Investigations of a Dog

[Cross posted to The horse in history and culture.]

I’d be really grateful if anyone could help me find more details of a couple of fatal accidents in American horse racing. I’ve picked up various stuff from the web, including YouTube videos, but I really need some respectable printed sources that I can cite in a history journal. Would the stud book contain dates and circumstances of death of the horses involved? Where else could I look?

Prescott Downs, Arizona, 26 August 2000. Loose horse Pacific Wind was running the wrong way round the track and collided head-on at full speed with Lot O Love ridden by Stacy Burton. Both horses were killed and Burton was severely disabled by the accident. So far I’ve got a YouTube video and a couple of stories from Google News (here and here). The accident is mentioned in Jockey: The Rider’s Life in American Thoroughbred Racing by Scott A. Gruender, but it doesn’t say what happened to the horses and doesn’t cite any sources.

Churchill Downs, April 2009. I’m not even sure about the exact date but it was at the Kentucky Derby meeting. Sources on the web can’t even agree on the names of the horses or other details. All the reports I’ve seen appear to be derived from one of two common sources. During training a loose horse (Dr or Doctor Rap) galloped into Raspberry Miss (or Kiss) who was standing/walking on the track. Both were brought down. Raspberry M/Kiss died later, but it’s not clear if she was put down or died of her injuries before she was put down. Dr/Doctor Rap apparently survived and didn’t break any bones but was possibly injured in some way. Also not clear if the jockey broke any bones. The video has been removed from YouTube for ToS violation. The only respectable source I’ve got is the New York Times, and I’m not sure if the report is accurate.

Last week I watched The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant. There’s not much I can say about it as a historical drama as I’m not familiar with the true story that it’s supposed to be based on. In general terms there are some things which I thought it got right and which you don’t necessarily see so much in more traditional costume dramas. Oppression and inequality were shown working as a system which dominated everyone rather than being the fault of individuals. There were no pantomime villains. The governor, lieutenant and marines had varying degrees of power and privilege, but they weren’t really free and clearly wanted to be somewhere else. Women were shown making patriarchal bargains to survive in difficult circumstances. Everyone from the governor to Mary made perfectly rational decisions to do really horrible things. As Marx said, we don’t choose the circumstances in which we have to make our choices.

But what really struck me was how similar it was to 70s science fiction series Blakes 7 (like Dexys Midnight Runners it shouldn’t have an apostrophe – Wikipedia is wrong!). A disparate group of convicts is transported to a penal colony and escapes in a boat/spaceship. None of them is unambiguously good or bad. They don’t like or trust each other but necessity forces them to work together. The only thing they have in common is a need to be free from an oppressive empire. You probably get that in lots of stories, but there were some more specific things. The scene on the beach where Will gets shot was very, very similar to the final scene of Blakes 7. Cox says almost the same things that Vila says about being forced to join the convicts. Will even has Avon’s smile! And Mary deciding to leave Sam is not too different from Avon deciding to kill Dr Plaxton by turning the engine on before she can get clear – in both cases their ruthlessness saves everyone else and proves them to be capable leaders but not nice people. So I wonder if the makers of the Mary Bryant series were consciously or unconsciously influenced by Blakes 7. Obviously it can’t all be a Blakes 7 rip-off because it’s also based on history. Which leads me to wonder whether Terry Nation knew about and was influenced by the story of the real Mary Bryant when he came up with Blakes 7. That would be an interesting case of intertextual relationships: a science fiction series influenced by historical events which goes on to influence a historical drama based on the same history. Intertextuality can be complicated like that.

Whatever you do don’t ever get yourself a reputation for writing snarky blog posts about dodgy old books about Oliver Cromwell. If you do, people will start giving you other dodgy old books about Oliver Cromwell in the hope that you’ll write something funny about them. Which is how I acquired the novelization of the film Cromwell (while searching for that link I found that there’s also a 2008 film called Cromwell that’s about a serial killer and a stripper!). If you’re at all interested in the English Civil War you’ve probably seen the film. I haven’t seen it for a long time but I assume that the structure of the book is quite close to the film (ie bears very little relation to anything historians have ever written, but doesn’t make much sense as a film plot either). Dipping into it at random throws up all kinds of weird things, like John Hampden and Thomas Hammond seem to have been conflated into the same character for no reason other than having some of the same letters in their surnames. But there are some things that are unique to the book. First of all, you’ve got to love the cover:

Is this a historical novel or a heavy metal album? Why hasn’t the image of a fist defiantly holding up a lobster helmet been more widely used on the covers of history books? It’s much more exciting than some of the usual clichés.

Then there’s the style of writing. In the opening scene, Arthur Bates has tried very hard to avoid the usual novelization trap of just tacking “he said” onto every line of the script:

A pair of horsemen made their way slowly across the bleak, lifeless fens of Cambridgeshire, their heads bent against the biting wind that was piling masses of dark clouds in the sky above them. Nothing else in that wintry landscape moved; it was as though the world had paused to gird itself against the onslaught of the bitter season, and even the old Norman church that loomed in the distance seemed to be hunching its shoulders against the wind.

Bates also has the kind of obsession with people’s ages that you normally only find in local newspapers: “Henry Ireton, a lean, keen-eyed young man of 29”; “His [John Pym] 56-year old eyes were blurred and made watery by the relentless wind”; “A pretty, dark-haired girl of 16 [Bridgett Cromwell] looked up from across the room”. He’d probably be very bad at telling the 28-years-old joke: “A 28 year old man strode across the desolate fens, vigorously doing something you would never expect a 28 year old man to do on the desolate fens…”.

Overall this is probably a bit more sensible than the Ladybird book – Arthur Bates at least knows that women have names and that Cromwell didn’t live in Lincolnshire – but somehow I miss the monkey, and the sheer insanity of L. du Garde Peach. It was said that his “only virtue was speed”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if speed was also his main inspiration. I can imagine him knocking out a Ladybird book in one long, frantic night, fuelled by purple hearts and a bottle of gin.

Following on from my last post about ideology, I want to introduce a new concept which I’ll probably be mentioning a lot in the future: the FedEx Arrow. I got this from yukie1013 via Debi Linton. The basic idea is that the FedEx logo has an arrow in it. Some people notice it and some people don’t, but once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. This is analogous to ideological assumptions in texts (and for the historian this applies whether those texts are fiction, primary sources, or secondary works; it also applies to films, comics, art and any other cultural artefact you can think of). Some people notice ideology in a text, and some people don’t. Once you’ve noticed it you can’t make it go away, and that changes the meaning for you.

Probably my first major experience of this effect was the film The Spitfire Grill. Maybe it was never a great film but I used to really like it. It was kind of like Twin Peaks re-imagined as a chick flick, which somehow appealed to me. But then I read somewhere on the internet that it was anti-abortion propaganda funded by the Catholic Church. That wasn’t particularly obvious from the film itself. Although it was obviously very sentimental and manipulative, Percy’s situation was so far removed from reality that I didn’t connect it with real women having real abortions. It doesn’t really matter whether the rumour is true or not, because once the possibility was there in my head it wouldn’t go away and I started to notice things in the film which were definitely there but which I hadn’t noticed before. Suddenly it became unwatchable because it seemed so misogynistic. The message I get from it now is not only that if you have an abortion you’re a murderer who deserves to die, but that if someone rapes you and gets you pregnant, and you decide that you definitely won’t have an abortion, but the rapist beats you up until you have a miscarriage, that you’re still a murderer and deserve to die. Now it doesn’t quite say that explicitly. Percy doesn’t actually get tried and executed for the death of her unborn baby. But it’s strongly implied that she has an unbearable burden of guilt that won’t ever go away until she dies. No-one ever tells her it’s not her fault. Yes, I’ve spoilt it now, but spoilers or not, just don’t watch it. I’m never going to watch it again.

But as Debi says, seeing the arrow doesn’t have to ruin something completely. It’s still possible to enjoy something while seeing the arrows in it. I really like old TV action series like The Sweeney and The Professionals even though they’re full of casual racism, misogyny and homophobia. Actually, having watched every single episode of both of them earlier this year (there’s a limited range of things you can do when you’re recovering from RSI) I think they’re not quite as bad as they’re often assumed to be, but there are still lots of problems with them. I can still be influenced by Nietzsche even though I can see that he had some very dodgy ideas about race and inadvertently encouraged the Nazis. The Smiths will probably always be my favourite band despite Morrissey’s blatantly horrible misogyny in songs like “Pretty Girls Make Graves” (and the fact that it’s such a great song probably just makes it all the more dangerous).

So that’s the FedEx arrow. Try and spot some. They’re everywhere even if you don’t realise it.

A couple of weeks ago George Simmers at Great War Fiction posted about some problems with applying the Marxist concept of ideological hegemony to the outbreak of the First World War. He criticized some vaguely Marxist influenced historians and literary critics who said that people were tricked by propaganda into supporting the war and then became disillusioned. I wanted to reply to his post, but every time I drafted a comment in my head it just ended up saying “I don’t really know”. I do know that George is right to say “These are words to be used with care.” Like many things, the concept of ideology can be useful if used well but can also be counterproductive if used badly. So in this post I’m going to try and explain what ideology means to me, and how it’s useful in my own work. Bear that in mind while reading, as when you see the words “ideology is”, that’s shorthand for “I think ideology is”, and not the definite assertion that it looks like. (more…)