#History St Lucie Canal

[jthurlow]

Learning the Beauty of the Pre-Drainage Lands - St Lucie Canal

-Florida’s Everglades Drainage District  survey for St Lucie Canal, 1915. Chief Engineer, F.C. Elliott. The St Lucie Canal was built  from Lake Okeechobee to the St Lucie River from 1916-1924. Trees and water bodies to be cut through are written at the top of the two page survey and are a rare record of pre-drainage lands. Click on images to enlarge. Page 1, EDD 1915 St Lucie Canal Survey Lake…

[addictedforbooksquad]

P I C K (S)  O F  T H E  M O N T H: M A Y

The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite

Passion on Park Avenue by Lauren Layne

Mistborn: The Alloy Era Series by Brandon Sanderson

Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson

Marriage for One by Ella Maise

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite

Genres: Historical Romance, LGBT, F/F romance

Synopsis:

As Lucy Muchelney watches her ex-lover’s sham of a wedding, she wishes herself anywhere else. It isn’t until she finds a letter from the Countess of Moth, looking for someone to translate a groundbreaking French astronomy text, that she knows where to go. Showing up at the Countess’ London home, she hoped to find a challenge, not a woman who takes her breath away. Catherine St Day looks forward to a quiet widowhood once her late husband’s scientific legacy is fulfilled. She expected to hand off the translation and wash her hands of the project—instead, she is intrigued by the young woman who turns up at her door, begging to be allowed to do the work, and she agrees to let Lucy stay. But as Catherine finds herself longing for Lucy, everything she believes about herself and her life is tested. While Lucy spends her days interpreting the complicated French text, she spends her nights falling in love with the alluring Catherine. But sabotage and old wounds threaten to sever the threads that bind them. Can Lucy and Catherine find the strength to stay together or are they doomed to be star-crossed lovers?

Why we love it:

a beautiful love story between two women

female friendships and women supporting women

characters who find out about Lucy and Catherine are not homophobic but rather supportive

focus on both romance AND personal journeys of the characters

sexism and misogyny are challenged, by both female and male characters (some of them at least)

beautiful, poetic passages

Trigger warnings: mentions of emotional abuse, sexism, misogyny

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Passion on Park Avenue by Lauren Layne

Genres: Romance, Contemporary, New Adult

Synopsis:

For as long as she can remember, Bronx-born Naomi Powell has had one goal: to prove her worth among the Upper East Side elite—the same people for which her mom worked as a housekeeper. Now, as the strongminded, sassy CEO of one of the biggest jewelry empires in the country, Naomi finally has exactly what she wants—but it’s going to take more than just the right address to make Manhattan’s upper class stop treating her like an outsider. The worst offender is her new neighbor, Oliver Cunningham—the grown son of the very family Naomi’s mother used to work for. Oliver used to torment Naomi when they were children, and as a ridiculously attractive adult, he’s tormenting her in entirely different ways. Now they find themselves engaged in a battle-of-wills that will either consume or destroy them… Filled with charm and heart and plenty of sex and snark, this entertaining series will hook you from the very first page.

Why we love it:

ambitious millionaire female character whose story is basically about rags to riches

soft male character

female friendships and dynamics are amazing

cute love story

Lauren Layne’s style has improved so much and it’s time to start reading her books

Trigger warnings: n/a

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Mistborn: The Alloy Era series by Brandon Sanderson

Genres: Fantasy, High Fantasy, Adult

Synopsis:

Three hundred years after the events of the Mistborn trilogy, Scadrial is now on the verge of modernity, with railroads to supplement the canals, electric lighting in the streets and the homes of the wealthy, and the first steel-framed skyscrapers racing for the clouds. Kelsier, Vin, Elend, Sazed, Spook, and the rest are now part of history—or religion. Yet even as science and technology are reaching new heights, the old magics of Allomancy and Feruchemy continue to play a role in this reborn world. Out in the frontier lands known as the Roughs, they are crucial tools for the brave men and women attempting to establish order and justice. One such is Waxillium Ladrian, a rare Twinborn who can Push on metals with his Allomancy and use Feruchemy to become lighter or heavier at will. After twenty years in the Roughs, Wax has been forced by family tragedy to return to the metropolis of Elendel. Now he must reluctantly put away his guns and assume the duties and dignity incumbent upon the head of a noble house. Or so he thinks, until he learns the hard way that the mansions and elegant tree-lined streets of the city can be even more dangerous than the dusty plains of the Roughs. 

Why we love it:

amazing writing

plots and twists all around

we see familiar faces from the first trilogy *wink wink*

SO. MUCH. FUN.

western-sherlock-fantasy

most adorable character ever, that's on the spectrum

Trigger warnings: violence

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Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson

Genres: Fantasy, High Fantasy, Adult

Synopsis:

Mistborn: Secret History is a companion story to the original Mistborn trilogy. As such, it contains HUGE SPOILERS for the books Mistborn (The Final Empire), The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages. It also contains very minor spoilers for the book The Bands of Mourning. Mistborn: Secret History builds upon the characterization, events, and worldbuilding of the original trilogy. Reading it without that background will be a confusing process at best. In short, this isn’t the place to start your journey into Mistborn. (Though if you have read the trilogy—but it has been a while—you should be just fine, so long as you remember the characters and the general plot of the books.) Saying anything more here risks revealing too much. Even knowledge of this story’s existence is, in a way, a spoiler. There’s always another secret.  

Why we love it:

view on Mistborn Era 1 events from different perspective

reunions that will make you cry

we get SOME answers as well from Mistborn Era 1 and 2

Trigger warnings: violence

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Marriage for One by Ella Maise

Genres: Romance, Contemporary, New Adult

Synopsis:

Jack and I, we did everything backward. The day he lured me into his office-which was also the first day we met-he proposed. You'd think a guy who looked like him-a bit cold maybe, but still striking and very unattainable-would only ask the love of his life to marry him, right? You'd think he must be madly in love. Nope. It was me he asked. A complete stranger who had never even heard of him. A stranger who had been dumped by her fiancé only weeks before. You'd think I'd laugh in his face, call him insane-and a few other names-then walk away as quickly as possible. Well…I did all those things except the walking away part. It took him only minutes to talk me into a business deal…erm, I mean marriage, and only days for us to officially tie the knot. Happiest day of my life. Magical. Pop the champagne… Not. It was the worst day. Jack Hawthorne was nothing like what I'd imagined for myself. I blamed him for my lapse in judgment. I blamed his eyes, the ocean blue eyes that looked straight into mine unapologetically, and that frown on his face I had no idea I would become so fascinated with in time. It wasn't long after he said I was the biggest mistake of his life that things started to change. No, he still didn't talk much, but anyone can string a few words together. His actions spoke the loudest to me. And day after day my heart started to get a mind of its own. One second he was no one. The next he became everything. One second he was unattainable. The next he seemed to be completely mine. One second I thought we were in love. The next it was still nothing but a lie. After all, I was Rose and he was Jack. We were doomed from the very beginning with those names. Did you expect anything else?

Why we love it:

soft and bubbly female character

broody male character

fake marriage trope

slowburn + cutest romance with a lil’ bit of angst

development is A+++

Trigger warnings: n/a

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A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

Genres: Fantasy, High Fantasy, Adult

Synopsis:

Long ago, in a time forgotten, a preternatural event threw the seasons out of balance. In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister and supernatural forces are massing beyond the kingdom’s protective Wall. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the land they were born to. Sweeping from a land of brutal cold to a distant summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, here is a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens. Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; and a determined woman undertakes the most treacherous of journeys. Amid plots and counterplots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, the fate of the Starks, their allies, and their enemies hangs perilously in the balance, as each endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.

Why we love it:

high fantasy political drama 

well-written dialogue

if you’re already a fan of the TV show, the book gives you an even more detailed account of events with characters POVs while these key moments play out

amazing world building and backstory with so much thought and detail

GRRM has successfully achieved a whole new universe

full of backstabbing, bloody battles and political intrigue

multiple POVs

Trigger warnings: rape, sexual abuse of a minor, graphic violence, sexual violence, incest, misogyny

[qqueenofhades]

Starlight & Strange Magic, Chapter 18: In Which Everyone Would Like To Know How This Happened

Rating: M Summary:  Lucy Preston, a young American woman, arrives in England in 1887 to teach history at Somerville College, Oxford. London is the capital of the steam and aether and automatonic world, and new innovations are appearing every day. When she meets a mysterious, dangerous mercenary and underworld kingpin, Garcia Flynn, her life takes a turn for the decidedly too interesting. But Lucy has plenty of secrets of her own – not least that she’s from nowhere or nowhen nearby – and she is more than up for the challenge. Available: AO3 Previous: In Which It Snows In St. Petersburg

To say the least, there is not a lot that can prepare you for the sight of your best friend literally falling out of the blue, a hundred and thirty years and a parallel dimension away from where you left him, and his landing spot being a back alley in Steampunk St. Petersburg just yards from you and your – well, Lucy has given up on any easily definable term for Flynn, so never mind that. She remains kneeling next to Rufus, her mouth still open but no sound coming out, as he likewise tries to regather enough wind to speak. He lifts his head an inch, then gives up, falling back into the snow, and she briefly fears that he’s dead. “Rufus?” she says again. “Rufus?”

“Nnnrgh.” Rufus seems to be signaling that he in fact still operational, but it’s going to take a long time to get everything back online, and she shouldn’t panic in the interim. At least he can apparently tell that he ended up in the right place, so he takes several well-deserved moments to remain exactly where he goddamn is. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Lucy repeats. It’s not really worth asking him the obvious question at this point, but she slides a hand under his head. “Can you stand up?”

Rufus tries, legs twitching, but to no result. For his part, Flynn – after an understandable moment of total shock – has realized that Lucy knows the magical flying moron, and strides down the alley, boots crunching, to tower over him. “Who the hell is this? What just happened?”

“This is my – this is Rufus.” Lucy waves at him to back off with the looming, as Rufus has clearly had the hell of a day already and she doesn’t want his first impression of Westworld to be an upside-down, bad-tempered Flynn. “I have no idea what happened, but he – he may be hurt.”

Flynn raises an eyebrow, as if to say that if anyone wasn’t hurt after that swan dive from the sky, he would be very surprised. He considers Rufus balefully, as if to make sure he isn’t a cleverly disguised cruise missile (or whatever this world’s equivalent would be) and then realizes, as Lucy does, that this has put a crimp in the plan of packing her aboard the nearest airship back to England. She isn’t sure if that’s a good thing or not, but Rufus is here, needs help, and obviously has a whale of a tale as to how he is. And with Jiya supposedly held captive by Rittenhouse, that means all three of the team may be here, and while Lucy would of course gratefully welcome the presence of her friends again at long last, there is a fairly obvious logistical snafu. The Lifeboat, hidden back in New York, is only configured to take one of them home. And while further individual rocket-ship rides might not be totally out of the question, it is a stretch to expect to be normal after one of those, let alone survive two.

One problem at a time. Lucy pushes that out of her head, and turns to Flynn. “Can you – can you help me with him? We’ll have to go back to the hideout.”

Flynn considers, then shrugs. He leans down, hauls Rufus upright none too gently, and slings him over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, as Rufus groans feebly but can’t really object to being tossed like a sack of beans. Lucy gives Flynn a be careful look, and goes to ensure that they can get out ahead of what must be a horde of incoming spectators. People must have seen that across St. Petersburg, and if the story spreads, that could also cause difficulties. It would be better to be away from here post-haste.

With Flynn lugging Rufus, Lucy wends her way back through the narrow alleys and stone quays that line the canal; the Neva is frozen solid, and won’t break up until March or April of next year, so the wintertime commerce is starting to set up camp on the river. At the moment, most of them are heading toward the site of the impact, speculating worriedly on what it could be, so Lucy and Flynn have to be careful about staying out of sight. They finally clamber over a low wall and hurry toward the warehouse, check once more that they haven’t been followed, and push through the door, as Lucy shuts and bars it behind them.

Flynn’s gang, who were expecting the boss back but not Lucy, jump to their feet in confusion, which is doubled at the sight of a semi-conscious man slung over his shoulder. The Sokolovs hurry to get some sacks to set Rufus down on, and as he recovers more of his battered higher faculties, Lucy can see him wondering just what kind of crowd she is running with these days. It’s finally Shitmouth who says, “Who’s the Negro, then?”

“Friend of hers.” Flynn glances at Lucy, with a hard-to-read expression. “At least, I take it from how she greeted him. If you recently heard a very large bang and saw a flash, that was him.”

“We thought an airship might have blown up,” says one of the Taylors. “Or someone had bombed the docks. How’s one man have that effect instead?”

“I sense it’s a fascinating story. But one not for you lot’s ears.” Flynn speaks brusquely, his manner once more that of the take-no-prisoners crime boss, as he turns his head at a sound from outside. “We’re still close to the scene. We should move again.”

“And what, that means I’m off to scout another hideout for us?” Karl has been standing with arms folded and chin outthrust. “We stay low and quiet, they’re not likely to come nosing around here again so soon. They just made an inspection yesterday, a few proper bribes should keep them out for months.”

Flynn looks at him as if to ask if Karl knew the correct St. Petersburg middle bureaucrats to pay off and did so, Karl looks back as if to say that of course he does and did, and interesting though this ongoing power struggle is, Lucy thinks they need to pay more attention to Rufus. She gets a cup of tea from the chipped porcelain samovar, warms it up, and hands it to Rufus, who is able to sip it with only minor assistance. Flynn waves away the gang to give her space, and once they have all withdrawn to the other side of the warehouse, Lucy and Rufus are left with a semblance of privacy. They look at each other, then blurt out at the same time, “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“Yeah.” Rufus grimaces. “It was not easy. I’ll see if I can explain it briefly. Basically, Jiya went missing thanks to some kind of artifact that took her and Wyatt Logan’s wife out of a room at Bethlem Royal Hospital. Mrs. Logan is there, it’s a long story, I don’t know it. I went to confront Connor about it, and – I can’t be sure, but I think he’s still actually on our side, has been tricking Rittenhouse and trying to delay them while pretending to be their fancy CEO. He gave me the equations for the Mothership’s modifications, and the schematics for whatever device he used to talk to Emma here, the Refractory-Glass. I put one together, which was how I communicated with you the other day. When is it, anyway? Date-wise?”

“November 1887,” Lucy says. “I’ve been here for just over a year. So what, you managed to build a working Refractory-Glass receptor from scratch?”

“Well, I had the plans,” Rufus points out. “And as I thought about it, and how Jiya vanished, I realized that I could possibly apply the principle to transmit myself along the same channels. After all, the human body is also essentially highly coded information packets, so if I could find the right frequency, I could basically email myself here. I took the Mothership modifications and meddled around with them so they applied to one person rather than a time machine, kind of like what I did to the Lifeboat the first time, but without the infrastructure. I realized that I already had a connection to wherever you were physically with the Refractory-Glass, so I set up the destination point to track with you.”

“So you were magnetically guided to wherever I was, and I’m supposed to be in Oxford, but instead, I’m in Russia – it’s a long story,” Lucy adds, seeing Rufus’s face. “That’s amazing, Rufus, that’s dazzling genius, but how did you know it was going to work?”

“I didn’t,” Rufus admits. “If I’d made a mistake in the math or the coding protocols, I would be disconnected wifi, times a thousand, and not exist in any of the branches of the multiverse ever again. But I couldn’t get here any other way, and I – ” He stops, then shrugs, glancing down. “For you and Jiya, I thought it was worth the risk.”

Lucy looks at him, realizes that in the haste and shock and disbelieving explanations, she has had no time to simply take in the fact that he’s here, he’s here, and reaches out to hug him desperately hard, fighting tears. Rufus does the same, they shake silently in each other’s arms, and then sniffle and try to pull themselves together. “Anyway,” he says. “I turned on my receptor to get a signal connected to Westworld, punched in all the information, crossed my fingers and toes and everything else, and stepped into the projector circle. The next thing I know, I’m dive-bombing out of the clear blue yonder, it’s really cold, I can’t breathe, and I see you and some cranky Russian giant staring at me. So I guess I didn’t screw it up.”

“That’s – that’s Flynn,” Lucy says. “He’s not actually Russian. He’s – as I said. Long story.”

“That’s Flynn?” Rufus looks startled. “Wait, the same one that Connor said was causing all the headaches for Rittenhouse here? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you two managed to meet up, but what’s with all the Newsies sidekicks?”

“He’s a crime boss in London. He runs a gang, that’s them, they’re here in Russia because Rittenhouse has an interest in the Trans-Siberian Railway. They’re having it built to provide themselves with a proprietary aether pipeline. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what they’re doing and how they want to harvest magic from this reality. I was actually on my way back to Oxford – I have a teaching post there – right before you made your dramatic entrance.”

“Have you heard anything about Jiya?” Rufus asks urgently. “Anything at all?”

Lucy hesitates. “Emma came to see me in Oxford last week,” she says at last. “She hinted that Rittenhouse had Jiya prisoner, and unless I cooperated, they’d – well. You know.”

“Rittenhouse has Jiya prisoner?” Rufus looks set to jump to his feet and swim to England himself. “I mean, I realize we can’t exactly work with them, but – what the hell did Emma even want? Just to be horrible and ruin more people’s lives?”

“She wanted help finding a lost magical library,” Lucy says. “The Bibliotheca Corviniana. It belonged to the Raven King, a famous fifteenth-century magician. She thinks it’ll tell her everything she needs to know to complete her world domination.”

“Yay. Emma.” Rufus rolls his eyes heavenward. “Still the worst in every universe, good to know. I feel like I’m probably missing half the story, but we can’t sit around shooting the shit all day. Are you and Flynn friends?”

“We…” Lucy doesn’t know how to answer that. “We’re colleagues, sort of. It’s been a very back-and-forth process. I think we’re working together now, but it could change again.”

Rufus eyes her shrewdly, as he knows her well enough to tell that she’s being purposefully evasive on this front. Still, this is not the opportune moment to press for details, so he doesn’t. “So, Jiya – did Emma say where she was supposed to be? Anything?”

“No. I was going to try to find her, but then I got – ” Lucy considers that. “Inadvertently brought over here, by Karl. He’s Flynn’s right-hand man. I think.”

“Which one’s Karl? The sandy weasel with the pornstache?” Rufus glances at the far side of the warehouse, where the gang appears to be a little too intently absorbed in conversation. “Or one of the other Scorsese rejects? Lucy, obviously, I’m the newcomer here, I don’t know what’s going on or what you’ve been up to, but do you really trust these guys?”

“I trust Flynn,” Lucy says. “And the Sokolovs – those two, the large blond Russian brothers. I think the others like me, or are at least certainly aren’t going to do anything to me. They’re the closest thing I’ve got to allies.”

Rufus continues to look extremely skeptical, but at last, he blows out a breath and nods. “Okay, if you say so. So what’s the plan? Can we get out of here and go save Jiya?”

“I want to,” Lucy promises him. “But after your entrance, we have to see if the airships are even still running. The Russian authorities may have closed down the port, and Rittenhouse definitely has people here as well. Can you even walk yet?”

Rufus makes a valiant attempt to get up, then reels, and Lucy has to catch his arm before he falls. Rufus breathes hard as the world apparently somersaults, and sits down again heavily. “Jiya’s hella resourceful,” he says, as if in an attempt to convince himself that any delay whatsoever in the rescue mission is acceptable. “She’s pulled the wool over Rittenhouse’s eyes and gotten away from them before, she could have done it again.”

“Yes, but we can’t count on that, and we can’t kill you too trying to get to her.” Lucy notices that Rufus’ color is still off, and drains the dregs of the samovar for another cup of tea. Violent interdimensional self-translocation is definitely not flying in business class, which her trip in the Lifeboat was by comparison. “Actually, I’m going to send a telegram to Ada Lovelace. Tell her to tell Oxford that I’ll be back soon, and see if she can get her butler on the case. Woolsey found Flynn’s hideout in like one morning, he could possibly find Jiya too.”

“Ada Lovelace?” Rufus goggles. “You know Ada Lovelace? Didn’t she die in like, the 1850s?”

“Not in this universe, apparently. She’s a grand old dame and very gleefully eccentric.” Lucy smiles at the thought. “We met when I came to London, and we hit it off.”

Rufus looks suitably impressed at the idea, and after a few more minutes, Lucy leaves him to continue his recuperation, heading over to the gang and explaining what she needs to do. It is agreed that Anton and Gennady will escort her to the telegraph office and take stock of the airship situation, and she can feel Flynn’s eyes on their backs as they leave. She’s tempted to glance over her shoulder and see what expression it is, but she isn’t going to be caught mooning after him. She screwed up her courage and asked for what she wanted, and he said no. She doesn’t know why, she’s going to respect his refusal because that’s what decent people do, take her lumps and get on with things, but it still hurts in an entirely different way than before. See. This is exactly why she didn’t want to make a move and muddy the waters with unrequited heartbreak. Should have contented herself that they finally seemed to be on the same page and actually ready to work together, and nothing else.

Sensing her melancholy, Gennady clears his throat awkwardly. “Are sad, Lucy?” he asks. “Later, I JUGGLE for you? Is VERY FUNNY when I juggle. I often DROP BALLS.”

“That – what, oh, no, that’s very sweet of you, but no.” Lucy glances at the Sokolovs, striding to each side of her like twin towers of six-foot-three Bolshevik brawler with perfect manners, and wonders if she could convince them to come back to England with her. After all, they technically aren’t part of Flynn’s gang; they work on the docks in London, and they don’t seem terribly impressed by his shortcomings in the etiquette department. Rescuing Jiya, if necessary, would take a lot more muscle than she and Rufus have alone, and they clearly like her. Maybe she can start up her own gang. There’s not a whole lot more scandalized that Somerville can be, right?

The streets are crowded, the alley where Rufus crashed in is cordoned off, and police inspectors in high-collared overcoats and fur hats are blowing whistles and barking at the gawking onlookers to back off. It definitely looks like all incoming and outgoing airships and steamships have been halted while they search for the source of the incident, which doesn’t help. The crush slows almost to a standstill at points, so Anton picks Lucy up under his arm like a football and sends Gennady in front of them to bowl open a path. This is very effective, and they finally fight clear of the throng and make it to the port telegraph office. It occurs to Lucy just before they go in that Rittenhouse might be monitoring communications in and out of St. Petersburg, and she stalls. “Wait, what if they’re reporting to someone?”

“Eh?” Anton frowns at her, and Lucy explains that she’s worried they’ll pass her telegram on to some sort of secret listening service. The Sokolovs look at her, then at each other, crack their knuckles, and inform her to wait where she is and to maybe turn her back. They then proceed menacingly inside the telegraph office. Five minutes of muffled banging, thumps, shouts, and crashes later, Anton re-emerges, only slightly out of breath. “All right,” he announces. “Telegraph operator is ready to talk now.”

Lucy raises both eyebrows at him as he offers a hand to help her over the threshold, then over the numerous items of furniture that seem to have become unaccountably dislodged. A very cowed-looking clerk in a cockeyed green visor is sitting by the machine, with Gennady standing guard, and after some fits and starts, since Lucy doesn’t speak Russian and the clerk doesn’t speak English, Anton serves as translator and she composes a brief message to Ada. There’s also the possibility of it being read on the other end, so Lucy can’t go into much detail. She manages to convey that she has accidentally wound up in Russia, she would appreciate Ada informing Oxford that she’s not dead, and apologizing profusely for the inconvenience. As well, if Mr. Woolsey can possibly make a few enquiries about a young female friend of hers? Jiya?

When this is finished and dispatched, Gennady asks if he should take the telegraph operator by his heels and shake him several times to ensure he does not retain any copies for anyone else. It as he is prepared to do this that something falls out of the operator’s pocket, some kind of special cancellation stamp. When Lucy picks it up and turns it over, she can see the name SIBLEY in the grilling. Flynn said that Hiram Sibley Junior is running the railway project for Rittenhouse, and his father, Hiram Sibley Senior, was one of the main pioneers of the telegraph in America. Sibley senior worked with Samuel Morse, inventor of Morse code, and was the first president of Western Union, as well as being very interested in Russian-American telegraphic links. Lucy thought of him back when Flynn mentioned Rittenhouse’s Siberian interests at tea with Ada, and this appears to be proof positive that Sibley junior has in fact seeded St. Petersburg telegraph offices with his spies.

“What?” Anton asks, seeing her face. “What is?”

Lucy shows him the stamp – she doesn’t know exactly what it’s for, but most likely to highlight messages that might warrant Sibley’s personal inspection. Once she has conveyed this to the Sokolovs, they assume thunderous frowns and turn back to the clerk. They interrogate him in rapid-fire Russian, which Lucy of course can’t follow, and when the clerk seems to shirk on offering answers, Anton plucks him out of his chair and holds him up like a punching bag in front of Gennady. This sufficiently alarms the clerk into squawking something, which they make him write down. Anton holds it out to Lucy. “Is address. He says for office of Sibley.”

Lucy’s stomach lurches. This, obviously, would be a major breakthrough, and after a moment of consideration, she decides that they have accomplished enough for now. She jerks her head at the Sokolovs, they smartly step after her, and the clerk has a look of both terror and awe on his face at seeing a tiny woman command this pair of behemoths. They take a back route to the Ditch to avoid the police and the crowds, and hurry into the warehouse, where Flynn jumps away from the door as if to prove that he wasn’t standing there and waiting for them to return. “There you are,” he says. “Took long enough.”

“Is obviously some problems.” Anton eyes Flynn up and down. “You have not let Lucy’s friend die, we hope?”

“No, he’s over there.” Flynn jerks his head at Rufus, who does not look to be particularly enjoying his hospital bed of burlap sacks in a drafty Russian warehouse, surrounded by heavily armed criminals wanted in at least two countries. Shocking, that. “Did you get the message off?”

“Yes. And there’s this.” Lucy hands him the slip of paper. “The Sokolovs got it out of the telegraph clerk that that’s Hiram Sibley’s office. The family is in the business, he’s probably been helping Rittenhouse tap all the wires in and out of St. Petersburg.”

Flynn scans it quickly, scowling. “Sibley’s been at the Winter Palace most days to meet with the tsar and his engineering advisors. I did think he had to have a base somewhere nearby, but… are you sure about this?”

“I was about to punch clerk VERY HARD,” Gennady puts in. “In UNPLEASANT region for gentleman. Not sure if that make him more truthful, but I HOPE SO.”

Flynn raises an eyebrow at the younger Sokolov, but obviously does not dispute this bare-knuckled method of problem-solving. Finally he says, “Very well, we should check it out. If Sibley’s not there, we might also be able to steal his files or information. I’ll take the Taylors, Gennady, and Karl. The rest of you go and keep out of trouble, except for Anton. You stay here.”

Anton blinks. “I stay here? Why?”

“Because,” Flynn says, “you’re the only one I trust to keep a proper eye on Lucy and her vagabond friend. As soon as he can stand up straight and the heat’s died down, you can take care of getting them aboard an airship back to England.”

“Wait,” Lucy says. “I did send a telegram, I – Rufus just – ” She isn’t sure how much to say in front of Flynn’s gang, since he clearly has not widely shared the truth of her origins, and thus does not need to go blurting out that she and Rufus are from the next universe over. “He just fell out of the sky, I don’t think he’s going to be able to immediately travel – ”

“Airship to England,” Flynn says to Anton, ignoring her. “Yes?”

Anton pauses, then nods. “Yes.”

“Good.” Flynn strides away, opens a crate, and begins strapping on several extra guns, evidently in case Hiram Sibley is indeed there and objects to having his office robbed. Lucy stands there furiously, then runs after him, grabbing his arm. He looks up at her with his customary sardonic-dick expression. “Yes, Lucy?”

“You can’t just banish me,” Lucy says angrily. “You can’t just return to treating me like a piece of cargo, throwing me on board an airship again, like I have no thoughts or volition of my – ”

“Banish you?” Flynn arches the other eyebrow to its utmost potential. “You remember how you got here in the first place? I’m trying to help you out. I thought you wanted to go back to England.”

“I do.” Lucy’s voice sounds weak, and she tries again. “I do, but with Rufus – ”

“Nobody asked him to crash the party. Literally.” Flynn shrugs, thumbing open the chamber of a revolver, checking that it’s loaded, and slinging it into the holster. “Is that the only thing you want, Lucy? Because if not, you should say so.”

Lucy almost screams at him that she said so, she said so as clearly she could stand to do last night, and he already told her what his answer was. How dare he act as if it is her responsibility to fess up and bare her soul to him, when he stopped it, when he said no, and she has been chasing her head in circles and viciously second-guessing herself for risking it at all? The need is still present, it hasn’t gone away. If anything, infuriatingly, it’s gotten even stronger, the realization that while she is presently very angry at him and would happily slap that idiot look off his handsome asshole face, she would just as happily snap and kiss him, and possibly something else, if his entire gang was not standing right here and not even pretending they aren’t hanging onto this for dear life. Lucy’s fists clench. To stop herself from which of the options, she has no idea. Probably both.

After a pause, Flynn gets to his feet, straightening to his full height above her, which puts her nose somewhere in the region of his solar plexus. “You’ll stay here,” he says, in a tone that brooks no argument, “until it’s safe. Then you’re going to leave.”

Somewhere in the confused jumble of lust, wrath, and other deadly sins currently fighting for mastery of Lucy’s brain, it occurs to her to wonder if Flynn has been low-key panicking since she got here. If she’s likewise dropped out of the clear blue sky, not quite as spectacularly as Rufus but to basically the same effect, and he’s been scrambling ever since to accommodate her presence in the middle of his gritty, very-low-class, dangerous, anonymous existence as a spy and saboteur in the streets of St. Petersburg, running from his criminal record and Rittenhouse in one country and trying to blow up their operations in another. He’s had to devote time and effort to keeping her safe, fed, away from the police inspectors, un-frozen during the snowstorm, and otherwise in a functional state long enough to package her back to England in the first place, which by every respect, should be what she wants to do. What more does she want from him, his expression seems to say? When he’s gone to this much damn trouble to get her out of the frying pan, and she obstinately insists on sitting right in the middle of the fire?

They continue to eye each other for another extremely fraught few moments, Flynn staring down his nose at her as Lucy glares at him right back. Then he steps back. “I won’t hear anything more about this,” he says, “or I will have Anton throw you in the cargo hold.”

“Excuse me?” Anton looks mortally affronted. “You throw her in cargo hold yourself! Though if you try, I break your nose. Ignore him, Lucy. You know I never do such thing.”

“I know,” Lucy assures him. She’s tempted to tell him to break Flynn’s nose anyway, because it appears to be the only satisfaction she is going to get out of this, but she also just doesn’t want to have to look at him anymore. “Go on,” she snaps at Flynn. “Run out of here and leave your mess behind. Just like you always do, remember?”

He takes that in, and nods. Then he has the audacity, the sheer, ridiculous, unmitigated gall to grasp her shoulders in both hands, lean down, and kiss her patronizingly on the forehead. “Don’t worry,” he snarks. “We’ll be careful.”

“Right now, I honestly could not care less if you got yourself killed.” Lucy shoves him away from her with both hands. “So don’t strain yourself on my account.”

With a final evil look exchanged between them, Flynn stomps off, slings one last gun into his jacket, and jerks his head at his strike team. The Taylors, Gennady (with an apologetic glance at Lucy), and Karl form up behind him, Karl’s face also something that deserves to be in a museum, and they depart at speed. Once they’re gone, and the other gang members have scuttled out on their orders to make themselves discreet, Lucy’s strength abruptly runs out of her, and she sits down on one of the crates. She leans forward and puts her face in her hands.

“Lucy?” Anton hovers awkwardly at her shoulder. “I make you some tea?”

“No. I just…” Lucy remains where she is. “I’m done. I give up. Just take me back to England whenever the port reopens. I don’t know why I keep deluding myself, over and over, into thinking this has any chance of actually working.”

Anton pauses. Then he pulls up a crate next to her and pats her on the arm with a hand the size of a ham hock, in a clumsy but comforting gesture. “Flynn is horrible garbage goblin,” he says. “As I call him before. When he get back, I take him out and shake him very hard. You are very good lady, Lucy. Very strong. You give people chances when they not deserve. I am sorry how it is.”

“Thanks.” Lucy glances up at him. “I was thinking. Do you and Gennady want to come back to England with me? We’ll probably need to rescue our other friend, her name is Jiya. Rufus and I can’t pull it off by ourselves.”

“Lady needs rescue?” All of Anton’s Prince Charming sensibilities appear to have been activated on the instant. “Yes, of course we go. Flynn can think about poor life choices alone.”

Lucy snorts, feeling a little better. For his part, Anton does not juggle, but he offers to sing her a long Russian folk song, which Lucy graciously allows to hear a few stanzas of. He can’t really sing, but it’s sweet, and when he admits that he can’t remember any more of it, she thanks him and goes over to see how Rufus is doing. He has been watching the entire thing with the expression of an audience member at a blockbuster film, and glances up at Lucy with a look wondering if she’ll explain or he has to ask. Finally he says, “So, that whole married-for-ten-years argument, that was interesting.”

“That’s not what happened there.” Lucy feels her cheeks starting to heat. “And it seems to be how most of our meetings end up. With the arguing, that is.”

“Yeah, I see what you were saying about it going back and forth. Flynn seems like a real winner. I mean, it’s not like you got to pick who else in this world was going to be fighting Rittenhouse, but are you sure he’s worth the hassle?”

Lucy doesn’t answer, fussing unnecessarily with the burlap sacks that are serving Rufus in poor stead as blankets. Then she says, “Whenever the St. Petersburg port opens, we’ll get out of here. I’ll take you to London, I’m pretty sure Ada would be happy to put you up in her house. I’m not sure what I’ll do about Oxford. Maybe finish the rest of the semester, then leave.”

Rufus glances up at the tone in her voice. “Doesn’t sound like you really want to.”

“No,” Lucy says quietly. “No, I don’t want to. I’ve loved it more than anything. The city is magical and beautiful, my students are such interesting and passionate young women and I’ve been able to teach them things that nobody else has even thought about. I’ve gotten to have something like a normal life again, not just endlessly fighting and jumping through time. I’ve gotten to have roots again. A place to stay. Yes, well, I’ve inadvertently scandalized most of the faculty and students, but they got used even to that. But it would be beyond selfish for me to keep doing that, and leave you and Jiya and Ada and Wyatt and Flynn and everyone else to fight Rittenhouse, when what they’re doing here could change all of reality. I can’t sit out.”

Rufus looks at her with hesitant, uncertain sympathy, before he reaches out to take her hand, and they hold tightly. Lucy wonders if she should tell him about the revenant and the possibility of it being Amy, but decides that can come later. They have enough to deal with at present, and she doesn’t feel like Rufus would be all that enthused at the news of a murderous shadow monster stalking her heels. Instead they wait. And wait.

As the rest of the morning drains by and the afternoon goes equally slowly, Lucy – despite her resolve to stay mad at Flynn at least until he gets back – starts to worry. She paces and stares at the door, listening hard every time there are footsteps passing outside, fighting a swoop in her stomach every time they continue on without stopping. The distant sound of wailing klaxons aren’t helping her nerves either, and she isn’t sure if that’s related to the Rufus investigation or some entirely new calamity. Finally she says to Anton, “How long do you think it would take? Just to raid Sibley’s office, and leave?”

“If it was only that, not so long. But if they are caught, have to run for it, shoot way out, maybe longer.” Anton looks anxious as well, though he is clearly trying to keep his chin up for her sake. “Maybe clerk hurry and tell someone that he had to give up address, they have people waiting in case of attack.”

Lucy feels suddenly and unforgivably naïve that she didn’t think of that possibility. After all, she is the one who sent Flynn there, the one who gave him the information and told him that she didn’t give a rat’s ass if he got killed or not. A thick, sludgy feeling of horrible guilt crawls through her gut, making her swallow hard and stop in her tracks. “Oh God, is he – is he going to think I set him up or something? Led him purposefully into a trap?”

“Don’t know that is what happened,” Anton points out. “They could just have to take very long way back. Or hide out. Or – ”

At that moment, he is interrupted by the sound of footsteps that are very definitely coming this way, and he snaps into action. He shoves Lucy down on the sacks next to Rufus, heaves several fully loaded crates in front of them as a makeshift barricade, and draws his gun, pointing it warily at the door. Trying to peer out around the crates, Lucy waits, heart in her mouth, as the bar rattles and it swings open. If it’s the police, if it’s Rittenhouse – if it’s somehow worse, if it’s the gang with Flynn or without him and he’s not –

“Down!” a familiar voice says, sounding alarmed. “Bloody hell!”

“Karl?” Anton (and Lucy) stares at the bedraggled remnants of the strike team: Karl himself, the younger Taylor, and Gennady, all of them looking extremely bloody and dirty and grim. The older Taylor and Flynn aren’t there. “What in fucking hellfire – excuse my very bad language, Lucy, please excuse – just happened?”

“I’ll tell you what happened.” Karl wipes his filthy face on his arm, throwing down his spent revolver. “It was a trap from the start, that’s what it was. Guess the telegraph clerk ran off pronto to tell his Rittenhouse bosses to expect company, so that’s what they did. We got to Sibley’s office, went inside, and five minutes later, full house assault. John Taylor’s dead, they had to shoot him six times before they finished him off. We managed to hold our position inside the office for hours, but they called in more reinforcements. They got the boss, they dragged him away. Still alive the last time we saw him, they’ll want to grill him for information. The three of us barely made it out of there with our skins.”

A ghastly, stomach-churning silence falls in the wake of those words. It’s about as bad as it possibly can be – in fact, it’s worse. Rittenhouse has Flynn, they took Flynn prisoner, they’re definitely going to torture him in hopes of making him talk. Even if (as seems likely) he won’t, there is no scenario whatsoever in which they let him go alive. He has caused them too much trouble, and they have been hunting him for too long. If they chose to sell him back to the British government, they could ask for whatever political concessions or special powers they wanted in exchange, when he is the most wanted criminal in the entire United Kingdom and the egg has progressively accrued on the face of Gladstone’s government and the Metropolitan Police as they failed to catch him. Rittenhouse can do anything they want with Flynn, and get everything they want in return. Catastrophe barely does this justice. And Lucy – inadvertently, but still – sent him straight into the jaws of the trap.

“Oh my God,” Lucy says at last, which is impossibly inadequate, but is the only thing she can think of. There’s no choice, there’s no alternate option. “We have to save him.”

As far as predicaments go, Garcia Flynn has been in – he is sure – worse ones than this. But admittedly, just at present, they are not coming to mind.

He has taken a serious pounding, he’s fairly sure he’s been shot at least once by the stabbing pain in his leg, and he is well aware that he is, to put it gently, fucked. He was dragged off by the police and whatever local rented thugs Rittenhouse has acquired, hit a few more times when he kept fighting, and his ear is ringing in a way that means it might have taken considerable damage. Now he is crammed into some tiny, bleak holding cell, and his odds of getting out are very bad. He has a confused impression of seeing at least one member of the gang down – he thinks it was a Taylor – and the rest scattered. He doesn’t know if they got away. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, if they made it back to Lucy or not, if she –

Lucy. That thought hurts the most of all, and given his present dismal state of repairs, both mental and physical, that is saying a lot. He tries to roll onto his back, grunts as his back registers its extreme objections, and remains where he is, half-sprawled on his side in the darkness, like a dangerous animal thrown in a cage. His cheek is sticky with blood where it presses to the metal, and there’s a rattling sound in his chest where he breathes. Rittenhouse isn’t going to get much sport out of hurting him, at this rate. Well, he’s sure they will anyway, because they’re the worst and they’ve been waiting long enough that they’ll take full advantage. But –

Did Lucy know? Did she send him there on purpose? I honestly could not care less if you got yourself killed. Was that the warning, and he missed it? Flynn is well aware that his behavior, over the general span of their acquaintance and then again today, has been far from exemplary, and perhaps she finally axed the entire ill-fated experiment of their collaboration for good. But why after it was almost working, and why especially after last night? Was it a vindictively cold-blooded move to get revenge on him for turning her down? That would be callous beyond belief, something that Lucy, for all her fierceness, doesn’t seem to intrinsically possess. And it wasn’t – that wasn’t what he – he knows and he doesn’t, it is tangled and twisted and raw, wrapping around him like a strangler snake, and he can’t breathe as it tightens.

Last night, lying next to her in bed, with her soft and warm and nuzzled into his side, looking at him with those big dark eyes as he told her about the Raven King… even now, Flynn’s stomach turns over at the memory. It took every inch of his self-control not to grab her, to roll her over beneath him and bear her down into the mattress, take her until there was no space or separation left, but he has never in his life touched a woman like that and there is no way he is going to start now. Not with her, not in the least. She deserves someone who would come to her with gentleness and care, someone younger and less shop-worn, who could devote himself to nothing but making her happy. Self-evidently, a widowed forty-three-year-old ex-monster hunter crime boss, international fugitive, and ruthless anarchist is not that man. Not with the ghost of a murdered daughter that shrieks in his nightmares, and a quest for vengeance that – well. Was probably always fated to end up like this. So he sabotaged himself, he pushed her away, he set out to viciously prove to himself that she would never want him. In that, at least, he has spectacularly succeeded. This is what he wanted, isn’t it? Burning it all down?

Flynn works his tongue gingerly around his mouth, testing for broken or missing teeth. They seem to be still in place, though they ache like pieces of red-hot iron in his jaw, and this is not an unqualified blessing. He doesn’t see much point in struggling to get out of here. He can’t, clearly, and there will just be more of them on the other side. He has never cared about the odds or the number of enemies before, but now, he is finally too tired to keep fighting. He’s old enough to know that he can’t take an unlimited pummeling, and he needs to save what strength he does have. For what, he doesn’t know. Dying with dignity?

Some indeterminate time passes. Flynn wanders in and out of consciousness. Sometimes he thinks he sees shadows bending over him, once he swears he feels the brush of Lorena’s hand on his face, the distant echo of Iris’ laugh, and wonders if this is some new torment the revenant has cooked up, if it’s drawing closer in the dark, come to feed on him by insidiously making him forget, in fits and starts, that they were ever gone. To believe, to hope, to want, and then wake up, and relive the loss all over again.

(Lucy. He feels horribly guilty, and he doesn’t think he should want it, given as there is still the possibility that she deliberately betrayed him, but he keeps looking for her among the phantoms, and she isn’t even there.)

After some while, Flynn is aware of the cage being lifted, moved, loaded onto something and wheeled along with bumping jolts. His captors appear to be taking him somewhere. He can hear them talking in an indistinct blend of Russian and English, but his bruised, feverish brain is not up to the task of interpreting both at once. The walls of his prison are solid steel, so he can’t see out, and they are clearly taking no chances with his escape. He has to remain curled up in more or less a ball, since he is a big man and it is a small box. There is a large barred slit overhead for ventilation, and also presumably for them to toss food in from time to time. He wonders if they’re going to do that, or make him beg. They are in for an unhappy surprise if so. If this is the end, he’d rather just get it over with.

Flynn can smell coal smoke, and what sounds like the hiss and click of iron wheels on track. At that, he blurrily realizes where they must in fact be taking him. Whether if it’s a more convenient interrogation point away from prying eyes in the city, or they have something more spectacular planned for him, or want to demonstrate their success in building his railway to the tsar – why not? Out in the winter wilds, out in the depths of nowhere, no one will ever see him again.

“Matija.” The word is a hushed croak, all Flynn can get through his aching throat. He has a sudden memory of when he was a boy – he doesn’t remember exactly how old, seven or eight – passing a fence post with a raven painted on it, GK scratched beneath. The way he had a sense that as long as he stood on that exact spot, the boundaries between the worlds were thin as silk, clear as glass, and he might take another step on the path he had walked a thousand times and find himself lost in Faerie. The way a cloud passed over the sun, and he looked up and saw a flock of ravens winging on the wind. A meaningless coincidence, his father would have insisted. Asher Flynn, born Aleksandr Kovačić, a young idealist who changed his name and moved to the West in hope of making a fortune, then returned home to Šibenik as an angry, disillusioned atheist with a young American wife, a drinking problem, and eyes that always burned like dark coals. Flynn doesn’t remember being so scared of anything in his life as he was of his father’s eyes when they were angry. Not even the grimmest monsters (small wonder he ran away to join the hunters at age fifteen) of the darkest woods could compare.

“Matija,” Flynn whispers again. “Matija Korvin. The woods are yours. The sky is yours. The night is yours, and so too the morning. The hedges are your gateways, the stones your servants. In the earth you plant your staff, in the green you spread your roots. You are the branches upon which your children rest, and the wings on which they fly. I am only a servant, kneeling before the King. I call you from the dark, and I offer you my fealty.”

It’s a very old prayer, and he’s said most of it in Croatian because that’s how he learned it from his grandmother Katja, a formidable and bitter old crone who scared the children away from her house in the village and was constantly suspected (not without reason, Flynn thinks, Iris had to get it from somewhere) of being a witch. She was never impressed with Aleksandr for moving to the West, nor for bringing home Maria Thompkins, and spent most of her time making her daughter-in-law’s life miserable for not knowing how to cook and speak the language and otherwise instantly absorb the habits of their ancient town on the Adriatic coast. Flynn has complicated memories of her, to say the least. But Katja Kovačić was not about to let her grandson grow up without knowing his culture and his heritage, and the proper prayers to the King, the one he was never supposed to tell the priest about. She gave him that, at least.

“Matija… Korvin.” You’re supposed to call him three times by his full name for the proper effect, Flynn remembers. There is another bump and jolt, and it feels as if his cage has been loaded onto the train. He hears a piercing whistle, feels a gust of frigid air, and knows it is only going to get colder. He is actively struggling to maintain consciousness, and feels the dark tugging at him with alluring, relentless hands. “Matija… Korvin…”

Not a damn thing, so far as he can tell, happens as a result. He feels ludicrous, trusting in old wives’ tales and children’s stories for his deliverance, when he might as well have asked the cage to spring open of its own accord, for all the locks to unbind and the train’s engine to spit bolts and shut down. Technology does not tend to work in the places where you find the marks of the raven. Flynn closes his blood-crusted eyes and lets his head drop onto the floor. He cannot remember a time, recently or perhaps ever, when he has felt so utterly, desolately empty.

Once more, the whistle sounds. The train starts to move. The wheels click on the track, he can sense St. Petersburg dwindling behind them like a dream lost on waking, and so, Garcia Flynn begins the long, last journey to Siberia.

[connollyeloise-blog]

Nick Cleaver interview - primary research

What kind of work do you do?

Nick works with the Canal and River Trust and mainly works with exploring why people use the canal and how he can get people to visit the canals. He also helps a lot with cleaning up the canals and clearing plastic, painting the locks and keeping up the overall appearance of the canal. “Think of us a bit like the National Trust, without them, all of these old historic buildings wouldn’t be able to be maintained. The Canal and River Trust is similar, yet it is to do with canals and rivers. We look after the heritage and history.”

Attracting people to the canals

“We want to broaden the basis of people who come and visit the canals. We used to always get the same kind of people, mostly older and of the same interests however the people who live around the canal are a lot more diverse than that, we need to attract them. One of the ways of doing this is by creating new things that people will look at and graffiti is one of them. No one in Birmingham lives further than a mile and a half away from a canal so it is important that local people visit.”

When railways and lorries took over, canals were bricked up and no longer used, they were abandoned. Now in the 21stcentury, especially with the development of Brindley Place, it is a great example that you can do with canals and it attracts people to visit. So now, the trust works with developers to ensure the canals are part of the development and not simply left to the side. There is something coming up soon where they are building an urban village near Ladywood in Birmingham where social housing is built near the canals, but they have made sure it is integrated in the plans to make it a nice place to be.

Negatives associated with the graffiti on the canals

Historically, people saw graffiti as vandalism and people wanted to clear it up whereas now they want to keep it as art and also it would cost thousands to clear it all up just for it to be repainted over, if you can’t beat them, join them.

There are places where graffiti really isn’t appropriate due to some of the historically significant parts of the canals. Because heritage is important and looked after in this country, people are interested in this because it shows history and a lot of tourists come to see that. Sometimes if people graffiti over these old sites and historical aspects of the canal, that it is a “me me me” world and they’re only putting their art on these things to put their stamp on it and get their name out there.

What is the Canal and River Trust's perspectives and involvement with the graffiti/artwork along the canal?

“I’m 52 but I’m learning all the lingo of the graffiti.”

“The biggest divide is between street art and what they call ‘graph’ writing which is usually just names and then street art. “

The people who have to maintain the canals, who work in the river trust, tend to hate the graffiti and see it as a nuisance. However, it can’t be like a preserved, untouched railway, it has to be a living thing. So, the trust has now changed its perspective so people can see the canals as walking routes, jogging routes cycling roots, etc. He mentions why would people cycle on the Bristol road and weave through dangerous traffic than take a simple, quiet route on the canal. They should be used by the public as open spaces in the middle of a clustered, busy city.

“The perception that the canals are dangerous can be partly due to the graffiti. We, as a trust, could spend our lives cleaning up the graffiti however we realised some of it is really good and it is actually very vibrant. (He knows a lot about the graffiti culture and is actually quite passionate about it, he doesn’t see it as a nuisance but more of an opportunity to bring people to the canal and bring some new culture to it.”

He does however ‘hate’ the people who don’t take their time to create some nice artwork because it is a pain to remove. “We realise we have to get much better at cleaning it off however it is very difficult. There is a recognition within the trust that we need to get better at that though. We can’t actually encourage graffiti because the artists like to think they are above the law so we have to create the spaces where good art can happen with their own incentive do create the artwork themselves.”

The Trust have commissioned 3 pieces in Birmingham including Lucy’s. “We don’t need Banksy; we’ve got our own local artists that are good enough and locally recognized as well as recognized across the world. We need people from the local communities that are known for their art. Our strategy is to allow graffiti where appropriate for example Digbeth where obviously it is a big part of the culture. It was a sensible place to put it so we tried a commission wall there, at the moment it is a mess! But it will always be painted over with better work eventually so you can’t fight it.”

He also works very closely with Birmingham artist Lucy McLaughlin and has even helped her paint one of her pieces. He explained how she is embarking on a new project to create a street art trail along the canal where she will paint graffiti and leave room for others to do so too.

“I work with the grand union canal, I’m more about community engagement. Designed to analyze footfall, improve the environment and encourage people from the local area, we were pretty successful in Birmingham so now the trust is doing that in every canal across the country. The small improvements make huge differences here because sometimes all that needs done is getting rid of litter etc. Hopefully we have now set up groups of people who will come to the canals on a regular basis to maintain it. These groups basically ‘adopt’ these areas and look after them.”

Moving forward

-       Print some copies of your magazine out and try email the contacts he gave to see if they will put the zine in their offices etc

-       Fb page – community routes Birmingham, canal and river trust community routes Coventry - join these pages

-       Mention volunteering in the magazine, the trust are more likely to help with getting our magazine out there if it encourages people to volunteer and help out with the canals. Sell the canal in the magazine, he will email links we can put in the zine to encourage volunteers etc. the more people we ca get volunteering, the more people can view artwork. Mention that people can volunteer to get involved and make a difference.

-       He mentioned he could actually do a kind of ‘tour’ for us mentioning interesting facts about the canal round Digbeth etc.

-       Ask the contacts he’s mentioned if they would possibly like copies of our magazine because they could potentially want copies of it.

-       Talk to the guys at ‘Minerva’? works, talk to Grand Union and a gallery called ‘Centralla’?,– mention nick in all emails so we are more likely to get a response.

(interview conducted by Eloise and Niyran)

[uwartlibrary-blog]

What We’re Reading:  Mel Chin, “Engineered Content,” Art in America, May 2018

Whether working with augmented reality systems or sculpting in bronze, Mel Chin aims to foster social justice through his art.  

Article by Eleanor Heartney

“Engineered Content” dives into the practice of Mel Chin, on the occasion of a survey of his work, “Mel Chin:  All Over the Place” at the Queens Museum of Art.  From his inclusion at the Whitney Museum’s 1994 exhibition “Black Male” to his battle with the National Endowment of Art over his piece, “Revival Field,” to his latest work, “Flint Fit” which debuts at the Queens Museum, “Engineered Content” explores the themes that have occupied Chin throughout his career:  social justice, equity, cultural understanding, and human rights.  According to his bio on his website:  

Chin’s art, which is both analytical and poetic, evades easy classification. He is known for the broad range of approaches in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork and works that conjoin cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas.   

Photograph by Philippe Rohdewald

In “Flint Fit,” Chin collected a fifty-foot trailer full of plastic bottles from Fint, Michigan.  Chin had been in Flint as part of his Fundred Dollar Bill Project where he traveled to across the country and taught young people about the problem of lead poisoning and possible solutions.  Participants in the meetings drew $100 dollar bills which Chin had originally planned to deliver to Congress to demand an equal amount of funding to confront the problem of lead poisoning.  With “Flint Fit,” Chin took the bottles to Unifi, a recycling plant in Greensboro, North Carolina, that transformed the bottles into cloth.  He then enlisted designer Tracy Reese, who created swimwear and rain gear from the cloth.  Women employed at the Flint-based St. Luke N.E.W. Life Center for social services sewed the garments.  For more about Flint Fit, see its website:  http://flint-fit.com/  

Mel Chin:  All Over the Place runs through August 12, 2018.

Partial view of Mel Chin’s installation “Sea to See”, 2014, wood, glass, steel, projectors, and mixed mediums; two hemispheres, each 12 feet in diameter. Photo Brandon Scott.

A selection of books in the Library with information on Mel Chin:

Chin, Mel, Lash, Miranda Isabel, and New Orleans Museum of Art, Host Institution. Mel Chin : Rematch. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2014. Art Library Stacks   N6537.C492 A4 2014

Huerta, Benito, Chin, Mel, Lippard, Lucy R, ExhibitsUSA, and Western Gallery. Inescapable Histories : Mel Chin : An Exhibition. Kansas City, Mo. : [Seattle]: ExhibitsUSA, Mid-America Arts Alliance ; [Distributed By] University of Washington Press, 1996. Suzzallo and Allen Libraries Stacks   N6537.C49 I55 1996

Chin, Mel, Flynn, Nick, and Menil Collection, Issuing Body. The Funk & Wag from A to Z. Houston, Texas: Menil Collection, 2014. Art LibraryStacks   N6537.C492 A64 2014 

Stuhlman, Jonathan., Doerr, Anthony, Chin, Mel, and Mint Museum. Connecting the World : The Panama Canal at 100. Charlotte, North Carolina: Mint Museum, 2014. [”Sea to See” was part of the exhibition] Suzzallo and Allen Libraries Stacks   N8214.5.P2 C66 2014 

Marras, Amerigo. ECO-TEC : Architecture of the In-between. 1st ed. StoreFront Books ; 3. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. Built Environments Library General Stacks  NA2542.35 .E34 1999

Friedman, Martin. Visions of America : Landscape as Metaphor in the Late Twentieth Century. Denver, Colo.] : [Columbus, Ohio] : [New York]: Denver Art Museum ; Columbus Museum of Art ; Distributed by H.N. Abrams, 1994. Art LibraryStacks   N8214.5.U6 V58 1994 and other locations

Weintraub, Linda., Danto, Arthur C., and McEvilley, Thomas. Art on the Edge and over : Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society, 1970s-1990s. Litchfield, CT: Art Insights, 1996. Odegaard Undergraduate Library Stacks   N6490 .W42 1996 and other locations

Lash, Miranda Isabel, Schoonmaker, Trevor, Camposeco, Diego, and Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Organizer, Host Institution. Southern Accent : Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art. Durham, North Carolina: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2016. Art Library Stacks   N6520 .S64 2016

Burton, Johanna, Jackson, Shannon, and Willsdon, Dominic. Public Servants : Art and the Crisis of the Common Good. Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England: MIT Press, 2016. Art Library Stacks   NX180.S6 P84 2016

Liese, Jennifer, and Paper Monument. Social Medium : Artists Writing, 2000-2015. Brooklyn, New York: Paper Monument, 2016. Art Library Stacks   N7452 .S624 2016 

Artist’s website:  http://www.melchin.org/

[healthandfitnessrecipes-blog]

The Surgeon Who Experimented on Slaves

https://healthandfitnessrecipes.com/?p=1189

Their names—at least the ones we know—were Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. There were other women, but their identities have been forgotten.

The man whose name appears in medical textbooks, whose likeness is memorialized in statues, is J. Marion Sims. Celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims practiced the surgical techniques that made him famous on enslaved women: Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the unknown others. He performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone, all without anesthesia, as it was not yet widespread. He also invented the modern speculum, and the Sims’s position for vaginal exams, both of which he first used on these women.

That Sims achieved all this has long won him acclaim; how he achieved all this—by experimenting on enslaved women—started being included in his story much more recently. And on Tuesday morning, in the face of growing controversy, New York City moved a statue honoring him out of Central Park.

The move came after decades of concerted effort by historians, scholars, and activists to reexamine Sims’s legacy. Medical professionals, especially gynecologists, have not always taken kindly to criticism from outsiders. Sims was one of their own. To implicate him, his defenders implied, is to implicate medicine in mid-19th century America.

The first serious challenge to Sims’s lionization came in a 1976 book by the historian G.J. Barker-Benfield titled The Horrors of the Half-Known. Barker-Benfield juxtaposed Sims’s “extremely active, adventurous policy of surgical interference with woman’s sexual organs” with his considerable ambition and self-interest. The man who once admitted “if there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis,” took to gynecology with a “monomania” once he realized it was his ticket to fame and fortune, writes Barker-Benfield.

In response, during the 1978 annual meeting of the American Gynecological Society, doctors took turns vigorously defending Sims against Barker-Benfield’s book. The most fervent of them was Lawrence I. Hester Jr., who said, “I rise not to reappraise J. Marion Sims, but to praise him.” He then announced that his institution, the Medical University of South Carolina, which Sims also attended, was raising $750,000 for an endowed chair named after J. Marion Sims.

Another doctor, Irwin Kaiser, in a more tempered defense asked the audience to consider how Sims ultimately helped the enslaved women he experimented upon. The surgery that he practiced on Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the other enslaved women was to repair a vesicovaginal fistula—a devastating complication of prolonged labor. When a baby’s head presses for too long in the birth canal, tissue can die from lack of blood, forming a hole between the vagina and the bladder. The condition can be embarrassing, as women with it are unable to control urination. “Women with fistulas became social outcasts,” said Kaiser. “In the long run, they had reasons to be grateful that Sims had cured them of urinary leakage.” He concluded that Sims was “a product of his era.”

This did not quell criticisms, of course. Over the next few decades, scholars continued to criticize Sims’s practice of experimenting on enslaved women. The story became well-known enough to join a list of commonly cited examples—along with the Tuskegee experiments and Henrietta Lacks—of how the American medical system has exploited African Americans.

Medical textbooks, however, were slow to mention the controversy over Sims’s legacy. A 2011 study found that they continued to celebrate Sims’s achievement, often uncritically. “In contrast to the vigorous debate of Sims’s legacy in historical texts and even in the popular press, medical textbooks and journals have largely remained static in their portrayal of Sims as surgical innovator,” the authors wrote.

In recent years, one of the most prominent defenders of Sims’s legacy has been Lewis Wall, a surgeon and an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Wall has traveled to Africa to perform the vesicovaginal fistula surgery that Sims pioneered, and he has seen firsthand what a difference it makes in women’s lives. “Sims’s modern critics have discounted the enormous suffering experienced by fistula victims,” he wrote in a 2006 paper. “The evidence suggests that Sims’s original patients were willing participants in his surgical attempts to cure their affliction—a condition for which no other viable therapy existed at that time.” Wall also defended Sims on the charge that he refused to give anesthesia only to black patients. Anesthesia was not yet widespread in 1845, and physicians who trained without anesthesia sometimes preferred their patients to be awake.

There is debate over whether Sims’s specific surgical practices were unusually gruesome for his time. But his practice of operating on enslaved women was certainly not unusual. He wrote about it openly. It is this ordinariness that is noteworthy.

Sims was able to advance so quickly, argues Deirdre Cooper Owens, a historian at Queens College, City University of New York, in her book, Medical Bondage, because he had access to bodies—first enslaved women in the south, and later also poor Irish women when he moved to New York. “These institutions that existed in this country, which allowed easy access to enslaved women’s bodies [and] poor women’s bodies, allowed certain branches of professional medicine to advance and grow and to also become legitimate,” she says. The history of medicine has often been written as the history of great men. Owens wants to the turn the focus from the doctors hailed as heroes to the forgotten patients.

This first part—taking the focus away from Sims—is happening. In 2006, the University of Alabama at Birmingham removed a painting that depicted Sims as one of the “Medical Giants of Alabama.” In February, the Medical University of South Carolina quietly renamed the endowed chair honoring J. Marion Sims—the one announced by Hester after the publication of The Horrors of the Half-Known. The minutes of the board of trustees meeting where it happened did not even mention Sims’s name—just the new name of the endowed chair. “The decision was made in recognition of the controversial and polarizing nature of this historical figure despite his contributions to the medical field,” a MUSC spokesperson confirmed in an email to The Atlantic.

The J. Marion Sims statue that stood in Central Park is being relocated to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Sims is buried. There, the New York Times reports, the statue will be demoted to a lower pedestal and displayed with a sign explaining the statue’s history. There may be an opportunity, now, to use the statue to tell the full story—to tell the stories of Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the other enslaved women and their place in the history of medicine.

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2018/04/AP_18107516672844/lead_960.jpg Credits: Original Content Source

[jthurlow]

Part III -The Boon of the Huge Monster Ditch, St Lucie Canal

-Stuart News 50th Anniversary Edition, 1964.Today I will complete part three, the final portion of my transcription of an historic 1964 Stuart News, anniversary edition from my mother’s archives. She actually shared this article with me over a year ago and I was so taken by it that I thought it may be an inspiration for a book. I never got around to it, thus now I am sharing on my blog as part of…

[nancygduarteus]

The Surgeon Who Experimented on Slaves

Their names—at least the ones we know—were Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. There were other women, but their identities have been forgotten.

The man whose name appears in medical textbooks, whose likeness is memorialized in statues, is J. Marion Sims. Celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims practiced the surgical techniques that made him famous on enslaved women: Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the unknown others. He performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone, all without anesthesia, as it was not yet widespread. He also invented the modern speculum, and the Sims’ position for vaginal exams, both of which he first used on these women.

That Sims achieved all this has long won him acclaim; how he achieved all this—by experimenting on enslaved women—started being included in his story much more recently. And on Tuesday morning, in the face of growing controversy, New York City moved a statue honoring him out of Central Park.

The move came after decades of concerted effort by historians, scholars, and activists to reexamine Sims’s legacy. Medical professionals, especially gynecologists, have not always taken kindly to criticism from outsiders. Sims was one of their own. To implicate him, his defenders implied, is to implicate medicine in mid-19th century America.

The first serious challenge to Sims’s lionization came in a 1976 book by historian G.J. Barker-Benfield titled The Horrors of the Half-Known. Barker-Benfield juxtaposed Sims’s “extremely active, adventurous policy of surgical interference with woman’s sexual organs” with his considerable ambition and self-interest. The man who once admitted “if there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis,” took to gynecology with a “monomania” once he realized it was his ticket to fame and fortune, writes Barker-Benfield.

In response, during the 1978 annual meeting of the American Gynecological Society, doctors took turns vigorously defending Sims against Barker-Benfield’s book. The most fervent of them was Lawrence I. Hester Jr., who said, “I rise not to reappraise J. Marion Sims, but to praise him.” He then announced that his institution, the Medical University of South Carolina, which Sims also attended, was raising $750,000 for an endowed chair named after J. Marion Sims.

Another doctor, Irwin Kaiser, in a more tempered defense asked the audience to consider how Sims ultimately helped the enslaved women he experimented upon. The surgery that he practiced on Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the other enslaved women was to repair a vesicovaginal fistula—a devastating complication of prolonged labor. When a baby’s head presses for too long in the birth canal, tissue can die from lack of blood, forming a hole between the vagina and the bladder. The condition can be embarrassing, as women with it are unable to control urination. “Women with fistulas became social outcasts,” said Kaiser. “In the long run, they had reasons to be grateful that Sims had cured them of urinary leakage.” He concluded that Sims was “a product of his era.”

This did not quell criticisms, of course. Over the next few decades, scholars continued to criticize Sims’s practice of experimenting on enslaved women. The story became well-known enough to join a list of commonly cited examples—along with the Tuskegee experiments and Henrietta Lacks—of how the American medical system has exploited African Americans.

Medical textbooks, however, were slow to mention the controversy over Sims’s legacy. A 2011 study found that they continued to celebrate Sims’s achievement, often uncritically. “In contrast to the vigorous debate of Sims’ legacy in historical texts and even in the popular press, medical textbooks and journals have largely remained static in their portrayal of Sims as surgical innovator,” the authors wrote.

In recent years, one of the most prominent defenders of Sims’s legacy has been Lewis Wall, a surgeon and an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Wall has traveled to Africa to perform the vesicovaginal fistula surgery that Sims pioneered, and he has seen firsthand what a difference it makes in women’s lives. “Sims’s modern critics have discounted the enormous suffering experienced by fistula victims,” he wrote in a 2006 paper. “The evidence suggests that Sims’s original patients were willing participants in his surgical attempts to cure their affliction—a condition for which no other viable therapy existed at that time.” Wall also defended Sims on the charge that he refused to give anesthesia only to black patients. Anesthesia was not yet widespread in 1845, and physicians who trained without anesthesia sometimes preferred their patients to be awake.

There is debate over whether Sims’s specific surgical practices were unusually gruesome for his time. But his practice of operating on enslaved women was certainly not unusual. He wrote about it openly. It is this ordinariness that is noteworthy.

Sims was able to advance so quickly, argues Deirdre Cooper Owens, a historian at Queens College, City University of New York, in her book, Medical Bondage, because he had access to bodies—first enslaved women in the south, and later also poor Irish women when he moved to New York. “These institutions that existed in this country, which allowed easy access to enslaved women’s bodies [and] poor women’s bodies, allowed certain branches of professional medicine to advance and grow and to also become legitimate,” she says. The history of medicine has often been written as the history of great men. Owens wants to the turn the focus from the doctors hailed as heroes to the forgotten patients.

This first part—taking the focus away from Sims—is happening. In 2006, the University of Alabama at Birmingham removed a painting that depicted Sims as one of the “Medical Giants of Alabama.” In February, the Medical University of South Carolina quietly renamed the endowed chair honoring J. Marion Sims—the one announced by Hester after the publication of The Horrors of the Half-Known. The minutes of the board of trustees meeting where it happened did not even mention Sims’s name—just the new name of the endowed chair. “The decision was made in recognition of the controversial and polarizing nature of this historical figure despite his contributions to the medical field,” a MUSC spokesperson confirmed in an email to The Atlantic.

The J. Marion Sims statue that stood in Central Park is being relocated to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Sims is buried. There, the New York Times reports, the statue will be demoted to a lower pedestal and displayed with a sign explaining the statue’s history. There may be an opportunity, now, to use the statue to tell the full story—to tell the stories of Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the other enslaved women and their place in the history of medicine.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/04/j-marion-sims/558248/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

The Surgeon Who Experimented on Slaves

Their names—at least the ones we know—were Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. There were other women, but their identities have been forgotten.

The man whose name appears in medical textbooks, whose likeness is memorialized in statues, is J. Marion Sims. Celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims practiced the surgical techniques that made him famous on enslaved women: Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the unknown others. He performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone, all without anesthesia, as it was not yet widespread. He also invented the modern speculum, and the Sims’ position for vaginal exams, both of which he first used on these women.

That Sims achieved all this has long won him acclaim; how he achieved all this—by experimenting on enslaved women—started being included in his story much more recently. And on Tuesday morning, in the face of growing controversy, New York City moved a statue honoring him out of Central Park.

The move came after decades of concerted effort by historians, scholars, and activists to reexamine Sims’s legacy. Medical professionals, especially gynecologists, have not always taken kindly to criticism from outsiders. Sims was one of their own. To implicate him, his defenders implied, is to implicate medicine in mid-19th century America.

The first serious challenge to Sims’s lionization came in a 1976 book by historian G.J. Barker-Benfield titled The Horrors of the Half-Known. Barker-Benfield juxtaposed Sims’s “extremely active, adventurous policy of surgical interference with woman’s sexual organs” with his considerable ambition and self-interest. The man who once admitted “if there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis,” took to gynecology with a “monomania” once he realized it was his ticket to fame and fortune, writes Barker-Benfield.

In response, during the 1978 annual meeting of the American Gynecological Society, doctors took turns vigorously defending Sims against Barker-Benfield’s book. The most fervent of them was Lawrence I. Hester Jr., who said, “I rise not to reappraise J. Marion Sims, but to praise him.” He then announced that his institution, the Medical University of South Carolina, which Sims also attended, was raising $750,000 for an endowed chair named after J. Marion Sims.

Another doctor, Irwin Kaiser, in a more tempered defense asked the audience to consider how Sims ultimately helped the enslaved women he experimented upon. The surgery that he practiced on Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the other enslaved women was to repair a vesicovaginal fistula—a devastating complication of prolonged labor. When a baby’s head presses for too long in the birth canal, tissue can die from lack of blood, forming a hole between the vagina and the bladder. The condition can be embarrassing, as women with it are unable to control urination. “Women with fistulas became social outcasts,” said Kaiser. “In the long run, they had reasons to be grateful that Sims had cured them of urinary leakage.” He concluded that Sims was “a product of his era.”

This did not quell criticisms, of course. Over the next few decades, scholars continued to criticize Sims’s practice of experimenting on enslaved women. The story became well-known enough to join a list of commonly cited examples—along with the Tuskegee experiments and Henrietta Lacks—of how the American medical system has exploited African Americans.

Medical textbooks, however, were slow to mention the controversy over Sims’s legacy. A 2011 study found that they continued to celebrate Sims’s achievement, often uncritically. “In contrast to the vigorous debate of Sims’ legacy in historical texts and even in the popular press, medical textbooks and journals have largely remained static in their portrayal of Sims as surgical innovator,” the authors wrote.

In recent years, one of the most prominent defenders of Sims’s legacy has been Lewis Wall, a surgeon and an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Wall has traveled to Africa to perform the vesicovaginal fistula surgery that Sims pioneered, and he has seen firsthand what a difference it makes in women’s lives. “Sims’s modern critics have discounted the enormous suffering experienced by fistula victims,” he wrote in a 2006 paper. “The evidence suggests that Sims’s original patients were willing participants in his surgical attempts to cure their affliction—a condition for which no other viable therapy existed at that time.” Wall also defended Sims on the charge that he refused to give anesthesia only to black patients. Anesthesia was not yet widespread in 1845, and physicians who trained without anesthesia sometimes preferred their patients to be awake.

There is debate over whether Sims’s specific surgical practices were unusually gruesome for his time. But his practice of operating on enslaved women was certainly not unusual. He wrote about it openly. It is this ordinariness that is noteworthy.

Sims was able to advance so quickly, argues Deirdre Cooper Owens, a historian at Queens College, City University of New York, in her book, Medical Bondage, because he had access to bodies—first enslaved women in the south, and later also poor Irish women when he moved to New York. “These institutions that existed in this country, which allowed easy access to enslaved women’s bodies [and] poor women’s bodies, allowed certain branches of professional medicine to advance and grow and to also become legitimate,” she says. The history of medicine has often been written as the history of great men. Owens wants to the turn the focus from the doctors hailed as heroes to the forgotten patients.

This first part—taking the focus away from Sims—is happening. In 2006, the University of Alabama at Birmingham removed a painting that depicted Sims as one of the “Medical Giants of Alabama.” In February, the Medical University of South Carolina quietly renamed the endowed chair honoring J. Marion Sims—the one announced by Hester after the publication of The Horrors of the Half-Known. The minutes of the board of trustees meeting where it happened did not even mention Sims’s name—just the new name of the endowed chair. “The decision was made in recognition of the controversial and polarizing nature of this historical figure despite his contributions to the medical field,” a MUSC spokesperson confirmed in an email to The Atlantic.

The J. Marion Sims statue that stood in Central Park is being relocated to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Sims is buried. There, the New York Times reports, the statue will be demoted to a lower pedestal and displayed with a sign explaining the statue’s history. There may be an opportunity, now, to use the statue to tell the full story—to tell the stories of Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the other enslaved women and their place in the history of medicine.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[londontheatre]

Following a sold-out UK premiere at Southwark Playhouse, when it received 6 Off West End Award nominations including Best Musical, The Toxic Avenger The Musical is to play the Arts Theatre for a strictly limited 10-week season from Thursday 28 September 2017.

Joining Mark Anderson, who returns after starring to great acclaim as Melvin/Toxie in the original London production, are: Natalie Hope, Emma Salvo, Oscar Conlon-Morrey and Ché Francis with Peter Bindloss and Sophia Lewis as swings/ understudies.

Based on Lloyd Kaufman’s cult 1984 comedy schlock-horror Troma lm, The Toxic Avenger, The Toxic Avenger The Musical tells the story of the citizens of Tromaville who are crying out for a hero. Enter nerdy Melvin Ferd the Third, an aspiring earth scientist, determined to clean up the state’s major toxic waste problem. When a corrupt Mayor and her government goons get wind of his plans, they vow to stop this heroic feat. Melvin is attacked and tossed into a vat of toxic waste… transforming him instantly into The Toxic Avenger – New Jersey’s rst superhero! Toxie is a 7-foot mutant freak with superhuman strength and a supersized heart to match. His aims are to save heavily polluted New Jersey, end global warming, win the heart of the prettiest (blindest) librarian in town – and get home in time for dinner! Prepare to laugh, scream and sing to songs including ‘Who Will Save New Jersey?” “Get the Geek”, “Thank God She’s Blind” “Hot Toxic Love” and “Choose Me, Oprah!” as ‘Toxie’ rocks the house and saves the day!

[See image gallery at http://ift.tt/1FpwFUw]

  Mark Anderson (Melvin/Toxie) Previous theatre includes: The Toxic Avenger The Musical (Southwark Playhouse); Stiles & Drewe’s Three Little Pigs (International tour); The Book of Mormon Original West End cast (Prince of Wales Theatre); Love Me Tender (National tour); Once Upon A Mattress (Union Theatre); Legally Blonde (National tour); Mary Poppins (National tour); Hello, Dolly! (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre); The Boy Friend (West End); You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown (Tabard Theatre).

Natalie Hope (Mayor) Previous theatre includes: Sweet Charity (Manchester Royal Exchange); Legally Blonde (Leicester Curve Theatre); The Commitments (Palace Theatre, West End); Our House (Savoy Theatre, West End); Sister Act (UK tour); Evita (UK tour); Disney’s High School Musical (UK tour); Fame (Shafesbury Theatre, West End and UK tour); Don’t Stop Believing (UK tour); Rocky Horror Show (UK tour); Laughter in the Rain (UK tour); Beyond the Barricade (UK tour).

Emma Salvo (Sarah) Previous theatre includes: Holy Crap (King’s Head Theatre), Grease (Royal Caribbean), Newsrevue (Canal Cafe Theatre), Sincerely, Mr Toad (UK tour).

Oscar Conlon-Morrey (White Dude) Oscar has just graduated and is making his professional debut.

Ché Francis (Black Dude) Ché has just graduated and is making his professional debut. The Toxic Avenger The Musical is the brainchild of the Tony Award-winning creative team behind the smash hit West End musical Memphis, Joe DiPietro and David Bryan, an original founding member and keyboardist/vocalist for rock giants, Bon Jovi.

Creative team: Director: Benji Sperring. Musical Director: Alex Beetschen. Designer: takis. Lighting Designer: Nic Farman. Choreographer: Lucie Pankhurst. Sound Designer: Andrew Johnson., Produced by Katy Lipson for Aria Entertainment and Derek Nicol and Paul Walden for Flying Entertainment. Performed by arrangement with Music Theatre International (Europe) Limited.

Joe DiPietro – Book and Lyrics Joe’s Broadway and West End hit Memphis won the Tony Award for Best Musical and two additional Tony Awards (Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score Music and Lyrics Written for the Theatre (with David Bryan). Joe was born and raised off Exit 166 in New Jersey and thus has been a Toxic Avenger fan for the last 20 years. Joe wrote the book & lyrics to I LoveYou, You’re Perfect, Now Change, the longest-running musical revue in New York history which has had hundreds of productions across the country and around the world. He also wrote the book and lyrics to the Broadway musical All Shook Up, and the award-winning musical, The Thing About Men, which has played internationally. He lives in Manhattan and Connecticut, but his heart will always be in New Jersey.

David Bryan – Music & Lyrics David is a Keyboard Player and Founding Member of the hit band Bon Jovi. He is also a Singer/Songwriter Composer, Lyricist and Programmer. David Bryan lives near Exit 109 on the Garden State Parkway. He was conceived, born and raised in New Jersey. As a young man, he saw The Toxic Avenger movie at a midnight showing in Newark, and from that day on, he dreamed of writing a musical about the rst mutant superhero from his home state. This show is a ful lment of that dream. David has accomplished some other stuff, too. Bon Jovi are one of the most successful bands in music history. They’ve sold over 130 million records worldwide, performed more than 2,600 concerts in over 50 countries for more than 34 million fans, and were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2006. They’ve survived and thrived the rock and roll years, the grunge years, the rap years and everything in between. For more info on David, visit www.DavidBryan.com.

Benji Sperring (Director) Recent directing credits include: Holy Crap (King’s Head Theatre), How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (Wil- ton’s Music Hall), The Stripper (St James’ Theatre), The Toxic Avenger The Musical (Southwark Playhouse), Shock Treatment (King’s Head Theatre). He was recently appointed an Associate Director of the King’s Head Theatre, Islington.

Lloyd Kaufman, creator of The Toxic Avenger Lloyd is co-founder, with Yale friend Michael Herz, of the 42-year-old legendary Troma Entertainment, arguably the longest-running independent movie studio in North America. He directed many of Troma’s feature lms, including The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD, Tromeo & Juliet and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.

Cast photos from the original London production by Claire Bilyard

LISTINGS INFORMATION THE TOXIC AVENGER THE MUSICAL Arts Theatre Great Newport Street London WC2HL 7JB

http://ift.tt/2oYKQiz LondonTheatre1.com

[jthurlow]

Part II: The Boon of the Monster Ditch, St. Lucie Canal

Today’s post is the second part of a story. A story from the 1964 50th Anniversary Edition of the Stuart News. “Signalizing Half a Century of Growth and Progress in Martin County, Florida.” It is a huge special edition newspaper, 110 pages! The article I am sharing is on page 6-H and is titled ” St. Lucie Canal Approved in 1914, Is Boon to Agriculture Here. Huge Citrus Growth Along Water Route;…

[jthurlow]

"The Boon of the Huge Ditch," St Lucie Canal

“The Boon of the Huge Ditch,” St Lucie Canal

Today, we will continue to study an article of a 1964 50th Anniversary Edition of the Stuart News from my mother’s history archives. We are doing this in light of the upcoming 100 year “anniversary” of the St. Lucie Canal. The title of the this article, published originally in the 1920s is “St Lucie  Canal, Approved in 1914, Is Boon to Agriculture Here. Huge Citrus Growth Along Water Route;…

[jthurlow]

Coming to Terms With a Painful Environmental History-St Lucie Canal 1913-1937

Coming to Terms With a Painful Environmental History-St Lucie Canal 1913-1937

-Part of a series leading up to the 100 year anniversary of the St Lucie Canal (built 1916-1924) as we continue to work to understand and heal this waterway… -Left side of 1913 east coast drainage blueprint, Florida State Archives -Right side of huge 1913 east coast drainage blueprint, Florida State ArchivesTwo days ago was the first day of 2023. As there is always a chance we will once again be…

[jthurlow]

Original Little Locktender's House - St. Lucie Canal

Locktender’s house at St. Lucie Canal lock #2 in the Everglades Drainage District. 1913 (circa). State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. I love this old photograph. I would think it must have been taken sometime between 1916 and 1925 when the Everglades Drainage District was constructing or repairing, (1924), the St. Lucie Canal. Yes, the lonely little house in the wildlands of a slash pine…

[jthurlow]

Two 1924 "Extreme Tropical Cyclone Rainfall Events" Affecting Completion of the St. Lucie Canal

I want to thank Tony Cristaldi of the National Weather Service, Melbourne, Florida, for writing and sharing historic weather information that gives strong insight into why in 1924 the St. Lucie Canal was so damaged that its completion date has been “clouded in history,” and thus the subject of my most recent blog posts. The October 1924 Cuba hurricane is the earliest officially classified…

[jthurlow]

The Great Rain of 1924 - Postponing the St. Lucie Canal

The condition of this October 23, 1924 Stuart Messenger article makes it difficult to read, but it is important to the history of the St. Luice Canal whose 100 year anniversary is coming up next year in 2024. In my research, I have noticed the final date of construction of the canal varies in historic documents. Sometimes I see 1925 or 1926. I have chosen to use 1924 because that is the official…