BOOKS THREAD

Boy, it's time to launch a thread on this one. Jemmy's been my favorite for a long time. (The fact that John Adams, that awful old shitehawk, is getting the full-on celeb treatment while Madison languishes makes me nauseous. For me, I think what Madison did -- besides the utter genius it took to overthrow the Articles while pretending not to do it, and simply because you were smarter than anyone else -- was create the framework and then make sure it was flexible enough to adapt to the changes inherent in history. He was very much beloved at his death, at not by his generational peers, then by the subsequent generation. JQ Adams delivered a beautiful three-hour eulogy.

 

Adams had the bromide and the borderline manic depression, Franklin the whimsy, Jefferson the grieving optimism, Hamilton the overt self-destructiveness. All sexy stuff for the pop historians, all picked clean. The ground is so trodden Burr is making incursions as a (f)ounder -- of all of them he would have fit best in this current polity. We see some of ourselves in these guys. Madison doesn't seem to radiate that. It's been said in regard to Hamilton that no one loves their bookkeeper. No one really loves their structural microengineer, either. Hamilton's monuments were the twin towers, commerce and industry. Madison's is/was what has been shat upon for the last seven years. That it's lasted this long and so powerfully is his achievement.

There's a hell of a book to be written about him that can excite both the popular fancy and mechanics of government, but it's going to require heavy lifting and patience.

 

Sirs, Madames,

As research--and I can't stress this strongly enough--I've just finished Carol Shields's Jane Austen in the Penguin Lives series. It was great ... the evolution of a writer and her writing gleaned from a very thin broth of fact that survived her. The Mozart Pen-Lives bio a lot less so. On to Larry McMurtry's Crazy Horse, Proust and James Joyce.

YHS, etc

 

Burr was interesting for the same reason that John Dillinger was. He's a hard height for anyone to clear. You can hardly pin the Embargo on him (''his" Embargo). Jefferson's got to carry most of the weight for that. Madison's responsibility for the war of 1812 is hardly unambiguous. He tried to run his presidency by the Constitution he'd written -- when the Congress declared war, he went along. (The war was driven, primarily, by the hotheaded leaders of the next generatin -- namely, Henry Clay.) NE didn't secede because Madison's people were smarter than the old Federalist establishment and because Madison declined to send in the NY militia he'd gathered at the border until and unless the Hartford Convention-ers committed an overt act of rebellion. He held the Union together. And he was very active in his post-presidential years, keeping himself in the mix on issues like the tariff and, especially, nullification. He was a mediocre president, I'l give you that, but Adams was more interesting?
Not really.

 

Adams never did anything for me. Cuddly as a cactus. Hamilton was my favorite as a young student, way before he (and I) became cool. Madison was the smartest, most practicable, most utilitarian. And he landed the girl with the big bosoms.

 

Well, actually, he married the girl with the biggest bosoms. (I actually once talked to Ketchum about why this brilliant nebbish landed the hotcha gal of the day. Even he had to admit he couldn't figure it out.) Hamilton "landed" a few.

 

Opposites attract.

Some of the sources have as much to say about her wrists as they do her mammary protruberances. The slender wrist and its curvature was considered a mark of beauty in the times. I used this shit with my girlfriend on one of our first dates. (It worked).

I had something published on the Reynolds affair a few years ago. That sex scandal had everything. You name it, it had it. Jefferson was so giddy about Hamilton's 95-page confession (maybe the most self-hating document in American history) that he bought a few dozen copies for friends and sent them overseas.

 

I decided to take the Cormac McCarthy plunge, and bought The Road and No Country For Old Men (I haven't seen the movie, either) with a Barnes and Noble gift card.

Will I enjoy myself?

 

I'm going to start The Trials of Lenny Bruce very soon.

Has anyone read it? Any thoughts?

 

Considering the in vogue status of the "founding fathers" since 2001, it really is shocking that no one-not even the popular historians-has delivered a tome on Madison.

It needs to be done, but whoever does it needs to take some time with it. Madison deserves more than some popular quick and dirty attempt by someone like Gordon Wood or Joe Ellis.

 

I like Ellis' ability to turn a phrase and add a sense of perspective to the Founding Fathers' escapades, but your point is well-taken. This is clearly a mission for Ron Chernow to pick up the white courtesy desktop, please.

We covered this subject pages ago, I believe.