Thomas James, polymath

I’m trying to imitate Edgar Allan Poe.

The Poe museum in Richmond, Virginia

The largest collection of Poe relics and memorabilia in the world.

James River in December

Daedulus Books #3

Paramount Theater

downtown mall, Charlottesville, Virginia

University of Richmond

Richmond, Virginia

Daedalus Books #2

Daedalus books
Charlottesville, Va

Europeans had long viewed America as a ‘belle savage’ [primitive, beautiful young woman]. The word America is a feminized version of the name of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. The feminization was not inadvertent. On early maps the continent is often represented by a naked native woman. Columbus had set the tone at the outset, when he claimed to have discovered the Garden of Eden on the Caribbean coast of South America-it was shaped, he said, like a nipple on a woman’s breast.

Much later, when England entered the Caribbean, Walter Raleigh still saw the region as a woman ripe for taking: ‘Guayana,’ he said, ‘is a country that hath yet her maidenhead.’ The travel writer Sam Purchas, an active cheerleader for the Virginia Company, saw Virginia in similar terms, as ‘a virgin … not yet polluted with Spaniards lust’; the name Virginia (honoring England’s Virgin Queen) encapsulates this point of view. The role of the colonizers, Purchas advised, was to woo her and make her ‘not a wanton minion, but an honest and Christian wife.’ Needless to say, as a wife she would serve in a subordinate position.

If the early investment returns from the Virginia colony were not impressive, William Crashaw, in a sermon to ‘Adventurers and Planters of the Virginia Company,’ advised, the suitors should not lose heart. Crashaw urged the ‘adventurers’ (investors) to be patient with the results of the ‘planters’ (settlers), on the grounds that even great leaders were once infants ‘carried in the arms of sillie women.’

In an elegy [of the period] entitled ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed,’ [English poet] John Donne inverted the conceit of colonialism as sexual conquest, comparing his mistress to the continent:

Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.

Thomas Christensen, 1616: The World in Motion

Blings of Wonder at Lewis Ginter

Walking under the train tracks by the James River in late December

Down in Shockoe

epic train is epic.

Ashland, Virginia

Ah the open fields of Virginia.