they are assigned to lead the attack on an almost impregnable fortress. They actually break through and take one part of it, but white troops don't support them and they're driven back with terrible loss of life. Louis Douglass survives. The regiment's white commander perishes.
Douglass goes to Washington to plead the case of black soldiers. He seems to be received well. He even gets a meeting with Lincoln and comes away impressed, if not satisfied. Lincoln basically says he can't authorize equal pay because it wouldn't play well with conservative elements he needs to keep onside.
Douglass is asked by government officials to travel to the south to recruit free and fugitive blacks, is given a letter of free passage and offered a commission in the army - something no other black man has been given. He goes home to Rochester and, in anticipation of the work he's taken on, closes down his newspaper after sixteen years. Then the commission doesn't materialize and Douglass refuses to serve without it.
It beggars imagination. Nothing changes. Recent data on pay inequities by race in the U.S. shows black men still make on average 1.3 cents less on the dollar than comparably qualified white men in the same job. In 1863, black privates were paid $10 a month, whites $13.
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I continued working on my winter 2012 photos, including these two stitched-together panoramas of a couple of the best wall murals we saw in all our years in Valencia. They were on hoardings around a vacant building lot at a corner in Carmen, the nightclub district. (Note: as always you can click on the pictures to enlarge them.)
The next two were taken in Ruzafa, the neighbourhood where we were living. It was a parade that was part of a February multicultural festival. Ruzafa has - or had - a large number of immigrants, many from Latin America. They clearly were channeling the Mardi Gras tradition.
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I'm having an Irish moment in my "cultural" life. Karen and I are watching two Irish series on TV. One is the much praised Bloodlands, about politically motivated murder in Belfast. The other, which I think is even better, though less topical, is Blood, about a dysfunctional extended family in the west of Ireland. It stars Adrian Dunbar, who also plays the compromised head of the special investigations unit in the long-running Line of Duty .
And then I'm reading the debut novel by the latest hot young thing of the Irish literary scene, Naoise Dolan's Exciting Times. She has inevitably been compared to the other twenty-something rising star of Irish literature, Sally Rooney (Normal People, Conversations With Friends - both of which I've also read.)
The two even look a little alike to my eye. Dolan is 29, Rooney 30. And while I'm sure both authors would protest the suggestion that their writing is similar, I think it in fact is, very. Both write in lucid, analytical prose about the relationships of twenty-somethings.
Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan
Exciting Times is a first-person narration of an affair conducted by a 22-year-old Dubliner of working-class background who goes to Hong Kong to teach English and takes up with a slightly older, upper-middle class English banker. Dolan tends to be a little more drily humorous than Rooney, perhaps. Rooney's writing arguably has a little more emotional depth.
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