english revolution - book - 1996 - Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth Century Controversies

Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth Century Controversies
Christopher Hill
Allen Lane
1996
354 pages

Christopher Hill was a major British historian whose specializes in the history of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century.  This history consists of a study of the transition from a full monarchical, feudal society towards a parliamentary government constitutional monarchy where power was shared between various sectors of society.  Probably Hill’s best known work is The World Turned Upside Down, a book about the revolutionary movements of that period (including The Diggers, The Ranters, and The Levellers as well as Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army) although he had written over twenty other books, edited a number of volumes (including an anthology of Digger texts), textbooks, and books about subjects such as the Russian Revolution of 1917.  

Liberty Against the Law is a book published well after Hill retired from academia in 1978.  It is essentially a series of historical sketches of subversive activity in England during the seventeenth century.  The book starts with discussions of issues and controversies surrounding things like the closing off of the commons and its effects on normal people, and the methods by which normal people may supplement the lacks in their life through the use of the forests and progress into brief historical discussions of groups of people who may be identified as subcultures or countercultures, such as pirates or vagabonds.  

Woodcut depicting the Diggers being forced off the common land they're cultivating

Woodcut depicting the Ranters

Woodcut depicting the Levellers' Putney Debates where the constitutional future of England was discussed.

The book is quite large although each chapter is fairly short and provides the reader with a succinct discussion of its topic in regards to its subversive qualities as well as its social value and import to the class which gives rise to it (which, when discussing things like piracy, smuggling, and poaching, is itself subversive).  It should be mentioned that Christopher Hill was an avowed Marxist, and his analysis of historical movements and features of the English underclass (such as vagabondia or a pervasive admiration for the folklore of Robin Hood) is driven by Marxian dialectics.

vagabondia - book - 1995 - The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City

The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City
Margaret Morton
Yale University Press
1995
148 pages

Margaret Morton is a New York City based professor at The Cooper Union School of Art and a photographer who has made a career out of producing images of the city’s homeless communities.  The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City is one of a series of photo-books Morton has published in which the dwelling structures of such marginal populations are represented.  She has called her photographic project The Architecture of Despair, and she has functioned as an advocate for the unpropertied urban poor, in addition to representing their dwellings and lifestyles via the camera lens.  

Morton’s The Tunnel is a photographic companion to Jennifer Toth’s The Mole People, a book already profiled on this blog.  Morton takes a different approach to the subject matter from Toth, choosing to structure it around photographs of the makeshift underground domestic spaces belonging to particular individuals, rather than deploying the journalist's strategies of information gathering.  Still, there is a significant amount of overlap between the two tunnel books.  Toth discusses a man named Bernard who assumes the role of tunnel-dweller representative.  The Tunnel begins with images of a man named Bernard, presumably Toth’s Bernard, and all other individuals in Morton’s book allude to some kind of personal relationship with Bernard.  For both of the tunnel authors Bernard was a diplomat of the underground realm.  Morton’s book is quite rich in the detail it provides of the people who live beneath New York streets, but like with The Mole People, the reader (myself, specifically) is left wondering what existed in the dark underworld beyond the reach of the author’s guide.

Morton creates a immanent experience of the tunnels and their inhabitants for her readers.  She focuses on appealing to the senses of the reader.  Her book includes 60 black and white photographs of tunnel habitations, many of which display many of the amenities of an above ground home (albeit these amenities conditioned by the circumstances of homelessness), including cooking space, decorations (sometimes graffiti murals), seating and bedding, and even pets.  Morton also includes a number of poetic images of the empty tunnels which sometimes featuring graffiti murals, sometimes featuring some of the plant life that manages to grow under the street.  Such photos of vacant tunnels convey a sense of the isolation the tunnel dwellers may feel, but they also convey a sense of peace from the dangers of the city at street level.

In addition to the sense of sight, Morton also appeals to the reader’s sense of hearing.  The book is subdivided into short sections, often under the heading of an individual dweller’s first name.  Accompanying the images pertaining to that dweller is a text of his or her words, transposed from tape-recorded interviews conducted by Morton.  The Tunnel is a textual-oral account of how a number of individuals came to live in NYC’s tunnel system, as the subterranean’s of Morton’s acquaintance describe their (often fractured) relationships with their families, their addictions, and their often Thoreau-esque daily routines.  Morton edited the discussions with the dwellers in her transposition although she attempted to preserve their language.  Many of the individuals describe a preference for the tunnels to the street-level life, and they also speak proudly of their abilities to take care of themselves rather than accept charity.  Morton has produced an artful book of images and statements of a marginal group of people that is both respectful of their pride, and sensitive to their condition.  The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City, is a strong addition to the literature on the communities who live in the underground infrastructure of an American city.  

vagabondia - book - 1984 - Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes

Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes
Ted Conover
1984
Viking Press
274 Pages

Hey out there in computer world!  I borrowed Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes from Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.

Rolling Nowhere is the first book by Ted Conover, an investigative journalist who has made a career out of immersing himself in the social world he intends to take as his subject matter. Conover wrote this text while he was still a student at Amherst College.  Inspired by his anthropology classes, he decided to embark on an adventure of social as well as geographical exploration, as he traveled the America by train, posing as a member of the hobo underclass.  Through his travels, Conover finds that in the early 1980s people with meager means of support still resort to hopping freight trains as a means for transportation and survival.

Rolling Nowhere is a story of Conover’s entry into, and participation in, the lifestyle of the travelling hobo over the period of several months in the early 1980s.  Much of his text notes Conover’s feelings and thoughts about what he is doing, his determination to go through with his plans despite his fears, his desire to speak with his family or the acknowledgment that his behaviors and attitudes are being changed by his adventure.   Much of the text is also descriptions of the people he meets or the experiences he has with them, however Conover’s self-transformation is really the subject of his book.

The text begins with the author’s naive efforts to catch out for the very first time, as he simply headed to the train-tracks one night to try to find a train to hop.  He quickly found Leroy after his travels began, who gave the author a quick education in the dynamics of train hopping and tramp living.  From that point on, Conover, lived among the hobos, riding trains with them, eating at missions and sleeping at Hobo jungles.  He began to smoke and drink with the men (and one woman) he met, and witnessed their forms of behavior directly.  

The persistent themes of Conover’s book are violence, scarcity, addiction, and isolation.   Conover witnessed pointless violence between the hobos, however he also witnessed the hobos victimized by people, particularly children and adolescents whom he said “attacked the only kind of grown up they could get away with attacking.”  Real accounts of such attacks have made headlines in recent months and are probably an ever-present possibility for the vulnerable poor.  Conover acknowledged that many hobos have fallen outside of society due to  trauma in their past, and often nurture an assortment of critical personal issues that make it difficult for them to reintegrate into society.  He observed hobos as people who are socially detached from one another, even when they appear to be engaged in friendships. Conover noted that the men who ride the rails are prepared to separate without sentiment at any moment, or worse, turn violently on one another over matters that may seem trivial.

Conover ascertained that while the train moving, the hobo is safe.  Danger looms when the train approaches its destination, as rail security, police, and potentially worst of all, other hobos, may be present at the stop.  Conover recalls a few close calls between himself and other hobos, and he describes some scenes of hobo on hobo brutality, however for the most part he avoided engaging in violence himself.  A single cruel act is committed by the author when he realizes a hobo was trying to enter his boxcar while the train was moving.  Conover insisted that to enter an occupied boxcar without asking its occupant is poor hobo etiquette, and when an invader grabbed hold of his car, Conover stomped on his fingers to force him to release his grip.  This one scene is shocking and almost creates a sense that Conover has crossed a boundary set by his middle class values, into the moral realm of the career hobo.  

While I was reading Rolling Nowhere I was expecting the text to end with some kind of stomping, like the sort Hunter S. Thompson described himself receiving at the hands of the Hells Angels in the epilogue to his account of the motorcycle club.  Instead, towards the end of Conover’s text, he described narrowly escaped the light of a police officer, probing the boxcar he was hiding in in Tulsa.  Conover described Tulsa as a “hot” town, where the police were intensely active in the search of illicit train passengers.  Conover then rests under an overpass and creates a sense of dread through his reflections upon all of the threats a hobo has to be concerned with, and expresses a profound lethargy over this constant worry.  He thus extends this dread to a kind of sympathy with the real hobos who did not share in his luxury to return home when they felt the adventure was over.  This feeling of dread Conover develops is palpable, however, and is perhaps as profound a means of conveying the danger of the depicted lifestyle as Thompson’s final experience of brutality at the hands of the notorious bikers.

    Rolling Nowhere describes the sincere effort made by a middle class young man to enter a social realm occupied by desperate and often dangerous men.  Conover lived as closely to the ideal hobo lifestyle as possible, without betraying his origins to any of the people he met on the road.  People came to respond to him as a fellow traveler, and he appeared to develop an insightful understanding of hobo society.  His reflections on the ways of living and methods for survival adopted by the train-hoppers he met are interesting enough that they should be acknowledged by researchers of this subject matter.