NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-13 New Jersey
My Book World Willner, Nina. Forty Autumns: A Family’s
Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall. New York: Morrow, 2016. Just under twenty-one, young Hanna flees East Germany to pursue a life of freedom in the West, and she must do it twice to succeed. The second escape, however, sticks, and she makes a life in America. Her daughter, Nina, is the author of this amazing and absorbing account of what the division of Germany following World War II did to Hanna’s family. Under the heavy thumb of Erich Honecker, the East German regime was perhaps more repressive than its mother, the Soviet Union. This forty-year tale follows the lives of those left in East Germany, as well as the life of Hanna and her children in America. Daughter Nina winds up working for the US government in West Germany and comes very close to where her family lives, but she is unable to visit with them or even let them know she is present. Hanna’s father, Opa, is a respected and revered school teacher in the town where they live, but eventually he is exiled to a small village because he will not fully support the Communist line. His children who remain in East Germany, however, become somewhat more compliant, although none of them ever joins the Communist party—which does inhibit their success. Wellner’s story of how the family finally unites after forty autumns is more than touching; it is the richest kind of poignancy. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-13 New Jersey
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twelfth post of fifty. Virginia (1957, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1973, 1974, 1989, 1990, 1994, 1999, 2010)In Northern Virginia, where my aunt and uncle lived in Fairfax County, it was difficult to separate, at times, Washington DC from the southern nature of its surroundings. The lilting dialects, the Georgian colonial architecture with red bricks and white columns. Even the White House is a southern building. And yet my aunt and uncle were New Yorkers; it seemed like an odd fit. In the dozen times that I’ve been to Washington, I’ve viewed multiple sights multiple times: The Smithsonian Institution (including the Air and Space Museum located a thirty-minute cab ride from DC in Fairfax County), the Capitol, the Washington Monument, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s, the World War II Memorial, The Vietnam Memorial (I had previously looked up the address of our Wichita neighbor, R. E. Jenkins, who’d been killed at nineteen, as well as the man for who I’d worn a steel MIA bracelet, Stephen Adams, Iowa), Georgetown, Mt. Vernon, the home of former president, Chester A. Arthur (a bed and breakfast where we stayed in 2010), on Logan Circle. The closest I came to the White House was Pennsylvania Avenue, where I took an iPhone picture through the wrought iron fence. I’ve seen both of Thomas Jefferson’s homes, Monticello and the one in western Virginia, Poplar Forest, a three-day trip by horse cart for its original owner. I’ve strolled through the quad at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where the Jeffersonian buildings provide space for qualified students to live. ¶ Virginia is tenth of the original colonies, established in 1788. Historical PostcardsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
My Book World Corn, David and Michael Isikoff. Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. New York: Hachette, 2018. This book is a hot read, mostly because these two journalists have taken the patchwork of daily news that we all read every day and transformed all that information into a seamless narrative that is easy to understand. And important, easy to appreciate. If Americans aren’t concerned about the Russia investigation, they aren’t very concerned about the survival of their country. Nuggets: “Putin had once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.’ He was a Russian nationalist to his core. H wanted to extend Russian power, restoring its spheres of influence. He was an autocrat in the long tradition of Russian strongmen and had little interest in joining the club of Western liberal democracies—or winning its approval” (31). NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-12 Virginia
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the eleventh post of fifty. Maryland (1957, 1959, 1963) L-R: Lou, Carol, Richard, Victor | 1963 Visit to DC  In 1963, I was fifteen when we visited Aunt Gladys in Washington, DC. My cousin was seventeen, and he and his sophisticated friends invited me to go with them to the beach in Maryland. On our way we stopped in at Nordstrom’s in the Seven Corners shopping center. I watched as my sophisticated cousin and his friends shoplifted identical plaid swim trunks. We rode out in a red Impala convertible, and when the traffic backed up surprisingly, the driver, one of my cousin’s friends, headed for the soft grass median rather than rear-end someone. ¶ At this Maryland beach, my cousin and his friends looked like they all belonged to the same fraternity and flirted with girls older than they were just for the fun of it. I never told my parents what my cousin had done. It was one of those events that advanced your childhood pretty quickly, traveling with delinquents, and you knew you could never go back. ¶ In the Baltimore neighborhood where my aunt and uncle lived in 1957, people attached ceramic cats, mostly black, to the roofs and sides of their homes, perhaps as a way of identifying theirs as they approached it on the street. My dad bought one before leaving for Kansas and it hung on the side of their house in Wichita for over fifty years. ¶ Maryland became seventh of the original thirteen states in 1788. Its bicenquinquagenary was celebrated in 2013. HISTORICAL POSTCARDSIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
My Book World Jackson, Shirley. Life Among the Savages.
New York: Farrar, 1948. Jackson’s memoir about family life up through the birth of her fourth and final child is entertaining and timeless, though it is written in the 1940s. What contributes to this timelessness is Jackson’s grasp of the universal through developing the specific. This is a woman’s story to tell, though it is for everyone to read. Jackson published many of these narratives in women’s magazines before releasing them in this book. She develops the universal by delving into the concrete. She never names her husband: it is always my husband this, my husband that, objectifying him as the head-in-the-clouds academic that he is, in the same manner in which she, as housewife, is objectified in this post-World War II period. She has pet names for her oldest three children: Laurie for Laurence (which he vehemently sluffs off at one point); Jannie for Joanne, and Sally for Sarah. It’s as if by naming them something more intimate, they cannot possibly belong to someone else, the world at large. What saves her persona from being a martyr is that Jackson actually enjoys being a mother and wife while at the same time pursuing a serious career as a writer of fiction. She would be considered a permissive mother, but such a free household allows all her children to develop unfettered: Laurie is allowed to take on a boisterous, all-boy personality; Jannie develops as one who expresses herself as bluntly as Jackson herself does; and charming little Sally is a princess, who quotes fairy tales and talks in oblique sort of riddles when she is angry about something. To be sure, Jackson spars with her children (and her husband) on occasion, nudges them back and forth over the goal line, but she allows them simply to be. One would love to know how they developed as adults, and how their children fared. This free and delightful yet sophisticated read is timeless and should be perused by everyone: women and men, old and young, especially those who think they know everything about raising children. They could learn a thing or two from the late Shirley Jackson. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-11 Maryland
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the tenth post of fifty. West Virginia (1957, 1959, 1963)Our car, accustomed to the prairies of Kansas, labored up the mountains of West Virginia, on our way to and from Aunt Gladys’s place in suburban DC. I recall some delightful cinnamon apple candy that we purchased every time we passed through a certain town (or maybe it was in Virginia). It seemed like a primitive place, but that may not be a child’s observation, but a jaded adult who, to this day, doesn’t like to pee in an outdoor closet that stinks from lye. ¶ Now that West Virginia has joined the Big Twelve, I pay more attention to the state. They’re tough to beat at home, especially when a proud bunch of fans fill up the place to cheer on their Mountaineers. ¶ West Virginia was part of Virginia until 1863, when it was granted its own statehood, making it the thirty-fifth state. In 2013, it celebrated its sesquicentennial. Historical PostcardsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
My Book World  (Liveright) Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. New York: Liveright, 2016. Roger Straus, Jackson’s first publisher, often called her “a rather haunted woman” (2). She had plenty to haunt her life, especially a mother who fiercely dominated her daughter, even after she became a literary success. “Jackson’s awareness that her mother had never loved her unconditionally—if at all—would be a source of sadness well into adulthood. Aside from a single angry letter that she did not send, she never gave voice to her feelings of rejection. But she expressed them in other ways. All the heroines of her novels are essentially motherless—if not lacking a mother entirely, then victims of loveless mothering. Many of her books include acts of matricide, either unconscious or deliberate” (25). Jackson spends nearly the rest of her life fighting against her mother about how to raise her own children, how to cook and keep house, how to go about her career even though her mother had never had one of her own. At the same time that Shirley attempts to establish a literary career while being supportive of a husband in the related business of literary criticism and raising four children, she seems to love being with her children. She often packs them up into the car to go on day trips. She more or less lets them have free run of the house and town, while at the same time, scolds her children with the same invisible criticism that she learned from her mother.
Franklin goes into great detail about Jackson’s literary life, each novel, her famous story, “The Lottery.” She paints an honest picture of Jackson’s life, one that is so interesting, I didn’t want the book to end. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States—10 West Virginia
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the ninth post of fifty. Pennsylvania (1957, 1959, 1963)  Barges. Coal. Coal dust. On our 1957 vacation, my family and I spent nearly three days in the mountain town of Brownsville, waiting for our Packard Clipper, a ’55, to be repaired. My mother tried hard to find ways to entertain us while we waited around on repairs that could never be made. She took movies of us running up and down the bank of the Monongahela River, me waving a jaunty striped cap I’d gotten for my ninth birthday. “Run, darn you,” my mother said. “It’s a moving picture.” And run we did, like little fools. The hotel where we stayed was so rife with coal dust that Mother had to wipe down everything (including the toilet seat) before we could sit.  The Jesperses' New 1957 Pontiac and Brother Vic At the end of that brief but drawn-out respite, my parents bought a new 1957 Pontiac, and we broke it in on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was one of the oldest in the nation, and the roads were not that well engineered, not near as sleek as the Kansas Turnpike (you could travel at eighty mph), but it was certainly scenic. ¶ Philadelphia is the city where some of my grandmother’s German cousins lived, but when I try to google the address where they lived, it seems that the street must have disappeared or been renamed. It’s as if they never lived. The city is also where my Dutch grandparents landed in the early 1900s. ¶ Pennsylvania is the second of the original thirteen colonies, established in 1787. Over 230 years old! HISTORICAL POSTCARDS If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
I'm Back! I spent much of the month of March continuing to work on a book that has already occupied two years of my time, and I only feel two-thirds of the way through it (maybe less). I spent half the month in the hill country of Texas at a dwelling known as Hacienda María. Sitting high atop a hill overlooking a beautiful valley where the landlords, Native American Seed Company, harvest grass and flower seeds indigenous to Texas, this dwelling is a bit of heaven in which I could work quietly each day as long as I wished, then prepare meals in a huge, sunny kitchen, and then walk my daily 10,000 steps or more on the beautiful country roads of the hacienda property. I've returned to Lubbock refreshed and ready to continue my book as well as my blog work. I hope you'll take a look at my photos below. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-9 Pennsylvania
Dear Fellow Travelers, I offer you my third and final installment of photographs taken during a week in early November 2017 that I spent with you in Barcelona, Spain. Below, please find slide shows exhibiting examples of architecture, art, landscape, black-and-white photographs, flags & signs, and miscellaneous sights. Enjoy! P.S. If you see any identification errors, please leave me a message. I did my best to get things right. ARchitecture, Art, LandscapeBlack-And-White PhotographyFlags and SignsMiscellaneousClick on Barcelona Photographs 1 if you missed that installment. Same for Barcelona Photographs 2. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-9 Pennsylvania
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the eighth post of fifty. Ohio (1957, 1959, 1963) On one of my family’s trips east, in 1957, we stayed in a cabin that, I swear, sat on nothing but concrete blocks as its foundation. When semis passed in the night, our little cabin shook like a big bowl of gelatin. In 1968, passing through Columbus in mid-August, the sun was but an orange disk in the sky. ¶ In 1882, my great-grandmother, Catharina Berges, emigrated from Germany and lived for a short time in Canal Dover, Tuscarawas County (later Dover). She then moved with her first husband to Missouri. ¶ Ohio became the seventeenth state in 1803. 1903. 2003. Wow! Historical PhotographsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link: NEXT TIME: Final Installment of Barcelona Photographs:
Architecture, Art, Landscape, Black-and-White, Flags & Signs
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the seventh post of fifty. Indiana (1957, 1959, 1963, 1969, 1976, 1994)  Shoals was our first stop when my family drove east in 1959. My father put in a good nine or ten hours of driving—over 650 miles and four states in one day. During that trip—before the interstate highway system was complete—we passed through downtown Indianapolis. My mother took a Super 8 film of the experience, flags billowing off some important building. Hot. Exhaust pouring in the windows of our Pontiac. On the second day, my father would drive through three states in one day (Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia), and we would think we were making grand time, but we were in the mountains and it took from dawn to dark to drive 550 miles. We were two hours from my aunt and uncle’s home in Falls Church, Virginia. It would be my third trip to Washington, DC, and I was only eleven! In 1969, my college choir performed in South Bend, and I was able to visit with the daughter of one of mother’s high school teachers, Jo Leatherman Perkey, who made a special effort to see our performance. The choir had fun touring the Indy 500 track (above). ¶ Indiana is the nineteenth state. Residents celebrated its bicentennial in 2016. Historical Postcards If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link: NEXT TIME: My World of Short Fiction
My Book World  Cooper, Anderson and Gloria Vanderbilt. The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. The epistolary nature of this book (if emails can be considered letters) makes it interesting at times. TV journalist Anderson Cooper exchanges emails with his mother, both of them attempting to make sense of their lives as mother and son. At times, the exercise feels belabored as if Cooper is indeed a writer interviewing another celebrity. Yet there are enough genuine moments to provide readers with the feeling they’re witnessing something real. His mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, makes a startling statement: “Although I have never told you or any one else, I did this [to work under her birth name] because I believed that if I succeeded in writing, or acting, or painting, it would expiate in some mysterious and secret way the public vilification of my mother and free her to love me as I longed to be loved” (101). One issue that deeply affects both of their lives is the death of Anderson’s father, Wyatt Cooper. Gloria is totally dumbfounded. Anderson’s brother, Carter, will commit suicide. And Anderson himself declares his life would have been so different if his father had lived: “I certainly longed for that sense of safety as a teenager. It would have been nice to have a male figure in those years. It always surprised me that none of the men you were friends with made an effort to reach out to Carter or me after Daddy’s death. I kept secretly hoping someone would come forward as a mentor or a friend, occasionally taking me out for a slice of pizza or to a movie” (204). Cooper turns inward after his father’s death, obtains a fake press pass, and begins his adventurous and often dangerous career in journalism overseas. He admits that if his father had lived, he might not have burned such a trail. Lucky for us that he did.
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-7 Indiana
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the sixth post of fifty. 6. Illinois (1957, 1959, 1963, 1969, 2006) When I was a child, Illinois was one of the four states my dad drove through in a single day as we headed to Washington DC to see my aunt and cousins. Beyond that, Illinois didn’t mean much to me until 1969, when my college choir’s tour included Chicago. In the middle of February with dirty snow piled onto the sidewalks like little mountains, a college friend and I walked under cloudy skies and chatted about what most twenty-one-year-olds do. The choir sang at a Methodist church in Evanston, and as a rising organ pupil I played the postlude. The sanctuary was cold. ¶ Even later, in 1976, Ken and I would venture across the Mississippi River to visit his grandparents’ old farm near Thebes, not far from Huck Finn’s haunt, Cairo. The humidity was so unbearable that we were drenched standing in full shade viewing his grandparents’ graves in the cemetery. In 2006 we traveled on AmTrak from Fort Worth to New York and changed trains to the Lakeshore Limited in Chicago. We took a brisk walk around during our layover. It was early May, and the trees were just beginning to bud out. We’d already had ninety degree temps in Lubbock, so it seemed that we were stepping back in time. HISTORICAL POSTCARDS Illinois is the twenty-first state. Its centennial was held in 1918. The year 2018 will be another big one. Check it out! If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
My Book World  Tur, Katy. Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History. New York: Morrow, 2017. This engrossing book seems to be made up of at least three strands: 1) MSNBC reporter Katy Tur’s narrative of her assignment to follow then candidate Donald Trump throughout the entirety of the 2016 presidential campaign. 2) In doing so she shares a great deal about what it’s like to be a reporter placed in such a position, the great moments, the uncomfortable moments, the shortchanging of her personal life. 3) And speaking of that, Tur interweaves bits of her personal life—including her childhood and youth, her love life, and her travels—into the weft of her fascinating storytelling. With regard to 1) she has mixed feelings about leaving her assignment which places her in London, England. Accepting it means moving to New York, giving up her flat in London, her friends there, a boyfriend in Paris, I believe. Turning it down would mean giving up the opportunity to cover one of the most controversial presidential candidates in history, and might also mean squelching her career by not playing ball with the producers at MSNBC. Katy Tur shares with the reader the details of her travels with DT: flying coach, packing economically yet in a way that allows her to appear fresh on camera (dry shampoo?); a significant lack of sleep because she can be wakened at any moment to be given an assignment; keeping up with tens of thousands of work-related emails, many of which she winds up dumping. Sad, sad meals grabbed here and there, the lack of exercise on any given day or week. But most of all, we see what it feels like to be on camera nation-wide: “Hardball wants me live. I take a deep breath, stand up, put in my earpiece, and hook back into MSNBC’s live coverage. Finally, Tur’s personal history adds a tantalizing touch to her career. It seems that her parents, Bob and Marika Tur begin in the 1970s a helicopter service in which they cover in Los Angeles such happenings as “fires, shootings, and most unforgettably, police pursuits. Their first big get was Madonna’s 1985 wedding to Sean Penn” (108).
From her parents, especially, father, she learns the thrill of the hunt. As a child, she goes up with her dad in his ‘copter, and one point she, without benefit of a harness, hangs out the cockpit a bit too far. Her dad says little but apparently turns white. At thirty-two or -three Tur must feel jaded in some sense, as anyone who’s been in a business for a decade must, but she’s got a long career ahead of her if she can sustain this kind of reporting and writing—if she can continue to hang out there without a harness. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-6 Illinois
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fifth post of fifty. 5. Missouri (1956, 1957, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1976 + many others)  Richard and Brother Vic and Sister Peggy at Bagnell Dam, Missouri—1956 On my family’s first trip through the Show-Me state, in 1956, we visited Bagnell Dam in the Lake of the Ozarks. I imagine that we took U.S. Highway 54 because it was as a direct shot you could get from Wichita. The trip was a tryout for my brother, who was three at the time, to see how he would take to long periods in the car. During that trip we also visited mother’s family friends in Tipton, not more than an hour’s drive from the dam. We stayed in a mom-and-pop motel, and I witnessed one of the hardest rains I’ve ever seen in my life. We traveled through Missouri every time we went back East to visit my dad’s family. One memorable sight were the charcoal factories that were nestled among the trees of the rolling hills. Some of them were partnered with rustic establishments where you could breakfast on eggs and smoked bacon. In Brownington is located the grave of my great-grandmother’s first husband, who drowned when, during a rainstorm, he drove a team of horses into a river, drowning him, his horses, and a calf loaded in his wagon. The year was 1884. ¶ My partner Ken’s family are all from the Saint Louis area. In the seventies I began to get a closer look at the state: clear streams and rivers, fried catfish, verdant woods and lawns, friendly people who embraced me as one of their own.  Richard Feeding the Fish at Missouri Hatchery—1976 Historical PostcardsMissouri is the twenty-fourth state. Its centennial was held in 1921, so it won’t be long until another hundred years have passed. I wonder why there is a forty-year gap between Missouri’s and Kansas’s statehood—so close and yet so far. If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
Dear Fellow Travelers, I offer you the second round of photographs from our November trip to Barcelona. This time I picture primarily the lovely people of that city, from those selling their wares on the street to those joining us as we stroll down one of the grand boulevards. Appreciate your generous comments from last time! RJ Click on Barcelona Photographs 1 if you missed that installment. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-5 Missouri
More Photographs of Barcelona Once They're Processed!
My Book World Alexie, Sherman. You Don’t Have to
Say You Love Me: A Memoir. New York: Little, Brown, 2017. I once attended one of Mr. Alexie’s readings in Iowa City; it was for his most recent publication, The Toughest Indian in the World. He’s tall and lanky; at that time his hair was of medium length. Handsome. His performance was half stand-up act, for he is acerbically, wickedly funny, and half dramatic reading in which he voiced all the parts. Not only the parts written on the lines, but you could hear the voices of his ancestors in the background, encouraging this talented young man to voice the Indian truth. Once again, in this painful but poignant memoir in which Alexie explores the relationship with his mother, he does not fail to delight, does not fail to sear our consciousness with the wrongs of our white ancestors. Just as his skin color condemns him, an innocent man, anyone with white skin must share the blame of our ancestors who ravaged the land and its native peoples as if it were all one prehistoric wellspring of riches. The book composed of 160 short chapters is NOT linear in structure; I do not think that is a particularly Indian way to tell a story. The author begins in 1972 when his family moves into a HUD home on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, when the author is six years old. Some chapters are as short as a four-line poem. Other chapters are poems several pages in length (including one about his mother as quilter), each one a work of art in itself, enhancing a lyricism spread throughout the entirety of the book. By beginning with an intimate description of the HUD house, Alexie gives us a double-edged view. On the one hand, the house represents a major step up for the family from the cramped quarters where they’ve lived before. The HUD house is not huge, but it does have a toilet, a bathroom, and that means a great deal to the family. Yet these new cramped quarters are an important metaphor for the Spokane Indian, whose entire tribe has been smothered, crammed into a piece of earth that represents a fraction of what it once owned. Alexie is always shoving against these boundaries of what white people expect of Indians, knowing their place. One must wonder how this nation would have developed if the white man had approached the Indians with respect and conceded to their wishes. If the white man had purchased land instead of stealing it, what then? If the white man had formed a government with native Americans instead of one that killed them off, what would we have today? Would any of us be here? NEXT TIME: Barcelona Photographs2 — Its People
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fourth post of fifty. 4 Louisiana (1950-52)I remember little about Louisiana, except that my family lived in a forty-foot trailer in Pineville, located near the air base at Alexandria. I recall cypress knees that my father brought back to Kansas and sanded to a sheen and varnished, using one to make the base of a lamp, the rest surviving as sculpture occupying various places in our tiny house. I recall the Po Boy sandwich my mother adapted by using “French” bread you bought in those aluminum foil wraps (instead of baguettes), shredded roast beef, topped with a mixture of ketchup, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce. This was as spicy as my parents could tolerate, even as young people. Their Kansas palates didn’t care for the traditional sandwich of fried oysters, vegetables, and coarse Creole mustard. The black-and-white photographs taken by a black box camera tell me more than my memory. There are surviving pictures of my sister, coy and cute, poised beneath a large metal bridge all by her lonesome. Shots of us playing in the dirt outside our trailor. Shots of my handsome soldier father in his uniform. I later visited New Orleans when as a member of the SMU seminary choir we toured there. I remember wearing the choir stole jauntily around my neck as if it were a scarf. Getting a little tipsy along with the other seminarians as we partied on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. My fellow students grinning as if viewing the real me for the first time. ¶ Louisiana is the eighteenth state. Its centennial was held in 1912, its bicentennial, well, you know. One forgets how long the state has been established, part of the Old World, as it were. HISTORICAL POSTCARDSIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
My Literary World Iron Horse Literary Review 19.4 Connections, “Like Breadcrumbs, Like Shards,” Lucas Southworth. Lucas Southworth won AWP’s Grace Paley Prize, in 2013, for his collection, Everyone Here Has a Gun. He is a professor of fiction and screenwriting at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore.
“Like Breadcrumbs, Like Chards”: Even though I am gay, came out a long time ago, have been with the same Grady for forty-two years, not until I reached the following sentence on the second page of Southworth's story did I realize I was reading about a gay couple. “At first glance my husband fills so many gay stereotypes. He’s all muscle, all tank top on the weekends, all styled hair and double-entendre” (4). Now . . . is my failed perception my fault or the writer’s? I’m willing to accept at least half the responsibility; I was lulled into the hackneyed convention that a husband must be paired with a wife, not another husband. But would it have been too unsophisticated to let the reader know this tidbit a wee bit earlier? In this story where young marrieds are struggling to become acquainted, the narrator, Mike, often texts his husband Grady—even when they are located in the same dwelling or in the same room. Seriously? Has texting become so ubiquitous that it has seeped into our literary fiction? Must we now work texting into the weft of our stories for them to be real, to be truly au courant? Okay, okay. F. Scott, I’m sure, employed an early phone or two, had a character cable someone that he didn’t love her any longer. I am totally humble and down from my horse. Mike’s texting his husband is a manner in which he attempts both to be close to Grady and yet distant from him at the very same time. At one point Mike uses an emoji of the Swiss flag (to indicate fidelity?) and in the same text a heart with an arrow shot through it to communicate his feelings. Is this how removed he is from the relationships with his husband, his mother, and mother-in-law, at least what he can find of his feelings? Southworth purposely keeps the reader at a distance from the character’s feelings—not entirely but enough for us to get the message. We can see the words on the page, or the text on the screen, but I’m not sure we can feel them. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-4 Louisiana
My Book World Aciman, André. Call Me by Your Name. New York: Farrar, 2007. This novel is a romance, both with a capital “r,” the kind that emphasizes subjectivity of the individual, and the small “r” kind, the Harlequin type that you must devour page by page, word by word, until you come to the final sentence of this desperate love affair between two young men. I found the first half tediously slow. But then I thought, Aciman must want us to be inside the head of the protagonist narrator, Elio. These are the mind and heart of a seventeen-year-old boy who can’t decide who he is whether it’s with regard to sexual orientation or his prodigious musicianship (he transcribes manuscripts from one instrument to another and sells them). His mind belabors everything including the appearance of a young graduate student, Oliver, who comes to live in his family’s Italian villa for the summer of 1983, a tradition Elio’s father, a professor, has begun years before: the summer intern. Both Elio and Oliver waste half the summer semi-rejecting one another, making love to girls, until finally Elio becomes more aggressive and discovers Oliver has wanted him since they first met. Their first kiss doesn’t occur until page 81. But for a short, intense two weeks they become so close that they almost become one, wearing each other’s clothing, Elio especially in love with a red swim suit of Oliver’s. The very idea of calling each other by their own names—taking the name your parents have given you and calling your lover by that name—is a mental flip the reader must make to understand the depth of their intimacy: “Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth” (142-3). Aciman carries the development of this intimacy, which in the form of a deep friendship is to last forever, to the very last sentence of the book: “If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name” (248). Through the specificity of this scenario, Aciman reveals a universal story of desire and love. We’ve all been there, and wow, should our lives turn out as exciting as those of the two men characterized in this romance.
NEXT TIME: My Literary World
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the third post of fifty. 3 TexasMy parents related to me that we traveled around Dallas in 1950 using Loop 12, which was subsumed by Dallas city limits long ago. I clearly don’t remember it. My first memorable trip to Texas came in 1968, when my college choir sang at the national meeting which joined the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church, making it the United Methodist Church. The trip was in April, and, while those back in Kansas were still experiencing cool temps, we sunned by the pool at the motel where we stayed [photos below]. I remember roses blooming profusely in several locations. Even then I was impressed with Texas’s wealth and opulence, particularly in its churches. I returned to Dallas in 1970 to attend graduate school at Southern Methodist University. Even then, I often got the feeling I couldn’t begin to enjoy the city without earning a six-figure income. To heighten the disparity even more, SMU was nestled in the heart of the wealthiest part of Dallas. Highland Park United Methodist Church was located across the parking lot from the married student housing in which I lived for two years, yet the one time my wife and I attended services there, no one spoke to us or even extended us a hand. After two years I was only too glad to leave Dallas and serve an internship in the western part of the state. Yes, I moved to Lubbock, and I have lived there since 1972. At that time Lubbock was just what I needed, what my shrink called a quiet corner of the world. I didn’t intend to stay, but I wasn’t sure where to go. I hadn’t liked Dallas, but neither did I wish to return to Kansas. I sensed that living there I would still be subject to my parents’ scrutiny; I wouldn’t grow. Then at twenty-seven I divorced my wife, found a job and a boyfriend, in pretty short order, and Lubbock seemed like the place to be, where we could reside, and so we have. ¶ Ken’s and my retirement from teaching has been predicated on staying in Lubbock, where our home and cars are paid for, and the cost of living is much less than it is in any of the so-called retirement meccas found in the Southwest or in Florida. With the money we save each year, we can travel to almost anywhere in the country or the world for that matter. There is so much more I could have shared about Texas, having lived here forty-seven years, but I'll save it for another time.¶ Texas is the twenty-eighth state. Its centennial was celebrated in 1936 (on the basis of its being a republic, not its 1845 statehood), its sesquicentennial in 1986. It is curious to me that Texas’s and Oklahoma’s statehoods are over seventy years apart, and yet they lie next to one another like siblings. Trunk Decals and PostcardsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
My Book World Mundy, Liza. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. New York: Hachette, 2017. Award-winning author Mundy writes of 11,000 women recruited in the early 1940s to help break codes of Japanese and German intelligence. The Navy recruits from exclusive women’s colleges in the Northeast, and the Army recruits from the ranks of teachers (mostly math but some who teach foreign languages), many of whom are disenchanted with their poor salaries and tough classroom conditions. “Sworn to secrecy, the women were forbidden from telling anybody what they were doing: not their friends, not their parents, not their family, not their roommates. They were not to let news of their training leak into campus newspapers or disclose it in a letter, not even to their enlisted brother or boyfriend. If pressed, they could say they were studying communications: the routing of ordinary naval messages” (5) This dictum is one that is repeated throughout the book until the very end. Even as some of these women survive into their nineties, even after the government grants them permission, finally, they are reticent to tell their stories. However, Mundy does a superb job of seeking out these sources, still sharp mentally, and getting their stories down. Mundy also combs written sources to fill out her epic narrative of quiet courage among these women—not only their work lives but their personal lives as well.
The code girls tackle many important difficulties, including the one of German U-boats sinking US ships in the Atlantic (as many as 500 by 1942). The women slowly but methodically solve this problem so that American ships are able to get supplies and matériel to troops in Europe. They are also paramount in intercepting official messages between Japanese and German leaders and confounding their strategies. Because of their unique skills the women make the work look far easier than it is. With a combination of innate ability and extreme dedication they are able to shorten the war and help save lives. Every man should think about what it would be like to minimize his intellect, to hide what he does for a living, to keep it a secret for almost seventy years—and come to the conclusion that it is not fair. And never again in our history should women be called upon to keep silent in this manner. It’s not only unfair but it cuts in half the sources our country could be using to solve problems. This book is not only a tribute to these particular women but to the idea of women taking their true place in the world as multifaceted individuals. NEXT TIME: My World of Short Fiction |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
http://amazon.com/author/rjespers Archives
May 2018
Categories
All
Blogroll
Websites
|
RSS Feed