I just got back home. Thank you Linda, for posting about Albert. Albert was not sick, this happened suddenly. I spoke to him last Saturday, he was telling me about his new deck and the flowerbeds they were putting in. I told him I had stopped by his house but they were not there. I saw what Betty and him had done, his yard was beautiful. He offered to lend me his trailer so I could bring big plumeira plants home from Corpus for a couple of guys on the plumeira forum. but I did not have a hitch on my vehicle. He said he would offer to drive, but his daughter had taken his truck to Belton. He was always thinking of others. He told me he loved to read the fourm, but since he moved down to the coast, was so busy, he did not have time to post. We were talking about the Oct plant swap, he said they had so much fun last year when they came. Barbra

jwttrans, I think our two readings may be compatible--the ambiguously misread situation having to do with misread racial stereotypes, the captain's fixation on skin color blinding him to unrevealed dark designs. And with time the hidden darkness or "evil" is revealed--the desperate escaped slaves are truly murderous and do practically wipe out TWO ships--the one they are in at the beginning of the story and that captain's ship they attack near the end of the story. My only hesitation about our combined reading is that Benito Cereno, read by itself, would tend to solicit an allegorical reading associating innocence with whites and evil with blacks. However, that would be to overlook the blame Melville heaps on the "innocent" white captain whose self-willed "innocence" is not true "innocence," but rather a wilful refusal to see and acknowledge the evil lurking in the depths. He nearly makes himself an accessory to murder, as a result--equally culpable, in other words. That would not be white "innocence," but white culpability. And if anyone has read Melville's other sea fictions, they would know he often depicts the blackness/evil in all men's hearts. (I'm not sure if he includes women or not. Anyone remember any portraits of women in his works? Certainly, a half century later, Conrad writing on racial themes in Heart of Darkness exempted the lovely fiancee--the "intended" -- from the darkness in human hearts, for instance.) But you have a good point on ambiguity--probably works on anything Melville and Hawthorne wrote. That was the way they often set up their allegories as the reader moves from the literal to the figurative/spiritual. Just as Melville explores the ambiguity of whiteness in Moby Dick, so he does by depicting an "innocent" white captain whose innocence is just as ambiguous since he becomes the reason why they are all nearly murdered. That good and evil are NOT black and white, but quite ambiguous in nature, would seem to be Melville's point? Kate

My DD and S-in-L took a 'break' to NYC earlier in the year and brought me back a copy of 97 Orchard 'an edible history of 5 immigrant families in one New York Tenement' by Jane Ziegelman. The sort of book you can pop into and out of now and again. I'm only about halfway through but finding out much about the Jewish community in the Lower East Side and how their eating patterns were formed by a mixture of where they had come from in Europe and the American traditions they met once they had crossed the Atlantic. Of course what Ms Ziegelman knows about the actual inhabitants of this neighbourhood has been gleaned from census returns, rate books etc. These people didn't leave memoirs, write notes or recipes and as soon as the husbands got a better paying job they upped sticks and moved to a more prosperous area. So the families were always at the 'bottom of the honest heap' It appears that many of the Jewish community were eager to 'conform' to US working practices, some of them changed their Sabbath to a Sunday and started cooking shell fish and pig/pork, in its many forms. Much info on German/Polish/ Lithuanian bread making, but only a little about the Irish influence, possibly because it was not much different from what was being eaten in England and therefore by the earlier 'settlers' to the City. The only negative thing about the book is the very pale ink used and the close small print. It makes reading for long rather a chore!

I know this is now MAY but during April I had a very mixed month of reading. I raided S-in-Law's boxes of books (being stored by us while they moved from London to Manchester. Now they are in their new house while much of the furniture is 'locked down' with us) Unfortunately many of his books are of the Hunter S Thompson variety which don't appeal to me at all. I had higher hopes of the English books and tried Pat Barker's Union Street. A big mistake, set in a northern poverty stricken community where the men are idle abusive drunks. The women suffer rape and back-street abortions and take part in 'cat-fights' . . . all so dismal and unpleasant I gave up. Yet reviewers gave it 5 stars and claimed they 'enjoyed' the gritty realism! A more noble attempt was to read another classic novel. This time it was Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders. Way too much flowery writing and classical allusions, but the actual story when I was able to dig it out of all the verbiage was quite entertaining. The usual well bought up young woman, although 'promised' to an honest yeoman falls for the dodgy charms of the new doctor. A big mistake as he is having his wicked way with a village wench and the Lady of the Manor . . . I feel this would have made an interesting TV documentary on wood-workers of the nineteenth century as there was lots of details about the lives of the 'humble' artisans and their knowledge of tree-felling and everything to do with forestry and timber production. Or maybe a TV series on lusty swains and not-so-innocent village maidens . . .