• 46 – Life’s end

    [All good things come to an end, or at least to fundamental transformation.] [Monday, February 27, 2006] (11:50) Wonderful material, Joseph. You know how it moved me, and why. Yes, and you learned something about yourself, though actually I believe you came to know it a while ago. After the war Yes. So what happened…

  • Tidying up

    For those who followed the long thread — 46 parts long! — that I called Chasing Smallwood, I went back today and renamed each part so that rather than saying, for instance, Chasing Smallwood – 46, it says, 46 – Life’s end. I realized, rather belatedly, that since the thread is all contained in one…

  • Upton Sinclair (2)

    Wednesday, May 16, 2007 (7:40 a.m.) Somebody described yesterday’s exchange as “author to author” which is a different way to think of it! Not one that had occurred to me, or would have occurred to me. I suppose it is true enough from one point of view. All right, Mr. Sinclair, shall we talk about…

  • Upton Sinclair, an appreciation

    My ever-helpful brother Paul sent me an article that appeared in The New York Times nearly two years ago. I disagree with her assessment of Lanny’s character as a man of action rather than of introspection, but difference of opinion is what makes horse races. Not only an interesting article on its own, but particularly…

  • Black Box session 10-06-00 (3)

    Friday, October 6, 2000  

  • Enter Claude Bowers

    After so many days talking to Joseph Smallwood and then those who followed in his wake [see the category I call Chasing Smallwood], I began to realize that this wasn’t all my own bright idea, that the guys on the other side had an agenda. Because I was willing to follow, things entered another phase.…

  • Sinclair and Bowers

    Friday, May 18, 2007 9:20 a.m. Mr. Sinclair, how did you deal with fakers and self deceivers? It never came up. Not someone’s reputation but the material itself is the touchstone. You don’t cast pearls before swine, but sometimes you can pick them up from the bed of a pigsty. Did you and Claude Bowers…

  • Claude Bowers on Reconstruction

    [Monday March 6, 2006] Reconstruction (12:45) Well, Mr. Bowers, your chapter two on Andrew Johnson was very interesting and the most favorable portrait of him I have ever read, by far. And he seems to have shared Joseph Smallwood’s idealization of the common worker and smallholder. But your chapter three, “With Chase Among The Ruins,”…

  • Black Box Session 10-13-00 (1)

    Session five of ten Friday, October 13, 2000 Background On Tuesday, Jim Self talked to me for an hour from Chico, California, seeing what was wrong with my breathing, tracing it back to an unremembered incident of early childhood (that, perhaps, my mother misinterpreted as my having gotten too cold, when in fact it was…

  • Claude Bowers on racism and politics

    Wednesday March 8, 2006 All right, Mr. Bowers, since I’m not doing the work I ought to be doing, let’s resume. I’m half through your book and the comparisons between the Radical Republicans of 1865 on and those of 1995 on are just startling! Stolen elections, blatant disregard of law to get what they wanted,…