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Holiday Greeting

12/23/2020

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I Photographed This Tree Near Junction, Texas, and decided to decorate it!
Merry Christmas and a Happy 2021! Next post: January 5, 2021
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Plight of Plains Indians

12/18/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.
​Christopher Fry
Author of ​Venus Observed
Born December 18, 1907
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C. Fry

My Book World

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​Carlson, Paul. The Plains Indians. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1998. 
 
I grew up in Kansas amid the Great Plains, and I have lived my adult life in what is locally called the South Plains of Texas. As a child, because of all the Indian street names (Seneca, Pawnee, Osage) in my Wichita neighborhood, and because of artifacts I found, I believed there was an invisible life beneath the “civilization” that had been superimposed over the top of the previous one. Well, Professor Carlson unveils that previous world so that it is no longer invisible. Through detailed treatment of Indian life—its beginning, how horses and bison effected change, economics, the various social structures (tribes differed), war with other tribes as well as whites, and reservation life—he portrays the truth about native plains cultures. Indian tribes were quite capable of assimilating change, sometimes to their detriment. Slowly, over a century and a half, European culture squelched or eviscerated Indian life, breaking treaties and reservation agreements when it suited the federal government to take land that it wanted. One can only imagine the sort of country the U.S. would be today if Europeans had treated the Indians (as many as five million coast to coast) fairly and with respect: perhaps there would have been no African slave trade, there would have existed cities of mixed heritage, Indian forms of governing that might been fairer than our amalgam of democracy and capitalism which seems to eat human flesh at an astounding rate: Perhaps less greed and more consideration for all human life.
 
I could be wrong, but I encountered a couple of typos that a copyeditor at an academic press should not have missed: 
 
On page 49, the author uses “dominate,” a verb, for what should be “dominant,” an adjective: “Just over a century later, the Plains Indians were living on reservations, and many of their traditional ways changed again—or for a time endured—beneath dominant white culture before reemerging again in the twentieth century” (49).
 
On page 174, the author misspells “possessed” by omitting the first “s”: “In 1890 fifty-nine agencies possessed an Indian law-enforcement squad” (174).
These errors mar an otherwise scholarly and informative book.

FRIDAY, January 8, 2021 | My Book World: Harold Brodkey's First Loves and Other Sorrows

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A Writer's Wit: Ford Madox Ford

12/17/2020

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The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists—even of the fact he is reading a book.​
Ford Madox Ford
Author of The Good Soldier
Born December 17, 1873
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F. M. Ford
TOMORROW: My Book World | Paul Carlson's The Plains Indians
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A Writer's Wit: Margaret Mead

12/16/2020

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We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
​Margaret Mead
Author of Sex and Temperament
Born December 16, 1901
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M. Mead
FRIDAY: My Book World | Paul Carlson's The Plains Indians
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A Writer's Wit: Muriel Rukeyser

12/15/2020

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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
​Muriel Rukeyser
Author of ​The Book of the Dead
Born December 15, 1913
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M. Rukeyser
FRIDAY: My Book World | Paul Carlson's The Plains Indians
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A Comedic Discussion of Sex, Power, & Money

12/11/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.
​Grace Paley
Author of ​Long Walks and Intimate Talks
Born December 11, 1922
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G. Paley

My Book World

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Pascoe, Sara. Sex Power Money. London: Faber, 2019.

​I first saw Ms. Pascoe on BBC America’s Graham Norton Show and realized I must read this, her second book. In it she not only expresses her opinion on feminism but does so in a manner that is by turns hysterically funny, sobering concerning the reality for sex workers, and an honest reveal of her own life. She spends a great deal of time debating (with herself) the ins and outs and rights and wrongs of pornography. One keeps reading both because of her sharp humor and her incisive research.
 
Some nuggets:

“With our beloved prairie voles the female has her ovulation induced by the smell of male urine. It’s a sure sign there’s a male nearby and so her body gets ready for mating. The exact opposite of a human female getting a whiff of urinals in a nightclub and her vagina falling off in disgust” (47).
 
“When I was at primary school there was a Tango advert where an orange blob man tapped people on the back, slapped them round the face and yelled informatively, ‘You’ve been Tangoed.’ This went whatever things went before they went viral. Crazy? Popular? It went crazy popular. The kids in my school did it all day long. We slapped and got slapped, and we loved it even though it hurt. We were unified by it for several cheek-smarting days. Then the advert got banned, orange blob man was elected President of the United States and the fun was over” (164).
 
“I don’t think that paying for someone’s dinner is explicitly  transactional—buying a homeless person a sandwich doesn’t mean you’re expecting a hand job in the park later. Your manager pays for lunch at a meeting without expecting you to drop your trousers, your mum cooks you a roast every Sunday with no sexual undertones whatsoever—it’s clear people can provide sustenance for each other without tensions and obligations. But where dating is concerned, expectations and implications could be different for the people either side of the table” (300).
Having heaped my praise upon Ms. Pascoe’s efforts, I wonder how combining humor with highly researched material concerning sex can work. Is the scientific a bit tainted by her insouciance, or is her humor, likewise, deadened a bit by the scientific? You read. You judge. I loved it!

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Paul Carlson's The Plains Indians
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A Writer's Wit: Helen Oyeyemi

12/10/2020

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Sometimes I feel weird about time. Sometimes I feel that it doesn't go in the order we perceive it. There are . . . repetitions that maybe we decide not to notice because it is simpler. I like to pick up on those moments.
​Helen Oyeyemi
Author of Gingerbread
Born December 10, 1984
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H. Oyeyemi
TOMORROW: My Book World | Sara Pascoe's Sex Power Money
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A Writer's Wit: Dalton Trumbo

12/9/2020

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The chief internal enemies of any state are those public officials who betray the trust imposed upon them by the people.
Dalton Trumbo
Author of Johnny Got His Gun
Born December 9, 1905
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D. Trumbo
FRIDAY: My Book World | Sara Pascoe's Sex Power Money
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A Writer's Wit: Mary Gordon

12/8/2020

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I think coldness is chic among writers, and particularly ironic coldness. What is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than to acknowledge that they are sad.
​Mary Gordon
Author of Final Payments
Born December 8,1949
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M. Gordon
FRIDAY: My Book World | Sara Pascoe's Sex Power Money
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'Old' Book Seems New Again

12/4/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.
​Barbara Amiel
Author of Friends and Enemies
​Born December 4, 1940
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B. Amiel

My Book World

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Lewis, Oscar. With a foreword by Oliver La Farge. Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic, 1959.

Never has an “old” book seemed so relevant. Lewis’s tome, by now, is history, but he takes five Mexican families (some of whom he has known since the 1940s) in the 1950s and makes a study of them. According to his own account, his approach is multi-faceted: 1) a holistic approach with regard to a single family 2) through the lens of one family member 3) to study a problem area in the family, and 4) another holistic method by taking in a typical day of a family. 
 
Lewis’s process makes for a fascinating read. You feel as if you are reading a novel, that you are in the midst of each one of these families: The Martínez family living in the highland village of Azteca, the Gómez family of the Casa Grande neighborhood in Mexico City, the Gutiérrez family living on MC’s “Street of the Bakers,” the Sánchez family, “on the edge of Mexico City,” and the Castro family in the wealthiest neighborhood studied, the Lomas de Chapultepec area of Mexico City. 
 
Lewis takes you into the various hovels that four of the families live in: earthen floors, primitive or substandard heating and cooking stoves, crowded conditions with multiple family members occupying beds or spaces on the floors. He lets us in on the daily grind of the working poor, always borrowing a few pesos from a friend, neighbor, or family member to make ends meet, and sometimes failing. The drudge of dead-end jobs or self-employment, i.e. selling off items in the street for yet a few more pesos. This all happens sixty years ago, and yet it would not be surprising to find out that many Mexicans still live the same way. No wonder they find conditions, as difficult as they are, in the United States “better” by comparison.
 
The final family, The Castro family, is by contrast, a representative of what Lewis calls the nouveau riche. David Castro, has come from poverty but has worked hard and successfully to bring his family to the “fringe” of one of the wealthier neighborhoods of MC. They have enough bedrooms for each of their four children, three boys and one girl. They have plenty of money, apparently, but David is largely in control of it. He and his wife, Isabel, have a “free union” marriage which is recognized neither by the government nor the church, but it suits David Castro’s needs: to control his wife and his four spoiled children. They have three servants, but nothing is ever done to Isabel’s satisfaction. David never gives her enough money, she claims, and yet what she does have she spends quite freely on expensive items for herself and her children. The Castro family stands in stark contrast to the other four, and yet there seem to be some similarities. All five families with the exception of one are ruled by a macho man with an iron fist. All except one man (and Lewis suspects he may have “homosexual tendencies”) has affairs with multiple women. Children bicker and vie for their parents’ attention in various dysfunctional ways. Nutrition is poor (fried “meat” that is the dregs of what a shopper can buy). In all, however, the book still stands as an compelling study, one that should still interest Mexico’s neighbors who live along the border of the United States of America.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Sara Pascoe's Sex Power Money

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A Writer's Wit: David K. Shipler

12/3/2020

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If you stand with the Customs and Border Protection officers who staff the passport booths at Dulles airport near the nation's capital, their task seems daunting.
​David K. Shipler
Author of The Working Poor
Born December 3, 1942
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D. K. Shipler
TOMORROW: My Book World | Oscar Lewis's Five Families
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A Writer's Wit: Ann Patchett

12/2/2020

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I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
​Ann Patchett
Author of The Dutch House
Born December 2, 1963
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A. Patchett
FRIDAY: My Book World | Oscar Lewis's Five Families
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A Writer's Wit: Suzy Kassem

12/1/2020

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Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.
​Suzy Kassem
Author of Rise Up and Salute the Sun
Born December 1, 1975
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S. Kassem
FRIDAY: My Book World | Oscar Lewis's Five Families
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    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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