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We Are All Beneficiaries

8/30/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
​Mary Shelley
Born August 30, 1797

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M. Shelley

My Book World

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​Scott, Janny. The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father. New York: Riverhead, 2019.

Journalist Janny Scott limns a harrowing portrait of her father, Robert Montgomery Scott, yet his story does not begin that way. Between the dedication and epigraph pages of the book appears a family tree extending back three generations. From a vast variety of sources, Scott brings to light the larger-than-life characters who are her ancestors, one set of grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents. Most persons would not necessarily know that much about their people, but for generations this family live off the good fortune and largesse of Thomas A. Scott, a railroad baron of the nineteenth century. They live on one property, Ardrossan, larger than New York’s Central Park, west of Philadelphia. Scott’s grandmother, flamboyant Helen Hope Montgomery, is the real-life personage upon which Katherine Hepburn’s character is based in the 1940 film, The Philadelphia Story. There is so much spectacle in this family, people who can, and do, almost anything they wish to do, that we almost lose sight of the subject of the book, Janny Scott’s father.
 
At one point, when journalist Scott is young and becomes interested in writing, her father promises her possession of his journals one day. Through the years the promise is lost, both because she puts the idea on a back burner and because her father is apparently reluctant to hand them over. Following his death, from a long bout with alcoholism, Janny Scott unearths them in one of those hiding-in-plain-sight locations, where all she must do is recall the four-digit default household code to unlatch his trunk, and voila, there they are: decades of notebooks full of loose-leaf pages. Scott magically (it’s really arduous work, one must realize) gathers all of her sources, including this gold mine, and produces a portrait of her father, the beneficiary of generations of great fortune. Only, the portrayal of a human life is never that simple. The rich—we often don’t have much sympathy for them—have a uniquely difficult time in life. They often wield too much power for their own good, and Scott herself says it best:

“The diaries, I began to think, were an inheritance of sorts—unanticipated, undeserved, a stroke of fortune. But, like an inheritance, they came at a cost. Land, houses, money: Wealth had tumbled in my father’s family from one generation to the next. Each new descendant arrived as an unwitting conduit for its transmission. You had a right to enjoy it, an obligation to protect it, a duty to pass it on to your own unsuspecting children. It was a stroke of good fortune, of course. But what you could never know, starting out, was how those things would influence decisions you’d make over a lifetime” (220)
In the epilogue, Scott makes clear that the Scott money ran out. Descendants of the railroad baron now live as far away as Los Angeles or Paris and many points in between. “They work in education, medicine, technology, consulting, music, banking, business, finance, landscape gardening, the law. They don’t live in big houses. They work for a living. But they’re beneficiaries, in one way or another, now and forever, for better and worse” (260)
As any good journalist, Scott knows when to remove herself from the story, always maintaining that important distance. At the same time, she lets us in on one of life’s greatest secrets, yet also a platitude, that money alone cannot buy happiness.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-47  North Dakota
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A Writer's Wit

8/29/2019

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It is curious that, with my somewhat antinomian tendencies, I should have gone to Trinity Hall—which was, and is, before all a Law College—and should thus have been thrown into close touch with the legal element in life.
​Edward Carpenter
Born August 29, 1844
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E. Carpenter
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Janny Scott's The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father
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My Journey of States-46  South Dakota

8/28/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Writing fiction is . . . an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
--Rose Wilder Lane
Born December 5, 1886
De Smet, South Dakota Territory
Died October 30, 1968
Danbury, Connecticut
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R. Wilder Lane
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 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 forty-sixth post of fifty.

South Dakota (2014)

​Ken and I arrived in South Dakota in early May. Grasses had greened, and some trees leafed out, yet on one of the days we headed for Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the sky spit snow in our eyes, and the wind shoved frigid air across our faces; the second time we returned, as photos above reveal, the skies were clear. Later in the day, we visited Crazy Horse Memorial, a thirty-minute drive southwest of Mount Rushmore. 
 
South Dakota became a US territory with the Lousiana Purchase, in 1803. It achieved statehood on November 2, 1889 as the fortieth state.

Historical Postcards and Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia         42. Utah
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina   43. Washington
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama       45. Nebraska
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Janny Scott's The Beneficiary
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A Writer's Wit

8/27/2019

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I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
​Jeanette Winterson
Born August 27, 1959
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J. Winterson
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-46  South Dakota
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Less is Definitely More

8/23/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
The minute you make people laugh, you get them to listen.
​Merrie Spaeth
Born August 23, 1948

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M. Spaeth

My book World

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​Greer, Andrew Sean. Less: A Novel. New York: Little Brown, 2017.

While I admire a number of contemporary fiction writers, I don’t often envy one of them. This may be the book that many a gay author has wanted to write and been unable to do so, including me. It’s that good. So-called gay fiction, with this book, has joined mainstream. This novel is not a coming out story. Our culture is beyond that. Coming out is now something that every gay person must do—whether it takes years or a matter of minutes—the narratives and challenges so similar that how could one write a unique story about it? No, such fiction has advanced to a character named Arthur Less who is about to turn fifty.
 
Less is a self-described second-shelf writer. Nonetheless, he’s well published and in demand. When his former boyfriend of nine years announces he’s getting married (need I say to a man), Less suddenly checks his drawer for all the opportunities to lecture and teach internationally and RSVPs No to the wedding and yes to the offers. He then cobbles together a months-long tour to five or six countries. 
 
Greer’s structure seems interesting at first. In each new locale, whether it is Mexico, Italy, Germany, or Japan, Arthur Less is thrust into a new life of sorts. At the same time, Less’s old life keeps returning to him in waves, sometimes rushing to the reader in the middle of other thoughts. Yes, suddenly you find Arthur wrestling with some momentous event out of his past. While I can certainly understand Greer’s receiving the Pulitzer Prize (funny, in one bit, Arthur makes clear how it is to be pronounced), I question this structure. 
 
In several key spots in the novel, Greer informs readers that someone other than he is narrating the story. Who can it be? At first, the issue seems unimportant. The story unfolds in the third person, as told by this, as yet, unidentified narrator. I’m not as quick as others; I only suspected halfway through that the narrator was Freddie, the very boy whose wedding Less is avoiding. Okay, I think to myself. That’s fun. All along, Freddie is the one in the know, telling all about Arthur’s around-the-world trip in great detail, yet he has not accompanied Arthur. Oh, of course, at the end (spoiler) when the two men reunite, one assumes that Arthur will reveal all that has happened on his trip to Freddie, but that poses the question: Arthur presumably does not tell Freddie of his trip until after he returns to the U.S., so how can Freddie possibly know all that has taken place? I re-read the beginning to find the exact spot, page eleven, where Freddie begins, ostensibly, to refer to himself in the third person.
 
Why does Greer structure the novel in this manner? It’s clever, and, I suppose to the casual beach reader, the point of view probably doesn’t matter that much. But why doesn’t Greer just place the novel in the third person anyway or allow Freddie to narrate the novel by way of first person? Does Greer fashion it this way only to be novel, or does he have some other reason for doing so, one I cannot discern?
 
No matter what, I do love this book and envy it for its grand storytelling. I love Greer’s ease with the proper metaphor at the proper time, the deepening of a certain scene with the proper use of such metaphors. The blue suit. The concept that Less is a bad gay, not a bad writer. The literary allusions that don’t hit you over the head but are part of the fabric of the novel. The gray suit purchased in one country that arrives in the nick of time in another. All these combine to make not only a great read but something of a literary phenom. I now want to read all of Greer. 

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-46  South Dakota

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A Writer's Wit

8/22/2019

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To me, the most beautiful word in the English language is cellar-door. Isn’t it wonderful? The ones I like, though, are “cheque” and “enclosed.”
​Dorothy Parker
Born August 22, 1893
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D. Parker
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Sean Andrew Greer's Less: A Novel
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My Journey of States-45  Nebraska

8/21/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it.
Ernest K. Gann
Born October 10, 1910
Lincoln, Nebraska
Died December 19, 1991
Friday Harbor, Washington
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E. K. Gann
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 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 forty-fifth post of fifty.

Nebraska (2014)

Ken and I stayed at one of those nondescript road motels that begins with an “H.” The young woman at the desk asked me what brought us to Nebraska. And I told her that I was attempting to log visits to four of my last ten states. She seemed to have an inferiority complex about Nebraska which I’ve witnessed before. One time, I met a young gay man visiting Texas from Omaha. I simply asked him what gay life was like in Omaha, certainly assuming it was better than Lubbock’s, and he got all defensive about it, as if I were making fun. Anyway, I told the woman that driving north on Highway 83, we’d seen some of the most beautiful land ever. Northeast Kansas and southeast Nebraska are not entirely flat, nor entirely agricultural. There is a very pastoral scene there, even if a Nebraska waterway called the Dismal River runs through it. Nebraska, you’ve got some PR to do. You can’t rely entirely on your ‘Huskers to make your name in the world! You need a WillaCatherLand or something.
 
Nebraska became the thirty-seventh state on March 1, 1867 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2017. 

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia         42. Utah
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina   43. Washington
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Andrew Sean Greer's Less: A Novel
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A Writer's Wit

8/20/2019

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Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.
​H. P. Lovecraft
Born August 20, 1890
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H. P. Lovecraft
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-45  Nebraska
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Theft By Finding: Root of All Good Writing

8/16/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters.
​William Maxwell
Born August 16, 1908
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W. Maxwell

My Book World

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Sedaris, David. Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002. New York: Little, 2017.

Sedaris explains the meaning of his title right away, stating that in England if you find something, particularly money, you are duty bound to try and locate the owner or else you are guilty of theft by finding. At least in the beginning, when Sedaris is poor, he seems to find all kinds of money. Good thing he’s an American!
 
The voyeur in me always loves reading authors’ diaries and letters (email has obliterated the latter for future readers), and Sedaris’s diaries are among the best I’ve read. His mind is one that, for the most part, is completely unbridled. He learns early not to edit (in the psychological sense) his writing. He turns a trip to the market into a comic play. His desperate work situations, the same. He records jokes people have told him. He’s not a writer who stays at home, and, because of that, life serves him a big platter of human waste to transform into delectable satire. I marked so many funny or moving passages but I’ll only list a few nuggets here: 
 
 “Man to a woman he’d just screwed: If I’d known you
         were a virgin, I’d have taken more time.
Woman: If I’d known you had more time, I would have
         taken my panty hose off” (35).
 
“Edith Sitwell said that one of her favorite pastimes was to sharpen her claws on the wooden heads of her opponents” (112). [I cannot corroborate this anywhere online, but it sounds like Sitwell. Must have thieved it at a party.]
 
“Deodorizing puck = urinal cake” (130)
 
From Patricia Marx, in 1986, Sedaris gets a bit of advice we could now pass along to Congress or Trump about how to handle the Russians: “If we want a three-year-old not to put his hand on a hot stove, we do not beat him unmercifully. Rather, we teach him that a stove is hot, by pressing his hand to the burner for a minute or two” (155). We need to press Russia’ fat little hands to the burner!
 
While working as Santa at SantaLand: “Yesterday a woman had her son pee into a cup, which of course tipped over. ‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘but Santa’s also going to need a stool sample’” (278).
 
Sedaris’s entries becomes even funnier, in 1993, when his career takes off with Barrel Fever. 
 
“Harry Rowohlt, the fellow who translated my book into German and is reading with me on my tour, told me that when someone on the bus or at a nearby table in a restaurant talks on a cell phone, he likes to lean over and shout, “Come back to bed, I’m freezing’” (391). This was recorded in 1991. Good luck with pulling that stunt now.
 
Of course, Sedaris’s theft by finding not only refers to the $45 or $50 or $100 he happens upon but also to the stories he hears, dramas that play out around him, whether they be in his family or at airports or in the marketplace. He records his thoughts on world events, Diana’s death in Paris, JFK Junior’s demise. He has something to say about everything, and I believe that is one aspect of his work that makes him a fine writer. Nothing is too highbrow or lowbrow for fodder. Step up to the trough and feed!

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-45  Nebraska

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A Writer's Wit

8/15/2019

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I am not altogether confident of my ability to put my thoughts into words: My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. Which is to say that I am not oversensitive in such matters.
​Stieg Larsson
Born on August 15, 1954

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S. Larsson
NEXT TIME: My Book World | David Sedaris, Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002
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My Journey of States-44  Alaska

8/14/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
The true measure of a man is how he behaves when death is close.
Alma Katsu
Born November 29, 1959
Fairbanks, Alaska
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A. Katsu
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 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 forty-fourth post of fifty.

Alaska (2011)

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​Saturday, May 21, 2011 
In Seattle, Ken and I board the Holland American ms Westerdam and head for open sea. It is 48°. We’ve never been on a cool-weather cruise before, but so far we like it. The décor designed for the Dutch firm is subtle and nuanced, not garish like some other lines I could mention. The crew are polite and friendly but not overly so. Not long after we enter our stateroom, we meet our steward for the trip. Each morning that he makes up the bed he will fold a single white towel into caricatures of various animals. See photos below.

​Wednesday, May 25, 2011 – Sitka, Alaska
Our vessel is at anchor beginning at nine a.m. We will depart near five p.m. Our visit will be the length of a work day, and the group we’re with make the most of it. We all board a jitney, and a guide steps on board to be with us. At least three times throughout our day she informs us how lucky we are that the sun is shining and that the temps are in the seventies. It could be cool and damp, she says. There exists and interesting blend of Russian and Tlingit Indian influences that make the day memorable. 
​Tuesday, May 24, 2011 – Hubbard Glacier
I’m not sure it’s wise, but the captain glides our behemoth ship in close to view the glacier up close. The deck is crowded with passengers especially on the starboard side. I’ve seen glaciers calving on film but never live before. Of course, everyone is bundled up, and we can see our breath while back in Texas the highs are in the nineties. I stare and can’t help wonder what kind of shape of this glacier will be in a decade from now.
​Thursday, May 26, 2011 – Ketchikan, Alaska
We dock at 6:41 a.m. and undock at 12:56 p.m., making for a short visit. Ken and I actually remain aboard and watch the action from our spacious terrace. The town’s shops are painted a variety of bright colors, and I photograph the geographic features that serve as a backdrop: the trickling down of a waterfall, the fog, a thick green forest. It is 57°. I fully understand that we’ve only seen a small fraction of what Alaska has to offer the tourist this week, but I do hope to return one day and see more.
After a long and checkered past with the U.S., beginning in 1867, Alaska finally achieved statehood early in 1959, when I was in fifth grade. ​​

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & TRUNK DECALS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia         42. Utah
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina   43. Washington
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | David Sedaris, Theft By Finding, Diaries 1977-2002
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A Writer's Wit

8/13/2019

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I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.
​Tom Perrotta
Born August 13, 1961

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T. Perrotta
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-44  Alaska
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Metaphor from the Physical World

8/9/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
​
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
     They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
     And add some extra, just for you.
 
But they were fucked up in their turn
     By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
      And half at one another’s throats.
 
Man hands on misery to man.
       It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
       And don’t have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin
Born August 9, 1922
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P. Larkin

My Book World

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Houston, Pam. Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country. New York: Norton, 2019.

Pam Houston may be the single best teacher of writing in the U.S. today, not only by way of her classroom techniques (which I know of firsthand) but by way of example, and Deep Creek proves my case. Houston’s main tenet, always, is to begin with the concrete details—whether fiction or nonfiction—and those details will lead you to your narrative.

“I have always believed that if I pay strict attention while I am out in the physical world—and for me that often meant the natural world—the physical world will give me everything I need to tell my stories” (78).

Having studied with Pam, I can tell you she calls one’s paying attention to these details “glimmers”: that conversation you overhear at the market, the accident you see on the way to your doctor’s appointment. Your doctor’s appointment. Everywhere you look throughout your day, if you’re alive, you should be paying attention to these glimmers. Of course, they can come from your past, as well, but something from the past can be a bit dusty, so, once again, your mind must return to the concrete details. Houston says,

​“I believe—like religion—that the glimmer, the metaphor, if you will, knows a great deal more than I do. And if I stay out of its way, it will reveal itself to me. I will become not so much its keeper as its conduit, and I will pass its wisdom on to the reader, without actually getting in its way” (79).
​And once again, as in all Houston’s stories, novels, or essays, she mines the glimmers in her life to reveal to readers her twenty-five year acquaintance with a patch of land high in the Colorado Rockies, at the headwaters of the Rio Grande, her ranch; the extreme physical, sexual, and emotional abuse her parents heaped upon her; the nanny, Martha Washington, who was more of a mother to her than anyone; obtaining the ranch property and hanging onto it by a thread at times, both financially and in terms of the physical world which, where she lives, has an extreme impact on human life whether it be the winter temperatures and snow and ice or a hundred-year fire or human encroachment. Many metaphors guide her. She lives by a purely spiritual (not religious) guide: What are the best ways for me to be kind to others and to the earth I live on, and how can I leave both better off before I leave this earth? Because of her childhood abuse, Pam grows up always on guard, always ready to leap into the future, and that is how she often lives: running literally to all four corners of our, at times, flat earth. She is invited or invites herself to some of the most strenuous and exhilarating ventures around. And in this book she makes each one of them shine, or glimmer.
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-44  Alaska
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A Writer's Wit

8/8/2019

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Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.
​Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Born August 8, 1896
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M. Rawlings
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Pam Houston's Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
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My Journey of States -43  Washington

8/7/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
​Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.
--Sherman Alexie
Born October 7, 1966
Spokane, Washington
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S. Alexie
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 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 forty-third post of fifty.

Washington (2011)

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​The only place I’ve visited in Washington is Seattle, where Ken and I embarked on a Holland America ship headed for Alaska (see my profile next week). But we spent a couple of days there before leaving and a day upon return, giving us a good feel for the city. I was surprised by the topography, that it gives San Francisco a run for its money on its steepness, known informally for its “seven hills,” like Rome. Hee hee. I loved the outdoor market, where you can watch the vendors toss a fifteen- or twenty-pound salmon to a paying customer, who’d better catch it. I loved the vibe, the fact that much public art adorns the city, that it was one of the first cities to raise its minimum wage to $12. And then there’s the coffee, ah, the coffee—if you like that sort of thing.
 
Washington was the forty-second state to be admitted to the union in 1889.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia         42. Utah
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Pam Houston's Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
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A Writer's Wit

8/6/2019

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I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is “In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.”
​Andy Warhol
Born August 6, 1928
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A. Warhol
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-43  Washington
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How a Wicked Fire Can Effect Change

8/2/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
​James Baldwin
​Born August 2, 1924
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J. Baldwin

My Book World

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Fieseler, Robert W. Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation. New York: Norton, 2018.

On June 24, 1973, manager of the Up Stairs Lounge, in New Orleans, a gay bar, ejected a disgruntled and emotionally damaged individual for fighting, and he returned with a seven-ounce can of lighter fluid. Dispersing the entire container of accelerant, he set the entrance on fire which spread almost instantaneously, trapping scores of gay men and a few women upstairs. Because the establishment was cursed with a number of unchecked fire hazards, the blaze trapped and killed, in the end, thirty-two individuals, three of whom were never identified their bodies were so badly charred.
 
Journalist Fieseler does a persuasive job of tracing the history of this event, developing the characters of its key players, limns a portrait of the arsonist and his personal difficulties, as well bringing to light the tepid response of the New Orleans community, including a police department more comfortable taunting gay men and treating them like second-class citizens than attempting to conduct an investigation of the fire.
 
On that June night in 1973, I myself was twenty-five years old, not quite out of the closet, and because news of the fire only made it to print in the largest of national newspapers, I’m sorry to say I never knew of it until I read this book. Earlier, in 1971, I had visited New Orleans as part of a seminary choir tour, in which, without my young wife around, I drank, smoked (along with other seminarians), and tossed a choir stole around my neck like a feather boa, as I sauntered through the French Quarter. Halfway out the closet door, I would not shed my wife until 1975; I would not come out entirely until age twenty-seven, feeling as if I had lived a lifetime without knowing why. Reading now of the fire, I think, under different circumstances, I could very well have been one of those victims. The Up Stairs Lounge, after all, was also home to MCC (Metropolitan Community Church), a national movement of gay Christian congregants. Not by the farthest stretch of the imagination—had I concluded my seminary studies at SMU, and had I accepted a job in NO—might I have been present that disastrous evening.
 
Fieseler has earned our gratitude for bringing to light this long-forgotten story and for bringing it before the public’s attention when, once again, fragments of our society are acting with hatred against anyone who isn’t a white heterosexual male. As with any holocaust, every story must be told.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-43  Washington
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A Writer's Wit

8/1/2019

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It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
​Herman Melville
​Born August 1, 1819
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H. Melville
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Robert W. Fiesler's Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation
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