Return to Cold Mountain
From Mark G.:
It's amazing what you can find on the web.
Now and again I'll run a web search of my name, just to see what's out
there. The most prominent hits are usually to my own web sites,
followed by a long string of sites selling one or more of my books.
That's to be expected. But once in a while I find stuff I never knew
was there.
Case in point: it turns out that my appearance on NPR's Talk of the
Nation over seven years ago is still accessible. (I didn't know it was
accessible in the first place.) You can listen online. You can also
order a transcript for $4.95, though I must be the first person in
history to do that. Incredible.
a call from the producer of Talk of the Nation. Their next "Book Club
of the Air" segment would feature Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier's
amazing debut novel, which had just won the National Book Award. They
wanted a Civil War historian to come on the show, comment on the book,
and help lead the discussion.
Why me? Because someone like James McPherson had recommended me?
Because I'd won the Lincoln Prize? Nope. I was simply the first Civil
War historian she happened to reach who had a pleasant phone voice.
As it happened, on the day of the show I was visiting friends in
northern Virginia. So we didn't need the producer's original idea of
having me do my part from the local NPR radio affilate. I was already
near the main studio in Washington, so I just took the metro into town
and did the show right there.
Ray Suarez was the host back then. He had a relaxed, friendly style
that put me instantly at ease. A few quick lessons about the routine
we'd follow and the show got rolling. Ray introduced the book, played
a tape of Charles Frazier reading an excerpt, then introduced me. I,
in turn, gave a quick five-minute precis of the novel:
SUAREZ: Why don't you get it started. An important piece of
fiction?
GRIMSLEY: I think so. I think it's a remarkable debut novel. It's
both a critical and market success. Frazier, I guess, waited 46
years to become an overnight success. That's now old he is. Like
me, Frazier is a native of North Carolina and the novel is set in
North Carolina in the late summer and autumn of 1864.
I'm a Civil War historian, so let me kind of tell you what's going
on elsewhere while the action of the novel takes place.
Robert E. Lee's army is pinned by Grant in the Richmond- Petersburg
trenches. In September of 1864, Atlanta is going to fall. Lincoln
will be reelected in November of 1864, and that same month, William
T. Sherman will begin his desolating march across Georgia, the
march to the sea.
Almost none of this action though intrudes into the novel which is
essentially the story of two people -- Inman a confederate
deserter, and Ada, a lonely young woman who has recently lost her
sole surviving parent, her father.
They're not quite lovers. They were on the verge of becoming lovers
perhaps when the war broke out. But they have not seen each in four
long years.
The theme of the novel is redemption and growth. Inman is
journeying to Cold Mountain to save what remains of his soul.
That's the redemption theme. And Ada is learning to transcend her
privileged but limited past -- that's the growth theme.
There is a remarkable array of other characters, especially Ruby
and Stobrod and Teague that you can talk about, and a number of
wonderful issues -- desertion, the grueling "inside war," guerrilla
war, atrocity, the spiritual costs of war, psychological injury.
And looming symbolically above it all, the timelessness of the
mountains, especially Cold Mountain, the home of Ada and the goal
of Inman.
You can hear the full program here. It was actually a very good
exchange. The callers were perceptive and midway through we were
joined by Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who works with combat
veterans. Shay had recently published Achilles in Vietnam: Combat
Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1995).
As the title implies, he thought the Iliad offered a good lens through
which to view the conditions that might generate PTSD in a soldier. He
was then at work on a second book, this one dealing with recovery from
PTSD, which used The Odyssey for insights into the journey of healing.
Shay thought Inman, the war-weary Confederate soldier who is the
novel's main character, displayed some of the features of PTSD. His
literal journey in the novel--Cold Mountain has loose but unmistakable
parallels with The Odyssey--resembled aspects the metaphorical journey
of healing as Shay depicted it.
posted by Mark G. | 4:38 AM | 1 comments
Rally 'Round the Blog
From Mark G.:
Welcome to Civil Warriors.
I've been blogging for over a year now--first on a "homemade" blog
site and, since early December, on a conventional blog site called War
Historian.
surprisingly, a good way to spur my productivity. I've found that blog
entries can be a useful way to "write out loud," and to knock out what
can wind up being a pretty good rough draft of an article planned for
conventional publication. To see what I mean, check out the archived
blog entries under "Counterfactuals and Contingency." I wrote them
over eleven days. By the time I'd finished the series I had 7,000
words. Within hours I had revised this into an article for North and
South magazine:
"Second-Guessing Bobby Lee: A Counterfactual Assessment of Lee's
Generalship During the Overland Campaign."
Fine, the academics among you may sniff, but what did that do for your
career? Well, not much directly, but the $600 commission bought me a
lot of books. And blogging made the job almost effortless.
Even so, the real value of blogging lies elsewhere. While
comparatively few people discovered my blog during the first year,
those who did included military historians who found it
thought-provoking and prospective students whom it influenced to
consider graduate study at OSU.
If that sounds unlikely, consider what's happened since the "change of
base" to a Blogger-powered site made War Historian easier to find. Not
only have hits increased, the ideas in War Historian are starting to
find the right audience. Moreover, it's a surprisingly generous
audience.
From an entry in today's Cliopatria, a group blog on History News
Network:
But I want to return to my earlier point about blogging and the
virtual community of history blogging. There's a fascinating point
at which Cliopatria's and, then, Big Tent's, chez Nadezhda's and
Early Modern Notes's discovery of Mark Grimsley's War Historian
becomes known to all four of us. At Big Tent, Tom Bruscino's prior
interest in military history means that he knows something about
what Grimsley is about, but Cliopatria's and chez Nadezhda's
finding his blog and Early Modern Notes's featuring it in the
History Carnival causes Grimsley's readership to spike and for good
reason.
What kind of military historian features pictures of Robert E. Lee
and Che Guevara on his blog's masthead; and what kind of military
historian talks about a "post-colonial military history"? This is
intriguing stuff! Even to those of us not ordinarily moved by guns
and battles. Here's a military historian asking big, interesting
questions of his special field; and answering them in ways that
would interest all of us. Here's the kind of military historian who
even the University of Michigan might want to lure. And he freely
and generously shares of himself at War Historian. I'm making
copies of his "`Thieves, Murderers, and Trespassers': The Mythology
of Sherman's March" and passing them out to all my neighbors here
in Atlanta. Maybe I'll get to know them better. As Ben Wolfson said
at The Weblog on Friday, "I confess that life is awesome."
From an entry in today's Irregular Analyses, a group blog kept by A
Few Adequate Men:
Heh, we've got a small heads up from Professor Mark Grimsley's "War
Historian" blog, which has featured in the links section since this
site started.
I've tried to encourage various people in the War Studies
department to visit War Historian for a while now and I'd like to
take this opportunity to do so again, if anyone from the department
is reading. Anyone who knows my opinions on various issues and the
way that I look at the world will know that the approach taken by
the professor on many (non-military history) issues is not my own,
but even when I don't agree with him his work - especially on the
state of military history today - is excellent, self critical and
thought provoking. Also, he's the guy who wrote the chapter on the
American Civil War in The Dynamics of Military Revolution. 'Nuff
said. It's borderline criminal that somebody who helps run arguably
the best military history postgrad programme in the world gets so
few visits to his site. Git chore arse over there.
For other recent examples, see Flogging the Blog on War Historian.
I'm perhaps belaboring this point because unlike my other blog, which
is a solo enterprise, I hope to have company on this one.
A few weeks ago I began meeting with a small readings group of
graduate students in my history department. We began with four of us:
myself, two of my advisees on the early US history side of the house,
and a student in women's history. With the addition of two grad
students in military history, we're up to six. I'm in no hurry to grow
the group. Often it's best to start small, establish the tone you
want, and add membership slowly. But I believe in doing things well,
and experience has convinced me that the web in general, and blogging
in particular, can be intellectual "force multipliers" if used
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