Battle Days

These days of late August are Battle Days.  One hundred fifty years ago Union and Confederate armies were settling in for a major multi-day battle in northern Virginia.  It was the bloody culmination of a campaign that had begun with the appointment of John Pope, on June 26th, 1862, as general of the newly constituted Army of Virginia, tasked by President Lincoln with moving south to take Richmond, something his cautious commander of the Army of the Potomac, George McClellan, had been unable to accomplish over the past months from the Peninsula.  By late July McClellan had been beaten back from the gates of Richmond and Pope's army lay between Culpepper and the Rapidan River to the south.  Robert E. Lee, the relatively new commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, as it came to be called, freed from the threat of McClellan, decided to move north against Pope in order to push Union troops out of northern Virginia and open a way for a campaign into Maryland.

Out of this would come the Second Battle of Manassas, or the Battle of Second Bull Run, which began late on the 28th of August, and ended on the 30th with the utter defeat of John Pope.  It was a campaign of brilliant strategy & maneuver executed by Lee's subordinate, Stonewall Jackson, before the final crushing battle on the old ground of Bull Run, the first battlefield of the Civil War.

In a previous post on this blog I mentioned poring over the panoramic battle maps in The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War back in my youth.  These days I've been reading selected battle histories and other books about the Civil War in sync with the 150th anniversary of that conflagration.  This year its the 1862 battles and I read a history of Shiloh in the spring.  These past couple of weeks I've been working through John J. Hennessy's superb account of Second Manassas, Return to Bull Run. But it's been difficult reading, especially as the campaign gave way to the actual battle.  The carnage in the fields and woods of northern Virginia on those days in late August was unbelievable, with some of most intense, close-up fighting of the war.  Soldiers wrote home describing what they had seen and experienced, such as one infantryman from the 7th Wisconsin who fought against the Confederates of the Stonewall Brigade:  "We advanced to within hailing distance of each other, then halted and laid down, and, my God, what a slaughter!  No one appeared to know the object of the fight, and there we stood one hour, the men falling all around; we got no orders to fall back, and Wisconsin men would rather die than fall back without orders."  ... Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin wrote:  "Our one nights experience . . . . eradicated our yearning for a fight.  In our future history we will always be found ready, but never again anxious."

I have been moved to grief over these accounts of Americans killing other Americans, and the cacophony of death seems to ring deep in my soul, like brutal .  It makes me want to visit the battlefield--and mourn.  I wonder if I can complete Hennessy's book--I've only got around one hundred pages left--but I know I will.  But more death is waiting.  Longstreet's division is moving for the final devastating charge against Pope's left flank.  Soon his army will be swept from the field, leaving only the dead and dying in the thousands covering the ground.  Quiet.  A brief respite.  Then, three weeks from now, armies will clash again near a stream in western Maryland on an even bloodier day.     

Rain

We've been waiting a long time for this here in northwestern Missouri:  rain.  It started early this morning and has continued for six hours, by my reckoning:  a steady, drenching rain.  I can almost see the grass in the back yard turning from a scorched tan to green, almost hear the roots sucking up the water.  There's much ground moisture to make up, but this is a good start.  Here's the view of our back deck a few minutes ago:

Two New Drawings

In the past several days I've framed two drawings done this past summer.  The first is one in graphite based on a Rembrandt painting of St. Paul.  I did it for practice and thought it came out better than expected:

The second is a pastel of what I imagine is a Parisian woman beckoning me back to Paris.  It started out as a copy of a drawing by Monet, but things went a little sideways with the face.  Still, I still like way it finished.  The eyes are a little big, but it all seems to fit together somehow:

New Art

I recently completed an oil pastel of a flower bed in the Jarden des Tuileries, which is just west of the Louvre in Paris, very near where the old Tuileries Palace once stood.  The pastel is based on a photograph I took there in May.  I framed it this afternoon and it now hangs in our entryway.  Here it is:

Understanding Fiction

These days--the last days of summer break--are work days, as I tune up syllabi, etc.  Today I was working on the reading list for my Understanding Fiction class, which is populated with short stories and two longer works:  The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy and The Metamorphosis by Kafka.  I use a fairly consistent list of stories for this course, which I teach every couple of years, but change out a few of them for variety.  It's a first-rate line-up, including Sandra Cisneros, Toni Bambara, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Tan, Ralph Ellison, Sherman Alexie, Flannery O'Connor, Tim O'Brien, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ha Jin, Margaret Atwood, Isabel Allende, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Bobby Ann Mason, William Faulkner, and Raymond Carver. I teach novels in other courses, but the short story always seems to work best in courses like this, mainly because it's a compact form that includes all of the basic elements of fiction and each story can usually be covered in one class period.  I also like the variety of voices in the stories over one semester, and I like the windows they open into the human condition.  Last time I taught this one of my students characterized the course as a kind of "psychology of literature" because we spent so much time talking about what motivated the characters, which is the central question in fiction I believe.  

The Dream of Paris

Before I went I had often imagined Paris, and read about it, of course, especially Hemingway.  I the past few years I had taken to painting it as well, always in watercolor.  I would find a photograph online and use it as the basis for art.  I was primed, then, for the reality of Paris I suppose, but nothing quite prepared me for the emergence into City of Light quite literally from underground.  My son Peter and I had taken the Metro from Gare du Nord south to Vavin, the station on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, and the closest one to our hotel around the corner on the Rue Delambre.  It was a rainy evening in May--is there any better way to first experience Paris?--and I came up the stairway into Montparnasse and found that the dream had taken sensual form around me, as if I had walked into one of my own watercolors:  There before me was boulevard with the lights of cars and the windows of the cafes Le Dome and La Rotonde reflected on the mirror of the wet street. Three months later the moment is still with me and I suspect it will always will be--a moveable feast, in Hemingway's celebrated phrase.

Though it's not taken at night, this photograph of Le Dome on Montparnasse in 1925 by Eugene Atget captures a certain "look" of Paris from that time that has always captured me.

I'll probably do some more blogging about the Paris trip, but the weekend is here and I begin teaching again on Tuesday.  Just a couple of days to complete start-up chores before the semester begins and I want to write some about that.  Guess I'll have to stop thinking about Paris--for a day or so anyway.

August Turn-around

Seems like months. . .

The summer is about over.  I've been back at Conception Abbey this week cleaning my office, preparing for another year of teaching.  Today I saw some of the new students arriving on campus, cars packed with clothes and other dorm-life necessities.  Next Tuesday, the 21st, I'll be back in the classroom for the new semester.  It's the August Turn-around, when I shift out of summer mode.

I read a lot this summer, but nothing focused.  I've got no new fall courses to prepare for--only re-runs that simply need some tweaking.  I finished books on Thomas Jefferson (American Sphinx), the Civil War (The Longest Night), Caravaggio (Graham-Dixon's bio), a history of the Finns in Minnesota, the physical structure of the Internet (Tubes), Bell Labs (The Idea Factory), string theory (The Elegant Universe), and the history of Paris (Seven Ages of Paris).  I also read a lot of spy novels, mostly by Daniel Silva, Alan Furst, and John Le Carre (The Karla Trilogy).  Diversity--the way I like it.

No writing, though.  I've still got that book percolating inside, but my only creative output this summer was in the form of paint, pastel, and graphite.

Oh, yes--I also went to Paris.