LookingLand http://www.lookingland.com/index.php par grâce! quelle charité! en-us Nucleus CMS v3.32 � Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.lookingland.com/index.php/nucleus/nucleus2.gif LookingLand http://www.lookingland.com/index.php readin' and writin' (with reinstated gs) http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=39 here. i haven't started writing reviews yet (don't know if i will), but you can see the start of some junk in my collection. enjoy! (er...or not).

the novel-in-progress (the name of which is still Figfield at the moment, though i have idly considered changing to Fair Babylon for a while ~ thoughts?) is suffering from some overwriting at the moment. i think i am losing hold of the voice a little, which is new. more than anything else this is probably due to me worrying about twentieth century syntax not playing well with 19th century cadences. i write the sentence as i hear it in my head and then start agonizing whether an editor will want to throttle it for being a backwards construction. i did make a executive decision to keep all the ands and ings in place. if someone were to read this with the proper accent they would naturally drop the ds and gs, so why write them in dialect? it's the mid-atlantic peculiarities that need phonetic spelling, not the generic southernisms.

onward, i guess. when the draft is done i can go back and lay waste to some of the rambly-er parts of it. which is why i want to be careful that there's really enough story to make it an actual novel (as opposed to a really long short story without a proper ending ~ like more of the rest of my work).

for your amusement, i thought i would share with you this calamity of art i did a couple of years ago when i was still trying to decide how to handle Reconstruction. it's notable for the color (it's always autumn in my head unless there's no leaves on the trees and then it's winter). it's also the only picture of the titular Figdield itself that i have ever drawn. i am pretty sure i modeled it after an actual alabama farmhouse (abandoned if i recollect), but i would have to search for it to verify this.

gotta love the quote from the Odyssey. hey, it was an experiment, okay? be gentle!


i've made a lot of really surprisingly radical changes in the story lately. this is either a good thing or prelude to disaster. so much of it messes with what's been "canon" to me for so long that it's going to take a while getting used to. added characters, changed people's names (ack!), and i'm revamping the whole horse-selling that's supposed to be the inciting incident (which is a huge change). but i have always been a weak plotter and i am trying to up the ante wherever i can. if i can make the horse 8,000 times more significant, the impact will payoff later.]]> reconstruction http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=39 Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:06:20 -0500 Eisenschiml and Stanton ~ http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=38 Why was Lincoln Murdered? i didn't want a paperback reprint and i didn't want to pay $20-30 for it, so i found a copy on eBay for $4 which was great. of course, it's what $4 will get you in an Eisenschiml these days. it's about as good as my copy of Weichmann's drivel, which is to say it's a readable piece of junk that's still all in one piece but wouldn't win any beauty prizes. that's about what i need. Eisenchiml is, sadly, almost relegated to the same fire-pile as Gutteridge these days, but given that it is the grandfather of all conspiracy theories, i think it's worth reading. i have a soft spot, too, for it, because i am pretty sure it's one of the first Lincoln conspiracy books i ever read (hopelessly warping my perceptions for many years, alas). as Burkhimer says in 100 Essential Lincoln Books says: Eisenschiml "is both influential and incredibly bad at the same time." what's not to love?

unfortunately, it's not in the public domain, so i can't just cannibalize it like a lot of other sources i am using. but i am considering creating a hysterical conspiracy theorist-historian character to wreck havoc in the meta-theatrical layer of the world i am trying to create (based on Eisenschiml and maybe one or two other serious fruit loops). he can hang out and play poker with Washington in Carrera.



"The past is so often unknowable
not because it is befogged now
but because it was befogged then, too,
back when it was still the present.
If we had been there listening,
we still might not have been able
to determine exactly what Stanton said.
All we know for sure is that
everyone was weeping,
and the room was full."

meanwhile, here's a great article about Czar NastyOwlFace's epitaph at Lincoln's deathbed from the New Yorker Angels and Ages: Lincoln’s language and its legacy by Adam Gopnik. this is for those of you obsessed with the sort of minutiae that makes history so bizarrely compelling.]]> in pursuance of said conspiracy http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=38 Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:22:27 -0500 opening testimony, along with a can of worms ~ http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=37
i dunno what on earth i was thinking. the script for these two days alone is 120 pages. granted, i intend to cut a lot and try to tighten as much as i can, but Weichmann's endless blithering is 80 pages just by itself and much of it is very necessary unfortunately. blerg. Doster's first cross-examination of Weichmann is great [i paraphrase]: Do you know anything about this? No. Do you know anything about that? No. Do you know anything? No. and yet somehow Weichmann manages to implicate everybody without actually knowing anything. and then the mustache exchange, which is one of my favorites:

REVERDY: When he came home, as I understood you, he seemed to be feeling for something; said he had lost something. Did he not ask for the mustache?

WEICHMANN: Yes, sir: he said, "Where is my mustache?"

REVERDY: Why did you not give it to him? It was not yours. Did you suspect him at that time of intending any thing wrong?

WEICHMANN: I thought it rather queer that a Baptist preacher should use a mustache; and I did not care about having false mustaches lying around on my table.

REVERDY: What did you intend to do with it?

WEICHMANN: I did not intend to do any thing with it. I took it, and exhibited it to some of the clerks in the office the day afterwards, and was fooling with it. I put on a pair of spectacles and the mustache, and was making fun of it.

REVERDY: Your only reason for not giving it to him, when he said it was his, was, that you thought it was singular that a Baptist preacher should be fooling with a mustache?

WEICHMANN: Yes, Sir; and I did not want a false mustache about my room.

REVERDY: It would not have been about your room if you had given it to him, would it?
also on the good side, i am coming up with tactics for handling the long court scenes. Aiken, Clampitt, and Ewing are developing into quite the interesting little peanut gallery, and the more i work with Reverdy Johnson, the more i love the snit fit he throws when Harris tries to get him thrown off the counsel. while this trial is nowhere near the three-ring-circus that J. Surratt's will be in a few years, it definitely has its moments.

i'm also having fun with Hartranft (this side story is its own little saving grace). i love all the little obnoxious directional nuances going on in the background of the major drama. i may have to do a little fact-bending just to keep things from being too scattershot, but i feel very ambivalent about mucking too much with the historical side of things. it's one thing to pare down the testimony or to throw in asides from the counsel for the sake of exposition, but it feels altogether different to move time and space in a way things didn't occur. i'm working out a tenuous balance.

overall, i would say this has been a lot more work than i anticipated. i really expected to just trim from the transcript and baste in some exposition around it, but it's proving far more complicated. and i want to be fair (as fair as my biases will allow). i don't for a moment pretend that i don't feel about this trial exactly as Doster did (which is why it's through his eyes I want to tell this). every one of the prisoners on the dock is guilty of something. it's the degree to which they ought to have been punished that's arguable.

and though historians and lawyers have weighed in on the issue of jurisdiction, the question has never been settled, really. if it was, we wouldn't still be arguing about it today. so i am not interested in painting the conspirators as victims, but i do want to show that the military commission and the prosecuting judges (and by extension CzarNastyOwlFace) were all rotten to the core. the trial was a farce. anyone who says it wasn't is really kidding themselves.

today's picture is another mugshot. this is George Azerodt's cousin, Hartman Richter, who was arrested with him after the assassination. Richter spent a good spell in the Arsenal prison and Hartranft seems to have shuttled him around quite a bit and wrote numerous letters to Hancock saying: this guy's not on trial, can we take off his constraints? etc.


scores of people like Richter, Celestino (a "known" spy), Willie Jett, most everybody who worked at Ford's Theatre, for example, and all of Booth's brothers (they would have arrested his sister Asia as well, but she was too pregnant, so they put her under house arrest) were "apprehended" shortly after the assassination and held without charges (just on suspicion) for far too long for it to be Constitutionally legal. but the government gets to make up new rules in such cases, apparently.

sound familiar?

: o p]]> in pursuance of said conspiracy http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=37 Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:54:02 -0500 the desk of death (and sundays with dead people) ~ http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=36
i had to reconfigure the desk. the books were walling me in. they're very clingy, needy things sometimes. they make it hard to concentrate. so i turned my tv into a dictionary stand (you've probably not seen my 1893 Funk & Wagnall's dictionary ~ it's kind of immense), and moved all the books over to the table it used to occupy. this had made the dictionary crabby, but i will find it a place of honor elsewhere (just not right now).


anyway, this has alleviated the crush and made the source material easier to get a hold of (that teetering pile was just ridiculous after a week). i also put Hartranft's Letterbook into a binder (dunno what took me so long!). of course this meant punching it full of holes (that's okay, it's a lousy copy), but worse, i wound up whiling away an hour trying to read Hancock's letters. i'm getting better at it. it only takes me a few minutes to remember how to follow the stroke of the pen. bad as his handwriting is, it's consistently the same kind of bad throughout, so once you know how he writes "to the" as a one-word one blobby mess with no crossed t's, you can pretty much identify it across the board.

so yeah, that's been my morning. and just to share, i have this photo, which sold on eBay last year and which i never even bothered bidding for (as i knew it would sell for way more than i could ever hope to afford). from looking at his pictures (pretty much all of them), it's easy to see why people were scared of this guy. if all accounts didn't say what a marshmallowy underside he had, i prolly wouldn't believe it.



Hartranft in uniform seems a pretty
rare commodity. this one and another from the
same photographer of him sitting,
sold for $550 each.
]]> in pursuance of said conspiracy http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=36 Sun, 30 Mar 2008 11:47:00 -0500 set no. 2 ~ http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=35 unhappy if this is the finished set. i made modifications from the picture from which this was derived. i wanted to make sure the cannons were visible and then i got lazy and didn't want to draw a bunch of them ~ one seems sufficient.


when i first conceived to write this story, the idea was that it was to take place entirely at the Arsenal: mostly in the court room and under this tree. i don't think we'll get as much use out of the tree in this latest incarnation, but i do have at least a couple of scenes in mind that will take place here (most are made up, but at least one is historically documented). and to maximize its usefulness, i can always shuffle people around.

since most of the action is still taking place in the courtroom, i need to start working on that. while i can get away with one static angle for most of the periphery scenes, there are too many people and there is too much going on in the courtroom, so i need a variety of angles. also, we spend so much time there listening to so much blah blah blah, it would help to shift viewpoints every other scene or so. ]]> in pursuance of said conspiracy http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=35 Sat, 29 Mar 2008 08:57:00 -0500 remember that beautifully organized desk i had? http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=34

i tend to work best while standing, so it's fine if i throw stuff all over the chair, but the fact that i barely have any space to actually work in is making me feel buggy. i need a rolling trolley thingie to put my books in so that they will be right on hand, but not consuming the lion's share of my work area. then i could just pull 'em up when i need 'em and shove them off when i don't.


and all of this just to say: really, i am working. inking the Morse house on grace street may kill me, but i'm going to finish it (and a number of other goals) this weekend.



]]> inspiration http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=34 Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:46:32 -0500 a night at the theatre ~ http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=33
a whoooooole lot of hours later, i have this to show for it, which was totally unexpected. it took me a lot more time and effort than i thought it would, but it also came out not too shabby at all. i freely robbed from Harper's Weekly (intentionally ~ it will be duly cited), but taking care to correct some of the fudged details from the original etching (like the flags and the curtains, the George Washington picture, and the arrangement of the columns. i decided not to put a theatrical set on the stage. the blank space will be easier to work with.

anyway, this is an extreme reduction, so you won't be able to see much detail, but you're not missing much either ~ it's a pretty simple line drawing.



all-in-all it's a little tidier than i had meant for it to be, but i'm calling it a "keeper". there are a couple of more details i might add, but that's one set down and about thirty more to go (many of which are a lot less complicated than this one).



Brady's actual photo from 1865 ~
this is one of two that shows the onstage set
and a difference arrangement of the flags.
i will probably add the open lower boxes to my own.

this just may be do-able after all!

: D]]> in pursuance of said conspiracy http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=33 Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:23:00 -0500 more about George Loring Porter ~ http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=32 The Surgeon in Charge.

The good news is, this is a weird little aggregation of George Loring Porter's leftover diary, letters and notes regarding the conspiracy trial (and he seemed to have saved most everything that got put into his hands).

a bonanza, right?

well no. unfortunately, Porter was a by-the-book fella who took very seriously his oath to convey no information about the proceeding whatsoever ~ not even privately to himself. so the diary ends with him saying he's been called to duty with General Hartranft, and then is dead silent until the 4th of July when he recalls the grand procession in Washington ~ complete with a hilarious reference to Sherman and Stanton: "they had a spat". i doubt anyone on my flist would know this, but Sherman was so furious at Stanton (and visa versa) that they very publicly snubbed one another on the grandstand. even today there is debate about who did the snubbing first, Stanton later claiming it was he who snubbed Sherman, not the other way around. unfortunately Porter doesn't shed light on this very pressing historical issue.

silly generals and politicians. does it amuse me that my two least favorite people in 1865 were such brats? oh yes, yes it does.

anyway ~ the book answers one really important question regarding the whereabouts of the surgeon's reports. there simply were none. Porter reported verbally to Hartranft and, if there was some pressing issue that couldn't be resolved between them medically, Hartranft reported to Hancock, who reported to Stanton, who sat on his throne and made all the decisions. so we'll never know the particulars of who was ailing and what with. and if Porter wrote no reports, then it is highly doubtful that Dr. Gray (the insanity expert who reported directly to Stanton) ever wrote any either.

unfortunately the book raised more questions than provides answers. Porter seems a stiff fella who wrote a lot of letters correcting other people's assumptions about the conspiracy trial later ~ he even kept correspondence with Weichmann (good heavens, is it just me or does that seem totally inappropriate?). he claimed to have been present during Booth's interment, but Kauffman doubts that he was (his details of the event don't jive with anybody else's, but then you have such a pack of liars and braggarts in this area it's hard to know who really did what).

the biggest puzzlement is in regard to the blasted stupid hoods the prisoners were required to wear. Stanton initially ordered the hoods, in his own word: to prevent self-destruction. this leads me to think they must have been padded. Sam Arnold says they started out with canvas hoods and then got switched to the padded (Sam Arnold's memory, unfortunately, is a bit unreliable as well, though). the Porter book contradicts itself in saying that the padding was installed to prevent chaffing from the canvas, and/or it was done to keep them from communicating. it's generally believed that the hoods were exchanged at some point, but some sources say the padding was exchanged for the canvas because of the heat and some say the canvas was switched to the padding. it's worth noting that General Hartranft, in his letter to Stanton, asks to remove all the hood "except 195 [Powell], as he does not seem to suffer as the rest". (though betty insists that the hood made Powell so traumatized he couldn't think straight).

anyway, Porter doesn't shed any light whatsoever on any of this. he wrote only one report to Hartranft on the condition and suitability of the prison itself, with recommendations for taking out a few window panes to let in a breeze and prerogatives to air out the bedding and keep the prisoners in clean underclothes (an ongoing concern).



Porter lived at the Arsenal in a little house
with his pregnant wife, baby girl, and the girl's mammy.
i'm not 100% sure, but based on the tree line in this picture
and the cannons in the background, i think this was
taken on the Arsenal lawn, which is excellent because
i need a bench under a tree in my story
and i have decided that this is it. yay!

other minor points: Porter was a regular career army surgeon (once captured by rebels earlier in the war) who received two brevet promotions in the summer of 1865 for his service during this time. there's no evidence that he ever personally quarreled with Stanton (though who didn't, given the chance). he liked General Hartranft (who didn't?), and sent him a gift from florida when he and Dodd escorted Mudd, O'Laughlin, Spangler, and Arnold to dry tortugas.

he was 27 years old at the time.



Porter's "ticket" to the execution, signed by General Hancock
(i just love that guy's writing!). even with my very rudimentary
paleography skills, i am pretty confident the handwriting
on the back is General Hartranft's.
]]> in pursuance of said conspiracy http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=32 Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:05:13 -0500 the devil is in the research ~ http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=31
70+ sources being shuffled around on my desk later, i am positively overwhelmed by the enormity of it. and so i recall the halcyon days of claiming: oh no, i'm not going to write an entire history of the assassination. i'm just writing about a narrow slice of it: Doster's defense of Powell from Powell's arrest to his execution. i'm using three main sources and that's it (i can't even name the three now ~ i think they were the Pittman transcript, Doster's Memoir, and Gath's account of the execution...or maybe Gambone's biography of Hartranft? see, i can't remember).

well and good (as Judge Bingham would say). but you can't really enter into this realm without getting your feet wet with every other little detail of the events: the seven other prisoners on the dock, the operations of the prison itself, the vindictive cabinet who ordered the military trial, their attempts to condemn the Confederate government in absentia, and consequently the secret service's involvement in the murder. and then there's just all this other stuff that's so dern interesting, i feel like i sort of have to include it.

and then there's this sprawling cast of characters. today i found a new picture of George Loring Porter, who was assigned as medical officer at the penitentiary. as one of the only people who had unrestricted access to the prisoners, you gotta wonder what all he knew. his wife wrote a memoir, which i won't get until monday (and i doubt it says much), but i'm all for the smallest little details.


there is an insinuation that his incessant nagging of Stanton to treat the prisoners better and Stanton's pigheadedness in response may have resulted in his quitting the army (despite Hartranft's commendations, etc.). i need to do more investigating.

anyway, i'm going back to work now. i really do want to have a solid outline completed before the end of the weekend and it's not going to write itself.]]> in pursuance of said conspiracy http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=31 Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:21:22 -0500 LJ is going to the devil ~ http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=1
: D]]> announcements http://www.lookingland.com/index.phpindex.php?itemid=1 Sat, 15 Mar 2008 08:45:00 -0500