It seems too soon yet to say very much about his last book, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority. I’m still trying to figure out if this ultimate phase of his thinking actually marks an advance on his early work or not. In Deathworks, Rieff speaks of three culture or “worlds” that correspond to different historical periods, very loosely defined. A good overview by an enthusiast is available here.

So far I’m kind of dubious. The book feels to me like Ortega y Gassett’s The Revolt of the Masses translated into Rieffese, an exotic idiom distantly related to English. Then again, it can take time for his insights to settle in, so that may be premature. (There are at least three forthcoming posthumous books by Rieff, so this may take a while.)

My friend David Glenn published a fine profile of Rieff late last year. See also this affectionate if slightly terrifying recollection by Gordon Marino, who describes himself in a note to me as “a longtime - forever student of Rieff’s.”

Clearly the man was an incredibly powerful teacher. One hopes that there are recordings available of him in the classroom. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it turned out he strictly forbade anything of the sort.

An article by Christopher Phelps published last month by the History News Network reviewed the evidence and settled the matter pretty decisively. No grounds exist at all for See Sharp's claims that the 1906 text was censored. Sinclair reprinted that version himself and sold it for decades. Even the fanciest possible footwork by a defender of the See Sharp edition cannot quite get around the very inconvenient fact that he could have reprinted the serialized version, but didn't.

Well, there's a new bit of evidence against the bogus claim of censorship. And it comes from Sinclair himself.

Last week, in an update to the HNN article, Phelps cited a letter by the novelist written in 1958 that is worth the attention of anyone who has been following this matter. Here it is:

"The book was finished at the end of 1905," writes Sinclair,"and was not published until June of 1906. It started as a serial in the weekly Socialist paper, The Appeal to Reason, which at that time had a circulation of something like three-fourths of a million copies. It published large installments, I would say at a guess about a newspaper page; so all my revelations concerning conditions in the packing houses had been put before a huge public early in the year. I had been offering the manuscript of the book to publishers in New York -— I think to five -— without result. They were afraid of it, and finally growing desperate I decided to publish the book myself. I got Jack London to write his tremendous endorsement of the book. I announced the publication in The Appeal to Reason, and I was taking in several hundred orders a week. I had the plates made and paid for. Then -— I have forgotten how -— it occurred to me to offer the book to Doubleday-Page; and they immediately accepted it and agreed to take over my plates and to let me have and sell my own edition."

Okay, let's go over that again, m'kay?

Sinclair says he prepared an edition of the book after it ran as a serial, but could not interest a commercial publisher. He was ready to publish it himself....had the plates for it made....then got an offer from Doubleday -- which bought and used his plates.

So much for the damned dirty capitalist censors depriving the world of"the version of The Jungle that Sinclair very badly wanted to be the standard edition."

As I've said before, it is hard to believe someone has not yet prepared a variorum edition of the book: a scholarly text marking all the changes between 1905 and 1906. This might not be nearly as exciting has a halfbaked, fact-free story of" censorship." But it would be honest work, which counts for something.

At this point, the See Sharp crew looks as indifferent to historical accuracy as the slaughterhouses bosses were to hygiene back in Sinclair's day. They need to stop offering tainted goods to the public using false labels.

The cover for the galleys says it will be published on August 1 by Henry Holt, but in fact finished copies are in stores now. Various articles by the author are available at his website.

By coincidence, I started reading the book at just about the same time word started getting around about a new album, , by Chicago hiphop artist Ecclesiastes, whose vision of urban guerilla warfare is probably going to give the American Civil Liberties Union a neat little project to work on, pretty soon. Check out his lyrics. Some cuts from the record are available here.

Peniel Joseph's history of the undercurrents in the early civil rights movement really places a track like"Waitin' in Line" in context.

The simplified narrative of the 1960 that is now part of the popular memory regards extremely militant, more or less Third Worldist versions of African-American politics as something that came to the fore pretty late -- only after the initial, more optimistic phase of the movement had passed.

Well, not quite. Joseph quotes from FBI reports from the early 1960s in which agents describe well-attended meetings where people discussed scenarios indistinguishable from the"people's war" rhetoric of Ecclesiastes.

I'm not saying that such talk therefore represents some"authentic" mood or political ideology within the African-American community. Hell, that's not my business anyway -- what with me being, as the saying goes, a white shade of pale -- though frankly the gun-totting fantasia seems futile at best, suicidal at worst.

But it's probably always been there -- alongside, and in tension with, more properly utopian images of transcendence and redemption, serving as both a critique of reformist hopes and an emergency backup plan for liberation.