Back in 2006 when I first met Sudarghara and Ajmail Dusanj at the Robert Cain brewery in Liverpool they expressed admiration for the Samuel Adams brewery in Boston, Mass., in particular for the way that small operation had managed to become internationally recognised. Then in March this year, after a tumultuous twelve months, they announced they were making a bid to become an exporter. And now comes the news that Cains is attending the National Beer Wholesalers’ Association convention in Las Vegas, with the aim of exporting Cains Export Lager to the United States. I hope they also take along a few copies of my book.
Category Archives: America
Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?
Tom Waits. A great song. Photography by Walker Evans, among others. Perfect.
via.
White Whales and Wooden Ships
There is a great story over at Wired about the whaling ship Essex, which in 1820 was rammed and sunk by a Sperm Whale somewhere in the Pacific. This is the story that partly inspired Melville to write Moby Dick a book everyone should read at least once. Melville of course was a seaman on several whale ships and stories like this would have circulated among his fellow crewmembers. One of the best things about Moby Dick is the way Melville blends the mechanics and science of whaling and whales with their mythic power. The real story of the Essex is fantastical in itself, but Melville’s novel turns the whale into a force beyond nature. From the article:
The ship’s three remaining whaleboats — one had been destroyed by a whale’s flukes during an earlier hunt — were dispatched for the kill. As the harpooning began, First Mate Owen Chase, commanding one of the whaleboats, looked back and saw a large sperm whale, which he estimated at 85 feet, approaching the Essex.
As he watched helplessly, the whale propelled itself into the ship with great force. Some crewmen on board were knocked off their feet by the collision, and Chase watched in disbelief as the whale drew back and rammed the ship again. This time the Essex was holed below the waterline, and doomed.
The crew organized what provisions they could and two days later abandoned ship aboard the three whaleboats. Twenty men left the Essex. Eight would ultimately survive the harrowing ordeal that played out over the next three months.
Here’s the link to the story, which comes with an excellent slideshow entitled ‘The Creatures That Ate Hollywood’.
Here’s my take on Melville’s novel.
Reader Magazine 32: Milton and Hammett
I received in the post this morning a copy of issue 32 of The Reader magazine. It’s always been good, but The Reader is going through a really great period at the moment. Not only is it attracting some big names–Andrew Motion, Adam Phillips, Marilynne Robinson and Ian McMillan in this issue for instance–but has work by lesser-known writers as well as reviews and recommendations. Its poetry selections are especially good.
The range of the magazine these days is also impressively wide. Angie Macmillan, one of the magazine’s founders, included a note with my copy saying “I love working on a mag that can accommodate Milton and Dashiell Hammett.” Amen to that. The Hammett, incidentally, comes in the form of an article by me on the Flitcraft Parable, and a piece by Fred Zackel on the writing of The Maltese Falcon; it’s been a pleasure working with Fred on this. I’ll be posting my Hammett article here soon. My Hammett article is right here.
Reaching Beyond Expectations
Several years ago now I wrote an article about American architect Jeh Vincent Johnson for a reference publication called Contemporary Black Biography. With so much being written about Barak Obama’s achievement in becoming President only forty or so years since segregation I’ve been thinking about this remarkable and generous man, who was kind enough to grant me an interview to support the piece. The United States has come a long way in terms of its racial politics but it has been as much to do with high-achieving black educators, architects, lawyers and other professionals as it has the revolutionaries and speech makers. It is worth remembering that the drive for equal rights in the United States goes back much further than the well-known events of the 1960s and that the door to high achievement has been grinding open for a century or more. It has been a long road indeed.
Jeh Vincent Johnson was born in 1931 and was educated at Columbia College and then, after winning a scholarship, at Columbia University. His father was Charles Spurgeon Johnson, a sociologist, born in 1893, who developed the Social Science Institute of Fisk University into a major centre for the study of race relations. Charles S. Johnson served with the League of Nations (which became the UN) and was the first black President of Fisk; he was inaugurated as such in 1947. His son, Jeh Vincent Johnson had a similarly meteoric rise. Having set up in private practice in 1959 to specialise in designing social housing, he was a member, in the late 1960s, of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Commission on Urban Problems, known as The Douglas Commission.
Jeh Johnson’s time as a part of the Douglas Commission put him at the centre of America’s efforts to tackle poverty and discrimination. He told me that government agencies were strongly distrusted by people living in the tough neighbourhoods they visited and that members of the Commission were sometimes attacked or threatened, though they rarely accepted the offer of a police escort. As I wrote in my piece: “Johnson noted [that] the work of the commission was received without fanfare, but most of its recommendations for ways of rationalizing taxation, construction processes, and alleviating segregation have since been adopted.”
Johnson spent many years teaching at Vassar College, where he was a dedicated advocate of equality in architecture, encouraging women and minority students to enter the profession. He was later a founder of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) and while few people outside of American architectural circles will have heard of him his influence on architecture as a profession, and on urban design in particular, is significant.
The third generation of the family is represented by Jeh Charles Johnson, son of Jeh Vincent Johnson, born in 1957. He served in the Clinton administration as General Counsel of the Department of the Air Force and was a foreign policy adviser and fundraiser for Barak Obama’s campaign. He will no doubt have influence in the new administration. News reports around the Obama campaign focused naturally on the more visible aspects of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but the revolution has also taken place in quieter ways, in the hard work and achievement of several generations of families like this one, and in the encouragement and assistance they received to, as Jeh V. Johnson himself put it, “reach beyond their expectations.”
Here’s the link to my piece on Jeh Vincent Johnson again.
