Home in the railroad earth

Why I've used my full legal name on Facebook and for publication, or I'm not into kinky, thank you

2011-12-28T00:03:00.000-05:00

It all started some time in the 1990s, when I got a call from my father, who was living in New Mexico. He had received a call from a collection agency, which was trying to find the whereabouts of one Stephen Wylder. My dad knew I wasn't the one the agency was looking for, as the the said Stephen Wylder had lived in New Mexico as an adult. I lived in Albuquerque from 1958, when I was six, until 1965, when I was all of 13. He wisely didn't tell the representative any information about me, because the agency probably probably would have gone after me anyway.

It was a bit unsettling to know there was somebody else out there with my name—especially somebody with a credit problem. There just aren't that many Wylders in the United States. Most are descended from Wiley Wylder, son of Moses Wilder. There are different stories about why Wiley changed the spelling of his name. One tale is that it was a dispute over some land. My wife thinks Wiley just couldn't spell. In any case, Wiley changed the spelling to “Wylder” and moved from North Carolina to Illinois. In 1861 his son, James Robert Melton Wylder, the grandson of a Virginia slaveholder, was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 61st Illinois Infantry Regiment. It's possible I'm a distant relative of Douglas Wilder, the first (and so far the only) African American governor of Virginia, but that's another story.

It must have been around 2000 when I found Stephen Wylder again, thanks to the Internet. I “Googled” my name, though I suspect I used Alta Vista or Dogpile back then, and found there was a Stephen Wylder in California, who claimed to be a priest in the “Preterite (Anglican) Church” in California. While I know nothing about the Preterite Church, I am an Anglican (Episcopal Church—not one of those sects that broke away over the ordination of women and/or gays). There was also a Stephen Wylder in the San Diego area who posted on a message board for men who were in search of a dominatrix. (I kid you not.)

Given the possibilities for confusion, I began using my full name, Stephen Crews Wylder, when I wrote for publication. I also used it on for my Facebook page. The trouble is, it looks as though there should be a should be a Roman numeral and perhaps a title of nobility after it, though my wife, Kathleen Crews Wylder (I changed my middle name to her maiden name a la John Ono Lennon.) is the one who can trace her lineage to nobility. She's a descendant of John, Lord of the Isles, of Scotland.

Recently I learned that a Stephen Wylder had died in California. He was the same age as I, and whether or not he was the same Stephen Wylder who had me worried in the past I haven't seen any references to the Preterite Church or dominatrices attached to my first and last name in many years.

So I'm going back to plain Steve Wylder on Facebook, if I can figure out how to change it, but I'll stick to Stephen Crews Wylder for publication.

Meanwhile, if I'm ever in North Bay, Ontario (and the only reason I can think of going there is to ride the Polar Bear Express up to Moosonee), I can stop in at Wylder's Bar and Grill. Maybe I'll get a free drink.

My bizarre employment history, or how On the slow train became Home in the railroad earth

2011-11-02T02:45:00.001-04:00

In April of 2005 I was living in an efficiency apartment in Northeast Philadelphia, while my wife and son were in Elkhart, Indiana. It was the fourth phase in my career with Amtrak, which began in Chicago in 1984, and contiunes today in South Bend. I started at the Chicago Reservation Sales Office in February, after working for the Franch National Railroads' Chicago office and then for CIT Tours, the agency representing the Italian State Railways.

Kathleen and I lived in Oak Park, Illinois at the time. Our two daughters were born there, and by 1989 we had a third chid on the way. Rents were high in Oak Park, and inexpensive places to live in the Chicago area often came with second-rate schools. So we were looking for a smaller city, where the cost of living was lower. We were hoping for something near Iowa, where we both grew up. I had put in for a voluntary transfer to work as a ticket agent in numerous cities in the upper Midwest. Elkhart, Indiana wasn't one of them.

But Frank Stoy, the station supervisor in Toledo needed an agent in Elkhart. We looked at the town, liked it, and I made the transfer. We bought a house and moved while Kathleen was eight months pregnant. Our son Jim was born October 10, 1989--a little over a month after we moved.
Four years later, after Amtrak closed the station in Fort Wayne, I lost my Elkhart ticket agent job. But because I hadn't yet worked five years under the voluntary transfer, I still had seniority in Chicago.

For ten years--from December 1993 until December 2003--I was back at the Chicago call center, commuting from Elkhart on Amtrak and/or the South Shore (the latter involved a drive to South Bend or Michigan City). In the last few years I had enough seniority to work a four-day, ten-hour shift.
That all came to an end when Amtrak management decided to close the Chicago call center. I still believe that was a mistake, but upper management had made the decision. Even Richard M. Daley's offer of giving us a rent-free lease in an upper floor of the Carson's building did not sway the top brass. I had the choice of staying in Chicago or transferring to one of the remaining call centers.

Given the unstable situation in Chicago, I went to Philly. The girls were both in college by this time, but Jim was still in high school. The original plan was for all of us to move to Philly, but it's not easy to sell a house and Jim really wanted to graduate from Elkhart Memorial. So I ended up commuting back and forth, usually riding down to Washington on the Northeast Regional and switching to the Capitol Limited back to Elkhart. Because the Capitol winds its way along the river valleys of Maryland and Pennsylvania, it was very much the slow train. I had a recording of the King's Singers performing the Flanders and Swann's song, "Slow Train, and I remembered Bob Dylan's rambling poem on the album cover of Highway 61 Revisited beginning, "On the slow train time does not interfere." "On the slow train" seemed an apt name for my blog.

I kept it after I transferred to Bloomington-Normal. Illinois, and began driving every week between there and Elkhart. In the spring of 2009 we were in the process of moving to Bloomington when, after getting indigestion from eating a toasted tortilla with Pace 3 Pepper Salsa, I went to the computer and checked the Amtrak job website and saw a job opening in South Bend. I was supposed to have been notified of the job, as I had a transfer application in. Once I got hold of the station supervisor, the job was mine. Since July of 2009, I've been living in Elkhart and working in South Bend, some 15 miles away. So I haven't been "on the slow train" for some time. I also haven't been blogging much, as other things have taken precedence. Still, I'd like to blog more, and changing the name to "Home in the Railroad Earth seems appropriate. It's a variation of lines from Jack Kerouac's prose poem, "October in the Railroad Earth," which has been a favorite of mine ever since I first heard it, with Kerouac reading the poem to Steve Allen's piano accompaniment.

Elkhart, a railroad town for more than a century, and still the home to one of the Norfolk Southern's biggest rail yards, is surely of the Railroad Earth.

Of course, the Republican Congress would like me to be unemployed. Not personally, of course, but because I work for Amtrak. And while it doesn't look as though it will succeed in killing my employer, it may very well force Amtrak to cut its long-distance service. I still have seniority in Philadelphia, so I could end up moving back. But Kathleen would be going with me. And with no slow train to ride, I'd have to come up with a new name for the blog.

To Althea, who rode the train

2011-10-12T01:23:00.000-04:00

Checking a passenger list recently, I came across the name Althea. It's not a common name, and it brought to mind Richard Lovelace's poem, “To Althea, from Prison.” And it prompted me to revisit the poem and to look up Richard Lovelace on Wikipedia. The poem is a familiar one, if only for the first few lines of the last stanza. It was well-worth rereading, especially after learning that Lovelace actually did spend time in prison:

When Love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my Gates;
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the Grates:
When I lie tangled in her hair,
And fetter'd to her eye;
The Gods that wanton in the Air,
Know no such Liberty.

When flowing Cups run swiftly round
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with Roses bound,
Our hearts with Loyal Flames;
When thirsty grief in Wine we steep,
When Healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the Deep,
Know no such Liberty.

When (like committed Linnets) I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, Mercy, Majesty,
And glories of my KING;
When I shall voice aloud how Good
He is, how Great should be;
Inlarged Winds that curl the Flood,
Know no such Liberty.

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor Iron Bars a Cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage;
If I have freedom in my Love,
And in my soul am free;
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

Lovelace, born in 1618 into a well-to-do family, was the son of Sir William Lovelace, a member of the Virginia Company, and Anne Barnes Lovelace, daughter of Sir William Barne and a granddaughter of a Lord Mayor of London and an Archbishop of York. Given his circumstances, he grew to be a strong defender of the King Charles I and the Royalists in the conflict between King and Parliament.

He fought on the Royalist side in the 1640 Bishops' War, after Charles imposed bishops on the Church of Scotland. It was a precursor to the English Civil Wars. In 1641 he led a group of men to seize and destroy a petition for the abolition of episcopal rule in the Scottish church. The following year he presented the House of Commons with a pro-Royalist petition, which was supposed to have been burned. These actions landed him in Gatehouse Prison on April 30, 1642, but he was released on bail on June 21 of the same year on that condition that he avoid communication with Parliament.

Yet that brief incarceration inspired one of the most well-known poems in the English language. For Lovelace, the power of human love transcends the confinement of the stone walls and iron bars. The sublime eroticism of the first stanza: “When I lie tangled in her hair,/And fetter'd to her eye;/The Gods that wanton in the Air,/Know no such Liberty.” ought to be as well-remembered as the first lines of the last stanza. His use of the “fetter'd” “bound” reminds us that there can be freedom in the bonds between lovers.

Was there really an Althea who visited Lovelace in prison? There is no evidence for it, but I'd like to think there was. While Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Reginald Frampton paints her as a redhead (with what would later be called a Princess Leia hairdo), I imagine her as having long, dark hair and sparkling brown eyes, and looking very much like the woman I married.

And for the Althea who rode the train, my thanks for reminding me of this beautiful poem.

Tenebrae

2011-04-19T20:19:00.004-04:00

WEDNESDAY OF HOLY WEEK, 1940

Out of the east window a storm
Blooms spasmodically across the moonrise;
In the west, in the haze, the planets
Pulsate like standing meteors.
We listen in the darkness to the service of Tenebrae,
Music older than the Resurrection,
The voice of the ruinous, disorderly Levant:
“Why doth the city sit solitary
That was full of people?”
The voices of the Benedictines are massive, impersonal;
They never fear this agony nor are ashamed of it.
Think...six hours ago in Europe,
Thousands were singing these words,
Putting out candles psalm by psalm...
Albi like a fort in the cold dark,
Aachen, the voices fluttering in the ancient vaulting,
The light of the last candle
In Munich on the gnarled carving.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
Return ye unto the Lord thy God.”
Thousands kneeling in the dark,
Saying, “Have mercy upon me, O God.”
We listen appreciatively, smoking, talking quietly,
The voices are coming to us from three thousand miles.
On the white garden wall the shadows
Of the date palm thresh wildly;
The full moon of the spring is up,
And a gale with it.

--Kenneth Rexroth

This Wednesday, at 8:00 p.m., St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in Elkhart will be celebrating Tenebrae, an ancient Holy Week service of psalms and readings. Tenebrae is Latin for “darkness” or “shadows.” Fifteen candles are lighted in a stand called a hearse. At the end of each reading one candle is extinguished, until all but one candle is left burning. And that candle is hidden behind the altar, putting the church sanctuary in total darkness. A loud noise (Latin streptius) is made, usually by slamming a book shut or stomping on the floor, to symbolize the earthquake after Jesus' death. After the great noise, the single lighted candle is returned to the hearse, signifying the light of Christ's resurrection.

Kenneth Rexroth, who spent his early childhood in Elkhart, was an Anglo-Catholic or High Church Episcopalian, and he deeply appreciated the service of Tenebrae. In 1943, depressed about the war and uncertain of whether his conscientious objector status would be approved, tried to persuade an Episcopal or Roman Catholic church in San Francisco to offer the service, but without luck.

But three years earlier, Rexroth and his second wife Marie listened to Tenebrae broadcast on the radio from a Benedictine monastery somewhere on the east coast. The early spring of 1940 was the time of the “Phoney War,” in which the Germans and their Soviet allies were busy consolidating their conquest of Poland while the Western Front was relatively quiet. In fact, French troops had penetrated a few miles into Germany but then withdrew behind the Maginot Line.

Everyone knew a German attack on France was coming—the question was when, and Rexroth juxtaposes the dark service of Tenebrae with the tensions in Europe and the approaching storm outside his window. Rexroth mentions three European cities in the poem.

Albi, in southern France, was once the center of the Cathar Christians, deemed heretical by the Catholic Church and all but wiped out in the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) under Pope Innocent III. (Like other crusades this one had as much to do with temporal affairs as theological ones. The French monarchy gained control of southern France by participating in the crusade.) In any case, Albi brings to mind we now call genocide.

Aachen, or Aix-la-Chapelle in French, was the seat of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, and represents the triumph of Christianity over paganism. Many Nazi leaders wanted to exchange Christianity for a kind of neo-paganism. (I wonder whether the pre-Christian Germanic tribes would have recognized it as their religion.)

Munich, the principal city of Catholic southern Germany and Hitler's base of operations during the 1920s, was also the home of Cardinal Archbishop Michael Von Faulhaber, who spoke out against the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return ye unto the Lord thy God,” Rexroth pleads, quoting from the liturgy.

While we do not stand on the brink of world war today, the service of Tenebrae gives us an opportunity to reflect on the dark side of history and to take solace in the Light of Christ.

Image: Tenebrae hearse from Mainz Cathedral: Wikimedia commons

"A Reagan Book for his 100th"

2011-03-08T23:19:00.003-05:00

Thank you, Mark Souder. I'm not in the habit of thanking the former representative from the Third District of Indiana, but because of a column he wrote in the Elkhart Truth (“Pick up a Reagan Book for his 100th,” 5 February 2011), I have reason to thank him.

Souder, some of you may remember, was the Christian Right congressman who resigned after the public learned of his affair with a married woman on his staff. He resurfaced last month to urge Elkhartans to read a book about Ronald Reagan to celebrate the centennial of his birth.

Clearly, Souder idolizes Reagan: nearly all of the books he recommends are either hagiographies or extremely sympathetic to their subject. To give Souder credit, he does mention books by Lou Cannon, with the warning, “He does not share Reagan's worldview.”

Had Souder not published his list, I probably would not have reread Reagan's America: Innocents at Home by Garry Wills (Doubleday, 1987). It isn't on Souder's list; not only does Wills not share Reagan's worldview, he argues that it it is not based in reality: “A visit to his past is always a pleasant experience. Visiting Reaganland is is very much like taking children to Disneyland, where they can deal with a New Orleans cut to their measure. It is a safe past, with no sharp edges to stumble against. The more visits one makes to such a past, the better one is any troubling incursions of a real New Orleans, a real racetrack, the real American West.” (p387)
Wills calls the book's first section “Huck Finn's World.” In his autobiography, Reagan calls his childhood “one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls.” But Wills reminds us that “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in particular, takes place almost entirely at night, as a series of panicky escapes from one horror to another.” (p7)

Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, just a few miles from my father's hometown of Morrison. While Reagan's family moved many times during his childhood, he regards Dixon—one county over from Morrison—as his boyhood home. Reagan's first regular job was at WOC Radio in Davenport, Iowa. And while I grew up in Iowa City, I married a Davenport girl. So in a sense, Reagan's background parallels my own, though it's separated by some forty years. And while my father, who grew up in the same region as Reagan, voted for Dewey in 1944, but became a liberal Democrat not long afterward. Reagan supported Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but took a sharp right turn sometime after 1948.

Wills shows how the white settlement of the American Midwest, along with the West, was made possible largely by government: the Hennepin Canal, which benefited Tampico, was a government project. He goes on to remind us that Reagan's father and brother both through the Depression as a result of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

In Davenport, and later in Des Moines, Reagan worked as a sportscaster, transforming telegraphed signals from Chicago Cubs games into play-by-play coverage. And Wills points out that Reagan had spent his entire career as one of the “symbol specialists” Jeane Kirkpatrick attacked in her 1976 book, The New Presidential Elite: Men and Women in National Politics. Reagan went from sportscaster to actor to General Electric spokesman to politician.

“There is nothing wrong with any of these activities,” Wills writes. But it is strange that they should make up the sole background of a hero cheered by critics of mere 'symbol skills.'” (p101)

Wills follows Reagan's Hollywood career from his arrival to his 1942 triumph in Kings Row, to his transition from a movie to a television actor. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan helped engineer an agreement with MCA which allowed the corporation to act both as union representative of television actors an television producer—an obvious conflict of interest.

Reagan, according to Wills, came close to being indicted. Wills believes Reagan just didn't see it as a conflict of interest, but “was always always prepared to think the best of his own bosses.” (p278)

The main premise of Wills's book, though, is that Reagan's America is one of myth—a myth that millions of Americans hold as truth. In his chapter, “Greenfield Village on the Potomac,” Wills writes of Henry Ford's high schools, where students learned from McGuffey's Readers: “Ford kept creating new models of his cars to replace the old, but he would not allow his schools to admit new readers to replace McGuffey's... He could not take his old world with him as he whizzed off in his automobile time machine, which carried him in the wrong direction, forward to the future.” (p374, italics in original)

Reagan's America is one very much defined by Hollywood. Wills points out that the “Wild West” of movies and television is at odds with the real American West of the post-Civil War era:
“...Robert Dykstra, investigating the period of legendary drives through the towns of Kansas, found that places like Dodge City and Abilene averaged only one and a half murders per year, often having nothing to do with cowboys, and usually unconnected with 'shootouts.'” (p89)

In his 1976 primary campaign against Gerald Ford, Reagan repeated a story about a black Navy cook who was stationed at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed: “'He cradled a machine gun in his arms, which is not an easy thing to do, and stood on the end of the pier blazing away at the Japanese airplanes and strafing him and that [segregation] was all changed.'

“Reporters pointed out that segregation [in the military] persisted until Truman abolished it in 1948, three years after the war, but Reagan shook his head and said he did not believe them.” (p165) Wills surmises that he remembered the scene from a movie.

In a movie Wills does not mention, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the old newspaper editor says, “When legend becomes fact, print the legend.” For Reagan, the legend has become fact. And because the legends are the same ones that Americans have learned from television and the movies, he was able to key into the American psyche in a way that few politicians have: “He is a durable daylight 'bundle of meanings,' as Roland Barthes called myth. Reagan does not not argue for American values, he embodies them.” (p4)

And perhaps the central American value he embodies is one that it is at odds with traditional Christianity: that of original sinlessness:

At one time a woman of unsavory enough experience was delicately but cruelly referred to as “having a past.” The doctrine of original sin states that humankind, in exactly that sense, “has a past.” And much of American thinking has been intended to exempt this country from that stigma. (p384)

Wills contrasts “the doctrine of the Fall” with “the doctrine of the Market:”

Modern capitalism lives by a counter-myth to the Fall of Man—one where benign nature makes everything go, miraculously, right... Individual greeds add up to general gain... Eden was lost by free choice in the Fall of Man. It rises, unbidden, by the automatic engineerings of the Market.

The earlier myth called for a repenting awareness of sin. The later one called for a dutiful innocence and optimism. (p384)

Jimmy Carter, though a far more devout and orthodox Christian than Reagan, lost the evangelical Christian vote because he believed in the Fall of Man: “religious voters found that Carter lacked the higher confidence in man, man's products, and America. He talked of limits and self-denial, of tendencies toward aggression even in a sacred or 'saved' nation like America. He believed in original sin.”

Reagan's ability to identify himself with that American counter-myth, Wills argues, is the reason Americans twice elected him to the nation's highest office. More recently, Tea Party activists have accused President Obama of not believing in American exceptionalism. It seems to be a myth that, however untrue, all American politicians must subscribe to. And Reagan articulated the myth better than anyone else.

Reagan, who misquoted John Winthrop's 1630 “city upon a hill” sermon, by adding the adjective “shining” to it, distorted Winthrop's message of caution and turned it into an optimistic declaration of a new Eden. Winthrop uses the line from from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14): “...for we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world...,” as a warning to his Puritan followers that their colony would be watched and judged by the world. Reagan's “shining city on a hill” had no such cautionary message; only the shallow optimism of “Morning in America.”

Mark Souder, who, I hope, has repented of his sins, ought to read Reagan's America. And I pray that he and his former lover can repair their respective marriages.

Sarah Palin and "Second Amendment Remedies"

2011-01-11T21:55:00.004-05:00

Demonizing or ridiculing one's political opponents can be fun. I enjoyed calling George W. Bush an idiot and Dick Cheney an evil genius. Nixon was paranoid, Reagan a Grade B actor, and Gerald Ford played too much football without a helmet. Yes, we liberals have done some name-calling. But with the exception of the “Where is Lee Harvey Oswald Now that We Really Need Him?” buttons, which, as far as I know, never inspired anyone to try to kill Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, we never talked about “Second Amendment remedies,” as did Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle.
We've now seen a Second Amendment remedy in action, with Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in critical condition, and six people dead, including a 9-year-old girl.

Rep. Giffords, a moderate Democrat in a Republican-leaning district, was one of those targeted for defeat by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin in the 2010 election. And I use the word “targeted” almost literally, for one of her political action committee's advertisements showed Giffords' district in what appears to be the crosshairs of a gunsight.

Palin has expressed shock and sadness at the shooting. I'm sure she never expected anyone would take her literally and try to kill one of her targets. But Palin and her supporters were having too much fun playing the political demonization game to think there might be consequences to putting their opponents in a virtual gunsight.

Palin loves the political game. So do I. In the summer of 1972 I worked on the staff of Iowa Democratic senatorial candidate Dick Clark. Four years later I knocked on doors for presidential candidate Morris Udall, and did the same for the Democrats in 1980. Since then, employment and family have kept me from devoting a great deal of time to political action, but I'm still very much a political junkie.

As we all know, the outcome of the political game has far greater consequences than the outcome of, say, the Super Bowl. While I've always been politically liberal, I know very well that many conservative Republicans want to cut Amtrak funding to zero, thus depriving me of a job. (Still, I don't plan to kill any right-wingers because of it.)

Palin seems to like the political game a lot more than she does the business of governing. Otherwise, why would she resign as governor of Alaska in order to be the Tea Party's Number One cheerleader? I'm sure Palin's advisers told her that her best strategy for winning the presidency in 2012 was to stay in the governorship, make a reputation as someone who can govern effectively, and begin full-time campaigning in 2011. But the lure of the campaign trail and the adulation of the Tea Party crowds was too great for her, and she succumbed to temptation.

And until now, it's been fun for her. Even though some of the wackiest candidates she backed, such as Angle, Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell, and Alaska's own Joe Miller, lost, she picked up enough victories to celebrate. But now she has to face the consequences of her crosshairs ad, along with the Tea Party's view of opponents as The Enemy.

Here in northern Indiana, Kokomo radio talk show host Peter Heck referred to President Obama, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Indiana Second District Representative Joe Donnelly as “enemies of freedom,” while Donnelly's Tea Party Republican opponent Jackie Walorski (another Palin protege who lost) likened her campaign to the war against the Nazis.

I hope Palin and her Tea Party followers have realized, if they hadn't before, that their opponents are just that—opponents—loyal Americans who disagree with them on many issues, and that they are real people, with real husbands, wives, and children who love them. They aren't enemies or traitors, just as the Republicans aren't my enemies. I just happen to disagree with them.

And there are simply too many people in this country who don't understand that hyped political campaign rhetoric is not meant to be taken literally. We saw that Saturday in Tucson. Please, no more crosshairs, no more talk of “Second Amendment remedies,” and no more likening one's political opponents to traitors or enemies. From my position on the moderate left, I'll strive to do the same.

Blood, Guts, and Tattoos: My recent ordeal

2010-08-02T01:14:00.005-04:00

“I'll never get a tattoo,” I've vowed to myself more than once. While I have many friends I like and respect who sport body art, I've never had any desire to have someone inject ink into my body. The vast majority of tattoos I've seen are no improvement on the original, natural skin. But I'm no crusader against the tattoo industry or against those who have tattoos. I just don't plan on getting any myself.

But recently I found that I had three “tattoos” of India ink, though they were in a place almost no one could see. And while I never consented to them, I was glad I had them. I'm not certain whether any trace of them remains. They served their purpose.

Over the past dozen years, I've had problems with gastrointestinal bleeding. In the spring of 1999 I spent close to a week in Elkhart General Hospital due to G.I. bleeding. The doctor told my wife I didn't have stomach cancer, colon cancer, ulcers, and probably a few other things. But he couldn't locate the bleed except to say that it was in that vast, 18-foot-long small intestine. The bleeding stopped on its own, and the doctor said it was probably a “vascular malformation,” in which a weakness in a small vein manifests itself in bleeding. I was told not to use aspirin or ibuprofen. For me, the Columbine massacre will always be linked to my time in the hospital.

The next year, at around the same time, I had another bleed, and another hospitalization. This time, a colonoscopy detected the problem—a lesion in the large intestine. The lesion was cauterized, and I had no G.I. bleeding for a decade.

But on Thursday, July 8, it came back, first in the form of dark stools, and by Saturday the 12, I it was clear that I needed to check myself into the hospital. I drove back from my job at the South Bend Amtrak station, left a note for my wife, and drove myself to Elkhart General Hospital.

I was there for just over a week, while the doctors and technicians tried to locate the source of the bleeding. I had an upper-G.I. endoscopy, which ruled out the esophagus and stomach. I had a colonoscopy, which eliminated the large intestine. Once again, I was bleeding from the small bowel. After a capsule endoscopy, in which I swallowed a capsule that took pictures of my intestines, gave inconclusive results, it was clear that Elkhart General had done all it could do. On Sunday night, July 18, I rode in an ambulance to the University of Chicago Medical Center, one of the nation's best hospitals for gastroenterology.

Things went slowly at the big hospital. While I did the preparation for the double-balloon enteroscopy on Monday (drinking a dreadful laxative concoction called GoLytely, which supposedly doesn't drain the electrolytes from the system, though it wipes out nearly everything else), I didn't have the procedure until Thursday. But once I finally had it, the physicians found the problem. The team spent about three hours checking my small bowel first by way of the anus, and then by way of the mouth. And in that second scan, they found “submucosal lesions,” which were responsible for the bleeding. And to mark the lesions, as well as the part of my small bowel which was not surveyed, I received three “tattoos” of India ink.

The next day, Friday, July 23, I had laproscopic surgery. I awoke to find five small scars on my belly. Later I learned that the surgeon had removed about 3 feet of my small intestine. “You'll never miss it,” he said.

I sill have to do follow-ups, and there's some possibility I'll have to do a round of chemotherapy if the labs find anything potentially cancerous. But right now, I'm glad to be home. And since I haven't heard anything from Chicago, I'm hoping no news is good news. And I'm happy to be in the land of the living, albeit with 20 percent less guts and perhaps some vestige of India ink tattoos.

Photo: University of Chicago Medical Center (Wikimedia).

Grammar Girl, August Dvorak, QWERTY, and the Art of Tai Ping

2010-07-08T00:02:00.008-04:00

Grammar Girl says I should put only one space between sentences. It’s a hard habit to break. Back in the 1967-68 school year at Cedar Falls High, the typing instructor stressed that the break between sentences required two spaces. It was the one thing I really learned from that class, which I passed with a D. My biggest problem with typing, then and now, is that I can’t type without looking at the keyboard. Believe me, I tried. And I felt lucky to escape with a D.

According to Grammar Girl (a.k.a. Mignon Fogarty), typewriters were designed so that each character had an equal amount of horizontal space. To make a clear separation between sentences, a second space was necessary. But present-day word processing programs have done away with letter equality. They’re also designed to regulate the space between sentences, so the two-space rule can foul things up for the publisher.

She’s probably right. Still, I hate to give up the sum of my knowledge from that long-ago class. My girlfriend in my next and final year of high school, at University High School in Iowa City, was an ace at the subject (along with all of the other subjects), and referred to it as if it were a Chinese martial art: Tai Ping. She would have earned a black belt had the school awarded them. (Like most high school romances, ours did not last; she and I are both married, but not to each other. I'm really glad we're friends, though.)

She now makes good money with her prestidigitation, surely typing on the 21st century equivalent of what the Harvard Lampoon called a "a supercharged, fuel-injected, 345 hp Smith-Corona.” (Bored of the Rings) What’s more, she uses the Dvorak keyboard. Well, actually, she uses a QWERTY keyboard, but programmed as a Dvorak. For somebody who has to look at the keys, it’s well nigh miraculous. (Dvorak Simplified Keyboard below [Wikipedia])

A note of explanation: when typewriters were introduced in the nineteenth century, manufacturers experimented with a lot of different keyboard formats. The biggest problem with manual typewriters was that a fast typist would jam the keys; the QWERTY format reduced the jamming problem and thus became the standard of the industry. But in 1961 when IBM introduced the Selectric, with its rotating type head, there was no longer a jamming problem. And the QWERTY keyboard wasn’t necessary.

Enter August Dvorak, who had, in 1936, redesigned the keyboard with help from his brother-in-law , Dr. William Dealy and ther friend Etaoin Shrdlu. Shrdlu, as I discovered by reading Harvard Lampoon’s 1968 parody of LIFE, is not really somebody’s name, but the twelve most common letters used in the English language. If you look at the QWERTY keyboard, you’ll see that the three most common letters are on the left side. And most are not on the middle, or “home” row of keys. Dvorak's redesigned keyboard makes it possible for professional typists to type much more rapidly. This was true even before the IBM Selectric and computer word processing, but with the decline of the manual typewriter, the last reason for the QWERTY keyboard as a standard has disappeared—at least for touch typists, If you’re Steve Wylder and have to look at the keys, it doesn't much matter. I'll stick with QWERTY.

I'll probably keep typing two spaces between sentences. But the wizards at Sun Microsystems have made it possible for me to do so with no harm to the text. OpenOffice Writer's AutoCorrect function lets me keep typing the double space and still end up with a single space between sentences.

Maybe the "Worst" isn't so bad after all

2010-06-16T19:46:00.005-04:00

During the time when I was an active Authonomy member, I read some incredibly bad writing. But a yellowed newspaper clipping reminded me that these Authonomists couldn't hold a candle to Michael “The Fastest Typewriter in the East” Avallone.

The article, a “Weekend Whodunits” column by Henry Kisor, in the April 17, 1987 Chicago Sun-Times, reviewed Gun in Cheek: An Affectionate Guide to the “Worst” in in Mystery Fiction (Mysterious Press) by Bill Pronzini, a compendium of bad mystery writing, mainly of the hardboiled variety. Kisor begins with this excerpt from “one of a series of abominable pulp mysteries of the 1950s by Richard F. Prather, that featured a private eye named Shell Scott,” Take a Murder, Darling:

He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed and strangled. Either somebody really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I ever heard of.

Two of the funniest examples were from the speeding typewriter of Avallone, who seems to have had trouble with human anatomy:

“His thin mustache was neatly placed between a peaked nose and two eyes like black marbles.” (Don't Die in Bed)

“She...unearthed one of her fantastic breasts from the folds of her sheath skirt.” (The Horrible Man)

Pronzini even finds examples from more contemporary mystery writers: “The sun [was] shining its ass off.” (Looking for Rachel Wallace by Robert B. Parker, “who of all writers should have known better,” remarks Kisor.)

Pronzini's examples were not exclusively American. “Nobody,” writes Pronzini, “approached the art of name-calling with more verve and scorn” than British writer Berkeley Gray's detective, Norman Conquest. Kisor provides a few examples:

“'Reach, slugs!' he said calmly.”

“'There are a a lot of things you don't know, reptile.'”

“'It's a shame that a chunk of hellspawn like you should be one of the throng.'”

“'Say that again, filth, and my trigger finger will give a very nasty jerk.'”

But it's an American Kisor uses for the final quote in his column. “Nobody,” he writes, could construct a stumbling metaphor better than Joseph Rosenberger... in his Death Merchant spy series:”

Tuskanni stood in the open doorway at the top of the stairs, a .38 Colt automatic in his hand, watching as the burly drivers tried to bring down the two brothers—their efforts making as much sense as the termite who was a conscientious objector and went around trying to eat up draft boards.

The column inspired me to read Pronzini's book. As I recall, though, Kisor managed to get the best examples from the book. But rereading the article gives me pause to reconsider my judgment. All of the examples are in grammatical English, with no comma splices, dangling participles, or other errors. Richard Prather uses “all right,” as opposed to the “alright” which abounds in Authonomy—even among the better writers. (What's scary is that the spell check in Open Office Writer has no problem with “alright.”) Avallone may have had trouble placing the parts of the body, but he knew the parts of speech. Quite a few of my fellow Authonomists don't.

“May their roscoes forever spit 'Ka-Chow! Chow!'” concludes Kisor.

Amen.

Forgotten Books Friday: "Up 'Til Now," by Eugene McCarthy

2010-06-11T05:03:00.000-04:00

Some months ago I found Eugene McCarthy's Up 'til Now: A Memoir (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987) on the library discard shelf. It's a witty and very readable look back at American politics from 1948 until the 1980s by the man who dared to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination.

Up 'til Now includes a large section about the '68 campaign, but McCarthy's bitterness over it—especially over Robert Kennedy's decision to enter the race—makes it the weakest part of the book. But when he writes about his 1948 campaign for Congress and his years in the Congress, he's at his best. Take, for instance, his comparison of 1968 and his first Congressional race in 1948:

The support I received in the anti-Vietnam campaign of 1968 was described by some observers as motley and unprecedented. It was in fact little different from that which I received in 1948—from students, some old enough to vote, some not, old liberals, and party persons, especially women.

Or his description of the Philadelphia delegation to the 81st (1949-1951) Congress:

It was a noteworthy bunch, consisting of four members: Green, Granaham, Barrett, and Chudoff. They were all of the same height, roughly five feet four inches. The word was that Bill Green, who was the political boss of Philadelphia, would not approve any Democratic candidate for Congress who was taller than he. None of the delegation was. Moreover, the delegation of four sat in the last row of the House Chamber and voted as one man.

When he gets to his 1968 campaign, he seems defensive. He never really explains why he made virtually no effort to win after the California primary, except to write, "After the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the chance of carrying the antiwar issue at the Democratic convention was, barring unforeseen developments, lost."

His bitterness about Kennedy colors his entire treatment of 1968. He has a point—Kennedy's organization did run a ruthless primary campaign against McCarthy, in addition to coming into the race only after McCarthy had made his impressive showing in New Hampshire. Still,
McCarthy has nothing to say about the 1968 Democratic Convention or his lukewarm endorsement of Hubert Humphrey after Humphrey broke with Johnson on Vietnam.

He's surprisingly kind to Richard Nixon. "I think it fair to say... quite possibly no one could have done any better in ending the war unless he had ended it sooner, but quite certainly no one could have done any worse."

But he does go on to write that "traces of the old Nixon showed through." McCarthy is bothered

less by Watergate than by Nixon's 1971 "enemies list."

In the final section of his book, "Entropic Politics," McCarthy writes,"The politics of the United States, and especially of the Democratic Party, following Watergate and the end of the Nixon administration might best be labeled 'entropic,' a state attributed to society generally by Professor John Ahearn of Stanford University as having 'no goal' and 'no path of effective action.'"

McCarthy sees the America of the late 1980s as "overtransported and overfueled... overdrugged... overadvertised, over info-tained...overbureaucratized... overincorporated... overdefensed."

In the course of his scathing, but largely accurate assessment of American society, he goes on to say, "President Reagan and his administration have judged the growing power of the corporation to be a good thing." Yet he does not explain his 1980 endorsement of Reagan over Jimmy Carter, who had proposed an extensive program of energy conservation in 1979. While McCarthy's personal dislike of Carter is well-known, McCarthy must have realized that Reagan was working hand in glove with the multinationals.

In spite of all its shortcomings, Up 'Til Now is a refreshing look at American politics. And in a time when the TEA party folks are screaming for term limits and denouncing career politicians, McCarthy's book reminds us why we need professional politicians. In what is really a eulogy for Senator Philip Hart of Michigan, he writes:

Philip Hart was a politician. He recognized politics as an honorable, necessary, and difficult vocation. He practiced it not as "the art of the possible," which is wholly inadequate as a definition, but as a discipline of mind and will, as a profession that should carry the common good beyond what is considered prudent and possible. He knew that politics is not a game to be scored, to be marked by winning and losing, but that it is a continual challenge.

I was too young to tramp through the snows of New Hampshire for Gene. I did what I could, selling McCarthy's Million buttons to my high school classmates, and working to nominate McCarthy at the Cedar Falls High School mock Democratic convention. (See "When I was Clean for Gene.") Even though it reminded me of McCarthy's many contradictions, quirks, and foibles, reading Up 'Til Now gave me a new respect for the man, who died in 2005, and for the thousands of idealistic students who cut their hair, put on suits and dresses, and went off to campaign for the only Democrat willing to challenge LBJ over Vietnam.

Last Train to Des Moines, Forty Years Ago

2010-05-31T12:10:00.008-04:00

Note: The following was submitted to the Des Moines Register as a guest editorial. As the Register has apparently decided not to use it, I'm posting it here. Photo Credit: Ron Goodenow. (Train No. 7 near Grinnell, IA, late 1960s or 1970)

On May 31, 1970, I took Trailways from Iowa City to Davenport, walked across the Government Bridge to Rock Island, Illinois, and walked a few more blocks to the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad station. I was there to ride the last run on the Rock Island Lines' Train No. 7, which, along with its eastbound counterpart, No. 10, were the only passenger trains serving Des Moines and Iowa City. The Rock Island depot was filled with families taking the children for a first, and presumably last ride on the train. They rode from Rock Island to West Liberty, West Liberty to Iowa City, and so on down the line to Council Bluffs, the train's western terminus. Forty years later, Des Moines, Iowa City, and the entire state of Iowa north of U.S. Highway 34 still have no passenger train service.

From the vantage point of 1970, that wouldn't seem very startling. Louis W. Menk, who was about to become chairman of the newly-merged Burlington Northern Railroad, appeared on NBC's Today Show on February 26, 1970, and said, "in my view we ought to let the intercity passenger train, the long-distance passenger train, die an honorable death, like we did the steamship, or the riverboats and the stagecoach and the pony express." Gasoline was cheap, the airlines were profitable and expanding, and passenger trains were being eliminated all over the nation. Des Moines wasn't even the biggest city in America without rail passenger service. Dallas, Texas had that dubious honor.

But even though things looked bleak for the passenger train, there was change in the air. Congress was working on a bill, popularly known as Railpax, that would create a quasi-public corporation to operate a national network of passenger trains.

In fact, the Rock Island was desperate to eliminate its passenger service across Iowa because the Railpax bill would put a hold on train discontinuances. And because membership fees in the proposed National Railroad Passenger Corporation would be based on the railroad's passenger train losses for 1969, the Rock Island wanted to stay out. (The railroad had claimed a $1.3 million loss on Nos. 7 and 10 for 1969. It had also run a Minneapolis-Des Moines-Kansas City train for the first half of 1969, for which it claimed huge losses.) It was cheaper to run its two remaining intercity services: Chicago-Rock Island and Chicago-Peoria, than join NRPC.

The Interstate Commerce Commission, the agency with jurisdiction over passenger train discontinuances, gave the Rock Island what it wanted, and allowed the line to drop Nos. 7 and 10 before the ICC held hearings on the discontinuance petition. Normally the ICC would order the trains continued during the hearing process. As expected, the Commission reaffirmed its original decision, and the Rock Island remained "freight service only" west of its namesake city. (The Rock Island and Peoria trains survived until the end of 1978.)

Meanwhile, President Richard Nixon signed the National Railroad Passenger Act of 1970 on October 30 of that year, and Railpax emerged as Amtrak on May 1, 1971. In spite of efforts by every administration from Nixon through George W. Bush to curtail or eliminate Amtrak, passenger trains continue to cross the nation. And President Obama, with assistance from his train-riding vice president Joe Biden, has made high-speed rail a priority of his administration.
In 1974, when the energy crisis made the fuel-efficiency of rail attractive, it seemed likely that passenger trains would return to central and northern Iowa. The Iowa Legislature even approved $4 million for passenger train service that year, but in what state Representative Stephen Rapp (D-Waterloo) called a "sell-out," the appropriation was eliminated in conference committee.

Amtrak planned a Chicago-Des Moines train in 2000, when then-CEO George Warrington thought the corporation could make money by hauling freight as well as passengers. The expected freight contracts never materialized and the plan was dropped.

In the forty years since I stepped on board the last No. 7, I've promoted rail passenger service both as a citizen and for the last 26 years, as an Amtrak employee. But though I've lived out-of-state since 1981, I'm still an Iowan at heart. It's refreshing to hear of Governor Chet Culver's interest in reviving intercity rail service in Iowa.

I hope Iowans will continue to work for fast trains in the Hawkeye State. Another forty years is too long to wait for good public transportation in Iowa.

Happy Flora Day!

2010-05-08T15:03:00.003-04:00

Every year, around May 8, the people of Helston, Cornwall celebrate Flora Day, culminating in the "Hal an Tow," with the plays of St. George and the Dragon and St. Michael and the Devil. I'm sure the celebration evolved from a pre-Christian Celtic spring festival. Here are the lyrics:

Robin Hood and Little John
Are both gone to the fair-O
And we will to the merry greenwood
To see what they do there-O
And for to chase-O
To chase the buck and doe

Chorus (after each verse):

Hal-an-tow, jolly rumbalow
For we are up as soon as any day-O
For to fetch the summer home
The summer and the May-O
For summer is a-coming in
And winter is a-gone-O

As for St. George-O
St. George he was the knight-O
Of all the knights in Christendom
St. George he had the right-O
In every land-O
The land where'er we go

But for a greater than St. George
Our Helston has the right-O
St. Michael with his wings outspread
The archangel so bright-O
Who fought the fiend-O
Of all mankind the foe

Maybe I made a mistake by allowing AdSense

2010-05-06T15:30:00.002-04:00

Last week I decided to try to make a few bucks from this blog by allowing Google AdSense. I've had two politically-oriented posts which clearly indicate that I'm a liberal Democrat and opposed to the the worship of markets. Yet I'm getting ads urging people to urge Senator Bayh to vote against environmental legislation and the regulation of banks. I'll keep AdSense on for a while, but if my liberal blog is going to become a platform for right-wing nuts, I'll have to forgo the money.

Kent State and the Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon

2010-05-04T16:30:00.012-04:00

The verdict of history is never final. Warren G. Harding, almost universally considered one of worst American president, has been rehabilitated by at least some historians. Conservative columnist Mona Charen, in an October 13, 2009 article in the National Review, quotes two historians who lionize Harding.

Richard Nixon has never lost his defenders. And sometimes they make a strong case for him. The historian Robert Dallek, in his Modern Scholar lecture series, The American Presidency , gives Nixon high marks for his economic program and his ending of the Vietnam War. And Dallek is very much in the progressive school of historians. Yet the memory of the Kent State killings, which happened forty years ago this week, reminds us of the vicious and divisive nature of the Nixon presidency.

George W. Bush's campaign strategy of polarizing the American electorate and demonizing his opponents was nothing new. While Nixon used the slogan "Bring Us Together" in his 1968 campaign, by 1970 he had become the most divisive president in recent history. His vice president, Spiro Agnew, began the assault on intellectuals, the press, and dissidents. In 1969 he made headlines with the line, "A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." The Nixon machine, while never employing the outright racism of George Wallace, the 1968 American Independent Party candidate for president, took advantage of racial prejudice in what was called the "Southern Strategy."

Nixon, in his 1968 campaign, promised "an honorable end to the war." But once he became president he widened the war while launching a domestic offensive against the antiwar movement. The Johnson Administration took no action against Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and others who demonstrated in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. It was the Nixon Administration which ordered the Chicago Eight (later Chicago Seven after Seale was tried separately) trials.

In the spring of 1970 Nixon widened the war by approving an invasion of (he called it an "incursion") of Cambodia. As a result, there were antiwar demonstrations on hundreds of American campuses. Nixon's widely-quoted May 1 reaction to the demonstrations was:

You know, you see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world and here they are, burning up the books, I mean, storming around about this issue, I mean, you name it. Get rid of the war, there'll be another one. (American Experience, Nixon).

Three days later National Guardsmen fired on students demonstrating at Kent State University, killing four. "My child was not a bum," said the father of one of the girls killed.

Many Americans blamed the students for the deaths, as they had blamed demonstrators for the violence at the 1968, Democratic Convention, which the Walker Commission deemed a "police riot." The Republican National Committee decided to make campus riots, or "law and order" the main theme of its 1970 campaign.

The culmination of the 1970 Nixon effort was an election-eve broadcast:

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. (AP) President Nixon will climax his strenuous role in the 1970 campaign by appearing on major television networks tonight in filmed segments of a speech decrying violent dissent..." -Elkhart Truth, November 2, 1970.

The broadcast turned out to be a disaster. The grainy black-and-white film, with a poorly-recorded soundtrack, showed an angry Nixon who seemed out of control.

The Democrats aired a speech by Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine (the 1968 vice presidential candidate). It was in color and professionally recorded. Muskie exuded calmness and rationality in contrast to Nixon's anger. Charlayne Hunter-Gault of the PBS NewsHour put it this way: "In 1970, Muskie's star rose when he responded in a nationwide speech to a divisive Republican campaign that attacked the patriotism of college students and Democrats."

In fact, polls showed Muskie beating Nixon during much of 1971. And so began Nixon's "dirty tricks " campaign, which succeeded in eliminating Muskie as a 1972 presidential candidate.

Nixon may have been progressive in his economic policies. The Environmental Protection Administration and Amtrak began under Nixon's watch. He helped bring about detente with Moscow and opened up relations with China. And after four bloody years, he removed our combat troops from Southeast Asia. But all that pales in comparison to his campaign of division, anger, dirty tricks, and yes, hatred.

Indiana's Third District: A Race for the Extreme Right

2010-05-04T01:29:00.008-04:00

It's Primary Election Day in Indiana: the first Tuedsay after the first Monday in May. I'll be taking a Democratic ballot, so I won't have many choices. But I've had fun watching the Republicans trying to one-up each other. The Third District of Indiana, which includes part of my hometown of Elkhart, is represented by Mark Souder, a Christian Right Republican who's best known for his "Drug-Free Student Loan Amendment" to the federal student aid law. While the restrictions have been softened in recent years, the gist of his amendment was that students with drug convictions were ineligible for federal aid. Or, as my daughter Sarah put it, you can be an axe murderer and get student aid, but not if your record is clean save one conviction for marijuana possession. In any other state, Souder would be considered a right-wing extremist.

But apparently not in Indiana. He's got a primary opponent this year, Fort Wayne car dealer Bob Thomas, who virtually calls him a tax-and-spend liberal. Thomas is from the business right. He's against professional politicians and wants to impose term limits. And while Souder has been known to vote for omnibus bills which may contain things he doesn't like, Thomas appears to be a no-compromise conservative.

After enduring Thomas's attacks from the right, Souder began airing a rather clever commercial:

I live in the Second District of Indiana, currently reperesented by Blue Dog Democrat Joe Donnelly. But if I did live over in the Third, I think I'd take Souder over Thomas. At least Souder has a sense of humor.

The Dickens Challenge: An Update

2010-04-21T18:12:00.001-04:00

Five years ago, when I began writing this blog, America’s future seemed pretty dismal. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had been elected—this time without the help of the Supreme Court (though almost certainly through fraud and vote suppression in Ohio and other states), and the Christian Right was ascendant.

Mystery writer Tim Hallinan issued what he called the Dickens Challenge late in that year of 2005. Charles Dickens wrote his many of his novels one chapter at a time, as the books were serialized in magazines before being published in book form.. Dickens couldn’t go back and revise; he had to keep writing. Several of us, including Tim Hallinan and fellow blogger Lisa Kenney started novels through the Dickens Challenge.

In my Dickens Challenge novel, Things Done and Left Undone, since retitled See You in Chicago, I imagined a world in which an idealistic Christian cult of the 1960s had evolved into an authoritarian church, whose charismatic leader became a power behind the government and was on the verge of creating a totalitarian society.

The narrator, Timothy Rymer, goes to church on the Sunday after Epiphany, 2005, where he encounters his former lover, Helena McKechnie, who is now an Episcopal priest. She asks him to change something that went terribly wrong. He takes a harrowing train journey from Philadelphia to Chicago, where the Mage of Union Station sends his soul back into his eighteen-year-old 1968 body. Much of the story takes place during the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Today, it seems that the Christian Right, though still powerful, is less of a threat than those who, in the words of theologian Harvey Cox, see “The Market as God.” One sees it in such books as Freakonomics and in the cultlike Ron Paul movement. In spite of the worldwide economic disaster brought about by unregulated markets, devotees of the Divine Market are everywhere, especially in the TEA Party movement.

Meanwhile, the churches, especially when they take note of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, or Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, seem less of a threat. Right-wing commentator Glenn Beck recently warned against churches with a message of social justice. Many evangelical churches have a tradition of the Social Gospel, and seem to be backing away from the gospel of greed.

Thus, See You in Chicago needs a major overhaul. (Some of the original first draft can be found in this blog: keyword “Things Done and Left Undone.” A more updated version is on the authonomy website.) While I loved writing about time travel and the Station Mage (Chapter 11, second half), the story needs to be reworked. I see it as three independent narratives, told in third person, from three different points of view: Timothy’s, Helena’s, and the putative villain’s, which will converge in 1968 Chicago. In any case, I won’t be stuck in the 2005 time reference. But I’ll need to go back and replace the 2005 narrative with more 1960s background. I still see the story as a work of magical realism sans time travel.

It’s on hold right now as I work on a less ambitious piece—a romance/mystery set in 1972 Iowa City. Thanks, Tim, Lisa, and all the other Dickens Challenge people. I’m hooked on this stuff.

The Strange Saga of the Akkadian Libation Vase

2010-02-10T22:03:00.007-05:00

My father -in-law, who worked for the Davenport City Sewer Department before he retired, would sometimes bring back some strange items from the world below. And surely the strangest was this heavy stone vase. Kathleen took possession of it, as she recognized it as something ancient, or at least a reproduction of something ancient. When she first showed it to me, she said it was probably a museum-quality reproduction of something very old from the Near East.

After watching too many episodes of The Antiques Road Show, she began to think she may have a real ancient relic. She had identified it as a libation vase, and thought it might be Akkadian. But why would something that ancient end up in the sewers of Davenport, Iowa? Actually there was a plausible reason: Davenport was once home to a museum called A Little Bit O' Heaven, which housed an eclectic collection of art and kitsch assembled by B.J. Palmer of the Palmer Chiropractic School (now the Palmer College of Chiropractic). One visitor to the museum recalled that he saw a magnificent Buddha next to a plaster frog. Sadly, A Little Bit O' Heaven closed in 1973. (Kathleen and I blew our chance to see it--it cost $3.00 per person in 1973, the equivalent of $14.38 in 2008, according to The Inflation Calculator.) In any case, the vase might be something Palmer would want, especially as a triumph over medical doctors, who would envy his possession of something with a caduceus design. And someone who stole it and had no knowledge of its value might indeed throw it down a sewer grate.

After doing some online research, I discovered that Kathleen was right all along: it had to be a museum-quality reproduction--the original is in the Louvre.

it's the libation vase of King Gudea of Lagash, (ruled circa 2144-2124 B.C.). Under Gudea, Lagash was a semi-independent city-state in the Akkadian empire. The vase seems to be the first use of the caduceus, which later became the symbol of the medical profession.It seems likely that our vase is a reproduction, perhaps from the Louvre, of Gudea's vase. Whether it was discarded by its owner, most likely a medical doctor, or stolen and then discarded, we don't know. My father-in-law found it sometime in the 1960s or early 1970s. Who knows how long it had been there before.

My Student Senate colleague Debra Cagan: From leftist to neocon?

2010-01-29T13:05:00.006-05:00

Now that I’m done with the first draft of See You in Chicago (formerly Things Done and Left Undone), I needed a break from the world of Chicago, 1968. I decided to dust off a mystery/romance I had started writing in 1986 or so, and rework it as more of a romance/mystery, written in the third person, though almost exclusively from the woman’s point of view. It’s set in Iowa City, in the fall of 1972.

A lot of it is based on my brief career in student government at the University of Iowa. And thinking about that time, I wondered whatever happened to Debra Cagan, who served on the Student Senate at the same time I did. I also sat next to her in a political science class during the fall of 1972. She was always fun to be around. She had a quick, sardonic wit, though she sometimes had a tendency to shoot from the hip.

And she had compassion. In that political science class, she had a friend who was not just gay, but flaming. I must have made some disparaging comment to her about his black fingernail polish. Debra replied that it was just his tribute to Liza Minelli’s character in the movie Cabaret, who also wore it. I still think black fingernail polish is ugly, no matter what sex or sexual orientation you are, but Debra was able to look beyond the outer trappings and see the person behind them.
She was bright and very ambitious. In fact, she helped organize the Better Days Party at UI and became Student Senate president in 1972 or ‘73.

I always assumed that Debra was far to the left of me on the political spectrum. I was and am a liberal Democrat. I was for George McGovern in 1972 and Barack Obama in 2008. Debra has done well for herself in the thirty-some years since I last talked with her. But politically, it seems she’s become a neoconservative.

Her Wikipedia entry begins:

Debra L. Cagan (born March, 1954) is an American stateswoman and a former U.S, policy liaison. Her most notable public role was that of an adviser to former United States president George W. Bush.

The article mentions that she was Senior Coordinator for Nuclear and Nonproliferation Policy, Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs, Department of State, in 1996. In other words, she was working as a diplomat in the Clinton Administration. Most State Department employees are not political appointments. It’s common enough for a diplomat to work through changes in administration.

But her last government position, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Coalition and Multinational Operations, which she assumed in 2007, was clearly a political appointment. And it’s strange to read of someone who opposed America’s military adventure in Southeast Asia becoming an advocate of preventive war with Iraq.

I haven’t spoken with her in over thirty years, so I don’t know her side of the story. Her job involved trying to persuade other nations to join in the "coalition of the willing" in the Iraq war. That doesn’t necessarily mean she supported the war initially.

But the most damning thing I’ve read about Debra is an article in the London Daily Mail which quotes her as saying "I hate all Iranians." The article also accused her of accusing Britain of "dismantling" the Anglo-American coalition in Iraq by pulling troops out of Basra too soon.
The first quote sounds both right and wrong. Debra could make off-the-cuff remarks. But she’s had years of diplomatic experience. If she did say it, I’m sure she denied it. I would have. But it’s still a troubling accusation.

The remark about the British really depends on whether she said it on her own, or at the behest of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Again, if it was one of her shoot-from-the-hip statements, she surely denied it. If Gates told her to say it, he’d deny it.

I’ve seen her portrayed as the Wicked Witch of the West on one blog. She’s been accused of being an Islamophobe, wearing the Iron Cross (it’s actually the Hungarian Commander’s Cross Order of Merit), being transsexual (All right, I’ve never seen her naked, but she was definitely female when I knew her.) and even being HIV-positive. (Even if she is, does that affect her ability to be do government service?)

I’d like to hear her side of the story. I considered her a friend in the early 1970s. But no matter how much her views have changed, I’ll remember fondly her cracks about politicos and political science, which she called P.S., as in, "That’s a lot of P.S."

Authonomy: The Game

2010-01-11T02:21:00.005-05:00

In November I uploaded the bulk of my novel, Things Done and Left Undone, onto the HarperCollins Authonomy website. Authonomy's motto is "Beat the Slush." The idea is to supplement the "slush pile" editors, who sift through the thousands of unsolicited manuscripts HarperCollins receives, with what amounts to volunteers. I suspect that Amazon.com's reader reviews were the inspiration for it.

The publisher has apparently found some gems among the slush. And I've read some fine writing. I've also read some writing that needs a team of editors to work overtime to get the writing in shape. One such book, which has a very interesting storyline, has potential. It's a Black Mask-style detective novel set in 1945 New York. But the author is British or Australian and uses terms that would be foreign to an American. I've made some comments on the book, explaining, for instance, that "suspenders" in American means "braces" in British. The term he needed was "garter belts." He uses British/Australian terms such as "whilst" and "walkabout" and puts in a lot of anachronisms, such as a reference to the New York Mets in 1945. I'm afraid this author will get his book to the Editor's Desk before it's ready for the editors. Maybe I'm wrong. In any case, he's extremely good at playing the game.

The object of the game, of course, is to get published, and a big step toward getting published is to reach the Editor's Desk, where a real, professional team of HarperCollins editors will review your book. Every month the top five books are sent to the Editor's Desk. But getting a manuscript to the Editor's Desk has less to do with writing than with horse trading. I haven't been playing the game very well. Each book has a ranking, based on the number of people who have recommended it by placing it on their bookshelves. You can back up to five books at a time. I wasn't sure how it worked, until another writer let me know:

"A good tip--you can back any number of books and if you take one off your shelf to save space it loses no points."

I thanked him for the tip and got a further explanation:

"I'm afraid it's a bit of a game on site here, the more books you look at, the more people are likely to look at your book. The better ranked a person is that backs your book the more points you get."

I replied that I thought the point of looking at books is to provide constructive criticism. His reply:

"HC would love you to read whole books and make weighty comments. But I'd only get through 2 or 3 books per week. And that's not going to compete with someone who's apparently reviewing twenty books a day. I usually judge on one chapter plus the pitch. I honestly think that's enough."

I backed his book, even though it's not the type of book I'd normally read. It was well-written.

So it's back to Authonomy, to rewrite my pitch and start judging books one one chapter plus the pitch.

I haven't quit--honest!

2010-01-05T21:25:00.003-05:00

I haven't been keeping up with my blogging recently. One regular reader even decided I'd quit blogging. It's mainly because I've been spending a lot of my time at the squat blue building pictured above (courtesy of TrainWeb).

While working at the South Bend station has been a blessing to me because I can now live in the same house as my wife, it's a place with no Internet access. So while I've been able to get writing done during the slow times, blogging has been another matter. And because we had no extra-board agent to fill in for vacations and personal days, I've had very few days off during the month of December. I hope to return to the blogosphere soon, now that I've got a few days off. And an extra-board agent is in training right now.

P.S. I'm not the one driving the Taylor-Dunn baggage cart. I think it's Dale Crawford, whose retirement allowed me to get the position.

Latest Examiner Articles: Heywood Shepherd, Zeppelins, and The Great Peril

2009-11-05T02:26:00.007-05:00

Recent Examiner.com articles have included Hallowe'en, the infamous Heywood Shepherd Memorial, and comments on a couple of century-old cartoons:

Women: "The Great Peril?"

Heywood Shepherd: first casualty of the John Brown Raid

The "Faithful Slave Memorial Committee"

A defense of slavery and a rebuttal

W.E.B. Du Bois responds

The Heywood Shepherd Memorial: A personal reflection

Hallowe'en

The Zeppelin: threat or menace?

"The Unfortunate Rake" and its many variants, including one of my own

2009-11-03T23:30:00.009-05:00

Cab Calloway, here singing as Koko the Clown, performs a beautiful rendition of the "St. James Infirmary Blues," in Fleischer Studios' "Snow White," with Betty Boop in the title role.

My son James made a reference to the song on his Facebook page, and it got me thinking about the song and its song family. There are probably hundreds of songs in the family, and dozens of variations of each one. If we're to believe Wikipedia, the great granddaddy of the family was an eighteenth-century English ballad called "The Unfortunate Rake," about a young man dying of venereal disease. Its lyrics recall the line, "A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury," though for the man in the song, it was too late even for this dubious cure:

"And had she but told me before she disordered me,/Had she but told me of it in time,/I might have got pills and salts of white mercury,/But now I'm cut down in the height of my prime."

In 1960, Folkways Records issued an album with twenty variants of the song. including the one most familiar to Americans, "The Streets of Laredo," or "The Cowboy's Lament."

Which is a long way of getting around to my take on the song. During the 1990s, when Amtrak had more money than it usually did, presidents Thomas Downs and especially George Warrington squandered huge sums of it in trying to remake Amtrak's image. Downs decided to use a General Electric model and split up the company into "strategic business units." It made sense for GE, which was extremely diversified; Amtrak was just split into geographical regions, all of which were offering the same product. Warrington was heavily into "branding." Warrington dropped the headless arrow logo and gave us the three wiggly lines, as well as the Acela brand for the high-speed service.

The reservation offices were subjected to endless analysis by outside companies, especially MCI and CMC (a Memphis-based training company, which is no longer with us). CMC came up with having call center agents answer, "May I make a reservation for you?" The company wanted agents to be plugged in 100 percent of the time--taking one call after another. But to do a good job as an agent, you need to be off the phone occasionally, if only to cough, clear your throat, or take a drink of water. Thankfully, that craziness is over with--at least I think it is.

Sometime around the year 2000 the late lamented Amtrak Chicago Call Center had a cowboy-themed end-of-fiscal year celebration and I expressed my frustrations with the following ballad. Now that George Warrington has been gone from Amtrak for quite some time, and present Amtrak management is focusing much more on real customer service and safety, here's "The Dying Agent."

A few glossary notes first:

Six buckets--You know when you call Amtrak or the airlines and get a fare quote, then call back the next day and the fare's higher? That's revenue management--a way to apply supply-and-demand to transportation. The available seats for a given train and date are divided into "buckets." For instance, the fare from Bloomington-Normal to Chicago could be $12, $16, $21, $27, or $34. On a 200-seat train there might be 50 seats in each bucket. Once the $12 seats are sold out, it goes to the $16 bucket, and so on. The revenue management gurus adjust the number of seats in each bucket based on demand. There will be fewer in the lowest-fare bucket around holidays; more on slow travel days. (Amtrak has four regular buckets plus two others for miscellaneous fares.)

Thirty-eighth floor--The Chicago call center was on the 38th floor of the 55 East Monroe building until 2000, when we moved down to the 20th.

AFREND--The Arrow Front-End system. It was an experimental program to make it the reservation system easier to use. I used it during its last days of experimentation, and thought was a very good program that needed some more work. I was on the beta test team for the front-end system we got, called RailRes. It's a good system, but I thought a modified AFREND would have been better.

Forty-five minutes--The basic lunch period, of which 15 minutes were paid. While you wouldn't be brought up on charges for being late once, a few times could get you in trouble.

The Dying Agent
(Sung to the tune of “Streets of Laredo”)
　
As I walked out in the streets of Chicago,
As I walked out in Chicago one day,
I spied a young agent all wrapped in timetables,
Wrapped in timetables, and cold as the clay.

“I see by your T-shirt that you’re a res agent.”
These words he did say as I slowly walked by.
“Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story.
I’m fried in the brains and I know I must die.

“It was once in the office I was a top seller.
Once I was pride of the thirty-eighth floor.
But then MCI came, and CMC trainers,
My dialogue’s broken; I’ll plug in no more.

“Those CMC trainers, they plied me with trinkets.
Made me and my friends play ridiculous games.
I had to say ‘May I make a reservation for you?’
Which was awkward, insulting, tongue-tying, and lame.

“My team leader told me I wasn’t productive,
That ninety percent was just not the right stuff.
I struggled, I labored, I sweated six buckets.
I reached ninety-seven; it wasn’t enough.

“My fingers are callused, my shoulders hunched over,
I’ve festering blisters upon my rear end.
My carpals are tunneled, my eyes are all frazzled,
My system is down and I’m without AFREND.

“Get six burly redcaps to handle my coffin,
Get six coach attendants to sing me a tune,
Take me down to the train yard and lay the ties o’er me,
As the Zephyr rolls by on a gray afternoon.”

I heard the young agent tell all his sad story
Of pressure, harassment, the stresses and lies.
His story took longer than forty-five minutes.
I’m brought up on charges; I think I will die.

2009-10-09T14:38:00.002-04:00

Latest Examiner story--Ferdinand Pinney "Affinity" Earle surely would have been a regular feature of "Entertainment Tonight" if it had been around in 1909. Check out the story of this early Hollywood artitst's marital and extramarital adventures here.

Dan Brown and the Hardy Boys

2009-09-27T16:21:00.007-04:00

I admit it. I’ve enjoyed reading Dan Brown’s novels. And I’ve read all but one, from Deception Pont to The Da Vinci Code. It’s fashionable to disparage Brown’s writing, and some of the disparagement is merited. A few years ago, I read Angels and Demons, the first Robert Langdon novel (in the movies the order is reversed—The Da Vinci Code comes first). The book mentioned a secret passage from Castel Sant’Angelo to the Vatican. I asked my wife, who majored in art history, if there was any truth to it. She let me know there was nothing secret about it—everybody knew about it. Well, not everybody, as I clearly didn’t. Brown has a knack for turning facts into mysteries and mysteries into facts. And often he’s just dead wrong.

Any art historian will tell you that the figure of St. John in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper is male and that Leonardo intended him to be male. When the New Testament refers to Mary of Magdala as Jesus’ "companion," Brown’s protagonist says it’s a mistranslation: the Greek word should be rendered into English as "wife." But biblical scholar Bart Ehrman says the word means "companion." I trust Ehrman’s scholarship over Brown’s.

Still, Brown can write a page-turner. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief (except for the time in Angels and Demons when Langdon jumps from a helicopter without a parachute, falls over a thousand feet, and lives) and just enjoy the story.

Adam Gopnik writes about Brown in the September 28 issue of The New Yorker (p. 21). And like all intellectual critics of Brown’s he goes after the kind of thing that an intellectual would notice: that neither Harvard, nor any other university, has a department, or even a field of study called "symbolology." As Gopnik points out, Microsoft Word’s spell-check doesn’t recognize the word. The proper term for the study of symbols is "semiotics."

But Gopnik does something most intellectual critics don’t. He explains the appeal of Brown’s style:

Brown’s writing resembles less the adult best-sellers of the past, which popularized high literary forms—"Gone With the Wind" was a kind of kitsch Tolstoy—than the adventure stories that were once the staple of adolescent literature. Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys were always in the midst of compelling conspiracies; there was always a code that had to be cracked, and ancient Asian priests and ancient Asian cults invading their cozy American world.

And that may be the secret of Brown’s appeal: his books are as sweet-tempered as they are secret-minded. Langdon exposes horrible conspiracies, but it turns out that, with the exception of a few homicidal hotheads, who have maybe let the thing run away with them, decent, well-intended guys run even the weirdest cabals...

I didn’t grow up reading the Hardy Boys books, but I read them to all three of my children. And I enjoyed reading them as much as they enjoyed hearing them. They’re fun to read, as are Brown’s works. But instead of Frank and Joe Hardy, who manage to explain mysteries whose solution was beyond the ken of the local police, Brown gives us Professor Robert Langdon, who can outthink the Vatican police and the Police Nationale. And as a bonus, Langdon is usually accompanied by a beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who’s constantly astounded by Langdon’s insights. Funny thing: the beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed woman I married can figure out the mysteries a lot faster than Langdon does. Maybe she should have become a "symbolologist."

I really can’t justify spending money on Brown’s latest bestseller, The Lost Symbol. But I’ve got a hold on a library copy. I’m only thirty-fifth in line.

The Racer and the Dancer: New Examiner.com entry

2009-09-14T15:18:00.003-04:00

I'm still working on my series about the first auto races at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I discovered that racer Lewis Strang, who won the 100-mile race on August 20, 1909, was married to the dancer Louise Alexander, who electrified New York audiences with her "Vampire Dance:"

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-20007-Indianapolis-History-Examiner~y2009m9d14-The-racer-and-the-dancer-Lewis-Strang-and-Louise-Alexander

The drawing of Stran's victory kiss is by my wife, Kathleen Crews Wylder.

From Hometown to Hippie: Evolution of AM Radio

2009-09-09T18:46:00.007-04:00

When I moved to Elkhart 20 years ago, the local AM radio station, WTRC, 1340, was strictly hometown. If you wanted to hear the big game between the Elkhart Memorial Crimson Chargers and the Elkhart Central Blue Blazers, you tuned to 1340. You could always get the local weather, news and sports. For a couple of hours a day, there was a program called "Sound Off," where people called in with their opinions. There were the usual fix-it shows. Every morning the announcer would read local birthdays. On February 29, 1992, they even gave ages--based on the number of leap year birthdays. WTRC even covered one of the last meetings of the Ambrose Bierce Cynics' Society meetings, with a special appearance of "Ambrosia," a local Bierce fan who exhorted us all to read "A Horseman in the Sky."

All that changed in the mid-1990s, when WTRC switched to an easy-listening format. My wife, Kathleen, called it "All Barry Manilow All the Time." The format lasted a few years. There was still some local content, though. I'm not sure what the target audience was, but WTRC managed to drive away just about everybody who didn't care for Barry Manilow. But compared to the next incarnation of WTRC, it was a joy to to listen to.

Like way too many stations, it went to a right-wing talk-show format. I don't believe it ever carried Rush Limbaugh, who was the star attraction of WSBT-AM over in South Bend, but it had a guy named Garrison who was almost as obnoxious. One day in the fall of 2002, I was forced to listen to Garrison when I was riding on the the city bus. The driver had the show on full-blast. Garrison was denouncing all Democrats, especially those who dared to question George W. Bush's plans to invade Iraq. One caller said Garrison should make an exception for Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam veteran and triple amputee. Garrison, as I recall, wasn't swayed. No exceptions for Democrats. The station had also carried G. Gordon Liddy's radio show, but dropped it--not because of Liddy's neo-fascist views, but because of his vulgar language.

So I was amazed to see an ad in the Elkhart Truth for "Hippie Radio 1340." Kathleen and I listened to it and were pleasantly surprised. It was an oldies station, but it played the likes of Judy Collins, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and The Mamas and the Papas. It had fewer advertisements than the FM oldies station, though that will probably change in time. The "Hippie Radio" format is nationally syndicated, but at least some of the programming is local.

The term "hippie," once carrying all sorts of associations with the drug culture, has long since been rendered harmless. I've been doing a lot of research about the 1968 Democratic Convention for the novel I'm working on, and "hippie" was the Chicago Tribune's term of choice for all of the demonstrators at the convention, from the nonviolent antiwar activists, to the Yippies, to the people who fought against the rampaging police. Nobody would dare start up a "hippie radio" station in Chicago, 1968.

During the 1960s, a lot of the people labeled "hippie" resented the term. In fact, closing event of the 1967 "Summer of Love" in San Francisco was a mock funeral called "Death of Hippie."

Hippie, of course, never died. It's now innocuous, a label for nostalgic baby-boomers, most of whom never adopted the countercultural lifestyle, much less went to San Francisco with flowers in their hair. I guess I'm one of them. I had the long hair, but never embraced Timothy Leary's "Turn on, tune in, drop out" philosophy. Instead, I sold "McCarthy's Million" buttons to my high-school classmates. I was "clean for Gene."

I still love the music on Hippie Radio. But please, people of WTRC--the next time you play "Light My Fire," play the whole song, not the Top 40 truncated version that cuts off Ray Manzarek's organ solo.

Forging ballots and Looking for Love: 1972

2009-09-02T03:07:00.004-04:00

In the last post I wrote briefly of my work in 1972 on the Dick Clark senatorial campaign. I was an assistant to Pete Smith, the press secretary. I'm working on a novel I started a long time ago, for the Dickens Challenge. The idea was to write a novel in serialized form, as Dickens did--one chapter a week, with no going back. All but perhaps one of us never completed his or her novel. Rachel Green actually did finish Another Bloody Love Story, though I'm sorry to say it hasn't been published.

The novel I never finished when The Dickens Challenge was active (and which I intend to finish now) includes a chapter that talks about the Clark and McGovern campaigns of 1972. It's based on my experience that year. The narrator, Timothy Rymer, is musing about his true love, Helena McKechnie, on a 2005 train journey from Philadelphia to Chicago. She had disappeared at the end of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, only to reappear four years later:

Chapter 8: “Come Home, America”

The sleeping car attendant came with my meal. I tipped her, closed the door, and peeked through the window. We were at Cumberland, Maryland and about to start the climb into the Alleghenies. I said a blessing before eating the roast chicken I had ordered, and said a prayer for Helena, and for the man I knew only as Benét. After I finished, I called the attendant to make up my bed. Once she had gone, I lay down, though thought came before sleep.

I wondered once more why I was going to Chicago, and how I could change what had happened in 1968, or 1970, or 1978. I didn’t know which year was the key. I didn’t think the key year was 1972. But that was the year Helena came back into my life. I had finished my bachelor’s degree in history in the spring of 1972, and was planning to take a break before beginning graduate school. A friend from my McCarthy days had persuaded me to work in another seemingly quixotic campaign. Dick Clark (no, not the American Bandstand guy) was taking on the seemingly invulnerable Senator Jack Miller of Iowa.

Clark’s campaign office was in downtown Marion, Iowa, in a loft above a restaurant. When I joined the campaign, Clark was just beginning his walk across Iowa. It wouldn’t be a simple walk across the state, but a 1300-mile trek covering virtually all of the 99 counties. I spent my time in the press room, drafting news releases and position papers. But my first job for the campaign was to forge ballots. Nothing illegal--it was for a straw poll at the All-Iowa Fair in nearby Cedar Rapids, but I did have some qualms about it. The campaign manager would walk by the Cedar Rapids Gazette’s booth, pick up a few pads of ballots and bring them back to the headquarters. The ballot had the contests for president: Richard Nixon, George McGovern, and George Wallace (who turned out not to be a candidate in November); for governor: Democrat Paul Franzenburg and Republican Robert Ray; and senator: Clark vs. Miller. Of course, all of our forged ballots were for Clark, but I asked about the other two races.

“Yeah, I mark some for Nixon,” said Pete, the press secretary. “And sometimes I use a really hard mark and vote for Wallace, Clark, and Ray.”

“But,” said Connie, his assistant, “I try to mark as many for McGovern as I can.” I might have fallen in love with Connie, a gorgeous woman with long dark brown hair and brown eyes, if she hadn’t been 32, married, and with four children. Like her, I badly wanted McGovern to win, even though he had virtually no chance.

It seemed that some of McGovern’s supporters were his worst enemies. Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) did a lot to sabotage the Democrats, but they were pikers compared with McGovern’s friends. They were the ones who kicked Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley out of the convention. Sure, it was payback for 1968, but it meant that that Illinois and other traditionally Democratic states would go to Nixon. And their endless debating over minor points shoved McGovern’s acceptance speech into the wee hours of the morning. It was a beautiful speech, almost like one of the great litanies of the early Church. Most Americans never heard it. I saw it on a black-and-white TV in the little press room carved out of the big loft:

From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America.

From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.

From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick -- come home, America.

Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.

Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world, and let us be joyful in that homecoming, for this “is your land, this land is my land -- from California to New York island, from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters -- this land was made for you and me.”

Less than a month after his nomination, McGovern’s running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri admitted he had suffered from depression, and had received electroshock treatments. And after saying he supported Eagleton “1000 percent,” McGovern faced the realities of 1972 and replaced Eagleton with Sargent Shriver. While McGovern’s candidacy was probably doomed from the convention on, I witnessed the final nail driven into his campaign’s coffin on October 26.

It was one of those beautiful fall days that almost makes up for the steaming Midwestern summers and brutal winters. I took the bus down to Iowa City to see McGovern. Clark and the other statewide Democratic candidates wouldn’t be there, as they’d be hurt by association with him.

The McGovern rally was held on the Pentacrest--the center of the University of Iowa campus, named for the domed Old Capitol building and the four great limestone halls that surrounded it. There was a huge crowd, reminiscent of the antiwar rallies of a few years before. People were sitting on the window ledges of Schaeffer and Macbride Halls, their legs dangling into the air. I was in the midst of the crowd, looking around for faces. There was a young couple holding hands--he with red hair like mine and she with luxuriant dark brown hair. I thought of Helena and wondered again what had happened to separate us.

The crowd roared when McGovern came out onto the Old Capitol steps. He said he had some good news. though. Henry Kissinger, who had been negotiating with the North Vietnamese in Paris, had announced that “Peace is at hand.” If this was true, Nixon could claim he had ended the war. Good news for the nation, but it ended even the tiniest hope of a McGovern victory.

McGovern gave his basic stump speech. I had heard it before. Still, I was happy to have experienced it. As the crowd dispersed, I stood there, trying to decide what to do until my bus left, I heard a voice from the past.

“You look dazed and confused.”

“Helena!,” I exclaimed, and we embraced amid the crowd.

P.S. I just worked for Clark through the summer. I went back to the University of Iowa the fall semester, and found love. I met an amazing young woman that fall. She was wearing a McGovern/Shriver button, as was I. We went to that McGovern rally in October--we're the young couple the narrator notices. (Yes, I had red hair once.) We've been married for 36 years now.

Edward Kennedy's Iowa Connection

2009-08-30T13:16:00.002-04:00

I met Senator Edward Kennedy only once—at a farm in eastern Iowa during the summer of 1972. I was working for Dick Clark, who had been administrative assistant to U.S. Representative John C. Culver, and was running against Senator Jack Miller. Clark would win the seat in November, due in part to support from the Kennedy family.

Culver had been Ted Kennedy’s roommate at Harvard, and their friendship survived over the decades. When Culver entered politics, he did so with the wholehearted support of the Kennedys. In 1966 I rode with a group of Iowa City Democrats to see Robert F. Kennedy in Marion, Iowa, where he appeared with Culver. (I and most of the other Iowa Citians were disappointed with RFK because he had not yet broken with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam.) Many of the Iowa Democratic congressmen who had been swept in with the 1964 Johnson landslide were swept out in 1966. But not Culver, who was able to fight off a Republican challenge in his northeast Iowa Second District. He stayed in Congress until 1975, when he won the seat vacated by Senator Harold Hughes.

“Iowa will go Democratic,” went the saying, “when Hell goes Methodist.” In 1975 Iowa had two Democratic senators with Kennedy connections. The moderate Republican governor, Robert Ray, got most of his ideas from the state Democratic platform. Both houses of the legislature had Democratic majorities. Apparently there were a lot of benighted souls in Bible study and prayer groups.

That progressive era in Iowa (and national) politics was short-lived. By 1978 Clark lost to Roger Jepsen, a conservative Davenport lawyer, whose victory foreshadowed the disaster of 1980. John Culver was challenged by Representative Charles Grassley of New Hartford. It was the year Culver’s Kennedy connection hurt him. Grassley’s campaign ran ads saying that when Edward Kennedy returned from Chappaquiddick, the first person he called was his old Harvard roommate.

For liberal Democrats like me, 1980 was Alaric’s sack of Rome. But the barbarians called themselves Christians,* and they swept into office with a passion born of religious fervor. Grassley became Iowa’s junior senator. In Indiana, where I now live, Senator Birch Bayh, the man who had pulled Edward Kennedy from the 1964 plane crash that nearly killed both of them, lost to a conservative congressman from Huntington, J. Danforth Quayle. Even New York, that hotbed of liberalism, elected conservative Republican Alfonse D’Amato to the Senate. And of course, the nation sent Ronald Reagan to the White House--a man who called the Vietnam War a “noble cause” and proclaimed that [our democratic] government was “the problem.”

Today, John Culver’s son Chet is governor of Iowa and Birch Bayh’s son Evan is junior senator from Indiana. Both men are up for re-election in 2010, as is Charles Grassley. We Midwesterners should honor Edward Kennedy’s memory by re-electing Culver and Bayh while sending Grassley back to New Hartford.

*Actually, Alaric's Visigoths called themselves Christians, too--they were Arian Christians who saw Jesus as divine, but lesser than the Father.

I'm now an Indianapolis History Examiner

2009-08-20T01:34:00.003-04:00

Like a lot of my fellow bloggers, I've neglected my blog for Facebook. Recently I've started writing for the Indianapolis edition of Examiner.com. I'll be linking these articles here, as well as in my Facebook page. The best thing about my Examiner articles is that many of them include drawings by my lovely and talented wife, Kathleen Crewa Wylder. Here are links to my first two articles:

The music of history

One Nation Indivisible: The first Pledge of Allegiance

I'll still be posting here infrequently, on issues not relating to history. But I'll include links to the Examiner articles here as well.

Clio, William Aydelotte, and the New Left, or Why I Quit the History Racket and Joined the Railroad

2009-07-31T04:16:00.005-04:00

While unpacking books I had brought back from Bloomington, I came across The Mystery Writer’s Art, edited by Francis M. Nevins, jr. (Bowling Green, OH, Popular Press, 1970). I turned to the article, “The Detective Story as a Historical Source,” by William O Aydelotte. The article itself really didn’t live up to its name. Professor Aydelotte spends most of the article trying to debunk myths about the detective story, in language such as this:

The charm of detective stories lies neither in originality nor in artistic merit, though they may possess both these qualities. It consists rather in the repetition of a formula that through trial and error has been found pleasing. We read these books, not to have a new experience, but to repeat in slightly different form an experience we have had already. Thus, for example, the “surprise” ending is not really a surprise. It is the ending we suspect and demand, and we would feel outraged if any other kind of ending were offered to us. It is true that many of these works introduce elements of novelty in the background and setting, and that the best of them show considerable skill in writing and construction. Such amenities, however, serve not so much to change the formula as to render it more palatable to the highbrow. The educated part of the detective-story audience shows no unwillingness to accept the formula but merely a fastidious distaste for its cruder expressions.

Aydelotte gets to his point in the next paragraph:

The interest of detective stories to the historian is that they shed light on the people who read them. By studying the fantasies contained in this literature, one may gather a description of its readers, in terms of their unsatisfied motivational drives. Thus these books are the more illuminating the more unrealistic and inaccurate they are. It is precisely by their inaccuracies that they reveal attitudes and emotions of the audience to which they cater…

Professor Aydelotte goes on to present what appears to be a Freudian analysis of the detective story reader. But rereading this 1950-vintage article brought me back to 1979, when I quit the history racket and joined the railroad, by way of Iowa City Transit, the French National Railroads’ Chicago office, and CIT Tours.

After graduating from the University of Iowa in December, 1976, I was accepted into the master’s program in the Department of History. There’s probably no good time to get a degree in history, at least from a financial point of view, but the late 1970s were certainly not the best. With thousands of other baby boomers swelling the ranks of graduate schools, it wasn’t the most hopeful prospect. Still, I hoped I could write about the history of rail passenger service in the post-World War II years. I had heard that while there were few jobs in history, there was a lot of interest in the history of technology.

Perhaps the first thing that told me that graduate school was a mistake was the cocktail party for graduate students, given at the home of one of the professors. I’m pretty shy and don’t do well at parties. And at least in those days, cocktail party skills were crucial to employment in the field.

I did well in classes—not straight A’s but a mix of A’s and B’s. But in conversations with the some of my fellow historians, I learned of a new trend in history: quantification. Actually, I knew about it, but wasn’t aware of how pervasive it had become in the field.

The quantifiers, armed with computer technology, were revolutionizing the field of history. And I must admit they did provide fresh insights into the past. Statistical analysis of records, once a tedious and time-consuming process, could be done quickly even with the computers available in the late 1970s.

There were some early missteps. In Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (1964), Robert W. Fogel used statistical analysis to argue that the industrial development of the United States would have been the same with or without railroads. In the late 1960s, when American railroads were in decline, most historians thought Fogel had proved his point with the certainty of mathematics. Then Fogel published Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery (with Stanley Engerman), which suggested that American slavery was not so bad as had been believed. Historians revisited Fogel’s earlier book and found flaws in his reasoning.

By the time I was in graduate school, quantification was seemingly taking over history. In fact, there was one professor at the University of Iowa who told his students that if it couldn’t be quantified, it wasn’t history. At least that was the story I got from fellow students who had taken Professor William O. Aydelotte’s classes.

Did I want to get into a profession in which events and personalities were replaced by numbers? I knew very well that I’d have to deal with statistics and accounting methods in writing about railroad passenger service. But for me, history had to be more than just data. The Greeks dedicated a Muse, Clio, to history. Thus, in the broad sense of the word, history is music. And while scientific developments can be useful, the fascination of history to me is in its music.

“The past is a foreign country," wrote British novelist L.P. Hartley. "They do things differently there.” Would that foreign country be reduced to columns of numbers?

In spite of my doubts, I kept at it. In the 1978-79 school year, I took a seminar in contemporary American history from Professor Ellis Hawley. He was not of the quantification school, and the readings were fascinating. Each week we read and reviewed a book. We studied historical method, discussed various schools of historical thought, and even made a field trip to the Herbert Hoover presidential library in West Branch. (Hoover’s library also includes the papers of conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler—for a while it was taking in just about any papers of right-wing figures.) And I learned that the Hoover library had become a mecca for New Left historians.

I’ve never quite understood Hoover’s appeal to the New Left. My suspicion is that New Left historians appreciated Hoover’s unstinting belief in capitalism. He was, to them, true to his class. Had Hoover been re-elected in 1932, perhaps America would have had the revolution that Franklin D. Roosevelt prevented. FDR, who saved capitalism by instituting limited socialism, was anathema to the New Left. FDR was my favorite president.

The final paper for the seminar had a catch: Students would read and evaluate each others’ papers. It was, of course, a great way to learn the business of teaching. And I came to the conclusion I wasn’t ready for it. I had been under a lot of stress the previous year, and perhaps I wasn’t seeing clearly. But when I was assigned to read the paper of the sole New Left historian in the seminar, who was writing a paper on economics in the 1930s, I knew I couldn’t do it. Oh, I would have bent over backward to be fair to my fellow student, even though I didn’t agree with his politics. I just had very little understanding of economics and didn’t feel competent to evaluate his paper.

So I withdrew from school and took advantage of one skill the University of Iowa had given me: bus driving. Cambus, the school’s campus bus system, put me through undergraduate school and two years of graduate school. I first found a job with Cedar Rapids Transit and then was hired by Iowa City Transit. After a year of bus driving, Kathleen and I moved in with her parents in Davenport while I looked for something else. I went to travel school in Chicago, staying with a family friend. In the summer of 1981 I got a temporary job with the French National Railroads office in Chicago. When that job was about to expire in the fall, the position of Rail Coordinator at the Bensenville, Illinois office of CIT Tours (Compagnia Italiana Turismo), the agency representing the Italian State Railways, became available, and I got the job. Finally, in February of 1984, a new-hire class opened up at the Amtrak Reservations Sales Office in downtown Chicago. I’ve been working for Amtrak, in one capacity or another, ever since.

But Clio still calls out to me to resume our love affair. Now that I’m actually living at home, I plan to embrace her once again—either through the Indianapolis Examiner or perhaps by way of one of the local newspapers. Professor, Aydelotte, who has since passed on, was wrong about the future of history---at least so far. Clio still inspires historians—even some of those who rely on statistical analysis.

P.S. I should add that I find that the detective story, with its attention to detail, can be a wonderful historical source when trying to understand the habits, attitudes, mores, and beliefs of the past. R. Austin Freeman’s Doctor Thorndyke stories meticulously describe the medical and legal aspects of Edwardian England. To get a feel for everyday life in antebellum western Virginia, check out the Uncle Abner stories by Melville Davisson Post.. To understand the British class system in the 1930s, Margery Allingham’s Campion novels have a wealth of information. Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise is as good a description of the British advertising business circa 1930 as any nonfiction work. There are countless more examples I could cite. Perhaps, in an article about the 1960s folk scene, I can cite Elkhart-born mystery writer Thomas B.Dewey (as opposed to Thomas E. Dewey, who “defeated” Truman in the Chicago Tribune), whose novel, A Sad Song Singing, brings the era to life.

P.P.S. The image of Clio is a detail from Vermeer's The Allegory of Painting, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Robert McNamara, R.I.P.

2009-07-06T11:58:00.008-04:00

When I was a high school student in Iowa City in the 1960s, I attended a number of antiwar rallies on the University of Iowa campus. In the spring of 1967, one of the songs we sang was "McNamara's War," an attack on Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, sung to the tune of "Macnamara's Band." It began, "My name is McNamara, I'm the leader of the war." That's all I can remember of it. But I do remember that there were people within the antiwar movement who criticized the song for declaring the Vietnam War to be McNamara's.

Robert Strange McNamara died peacefully July 6 at the age of 93. His death has prompted numerous retrospectives of the man who was one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War but who later came to question that war. But while he will best be remembered as the Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and the chief architect of Vietnam War strategy, he was also a military planner during the Second World War, a successful Ford executive, and longtime president of the World Bank. Like so many Americans of the late twentieth century, he had an almost religious faith in the power of technology. Unlike many other technocrats, he possessed a conscience. Sadly for the nation, his conscience came into play decades after the war he managed was over.

As an assistant to General Curtis LeMay during the Second World War, he was involved in planning the firebombing of Tokyo, in which 100,000 Japanese lost their lives. He later said that had the Allies lost the war, he would have been tried as a war criminal. Perhaps that horrendous act did shorten the war. But McNamara clearly had more than a few qualms about it. LeMay's belief in the efficacy of heavy bombing may very well have influenced McNamara in Vietnam, where massive bombing never stopped the shipment of arms down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

After World War II, McNamara turned down a job offer from railroader Robert R. Young (I really wish he had taken it), to work for Ford. There he turned the company around by reorganizing its financial system and imposing a new management structure. He opposed the Edsel division and introduced the economical Ford Falcon. He probably saved the Lincoln brand by introducing the Lincoln Continental. He was named president of Ford in early 1960, but left it to become Kennedy's Secretary of Defense.

McNamara reorganized the Defense Department much as he had done with Ford, emphasizing efficiency and technological innovation. During the Cuban Missile Crisis he was a moderating voice, supporting the naval quarantine option, which Kennedy implemented, over air strikes or a military invasion.

Had it not been for Vietnam, McNamara might have been considered a great man, perhaps even a possible presidential candidate. But McNamara, like most of his colleagues in the Kennedy and Johnson Administration, believed in the domino theory--that if South Vietnam goes Communist, then Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, eventually all of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes to Communism.

And he was a true believer in the lessons of Munich. On September 29, 1938, British prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler signed a pact ceding the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, to Germany. Chamberlain famously said the agreement would bring "peace for our time." Instead, by allowing Hitler to occupy the well-defended and militarily important Sudetenland (which included the Skoda auto works), his conquest of Europe was made far easier. The appeasement of Hitler had been a grave mistake.

But did the lessons of Munich apply to South Vietnam, which had been created by the 1954 Geneva Conference, and was supposed to be a temporary state prior to nationwide elections? The Eisenhower Administration scuttled the elections in 1956, as it was clear the Communists would win. For the Vietnamese, America had replaced the French as a colonial power.

But to McNamara and others, such as National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, South Vietnam was the Sudetenland, and to give it up was to appease the Communists. As McNamara later admitted, he saw a civil war as a key part of a global conflict.

In addition to McNamara's misunderstanding of the conflict, his very American faith in technology made the Vietnam war so much more devastating. His reliance on heavy bombing and the latest military theories, such as the Strategic Hamlet Program (which involved the forced relocation of villagers), turned friends into enemies. the struggle for "hearts and minds" failed in large part because of American reliance on the latest technology and military theory.

Still, McNamara had qualms about this war. His son was participating in antiwar demonstrations, as was his daughter's boyfriend. On February 29, 1968 McNamara either resigned or was fired from his Cabinet post. (McNamara himself was never sure.) Shortly thereafter, he became president of the World Bank.

In 1995 McNamara's book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, was published. Nearly thirty years after he left the Cabinet, he tried to deal his own part in that war. (Admission: I've only "read" the abridged audio version.) And while he claimed the book was not an apology, it seemed to me that it was something of one. Here was a man with a conscience, struggling to explain the unconscionable.

In the documentary, "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara," directed by Errol Morris (which I haven't seen), McNamara lists eleven lessons he's learned. Courtesy of Wikipedia, they are:

1. Empathize with your enemy
2. Rationality will not save us
3. There's something beyond one's self
4. Maximize efficiency
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war
6. Get the data
7. Belief and seeing are often both wrong
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
10 Never say never
11. You can't change human nature

For me, the list is both wise and frightening. Most are surely wise. The fourth forgets that a totalitarian government can be extremely efficient, while the democratic republic is rarely efficient. Yet that very inefficiency gives it the ability to look at all sides of a question. No. 9 sounds like Dick Cheney.

But unlike Cheney, McNamara has agonized over the morality of his actions. For this we can thank him, and wish him peace.

Column Writing: The Toothbrush School vs. the Nymphomaniac School

2009-06-27T21:09:00.006-04:00

I recently applied to write for the Indiana History Examiner. Examiner.com is a sort of online newspaper covering numerous cities throughout the United States. My fellow blogger Kellie Davis writes for the Anchorage Examiner, so I became interested in writing a local history column for the Indianapolis version. After applying, I got a response saying that Examiners are expected to write four to six articles of 200 to 400 words every week. That reminded me of Donald Kaul, onetime columnist for the Des Moines Register, who used to say there were two schools of daily column writing: the toothbrush school and the nymphomaniac school.

The toothbrush school was championed by Sydney J. Harris, who wrote a daily column for the Chicago Daily News and later the Sun-Times, from 1944 to his death in 1986. He compared writing a column to brushing his teeth in the morning. For him, it was a matter of routine.

Kaul then went on to quote another Daily News (later Sun-Times and the Tribune) columnist, Mike Royko, who quipped, "It's like being married to a nymphomaniac." (George Grizzard and Nora Ephron said the same thing--I'm not sure who said it first.) Like Kaul, I'll side with Royko, though not from personal experience.

So I gave a tentative assent to the Examiner offer, but only if I weren't subjected to the four-column minimum. That was a week ago and I haven't heard from the Examiner since. Perhaps the wedding is off.

Where I've Been

2009-06-19T23:38:00.004-04:00

I've been out of the blogosphere for a while, thanks to changes in job. On May 30 I worked my last shift at Bloomington-Normal. Until July 6, when one of the South Bend ticket agents retires, I'm working Guaranteed Extra Board, based in South Bend, but also covering Indianapolis. And that's were I've been for most of the intervening time.

Amtrak isn't in the beautiful Romanesque Indianapolis Union Station, which is now part of the Crowne Plaza Hotel complex, but in a ground-level space shared with Greyhound. In the wee hours of the morning, it looks like something out of an Ashcan School painting, with all the gritty urban realism. I couldn't find a picture of the interior, but WikiMedia had a shot of the platform.

Unlike Illinois and Michigan, which have spent serious money on Amtrak service, Indiana is committed to the world of Fly-Drive. I can't even blame Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor, for my state's neglect of rail. The three previous Democratic governors weren't any better. So Indianapolis, with nearly a million people, has only the thrice-weekly Cardinal and the Hoosier State, which runs to and from Chicago on the four days the Chicago-Indy-New York Cardinal doesn't run. The westbound train leaves at 5:30 a.m. (normally 6:30, but while I'm working it's an hour earlier in order to allow for the CSX to work on the track) while the eastbound arrives at 11:50. My shift, starting at 11:00 p.m. and running through 7:00 a.m., covers both trains. I've pretty much adjusted to the hours, though it was tough staying awake the first week.

One more week (maybe two) of living out of a motel (thankfully, at Amtrak's expense), and I expect to be working out of South Bend and really living at home.

Riverside and Hills, Iowa--Switched at Birth?

2009-05-24T10:25:00.009-04:00

I finally got to see the Star Trek Movie. I highly recommend it. But as someone who grew up in Iowa, I have to protest its depiction of the Hawkeye State. Iowa is not flat. Central California is flat--at least the part of California used for the Iowa parts of the movie. Apparently there were mountains in Iowa in one of the movie trailers. They seem to have been digitally removed in the final cut. The gaping chasm that the young James T. Kirk nearly falls into is wrong for Iowa as well. Both the mountains and the chasm could be explained by, say, the New Madrid Fault's Big One. But not the flatness.

The real Riverside, Iowa, declared the future birthplace of James T. Kirk, appears to be an oxymoron. There's no riverside. The English River flows nearby, but not in town. It's in a very hilly area. Just down the road, on the banks of the Iowa River, is the town of Hills. Not many hills. I suspect the railroad engineers (not the ones who drove the trains, but those who plotted out the route) switched the names on the map by mistake. The rail line now runs only from Iowa City to Hills, but had once gone through Riverside as far west as Montezuma, Iowa. I have no documentation for it, but it seems the most likely reason that Riverside has no river and Hills has no hills.

Star Trek shows James T. Kirk born not in Riverside, but in space. But then the movie seems to be following the lead of Alfred Bester, whose 1958 short story, "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," suggested that while it's possible to go back in time to change history, the change would be in an alternate reality. Perhaps that can also explain why Riverside, Iowa looks like central California.

The painting above is Grant Wood's "Stone City, Iowa," 1930 (Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska)

A Chance Meeting in Rome

2009-05-21T00:11:00.003-04:00

It was early March, 1983, and Kathleen and I were in Rome. I was working for CIT Tours then, as Rail Coordinator for the Midwest office. CIT (Compagnia Italiana Turismo) was the official agent for the Italian State Railways, and I was on a familiarization trip. I had been allowed to bring Kathleen along, and to arrive a week ahead of time so we could do some exploring on our own.

We were in a little trattoria one night. The place was fairly busy, and a well-dressed man, who looked to be South Asian, asked if he could sit with us. We said yes, and we introduced ourselves. I don't remember his name, but he was an official at the Sri Lankan embassy. He was surprised that we, as Americans, even knew where Sri Lanka was, and that it was formerly known as Ceylon.

He was intensely proud of his country. Sri Lanka, he said, had the highest literacy rate in South Asia. Sri Lankans enjoyed a higher standard of living than Indians. It was literally the sacred island: "Sri" is a Sanskrit title meaning sacred, and "Lanka" is Sanskrit for island.

We may have talked only for half an hour or so, but all three of us enjoyed the conversation. It sounded like a wonderful country. And perhaps it was. But while Sri Lankans were more educated and prosperous than their other South Asian neighbors, they still harbored the ethnic prejudices that would tear that beautiful, sacred island apart.

Only a few months after our conversation with the Sri Lankan diplomat, the civil war began between the majority Sinhalese speakers and the Tamil speakers, who lived mainly in the north and east. After more than a quarter century the war is over, with the total defeat of the Tamil Tiger rebels. Hundreds of thousands of Tamil speakers remain in refugee camps. The nation is in desperate need of help in a time of worldwide recession.

We can only hope and pray that Sri Lanka will become what our friend in Rome proclaimed it to be.

R.I.P. Compaq Elite 4/50CX

2009-05-13T11:48:00.005-04:00

In the spring of 2000 I was writing a column for the Elkhart Truth: a monthly, and sometimes biweekly column focusing on local history. I was working at the Amtrak call center in Chicago at the time, and commuting four days a week on the South Shore Railroad from Michigan City. I'd drive from Elkhart to Michigan City, sleep on the train in the early morning, and work on my columns on the return trip. I needed a laptop. I found a used Compaq LTE Elite 4/50CX at a Jackson Hewitt tax office in South Bend. For the next three years it became part of my life. At the end of 2001 I was asked to do "The Way We Were," a compilation of stories from 25, 50, 75, and 100 years ago. I'd scour the South Shore train for a seat by an outlet, plug in, and copy bits of stories from the photocopies I had made the previous weekend. I'd put the text on a floppy, download it into my PC, and e-mail everything to the paper.

In late 2003, when the Chicago call center closed, I went to Philadelphia, and the laptop went with me. I wrote out a two articles I sold to Classic Trains, for which I was paid, but which the magazine never ran, and one for Remember the Rock, which was published, but did not pay anything. Since I've come back to the Midwest, I haven't had reason to use it, except when going to Chicago for Amtrak block training. I brought it with me this spring, and worked on Things Done and left Undone along with a new post for the blog. But I couldn't transfer it to the floppy. After buying new floppy disks, it was clear that the problem was the disk drive and not the disks.

It would cost too much, I'm sure, to repair the drive in my laptop. And pretty soon, the Windows 95 program won't be compatible with anything. So the old laptop will go into storage. It served me well.

I've Been Possessed: The Trackside Professor Discusses Possessives

2009-05-05T13:05:00.011-04:00

Kellie Davis, better known in the blogosphere as Tea N. Crumpet, asked me to do a post on possessives. Kellie writes for the Anchorage Family Examiner as a Family and Parenting correspondent. Recently she posted a column by one of her colleagues at the Examiner on her Facebook page. I responded, "The author is essentially right, though she needs to learn how to use punctuation, especially with regard to possessives." (Actually, after rereading the article, I'm not sure she is right, but that's another story.) Her problem was that she left out the apostrophes in most of her possessive nouns. (Ex: "Know your kids friends.")

I got the following response: "Can you do a post on this? I need to learn about possessives'. (I did that apostrophe on purpose, Professor!)"

After arming myself with Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss, and The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White, 2005 edition, I should be able to write this without any serious errors. But if not, any errors are mine.

Possessives in English are, for the most part, straightforward, at least for most singular nouns. No learning intricate rules for noun declensions. Just put an apostrophe and an "s" after a singular noun, and you've made it possessive. Stephen's blog, Kellie's column, Alaska's governor, the philosopher's stone. But English has exceptions--lots of exceptions--that confuse a lot of people.

The rule works fine until you get a singular word ending in a sibilant. And most of the time it still applies: Kellie Davis's blog, Charles Dickens's novels, the octopus's garden, the moose's antlers. But if you get too many sibilants, the rules of style call for an apostrophe at the end of the word: Massachusettts' governor, or for convenience' sake. Jesus and Moses usually merited exceptions: Jesus' parables; Moses' laws. But I've seen Jesus's a lot lately. And if you get a word ending with a silent "s" (usually a French borrowing), put the apostrophe at the end: Illinois' ex-governor, Des Moines' museums, Arkansas' Huckabee. That way you just say the one "s," and don't say anything barbarous, like Illinoise's. As for the Illinois city of Des Plaines, where they pronounce the final esses, I'd hold with the final apostrophe. Strunk and White suggest another way of dealing with too many sibilants: say "temple of Isis" instead of Isis' temple.

And then there are plurals. Thanks to William the Conqueror, better known to his contemporaries as William the Bastard, and not just for his parentage, English acquired a lot of French grammar and vocabulary. On top of the Germanic "s" for possessives, we also have the French "s" for plurals. What to do? For regular plurals ending in "s," just put the apostrophe at the end of the word: the Davises' house, the Wylders' folly, the dogs' breakfasts, etc. Irregular plurals not ending in "s" go back to the rule for singular nouns: men's room green and women's room pink.

With compound nouns, you apply the apostrophe and "s" to the last word: My son-in-law's Facebook page says he's Lt. Worf. I'm not sure about plurals, here: sons-in law, attorneys general. I'd avoid the possessive case and use a preposition: the meeting of the attorneys general.

If you need to show joint possession, the apostrophe goes with the last in the series: Steve and Kathleen's house, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice's bed, etc.

But it's the pronouns and determiners--especially "its"--that give English speakers the most problems. Our case system, unlike those of Latin, German, or the Slavic languages, is based on word order, prepositions, and, in the possessive, or genitive case, the letter "s" and an apostrophe. No tedious noun or article declensions. Except for pronouns and determiners. Lynne Truss conveniently provides a list of possessive pronouns and determiners:

Possessive Pronouns: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, yours, theirs.

Possessive Determiners: my, your, his, her, its, our, your, their.

They're part of our Anglo-Saxon heritage, and they don't take an apostrophe. It's just that the word "it's," a contraction of "it is" or "it has," is pronounced the same, and has an apostrophe, though it's serving an entirely different purpose: to mark it as a contraction at the point where we've removed the letters. (Very traditional writers describe October 31st as "Hallowe'en" to remind us that it's All Hallows' Even.) Example: Even though the tree has lost its leaves, Kathleen knows it's a hackberry from its bark.

I wish there were a mnemonic for this, such as the one my generation learned for the order of planets: My very educated mother just served us nine pickles. (Doesn't work now, because Pluto's been stricken from the list of planets.) But I can't find one for its and it's. Once more:

"It's" is a contraction of "it is" or "it has." "Its" is the possessive.

I've noticed some confusion along the same lines between "your" (possessive) and "you're" (contraction of "you are.") and between "their" (possessive) and "they're (contraction of "they are.").

Examples:

You're never going to finish your novel if you keep wasting time on Facebook.

They're painting the passports brown. People with brown passports should apply for their visas at 1313 Desolation Row, just off Highway 61.

One more thing: Purdue University has a wonderful site on writing called the OWL. Check it out here. The page on apostrophes is here.

There you go, Kellie. Sorry so many of my examples date back to the 1960s (note: no apostrophe there-it's plural, not possessive). It's because I date back to the '60s (apostrophe there because I've left out the "19"). Now it's back to trackside.

Jennifer, Guinivere, Juniper, Ginevra

2009-05-03T00:00:00.008-04:00

My daughter Anne sent me this YouTube link featuring Helen Mary, aka "Jenny" Boyd. I love the song, even though the lyrics are a bit sappy. Helen Mary, called Jenny by her older sister Pattie, the model, photographer, and ex-wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton, inspired the song. Jenny was also a model in her own right, as the video above shows. It also reminded me of how much I disliked the Carnaby Street look, with the op-art dresses and overdone eye shadow. But I digress.
Donovan fell for Jenny during the 1968 trip to India with the Beatles. But like another famous Scottish poet, William Douglas, who wrote Annie Laurie, Donovan did not win his beloved. Jenny Boyd married Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood in 1970, divorced him, married and divorced him once again, before marrying antother drummer, Ian Wallace, formerly of King Crimson. She received a Ph.D in psychology from UCLA and co-authored a book on musicians and psychology called Musicians in Tune. (Thanks to Wikipedia for the above.)
But Wikipedia was wrong in its article about the song, "Jennifer Juniper," to wit: "The names "Jennifer" and "Juniper" are etymologically the same." But they clearly aren't--in fact, the Wikipedia articles about the names tell a different story.
"Jennifer" is Cornish in origin, and is related to the Old Welsh Gwenhwyfar (gwen: white, fair + hwyfar: smooth, soft). It's a cognate of Guinivere, the French form of the name. The name wasn't popular outside Cornwall until 1906, when George Bernard Shaw used the name for a character in his play, The Doctor's Dilemma:

RIDGEON. Thats a wonderful drawing. Why is it called Jennifer?
MRS DUBEDAT. My name is Jennifer.
RIDGEON. A strange name.
MRS DUBEDAT. Not in Cornwall. I am Cornish. It's only what you call Guinevere.

It became extremely popular as a girls' name after Donovan's song came out, and even more so when the heroine of the book and movie Love Story was named Jennifer.

Juniper, on the other hand, comes from the Latin juniperus, from junio, (young) and parere (to produce), literally "youth producing," but meaning evergreen. Wikipedia mentions an Anglo-Saxon name, Jenefer, that derives from juniperus, put it's clear that the name Jennifer is from the Cornish.
Donovan wasn't the first to use the juniper tree in conjunction with a similar-sounding woman's name. Leonardo da Vinci's painting of Ginevra de' Benci (circa 1476), uses the juniper tree as a background. "Ginevra" is Italian for juniper. The painting now hangs in the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, D.C.

Helen Mary Boyd acquired the nickname "Jenny" because her of her sister Pattie's doll, also called Jenny. So what became the most popular girls' name during the 1970s earned its popularity in part because of a toy.

In praise of Tourists

2009-04-24T21:58:00.004-04:00

May Day is coming soon, and I'm sure the good people of Padstow, Cornwall are working frantically to prepare their village for the coming festivities. And for the throng of tourists who come to watch the procession of the 'Obby 'Orses.

Tourists get a bad rap virtually everywhere. They've spoiled countless places. The satirical paper, The Onion, once carried a headline, "Santa Fe Resident Pretty Kokopellied Out." referring to the ubiquitous flute-playing figure of Pueblo culture. And while Santa Fe residents may be sick of tourists, a lot of Santa Fe residents would be out of work without them.

And I wonder whether the wonderful May Day celebration in Padstow would have continued without the tourists. Countless villages had similar celebrations, but only Padstow, Helston, and a few other communities still observe them. I have a feeling the tourists have a lot to do with it. I mentioned this to Kathleen, and she said that it only takes one generation to dismiss such traditions as stupid, and they're gone. But Padstow, on the north coast of Cornwall, was a tourist attraction because of its location. The tourists went back to London, or Edinburgh, or Cardiff, and told others about the incredible May Day celebration, and pretty soon, tourists from around the world descended on Padstow each year. With the money they brought in, even those who thought the May festival was stupid would oppose it.

Of course, it didn't hurt that Padstow had a truly beautiful song. Steeleye Span, though substituting "King George" for "St. George," is true to the spirit of the song:

Facebook: Assaulting the English Language Five Picks at a Time

2009-04-16T11:48:00.006-04:00

I usually don't get upset at the singular "they." English has no singular non-gendered personal pronoun. "He" sounds sexist, "he or she" is awkward, and "it" isn't personal. In casual speech and writing, using "they" as a non-gendered singular pronoun seems acceptable. I've heard Harry Truman use it (well, I heard a recording of Harry Truman using it). Take the title of Tea N. Crumpet's recent post, " Clean up, clean up, everybody does their share. . . " No problem. But Facebook has taken the singular "they" to a new, and to my mind, unacceptable level.

I was wasting my time on Facebook last night, and took one of its "Pick Five" applications: "Pick 5 Cars You've Had." Once it came up with a picture of a 1972 Volkswagen Fastback (mine was blue, and not orange, though), I was hooked. But then my picks were posted on my Facebook page, with this legend:

"Stephen picked their (5) for '5 cars you've had...'"

"Stephen picked THEIR???" Have I become plural? And the sad thing is, there are so many ways to get around the pronoun. For instance, "Stephen picked 5 for '5 cars you've had.'" Or, "The 5 cars Stephen picked are..." I'm sure I could come up with a dozen more perfectly grammatical ways to express it.

Facebook is the preferred social networking site for Americans, and probably for the the planet. When Facebook (and as far as I can tell, "Pick 5" is an application designed by Facebook) says something outright barbarous, to use Orwell's phrase, a lot of people are going to assume it's grammatical. I have no idea how to complain to Facebook, so I'll just send this out into cyberspace.

Everybody's Polish: Dyngus Day at the West Side Democratic Club

2009-04-14T11:01:00.011-04:00

In old Poland, the day after Easter was a sort of secular continuation of the Easter festivities, with more feasting and drinking. At a time when the Lenten fast was a lot more strict than it is now, two consecutive days of feasting wasn't excessive. And what must have been a pre-Christian spring ritual was incorporated into the celebration. On Dyngus Day, young men would get up early and awaken young women by dousing them with water and spanking them on the legs with willow switches.

When Poles came to the United States, they brought the tradition with them, but as Polish-Americans became more American than Polish, Dyngus Day might have gone the way of many ethnic customs. There isn't much water-throwing and leg-switching anymore in the States, but the feasting and drinking have continued in Polish-American communities, such as Buffalo, New York, and South Bend, Indiana.

Since 1930 the West Side Democratic Club of South Bend has held a Dyngus Day celebration. If you want to be elected as a Democrat in Indiana, you've got to be there, or at least have a representative to speak for you. This year there weren't any big names at the club, as there were last year, when former President Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea came to campaign for Hillary. But it was a lot of fun.

Kathleen and I got there at eleven o'clock Monday morning. We paid $8.00 each for admissopn plus a platr of food--kielbasa, Polish cabbage (like sauerkraut but sweeter and less acid), and Kluski--thick noodles in a chicken broth sauce. The food was excellent--the kielbasa was neither overseasoned nor bland, and wasn't overcooked, and the side dishes went well with it. Kathleen bought a Leinenkugel, while I stuck with Diet Dr. Pepper. (I've never cared for beer--I don't know what's wrong with me.)

We talked briefly with Dick Moore, the mayor of Elkhart, who later gave a brief speech. We sang Happy Birthday to him before he had to get back to work. He was planning to be at the evening Dyngus Day celebration at the Elkhart Knights of Columbus.

At noon the official program began with a blessing from a local priest, who transformed the pagan custom into a Christian rite by sprinkling the audience with holy water with an old-fashioned switch broom. We said the Pledge of Allegiance, and then we heard from the speakers. Jonathan Weinzapfel, the mayor of Evansville, had come all the way from the southwestern tip of the state to address the crowd. The rumor is that he's considering a run for governor in 2012, and wants to get his name in circulation.

The highlight of the day was the visit of the South Bend Washington High School girls' basketball team, which has gone to the state tournament for four consecutive years. Congressman Joe Donnelly presented them with an award, and read the remarks he had put in the Congressional Record about them. It's heartening that this all-black team was so warmly received by this mostly-white audience. Skylar Diggins, one of the nation's top players, got a special round of applause, as she'll be at Notre Dame next year.

Everybody's Polish.

Dyngus Day is here.

It's nine o'clock in the morning.

Let's have another beer.

begins the local anthem to Dyngus Day. I couldn't find any videos of this year's celebration, so here's a clip of last year's, starring Bill and Chelsea Clinton, courtesy of the South Bend Tribune:

Back to The City With a Heart

2009-04-10T00:59:00.005-04:00

Tuesday night I couldn't sleep. It was a combination of the stress of moving, the long drive to Bloomington from Elkhart the night before, and the Pace Triple Pepper salsa I put on the tortilla I had eaten as a bedtime snack. Probably the last, most of all. So I go to the computer and check out the Amtrak job listings. Here's the essence of what I saw:

Job Posting #90102781
Ticket Clerk South Bend, IN
Passenger Services Dept.
Salary: Per Labor Agreement

It took me even longer to get to sleep after that. I was supposed to be notified if a job became available in South Bend. There's some uncertainty about what this job is--it appears it will be a guaranteed extra board job covering South Bend and Indianapolis. I talked to a woman in Human Resources Wednesday afternoon, and she confirmed I should have been offered the position, took the job down from Internet posting, and sent me a letter offering the job.

But, assuming I don't get another surprise, Kathleen and I won't have to move, though we'll have to move some stuff back. We can keep paying down the mortgage and line of credit on the big yellow house in Elkhart (credit Vainateya Deshpande for photo).

I've changed my Facebook hometown to Elkhart, and even joined the Northern Indiana network. Maybe I can write about some of the amazing Elkhartans, such as poet Kenneth Rexroth, cartoonist Ding Darling, and columnist and naturalist Maurice Frink. Maybe I can write an article about the 1969 Special General Convention of the Episcopal Church in South Bend, which displayed both the best and the worst of the 1960s.

I like the job in Normal, and the Bloomington-Normal area. It seems like it's an exciting place to be. But Elkhart has been home for almost twenty years, even though I've worked in other places for more than half of those years. I'm looking forward to living full time in the City With a Heart.

Tales from the Three I States

2009-04-04T23:01:00.007-04:00

Kathleen and I are in the process of moving at least some of our stuff from our house in Elkhart, Indiana to our two-bedroom apartment in Bloomington, Illinois. On Tuesday, we rented a cargo van from Enterprise, loaded it up, and drove to Bloomingon. After unloading it, we stayed the night, drove to Davenport, Iowa, where we loaded up an antique bed (1920s) along with a lot of books, papers, and VHS tapes. The next day we drove to Bloomington, nearly exhausted ourselves moving the extremely heavy mattress and box spring, and then drove back to Elkhart.

We're still in the process of getting the Elkhart house ready to sell. Right now, it's a moot point. We paid $68,000 for it in 1989, and owe about $60,000 now. Given the fact that there's a house with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a swimming pool listed for $59,000 in this town, we'll likely be stuck with mortgage plus rent for some time. Who knows, maybe a ticket clerk position will open up in South Bend in the meantime.

Elkhart, as Ground Zero of the Recession, is getting nationwide recognition. An Elkhartan was recently called by a charity asking for money. She said, "I'm from Elkhart." That was enough for the fundraiser to cease and desist. Our daughter Sarah, who is an instructor at the University of Maryland, asked a a prospective student where she was from.

"I'm from Portland, Maine," said the student. "Where are you from?"

"I'm from Elkhart, Indiana."

"THE Elkhart?" asked the student.

Iowa has been in the news lately because the state Supreme Court declared the state's marriage law unconstitutional, opening Iowa to same-sex marriage. In Iowa, a constitutional amendment has to be passed by two consecutive legislatures and then submitted to a popular vote. That means the Court ruling will probably stand until at least 2013. And it seems likely that the people of Iowa won't amend the constitution.

Once upon a time, Iowa was one of the most conservative states in the nation. But starting in the 1960s, it's become more and more liberal. My theory is that those right-wing Iowegians who used to vote for the likes of H.R. Gross moved off to places like Orange County, California. Yes, Gross's successor in the House, Charles Grassely, beat incumbent Senator John Culver in the 1980 campaign and has won re-election ever since then. But Grassley faces strong oppostion from Bob Krause next year.

Since the Iowa Hawkeyes didn't even make it into the NCAA this year, I'm happy to see that there will be a Big Ten team in the NCAA championship. I won't be watching the game on Monday, which is a good thing for the Spartans. Whenever I watch a game, the team I'm rooting for almost always loses.

A Song My Father Taught Me

2009-03-30T23:05:00.004-04:00

I was talking on the phone with my daughter Anne, and she asked about a song "Mom taught us," and then started on the "Drink, drink, drink, drink."

"I taught you that one, I said, mentioning I had learned it from my own father. Anne had talked with someone of Dutch heritage, who had mentioned prejudices against the Dutch. She immediately thought of the song. It turns out the the song's title is "The Goddamned Dutch." Wikipedia says, "it first appeared in the book Gentleman About Town, Immortalia in 1927," but I suspect the song is much older, probably dating back to the eighteenth century when the Netherlands rivaled Britain as a maritime power. There are dozens of versions--many of them a lot more offensive than the one I learned from my dad. Here's the version I learned:

Drink, drink, drink, drink,
Drank, drank, drank, drank,
Drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk

Drunk last night. Drunk the night before,
Gonna get drunk tonight like I never got drunk before,
For when I'm drunk I'm as happy as can be;
For I am a member of the Souse family,
For the Souse family is the best family
That ever came over from Old Germany.

Chorus:
Sing Glorious!
Glorious!
One keg of beer for the four of us!
Sing glory be to God that there are no more of us;
For one of us can drink it all alone, damn near.

There's the Highland Dutch, and the Lowland Dutch;
The Rotterdam Dutch, and the God damned Dutch.

Chorus

God made the Irish. He didn't make much;
But a hell of a lot more than the God damned Dutch.

Chorus

By the bar, where I smoked my first cigar
And the nickels and the dimes rolled away (rolled away).
It was there by chance that I tore my Sunday pants.
And now I have to wear them every day, damn near.

Final Chorus

The last stanza, a parody of the hymn, "At the Cross," isn't part of the traditional song, but, in the way of folk songs, found its way into it.

You can find several versions of the song on YouTube, including a cleaned-up version by Mitch Miller, and the University of California version sung after the "Big Game" with Stanford last November. (They sing it very well--I don't think many of them were drunk.)

There won't be a PBS special on "The God Damned Dutch" as there was for "Amazing Grace," but it would be interesting to trace this song back.

Cassandra's Apologia: An Argument for Blogging

2009-03-24T19:44:00.011-04:00

Nearly four years ago, I was working on a novel contest for White Wolf, and wanted to name one of my principal characters Cassandra, as she was someone who told the truth, but was not believed. But I wasn't sure of the Cassandra legend. I did a Google search, and found The cassandra pages, which not only gave me a brief summary of the legend, but introduced me to the world of blogging. In those days, it seemed, almost everyone was blogging. I was extremely lucky that the first blog I read was beautifully written and always insightful. And through the cassandra pages, written by Beth Adams, I met some other wonderful people, including Peter, of slow reads, and Patry Francis, of simply wait. I began this blog in large part because of my serendipitous discovery of Beth's.

But as Beth points out in a post marking the sixth anniverary of her blog, many of us have tired of blogging, or have spent more of our time on social networking sites, such as MySpace or Facebook. I have a Facebook page, and I enjoy being able to connect with friends and relatives on it. But the Facebook medium is one which promotes brief quips--epigrams, if you like. But it isn't conducive to kind of writing exemplified by Beth, Peter, Patry, and others. The kind of writing that makes you reconsider your own views.

I commented on her blog that I found that my best writing outside the blog was done while I was actively blogging. She replied in an e-mail to me:

I think blogging is a way of keeping in shape, so to speak. Journal-writing was like that for me too. If you keep exercising the writing muscles, then they're there both when you need a quick burst, or to make an endurance run. It's the same for me with music practice - when I let it go for days or weeks, it's so much harder to get back into it.

I'm hoping that in this case, Beth is not a Cassandra, and thoughtful blogging will not diminish on the Web.

From the Myrtle of Venus to the Shores of Tripoli

2009-03-22T18:18:00.005-04:00

Olivia, of "Olivia's Sunrise of New Beginnings," has been giving her readers a virtual tour of the museums and other attractions of our nation's capital. (And you could pay good money for a tour that's a lot less informative and interesting than hers.) A recent post included a tour of the Museum of American History, and a description of the original Star Spangled Banner--the one that flew over Fort McHenry in 1814, and which inspired Francis Scott Key, a prisoner aboard a British ship, to write the poem, "The Defence of Fort M'Henry," which became the words to our national anthem. It reminded me of the story of the poem, and of the only well-known tune that fit its meter and rhyme, "The Anacreontic Song," better-known by its opening line, "To Anacreon in Heaven."

"The Defence of Fort M'Henry" appears to be a reworking of an earlier poem Key had written in 1805, to celebrate the return of Stephen Decatur, jr., and Charles Stewart from the Barbary Pirates' conflict. Entitled simply, "Song," it follows the same meter and rhyme scheme, and ends each stanza with: "...mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave,/And form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave." Even the phrase "Star Spangled flag" appears in "Song."

The Wikipedia article on "The Anacreontic Song" states that Key's brother, "on hearing the poem Key had written, realised it fit the tune of The Anacreontic Song." I suspect, though, that Key had the song in mind when he wrote the first poem, as it refers at the end of each stanza to the mixing of two plants. The final chorus of "To Anacreon:" "And long may the Sons/Of Anacreon intwine/The Myrtle of Venus/With Bacchus's Vine."

"The Anacreontic Song" was sung at meetings of the Anacreontic Society, an eighteenth-century London gentlemen's club for amateur musicians. It got its reputation as a drinking song because of a tradition that if a member could sing a stanza of the song successfully, he was sober enough for another round. And the difficulty of singing the tune, even when sober, has been one of the strongest arguments of those who wish to replace "The Star Spangled Banner" as our national anthem with something more singable, such as "America the Beautiful."

The late writer and scientist Isaac Asimov wrote a very powerful defense of "The Star-Spangled Banner," though even he had a problem with the third stanza. It's a little embarrassing to have the line, "No refuge could save/the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight,/or the gloom of the grave" in our national anthem. But, of course, few people ever get beyond the first stanza.

Another song with roots in the Barbary Pirates conflict is The Marines' Hymn, which makes reference to "the shores of Tripoli." Actually, the Marines never made it to Tripoli in that conflict, but they came close. Like "The Star Spangled Banner," the poem was written first, and a tune was found to fit it. And it appears that the Jacques Offenbach's "Gendarmes Duet" from the comic opera Genevieve de Brabant was the tune used. The men-at-arms who sing it are portrayed as, well, not exactly models of Marine Corps values:

I don't think anyone has suggested the Marines change their hymn, though. The tune works in spite of its beginnings. And it's not hard to sing.

"Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust-" Two Marriage poems.

2009-03-17T19:50:00.003-04:00

After subjecting my readers to the Beat poem of the last post, I thought I'd post one of my favorite Beat poems, "Marriage," by Gregory Corso. The "She" in the final stanza is a reference to the novel She by H. Rider Haggard.

Should I get married? Should I be good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky-

When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit with my knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where's the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap-
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?
Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter
but we're gaining a son-
And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?

O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just wait to get at the drinks and food-
And the priest! he looking at me as if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on-
Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd almost be inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climactic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner
devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy
a saint of divorce-

But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! Like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
When are you going to stop people killing whales!
And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust-

Yes if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,
finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear nor Roman coin soup-
O what would that be like!
Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father
Not rural not snow no quiet window
but hot smelly tight New York City
seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman
And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
like those hag masses of the 18th century
all wanting to come in and watch TV
The landlord wants his rent
Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking-
No! I should not get married! I should never get married!
But-imagine if I were married to a beautiful sophisticated woman
tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
holding a cigarette holder in one hand and a highball in the other
and we lived high up in a penthouse with a huge window
from which we could see all of New York and even farther on clearer days
No, can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream-

O but what about love? I forget love
not that I am incapable of love
It's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes-
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there's maybe a girl now but she's already married
And I don't like men and-
But there's got to be somebody!
Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,
all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible-
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lovers
o i wait-bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.

-Gregory Corso

Kathleen and I joked about having this poem read at our wedding. We did go to cemeteries before we were married. We kissed under the Black Angel, though not at midnight under a full moon. Of course, we didn't use "Marriage." We chose Shakespeare's Sonnet 116. It's pretty hard to go wrong with that:

LET me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love ’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

A Beat Generation Classic in the Three-Dollar DVDs

2009-03-15T22:31:00.004-04:00

Kathleen and I were at Big Lots this afternoon and we were going through the $3 DVDs when I spotted A Bucket of Blood. She was a little confused about my excitement in finding it, as I don't like violent movies. I explained that it was a Beat Generation classic, filmed in Venice, California. It was an early effort of director Roger Corman, who produced it in five days on a $50,000 budget. Even in 1959 dollars, it was a tiny budget for a film.

The opening scene was well worth the $3 price. Character actor Julian Burton is the poet, and his poem, though a parody, isn't a gross one. Part of it seems to be a parody of Kenneth Rexroth's "Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Memorial to Dylan Thomas," which was a staple of Beat poetry readings and an obvious influence on Allen Ginsberg's Howl: For Carl Solomon.

Some of the coffeehouse scenes were shot at The Gas House, a Venice landmark that was torn down in the early Sixties. For someone who was a bit young to experience the Beat scene in its heyday, A Bucket of Blood is a window on that era.

It's not a great movie, but it's certainly a great period piece. In a later coffeehouse scene, an unknown folksinger performs a creditable rendition of Ewan MacColl's "The Ballad of Tim Evans." Dick Miller, who played the lead role in the film, told writer Beverly Gray that "The story was good, the acting was good, the humor in it was good, the timing was right, everything about it was right—-but they didn't have any money for production values, and it suffered."

It's too bad there weren't some DVD extras about the Beat era and the making of the film. But for three bucks, I can't complain

In Which Stephen Wanders from Blogger Wood into Facebook Meadow, and is Trampled by a Herd of Digital Heffalumps

2009-03-09T23:50:00.005-04:00

"Steve! It's about time you got onto FB! I was just thinking of you today and thinking that I should see if you are on!"

Alas, I have finally given in and joined Facebook, in a moment of weakness Sunday night. My three children are on Facebook. My son-in-law is on Facebook. My brother is on Facebook. My wife is on Facebook. And a lot of my blogging friends are too, including the individual who sent me the above message. A few hours later that same individual announced she would be giving up Facebook for the rest of Lent.

When I filled in my profile, I noticed that Facebook had a memory for recent movies or books, but not necessarily for anything unusual, eccentric, or more than a few years old. Under "Favorite Movies," it recognized the relatively recent "Quiz Show," but not the classic Hitchcock film, "The 39 Steps." No recognition for Incredible String Band fans. Oddly enough, Facebook did recognize classical composers, including Ralph Vaughan Williams.

My high school, University High School in Iowa City, was unknown to Facebook. It did close in 1972, but I'm sure there are many U-High graduates on Facebook.

Almost as soon as I set up the account and made some friend requests, the friends started coming in. It's nice to be popular, but I was, well, overwhelmed, or at least whelmed.

And then I'm poked, tagged, and hugged. I'm not really sure what any of them mean, but one hug almost crashed my computer. I accepted a digital hug from one person, and tried to return it. But when I tried to send the hug, a pop-up ad for Domino's Pizza blocked it. There was no way to confirm the hug or to get rid of the Domino's ad, at least not that I could see. I gave up.

Now that I think about it, what nearly crashed my computer was not the hug, but attempting to make a friend request. When I made the request, I got another pop-up--this from the dreaded Capcha monster, which was speaking German at me. Honest, Capcha wanted me to type in "Mittag 18." When I typed it in, I got an error message. I clicked on "OK" and then got more Capcha pop-ups, but with no words to type in. From that point my computer was frozen. I had to restart the computer.

My Facebook page is under my full name, Stephen Crews Wylder. I'd be happy to have any of my readers here as friends. It just may take a while for me to confirm the requests.

"And the Gargoyles Only Sit and Grieve:" Phil Ochs in Chicago

2009-03-01T23:01:00.010-05:00

Evan, of Two Dishes, But to One Table, wrote a fascinating post on the folksinger Phil Ochs, who died by his own hand in 1976. He makes this interesting point: "Ochs had a lesser-known rival zoom past him, aping his style a bit, I think. Sitting here today in a coffee shop on 34th Street, I heard "American Pie" for the millionth royalty-generating time in my life and realized that Don McLean's voice (his voice itself!) and song both derive from Ochs just as much as, say, Sum 41 derives from Green Day nowadays. " (I'll have to take his comparison on faith. I've listened to a number of Green Day songs, but I've never heard of Sum 41.) Initially I was going to disagree with him, but then realized that even McLean's best song, "Vincent," has imagery reminiscent of Ochs (though far less so than "American Pie").

I've been thinking a lot about Ochs recently, because of the novel I'm writing, or trying to write, much of which takes place in Chicago during the week of the 1968 Democratic Convention. Ochs sang at the "LBJ Un-Birthday Party at the Chicago Coliseum August 27. Following is an excerpt of the first draft (and I emphasize first draft) of the novel. The narrator, Timothy Rymer, is a youth correspondent for the Indianapolis Times (which folded in 1965, except in the world of this novel). He faces a personal test in the next few days. Failure would cause some horrific consequences, and there are some powerful people who are trying to make sure he fails. His true love, Helena McKechnie, whose mother was a Parsi and is descended from Magi, has a calling to the Episcopal priesthood at a time when it was male-only. Their friends, Liane Thorvaldsen and Gregory Berberian, are journeyman metaphysicians and are something of guardian angels to Tim and Helena. (The story morphed into magical realism. Gregory once [earlier in the novel, in 2005--there's spiritual time travel involved] reminded Timothy of the fact that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was first published in Britain as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. There was once little difference, he explained, between philosophers and sorcerers.)

One difference between the story and the video above is that the frenzy of card-burning takes place during the song, "The War is Over" rather than "I Ain't Marching Anymore." There were conflicting accounts of the concert, and I chose the wrong one. It will be fixed in the next draft.

Excerpt from Things Done and Left Undone by Stephen Crews Wylder:

At around six-thirty that evening we squeezed into the VW and headed south, toward the Chicago Coliseum on Wabash Avenue. There was a huge crowd at Lincoln Park. Helena slowed, and pulled into the lot off Clark We couldn’t see Bobby Seale, but we could hear him.

“If a pig comes up to us and starts swinging a billy club, and you check around and you got your piece--you gotta down that pig in defense of yourself… If a pig comes up and starts swinging a club, then put it over his head and lay him out on the ground.”

We listened for a while longer while I took notes.

“I pray that no one dies tonight,” said Helena. “Have you enough notes, Timothy?”

I said yes, and we turned east to get to Lake Shore Drive, then south to to Michigan Avenue. At Adams we turned right, then left on Wabash. Once south of the Loop, Helena found a parking place and we walked the few blocks to the Coliseum. The place was nearly seventy years old and showed its age.

I had done some research on it, and had learned of its bizarre history. The guy who built it had the Confederate Libby Prison in Richmond dismantled and shipped to Chicago, and then rebuilt it, stone by stone. It was a tourist attraction for a while, but it didn’t pay, so he used some of the prison stones to build the Coliseum, a nineteenth-century castle with turrets and parapets surrounding a hall that could hold 6000. Theodore Roosevelt had accepted the Progressive Party’s nomination for president at the Coliseum in 1912. The three-way election that followed put Woodrow Wilson in the White House. Later it had been home to the Chicago Zephyrs basketball franchise and the National Hockey League’s Blackhawks. Tonight was probably the Coliseum’s last hurrah.

We paid a dollar and a half each at the box office and walked into the cavernous space. A band called “Home Juice,” named for a Chicago company whose trucks delivered fruit juice to people’s homes, was trying to see how many decibels these old walls could stand.

As the din of Home Juice subsided, I saw Allen Ginsberg sitting on the edge of the stage, doing a yoga exercise. Ed Sanders of the Fugs, the master of ceremonies, introduced the writer Jean Genet, a short balding man, who addressed the crowd in his heavy French accent, saying he that while he loved the Yippies, the ones he really loved were the ones who dressed unconventionally--the Chicago cops. The crowd loved him.

Allen Ginsberg had lost his voice the previous night, so he continued to do yoga on the stage while Sanders read his statement on the power of Om.

“I bring you greetings from Norman Mailer,” said David Dellinger. Applause and cheers echoed through the hall. He went on to give a fine antiwar speech, though some of the speeches that followed were less than rational.

Phil Ochs came onstage to deafening applause, and went into “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore.” It was an electrifying performance. He followed it up with “ The Power and Glory, perhaps his best song, and one that puts the lie to those who say we don‘t love our country:

This is a land full of power and glory
Beauty that words cannot recall
Oh her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom
Her story shall rest on us all

We were wiping the tears from our eyes when he began “The War is Over,” with its last lines, so fitting in this nineteenth-century castle:

And the gargoyles only sit and grieve
The gypsy fortune teller told me that we'd been deceived
You only are what you believe.
I believe the war is over It's over, it's over

The hall erupted with cheers and applause. People had their hands in the air, giving the “V” sign for peace. Some were burning money, draft cards, or whatever they had on hand to burn. All four of us were caught up in the excitement, though none of us burned anything. It’s easy to be seduced by the crowd, especially when you‘re in harmony with it. But I‘ve always been uneasy about crowd situations, and I felt myself holding back just a little.

And then came Abbie Hoffman, screaming and ranting about a march to the Amphitheatre. The crowd had lost control. Most would have followed him, had he decided to march then and there. But he left the stage, and Paul Krassner followed.

He told a story of a journalist who had interviewed Lyndon Johnson. After the official interview was over, the president said, “You know, what the Communists are really saying is, 'Fuck you, Lyndon Johnson,' and nobody says 'Fuck you, Lyndon Johnson,' and gets away with it!" He paused. "Well, when I count three, we're all gonna say it -- and we're gonna get away with it! Are you ready? One...two...three..."

“Fuck you, Lyndon Johnson” roared the crowd, though with at least four exceptions.

“That’s the last thing I want to do,” said Liane, causing a few titters around us. Helena put her arm around me and whispered her thanks for not joining in.

“I hope this program does not go out with that,” she said.It didn’t. It was Dick Gregory, the black comedian, who told a few of his jokes and then began reading:

“When in the course of human events,” he started, and the audience became quiet. The crowd cheered when he got to “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It was Dick Gregory’s delivery that reminded us of that this was a revolutionary document. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” Gregory continued.

But the climax of his reading came with the next sentence: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

The yells, cheers, and whoops reverberated through the old building, as the crowd gave Home Juice a run for its money. As the cheers finally subsided, people began heading for the exits. We followed them out the exit and into the cool Chicago night.

I saw the hand raised first, then the knife, and finally the painted face of the Yippie who wielded it. Greg, his target, reacted first, deflecting the knife, but cutting himself in the process. I made a lunge for his right arm, while Helena grabbed his left. The man was incredibly strong, and the three of us were barely able to prevent another thrust.

And then the man went limp. His eyes glazed over as he collapsed on us.

“Let him down slowly,” said Greg. “This wasn’t his idea.”

I looked around and saw Liane, staring intently toward the other side of Wabash. Greg’s arm was cut. Someone gave him a clean handkerchief to stop the bleeding.

"Don’t call the cops,” Greg said to the onlookers. This guy’s just hopped up on meth. I’m O.K.”

To me, he said, “It’s Liane who’s fought the hardest. Make sure she doesn’t fall.”

Helena and I went to her. She was still staring, but wavering. We both steadied her while Greg got up slowly and began staring in the same direction as Liane. We looked in the direction of their gaze and saw a man in a suit and tie staring back. He turned abruptly and disappeared into the crowd.

Ruminations of a Sickie

2009-02-25T22:41:00.006-05:00

I've spent the last week or so with a cold that wouldn't go away. Monday I went to the doctor and was diagnosed with rhino-sinusitis. A nose and sinus infection, in other words. After three days of antibiotics, I'm better and ready to face the Illinois State students in their weekly exodus from Normal, Illinois. (At ISU the weekend seems to start on Thursday evening.) So, here are a few random facts and factoids:

I knew this already, but Michael D.C. Drout, in his course on CD, "A Way With Words III: Understanding grammar for Powerful Communication," reminded me of it. English used to have an additional two letters in its alphabet, for sounds we now write as th: the thorn (þ) and eth (ð). As the language changed, thorn was often written to look like the letter y. And after printing was invented, the type fonts imported from Italy or Germany had no thorn, so Y was the accepted substitute. Thus, "Ye Olde Tavern" is, in fact, "The Olde Tavern."

Also from Drout: A writing style popular in the Middle Ages made it difficult to distinguish the letter u from v or w, especially when written next to m or n. So scribes began to use the letter o in such words. Thus we have such words as money, honey, come, wonder, and love. Drout remarks that the cutesy way to spell love, "luv," was once the way it was spelled.

One more bit of wisdom from Drout: When I was a kid, I remember wondering why Captain Kangaroo mispronounced the word, "why" as "Y." I found out he really wasn't. As a guy from Babylon, New York, the Captain, Bob Keeshan, was saying it correctly. In the upper Midwest, we've held on to the earlier, aspirated pronunciation of "wh" as "hw."

President Barack Obama gave a wonderful speech Tuesday night, but his fact-checkers missed his line about the country that invented the automobile. That was Germany, not the United States.

The Moody Minstrel has a wonderful post about Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture."

Gerry Rafferty, (1978 hit, "Baker Street"), who last August mysteriously disappeared from St. Thomas' Hospital in London, where he was being treated for a chronic liver condition, is apparently alive and well and living in Tuscany. I've noticed that his songs are being played more often on oldies radio stations. Maybe we can locate Christina "Licorice" McKechnie of the Incredible String Band, who's been missing since 1990. The ISB deserves some airplay. If you're out there, Licorice, I named the heroine of my work in progress (Helena McKechnie) at least partially after you. She's got your soft, sweet voice.

Finally, Peter of slow reads is, as usual, giving up blogging for Lent. This time he's announced it with a sonnet. I'll miss his posts. But his last few posts are worth reading and rereading. His blog is certainly worth revisiting during the next forty days.

"Up then, Melpomene!" The tragedy of Elkhart, Indiana

2009-02-15T20:56:00.012-05:00

"Up then, Melpomene! the Mournful'st Muse of nine,
Such cause of mourning never had'st afore."

Edmund Spenser, The Shepherd's Calendar, November

For just over a century--from 1884 until 1986, when this ornate Victorian structure was razed, the Muse of Tragedy gazed down on downtown Elkhart from her niche on the third floor of the Bucklen Opera House. And so long as she presided over the the city, Elkhart prospered. But now her tragic spirit seems to reign.

I've called this town, named for the island at the confluence of the Elkhart and St. Joseph Rivers which the Miami and Potowatomi tribespeople said was shaped like an elk's heart, home for nearly 20 years, even though I've had to work in other cities. For three years I was a regular columnist for the Elkhart Truth.

In recent days, it's become a poster child for the recession. President Obama came here earlier this month for a town hall meeting, where he gave encouragement to the many unemployed. Kathleen, who watched the meeting on local TV, broke into tears at the president's compassionate words. She works at the Elkhart Public Library, which is now crowded with men waiting to use the computers to check in with the unemployment office.

Not so long ago, Elkhart was the home of Alka-Seltzer, Selmer clarinets and saxophones, and just about every recreational vehicle manufacturer. The Alka-Seltzer story began just a year after the Bucklen Opera House opened.

In 1885 Franklin Miles incorporated the Dr. Miles Medical Company and began marketing the patent medicine Nervine, which Miles claimed was a remedy for "nervousness or nervous exhaustion, sleeplessness, hysteria, headache, neuralgia, backache, pain, epilepsy, spasms, fits, and St. Vitus' dance." Like most such tonics, it was alcohol-based. By 1931 the firm introduced the effervescent stomach remedy Alka-Seltzer; four years later it was Miles Laboratories. By 1977, when the German firm Bayer A.G. bought the company, its Elkhart plant was producing One-A-Day Vitamins, Chocks, Flintstones, and Bugs Bunny vitamins, Bactine antiseptic, among other products.

C.G. Conn established the musical instrument company bearing his name in the 1870s, and by his death in 1931, Elkhart was the band instrument capital of the nation.

The 1930s saw the beginning of the recreational vehicle industry in Elkhart, beginning with Schult Trailer Coach. By 1949 Elkhart was known as the "Trailer Capital of the World." And while it's still known as the Recreational Vehicle Capital of the World, it's hardly consolation to the thousands of Elkhartans who are unemployed today.

When my family moved here in 1989, Elkhart had seen better days. In 1986, the year the Bucklen was razed, Bayer moved Miles' headquarters from Elkhart to Pittsburgh. The Miles name disappeared in 1995, after Bayer acquired Sterling Winthrop, which owned the Bayer name. (Bayer's name and facilities had been confiscated by the U.S. government during World War I.) Today, Bayer is a minor presence in the city.

Whitehall Laboratories, which manufactured Advil, shuttered its Elkhart plant in 1991, taking advantage of a tax break to move to Puerto Rico. Conn-Selmer, bought by Steinway in 2000, has been crippled by a strike (the union actually recommended that the workers approve the proposed contract with Steinway) that has divided the community.

What we have left, mainly, is the recreational vehicle industry, which has been hit hard by the recession. Because RV factory work required little education, the people who have been laid off by Monaco Coach, Jayco, and other RV manufacturers don't have the skills to work in 21st century jobs. Even the Amish, with their carpentry and cabinet-making skills, are hurting from the implosion of the RV industry.

Elkhart is still a fairly safe place to live. My neighborhood (just down the street from C. G. Conn's mansion is lovely. A friend, who once lived in one of the poorer neighborhoods once remarked that only in Elkhart could she live in such an area and feel safe.

And Elkhartans have contributed more than their share to the arts. Three former residents went on to win the Pulitzer: Jay N. "Ding" Darling (editorial cartoons), Howard James (investigative journalism), and Charles Gordone (drama). Poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth spent his early years here. He liked to boast that he lived just down the street from where Ambrose Bierce lived. He didn't, but Bierce did live in Elkhart for a year or so. Architect Marion Mahony redesigned her brother's home into a Prairie School showplace. (Like the Bucklen, it was razed.)

Unless something happens, such as a retirement or resignation at the South Bend Amtrak station, we'll soon be putting our Elkhart house up for sale, and both of us will live in Bloomington, Illinois.

P.S. The statue of Melpomene was saved, though it's now in a private museum. It's way too delicate to put outdoors. But perhaps a replica of the statue needs to look down on Elkhart, perhaps from the 1920s Elco Theater. Maybe she'd bless the town once more.

Of Bonzo Dogs, Camels, and Lots of LSD

2009-02-12T12:09:00.003-05:00

I was going to do a post on President Obama's visit to Elkhart, Indiana, the city of Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy. Or one about the influence of Zoroaster on the three "Abrahamic" faiths and why they should perhaps be known as the Zarathushtran faiths. Maybe later. Right now I'm going to write about the Bonzo Dog Dooh-Dah (or Dada) Band.

The Bonzo Dog Band was part of that great absurdist British comedy tradition that included The Goon Show, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. And because of its absurdity, I assumed that "Bonzo Dog" was just made up. Not so. When Kathleen was rereading Dorothy Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, she came across a reference to the Bonzo Dog. In fact, the Bonzo Dog was a British cartoon character created in 1922 by George Studdy. It would have been known in Britain, but not here in the States.

One of the more bizarre songs, in a collection of bizarre songs, was "Ali Baba's Camel."

Recently my daughter Anne found an earlier version of the song, by Buddy Lewis and His Orchestra, from around 1931:

So why does this 1931 song included these lines?

"You've heard of Ali Baba, forty thieves had he
Out for what we all want, lots of L.S.D."

Lysergic acid diethylamide was not even synthesized until 1938. It turns out that LSD was also British slang for money--actually £sd, for pounds, shillings, and pence. The initials are from the Latin: librae, solidi, denarii. I'm sure the Bonzo Dog Band had fun with the double entendre.

"If Music Be the Food of Love..."

2009-02-04T23:01:00.004-05:00

Felix Mendelssohn, on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth (February 3), is getting a welcome reappraisal. National Public Radio did a story on recently discovered works by the German composer. A New York Times article tells of the efforts of violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and conductor Kurt Mazur to repair the reputation of the composer, damaged more than a century ago by Richard Wagner's anti-Semitic attack.

Strangely enough, Mendelssohn and Wagner composed the two most popular wedding marches. Wagner's is majestic and triumphal, but there's a richness to Mendelssohn's march that celebrates love.

I'm no connoisseur of music, but there's a place in my heart for Mendelssohn, who died at the age of 38 in 1847. And among those of us who love music, but are not musical scholars, he's remained popular. His music is simply enchanting. Memories can play tricks, but as I remember our honeymoon in Washington, D.C., in the dog days of August, 1973, Mendelssohn was always playing in our hotel room. I'm happy that the musical world is bringing him back to the first rank of composers.

Kathleen's Big Adventure

2009-01-28T22:32:00.021-05:00

Sometime before Christmas, our daughter Sarah and her husband, Vainateya Deshpande (Desh), who live in Washington, D.C., invited my wife Kathleen to visit during Inauguration Week. She left on the train from Elkhart Friday, January 16, in below-zero temperature. It was still pretty cold on Sunday, when the three of them visited Monticello. Here she is at a frozen birdbath outside the house. But to me, she seems a dark-haired Galadriel at her magic mirror.

Kathleen says that the underground part of the house extends beyond the limits of the house itself. Here are Kathleen and Sarah admiring Jefferson's house. Desh is saddled with the Curse of the Photographer. He took all the pictures, so he doesn't appear in any of them.

On Monday they went to the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum, in Chantilly, Virginia. It's big enough to hold the Space Shuttle Enterprise, an Air France Concorde, the B-29 Enola Gay (the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb), and hundreds of other complete aircraft. Desh got a picture of Sarah and Kathleen in front of a P-47 Thunderbolt, the type of plane my father flew in World War II.

Tuesday, January 20 was the big day. The original plan was to join a friend of Sarah and Desh who was a staffer for Senator Edward Kennedy and observe the inauguration from the balcony of Kennedy's office. Somehow that plan fell through. But since the Senate office buildings are on the other side of the Capitol, there might not have been a lot to observe. Instead, they went to the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, where they could see the procession from the White House to the Capitol and the Inaugural Parade. And they could watch the ceremony on a JumboTron. The Washington D. C. Transit system worked well for them. They took the bus from Sarah and Desh's apartment and arrived without a problem. The problems

began after they got to downtown Washington, where they had to

deal with long lines for security checks. The two hours of waiting did give Desh an opportunity to show the crowd and some of the individuals in it. One of the youngest participants in the festivities charmed everyone who saw her. While most of the people waiting to see the inauguration were focusing on Barack Obama, quite a few

were more than happy to see the departure of George W. Bush from the Executive Mansion. It's been eight very long years.

CNN was broadcasting from the Newseum. From her vantage point, Kathleen saw Cokie Roberts, Campbell Brown (who was noticeably pregnant), and George Will. Even though the people in the Newseum were inside, people kept their coats on. Still, it was a lot more comfortable than being out on the Mall in the 20-degree weather. And if they couldn't see the Inauguration directly, the JumboTron provided a larger-than-life view.

After the inauguration came the parade, with the wedge of police motorcycles bringing up the front. You can see beginning of a long line of portable toilets on the other side of the street. Somehow the crowds weren't that big on that side of the Avenue. I'm not sure the port-a-potties served their purpose.Then came the motorcade--the security and media vehicles and the President's (that's President Obama!) limousine--a stretch Cadillac Escalade--followed by more limousines and and security vehicles. Kathleen saw Sasha's pink mitten in the window. The parade, which went on for hours, included this 1950s-era Washington, D.C. transit bus, which garnered a lot of applause. I once drove a bus very much like this one when I was a student at the University of Iowa and drove the Cambus in a loop around the campus. There were a couple of 1953-vintage buses that were eventually replaced by modern 1956-models. This was in the early 1970s. There were a lot of bands, many from historically black colleges.

The Illinois float, with its John Deere tractor and image of Lincoln, was a highlight of the parade.

With the parade over, it was time to head back to Sarah and Desh's apartment, though not before eating an exorbitantly-priced meal at the Newseum cafeteria ($5 for a Coke, $9 for a personal pizza). Both Kathleen and Sarah came down with colds after their adventure, but it was surely worth it. I doubt whether there will be another inauguration like it in their lifetimes.

Forgotten Books Friday: The Dream-Detective

2009-01-22T23:09:00.010-05:00

I first read Sax Rohmer’s The Dream -Detective in the late 1970s, when I was in my twenties. It was a Dover reprint of the 1926 edition, though the book itself came out in 1920. Before rereading it, I remembered it as enchanting. And, in some ways, it still is. The character of Moris Klaw is simply unforgettable. Here’s a description of him from the first episode of the book, “Tragedies in the Greek Room:”

“A very old man who carried his years lightly, or a younger man prematurely aged. None could say which. His skin had the hue of dirty vellum, and his hair, his shaggy brows, his scanty beard were so toneless as to defy classification in terms of colour. He wore an archaic brown bowler, smart, gold-rimmed pince-nez and a black silk muffler. A long, caped black coat completely enveloped the stooping figure; from beneath its mud-spattered edge peeped long-toed continental boots.”

A little further down the page:

“From the lining of his flat-topped hat he took out one of those small cylindrical scent-sprays and played its contents upon his high, bald brow. An odour of verbena filled the air.”

Moris Klaw is the proprietor of a curio shop in Wapping, in the East End of London, described in the second episode, “The Potsherd of Anubis:”

“Somewhere amid the misty gloom of this place, where the loot of a hundred ages, of every spot from pole to pole, veils its identity in the darkness, sits a large grey parrot. Faint perfumes and scuffling sounds tell of hidden animal life to the visitor; but the parrot proclaims itself stridently—

“’Moris Klaw! Moris Klaw! The devil’s come for you!’”

And then there’s his daughter, Isis, as described in the second episode:

“He invoked a goddess, and a goddess appeared: a brilliantly beautiful brunette, with delightfully curved scarlet lips and flashing eyes, whose fire the gloom could not dim.”

In the first episode, Klaw sleeps at the scene of a crime, on his “odicallly sterilised” cushion, where he picks up the “etheric storm” unleashed by the last thoughts of the murdered man.

In my work in progress, Things Done and Left Undone, Helena McKechnie wears verbena perfume and bears some resemblance to Isis (though her connection to the ancient world is Persian, not Egyptian). The metaphysician Liane Thorvaldsen can discern people’s dreams. So I’m indebted to Rohmer.

But while Sax Rohmer (the pseudonym of Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward), can create unforgettable characters and scenes, his plots are often stale unimaginative. The creator of the inscrutable Oriental villain, Dr. Fu Manchu, Rohmer can be just as stereotypical about other ethnic groups:

“It is wonderful, snake-like, the power of fascination some Hindus have over women—and always over blondes, Mr. Searles, always over blondes. It is a psychological problem.”
-Fifth Episode: “The Blue Rajah."

All right, I’m a little sensitive here because my blond daughter Sarah fell in love with and married a Hindu. And he’s simply a fine man. But then there are the greedy Jews in the Third Episode, “The Crusader’s Axe,”, and the “dagoes” of the Sixth Episode, “The Case of the Whispering Poplars.”

There are a few really original stories: Episode 4: "The Ivory Statue" and Episode 7: "The Headless Mummies" are certainly worth reading. Only the last episode, No. 9, "The Veil of Isis," really delves into the supernatural. It's by far the best story of the book. In spite of the title, Klaw's daughter does not appear in the episode, except in mention.

An excellent essay on The Dream-Detective can be found here.
I lifted the illustration from it.

In spite of the many stale plots and stereotyped villains, The Dream-Dectective gives us a truly original detective. And it's because of Moris Klaw that Rohmer's book deserves to be brought out of the netherworld of forgotten books.

Two Train Journeys, 40 Years Apart

2009-01-19T13:51:00.005-05:00

A little more than forty years ago, thousands of Amercans watched as the train bearing the remains of Robert Francis Kennedy rolled slowly by on its journey from New York to Washington, D.C. Last Friday, another train traveling over the same line carried Barack Obama and Joe Biden from Philadelphia and Wilmington, respectively, to Washington. The cold weather and security concerns prevented huge crowds from gathering to watch the Obama train, but there were people who made the effort to watch it pass by.

The pundits and Obama's own staff have likened the president-elect's rail journey to that of Abraham Lincoln. But the analogy is flawed. Lincon was to take the helm of a nation on the brink of civil war. His journey was interrupted not by rallies, but by riots. The country was divided, and Lincoln's election had brought the crisis to a head. Lincoln wanted to be a uniter, but his principled opposition to the expansion of slavery made union impossible.

For me, Barack Obama has much more in common with Robert Kennedy. While I did my part as a high school volunteer for Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and considered RFK a usurper, I came to realize that Kennedy was the only candidate who could bring a divided nation together. The people who said they'd vote for Kennedy or George Wallace seemed totally oxymoronic, but we humans are contradictory. People whose prejudices led them to follow segregationist Wallace were also attracted to Kennedy, a man who had former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader (now Congressman) John Lewis on his staff.

Obama has received the votes of many who might have supported a racist candidate in 1968. His optimism and "Yes We Can" spirit have broken barriers between races and between political viewpoints. He has given us the kind of hope that America hasn't seen since the death of Robert F. Kennedy. His presidency is one legacy of the two dreamers who died forty years ago--Kennedy and Martin Luther King, jr.

I can't watch the first video without tears welling up in my eyes. The second, while not as beautifully photographed, reminds us that Barack gives us the hope of fulfilling the dreams of both Kennedy and King.

The Devil of Davenport

2009-01-06T23:31:00.003-05:00

In my six-month time working in Galesburg, I stayed with my in-laws in Davenport, Iowa. And I occasionally ventured over to the old Northwest Davenport neighborhood where I was reminded of a mystery I had planned to write many years ago. I had a name for the protagonist, and a general idea of the story. Friedrich Teufel is a reporter for a German-language newspaper in Davenport in the year 1916, when Iowa was voting on a constitutional amendment for woman suffrage. The German-American community was strongly against the amendment, as the women's movement at the time was led by prohibitionists. In the end, the amendment lost primarily because the German and Irish communities in eastern Iowa opposed it.

The story takes place before the election. A prominent feminist leader (possibly Carrie Chapman Catt, who was from Iowa) comes to Davenport to speak in favor of the amendment. Teufel tries to cover the event, is tossed out of the meeting, though not before making an impassioned plea that he is not a German, but a native-born American, who would report fairly on the event. A young woman, the widow of a British soldier killed on the Marne, takes notes of the speech, and in an act of defiance to her anti-German relatives, delivers her notes to the newspaper office.

Where it goes from there, I'm not sure. Most likely with the murder of a German-American leader working against the amendment, a romance between the Teufel and the widow, and the two working to solve the crime. And Teufel has to decide whether to vote for or against the amendment.

Teufel (German for devil) is a member the Northwest Davenport Turners, which for years met in the building pictured above. The Turners (Turnverein), founded by Prussian nationalist Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, came to America after the failed 1848 revolutions. Every, Turnhalle had a gymnasium--in fact Jahn is credited for inventing modern gymnastics. A number of American gymnasts, including Paul and Morgan Hamm, have received their training from the Turners.

Thanks to the Turners, Teufel is trained in gymnastics, boxing, and fencing. And he's fluent in German English, and French. But before I try to figure out the McGuffin for the Devil of Davenport, I need to finish Things Done and Left Undone.

Back to Normal for the New Year

2009-01-01T01:54:00.002-05:00

Six months ago I started a job in Galesburg, Illinois. I thought it would be ideal--close to Kathleen's hometown of Davenport, Iowa and an affordable place to live. I hadn't reckoned on the exhausting and frustrating nature of the job. In November, when almost everyone I knew was ecstatic about Barack Obama's election, I was too depressed to join in the enthusiasm. I was glad to see, or rather hear, Obama win--I spent election night driving from Elkhart to Davenport--I didn't have that great joy that so many around me had.

When a position opened up at the Bloomington-Normal station, I bid on it. But I was held on the Galesburg position because there wasn't anyone to fill in. But as of Friday, I'll be "back to Normal." With two agents working at the station, it should be far less stressful than it was when I worked there earlier. I'll still be going back and forth to Elkhart as Kathleen and I work on getting the house in Elkhart ready to sell, but eventually, we expect to be settling in Bloomington or Normal--probably Bloomington.

I'll most likely have less access to the virtual world for the next few days.

Happy New Year to all!

The Reagan-Bush Legacy: Breaking Precedents

2008-12-28T22:54:00.004-05:00

Let it never be said that I don’t credit the Reagan-Bush era for something. Now that it’s approaching its end (except in the Supreme Court, where its legacy will, unfortunately, live on), it’s time to note some amazing accomplishments of the three Republican presidents of that era. All three broke long-established patterns in the history of the American presidency.

Ronald Wilson Reagan broke the Prophet’s Curse, but just barely. The story begins with the Battle of Tippecanoe. Tenskwatawa, brother of Tecumseh, was a religious leader known as the Shawnee Prophet. He definitely didn’t have the military skills of his brother. In 1811, Tecumseh had assembled a coalition of native peoples at a camp on Burnett’s Creek near present-day Lafayette, Indiana. He had convinced people from tribes all over the region that they should stop fighting amongst themselves and unite against the Americans, who were steadily encroaching on their lands.

William Henry Harrison, whose military brilliance matched Tecumseh’s, had his army outside the Indian camp. Harrison knew that Tecumseh would never be so foolish as to mount an attack on the American army with his fairly small force. But Harrison also knew that Tecumseh was away from the camp, known as Prophetstown, and seems to have goaded Tenskwatawa into attacking. It’s unclear who shot first, but it appears that Tenskwatawa’s forces were moving in on the American camp. Harrison was prepared, and defeated the Indian coalition.

Two years later, at the Battle of the Thames, (at present-day Chatham-Kent, Ontario), Tecumseh, allied with British forces in the War of 1812, faced Harrison again. Harrison, with superior numbers, triumphed, and Tecumseh died in the battle.

The story goes that Tenskwatawa cursed Harrison and every president elected in a year ending in zero. Harrison, after giving a two-hour inaugural address in the rain, and without a topcoat, died a month after taking office. It's a pretty unlikely story, especially since Tenskwatawa died in 1834, six years before Harrison's election. But until Ronald Reagan, every president elected in a year ending in zero died in office:

Abraham Lincoln, elected 1860, assassinated 1865
James A. Garfield, elected 1880, assassinated 1881
William McKinley, elected 1900, assassinated 1901
Warren Gamaliel Harding, elected 1920, died of a heart attack 1923
Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected 1940, died of a cerebral hemorrhage 1945
John F. Kennedy, elected 1960, assassinated 1963

The only president to die in office outside the Prophet’s Curse was Zachary Taylor, who was elected in 1848, and died in 1850, after eating a dish of iced milk and cherries at a Fourth of July celebration. The cause of death was never established. Of course, Taylor was an officer in the War of 1812, and had fought Tecumseh’s ally, Black Hawk, at the Battle of Credit Island, (in present-day Davenport, Iowa). But Black Hawk and his British allies defeated Taylor’s forces in an ambush.

Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981. Modern medicine triumphed over the Prophet’s Curse. It appears that George W. Bush, elected(?) in 2000, will also live through his presidency. But then, does an election by a 5 to 4 vote in the Supreme Court count as an election?

George Herbert Walker Bush broke the Curse of the Sitting Vice President. Before 1988, the last time a sitting vice president had been elected to the presidency was in 1836, when Martin Van Buren, vice president under Andrew Jackson, was elected in his own right. Of course, there haven’t been many sitting vice presidents who have been nominated to run. John Breckinridge (1860), Richard Nixon (1960), and Hubert Humphrey (1968) are the only ones that I could find between Van Buren and Bush I. But still, it was a first.

That leaves George W. Bush, the only president to win office with less than a plurality of the popular vote and win re-election. The other three presidents who lost the popular vote either lost re-election (John Quincy Adams (elected 1824, defeated by Andrew Jackson, 1828) and Benjamin Harrison (defeated sitting president Grover Cleveland 1884, beaten by Cleveland, 1888) or did not seek a second term (Rutherford B. Hayes, elected 1876). Of course, vote suppression in Ohio probably cost John Kerry the 2004 election.

I don’t have a lot of good things to say about any of the three, but they all broke precedents.

Bah! Humbug!

2008-12-22T16:15:00.001-05:00

Bah! Humbug! When the early Christians decided to celebrate the birth of Christ sometime in the fourth century, why did they choose December 25? Some say it was simply nine months after the Annunciation, March 25. Others suggest they wanted to co-opt pagan midwinter ceremonies, such as those of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. Of course, they were living in the Mediterranean, where the weather is relatively mild in December. They had no idea that the celebration of Christmas would become the commercial frenzy it is today. And they certainly didn’t expect that people in northern climes would insist on traveling long distances in abominable weather in order to be together at Christmas.

After dealing with trains delayed by broken rails, switch failures, and engine breakdowns, driving past slide-offs on Interstate 74, and finally being diverted off the same highway due to a fatal accident, I concluded that we’re insane to be traveling at this time of year. I’m insane, as I had been planning to drive back to Indiana in below-zero weather to be home with my family. Kathleen talked me out of it. With another winter storm rolling across the Midwest tomorrow, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially since I‘ve got to be back to Galesburg to work on Wednesday. (I’ll be working the evening shift Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.)

I’ve often muttered, “The Puritans were right.” Oliver Cromwell banned the celebration of Christmas when he became Lord Protector, though Charles II brought it back when the crown was restored. The Puritans of Massachusetts banned the public celebration of Christmas. Puritans saw the trappings of Christmas--the Yule Log and wassailing--as pagan. And of course they were. There’s some indication that wealthy Puritans were more bothered by wassailers demanding food and drink.

What became Christmas--the tree, the presents, Santa Claus, et cetera--was a Victorian invention. In fact, by marrying Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Queen Victoria had a lot to do with it. Albert brought the Christmas Tree, a German tradition, to England, where it migrated to America, and to the rest of the world. Charles Dickens, “the man who invented Christmas,” gave us The Christmas Carol, which is still a major influence on our perception of Christmas. (I admit to enjoying the book, and even more, the movie with Alistair Sim as Scrooge.)

Over here in the States, Clement Clarke Moore, or someone (there‘s a controversy about the authorship), wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” usually known by its first line, “Twas the night before Christmas.” The poem confounded the Dutch traditions of St. Nicholas’ Day with Christmas. There are many legends about Nicholas of Myra, a fourth-century Greek bishop who lived in what is now Turkey, but the most famous is of the three bags of gold. A poor man had three daughters, but not money enough to provide dowries for them. Without dowries, the young women would almost certainly have had to become prostitutes just to support themselves. The man was too proud to accept charity, so Nicholas, under the cover of darkness, tossed three bags of gold, one for each daughter, through the man’s window. Thus began the tradition of gift-giving on St. Nicholas’ Day, December 6. In Holland and Germany, children set their shoes outside their door or by the chimney on the night of December 5, and “Saint Nicholas,” (Sinterklaas in Dutch) fills them with candy or small toys. (Kathleen brought this tradition to our household. This year was the first where there were no children at home to put shoes outside their door.) Moore (or whoever wrote the poem) took these Dutch St. Nicholas Day traditions and transferred them to Christmas. Sinterklass became Santa Claus, lost his bishop’s miter, and began saying little but “Ho, Ho, Ho.”

And while I’m down on Christmas right now, especially the way we celebrate it here in the United States, I expect to be enchanted by a beautiful Episcopal mass Wednesday night or Thursday morning. Once the buying spree is over, and we get to the babe in the manger (or in the house, if you use Matthew’s gospel), then Christmas is an entirely different holiday. In fact, the celebration of Christmas goes on, culminating on January 6, with the arrival of the magicians from the East. My Bah! Humbug!, will, I hope, turn to “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

My first disappointment with Barack Obama

2008-12-18T12:32:00.004-05:00

It had to happen. Every new president has to move toward a consensus. But I'm troubled by Barack Obama's decision to have Rick Warren give the invocation at his inauguration. Yes, it's purely symbolic. But symbolism is important in a presidency, and Warren symbolizes intolerance. Most recently he was active in supporting California's Proposition 8, which outlawed gay marriage in that state. But personally, his his efforts to bring about a schism in the Episcopal Church--my church--trouble me even more. He's been working to break up my church for at least three years. In November, 2005, he spoke at a Pittsburgh meeting of Episcopal Church dissidents opposed to the consecration of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man in a committed relationship, as Bishop of New Hampshire. An excerpt from a November 11, 2005 New York Times article:

The Episcopalians and Anglicans were joined by well-known American evangelical Christians, most notably the Rev. Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., and author of "The Purpose-Driven Life." Mr. Warren gave encouragement to conservative church dissidents who are trying to break with the Episcopal Church but who have often been stymied by disputes with their dioceses over ownership of church property.

"What's more important is your faith, not your facilities," he told the crowd at the Convention Center here. "The church is people, not the steeple. They might get the building, but you get the blessing."

Warren, whose megachurch is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, is self-serving at best when he works to break up another church. He is a divider, not a uniter. There are conservatives who oppose the ordination of gays and lesbians, but are committed to the staying in the Episcopal Church. Bishop Edward Stuart Little of the Diocese of Northern Indiana is a good example.

For Obama to un-invite Warren would cause even more problems for the president-elect. If Warren has any decency, he'll politely decline the invitation and allow Obama to choose someone who will bring the country together.

Cleverest headline on the Rod Blagojevich Pay-for-Play Scandal

2008-12-13T23:17:00.002-05:00

From the Galesburg, IL Zephyr:

"What Hath Rod Wrought?"

Changing Place Names: Would You Fall in Love in Jesselton? Or Kota Kinabulu?

2008-12-08T23:29:00.011-05:00

As I listened to coverage of the terrorist murders in India's financial capital (sadly, one rarely hears news from that part of the world unless it involves the loss of human life), I noticed that the correspondents referred to the city by its official name, Mumbai, while the vast majority of Indians called it Bombay, its former name. My son-in-law, who comes from a city nearby, calls it Bombay, as does Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.

The Portuguese, who in 1534 appropriated the islands that would make up the city, called the area Bombaim, which may mean "good bay" or "little bay." When the English took over in 1661, after receiving the island as dowry for Catherine de Braganza, who married Charles II, they Anglicized it to Bombay. Hindi- and Urdu-speakers called it Bambai, while Marathi- and Gujarati-speakers called it Mumbai. In 1996 the government of Maharashtra renamed the city Mumbai, in an effort to remove colonial names. Mumbai is derived from the Hindu goddess Mumbadevi.

Other cities in India have had similar changes: Madras became Chennai in 1996 because Madras was believed to be a Portuguese name (a contraction of Madre de Deus), or more likely from the Madeiros family. Although Chennai predates Madras, quite a few of the residents still refer to the city by its old name.

Malaysia has also changed names--most notably Jesselton, in Malaysian Borneo, which was renamed Kota Kinabalu--literally, the city of [nearby] Mount Kinabalu--in 1968. I suspect the new name has been more accepted there, but Malaysian singer Pete Teo's hit, "Jesselton Tonight," uses the old name. But its line "Would you fall in love in Jesselton ere days of 'burn baby burn' hearkens back to earlier days. "Burn baby burn" refers not to H. Rap Brown's slogan of the 1960s but to the destruction of forests for agriculture.

Other countries have been much more successful in getting new names to stick. I don't expect Zimbabwe to revert to Rhodesia after Robert Mugabe is out of power. Nor will Kinshasa go back to Leopoldville. If a name represents a despotic government, it usually will be replaced. Leningrad is now St. Petersburg, thus replacing the name of one despot with that of an earlier one (though Tsar Peter the Great had the modesty to name it for the saint who shared his name). Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad in 1925, but Nikita Khrushchev renamed it Volgograd in 1961. I suspect that someday Myanmar will again be Burma. In fact, virtually all the opponents of the despotic Myanmar government call the nation Burma.

But the most successful sub-Saharan African country, the Republic of South Africa, has kept Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, etc. , even though they're reminders of the colonial past. Maybe they've decided that changing the name doesn't change the reality.

But if a name change is to be truly successful, it needs to be supported by the people. Had India changed Bombay to Mumbai in 1947, in the days of independence, the people might have embraced it. But to change the name a half century after Indian independence and without any popular referendum made no sense. But then, the expense of changing it back may make even less sense. There's the old joke about the expense of changing Boulder Dam to Hoover Dam--that it would have cost less if Hoover had changed his name to Herbert Boulder. So I suspect that Mumbai will continue to be the official name of India's largest city, while its residents will keep calling it Bombay.

Jack Mabley, R.I.P

2008-11-25T14:01:00.004-05:00

In doing research for my Dickens Challenge novel, which in part takes place during the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, I stumbled upon Jack Mabley, the Chicago American columnist who, in August 1968, publicized the Yippies' so-called plans to put LSD in the Chicago water supply, have Yippie women seduce delegates by posing as prostitutes, and then put LSD in their drinks, etc. I had read Mabley before and believed him to be something of a right-winger. I was wrong. While the American was a right-wing paper (the afternoon paper published by The Tribune Company), Mabley was not a rightist, but someone who was alarmed by the Yippie movement and took their guerilla theater a bit too seriously.

When I did a Google search for Mabley, I learned he had died in January, 2006, at the age of 90. I also found his blog, Jack Mabley's Web Log. And in it I found two predictions: one sadly wrong, the other dead-on:

I’ve never hesitated to make predictions. They don’t jeopardize my reputation because my reputation is being wrong more than right. On that note, I predict that Kerry’s margin of victory will be substantial. And he’ll carry a flock of Democrats into public offices with him. And Barack Obama will be the first person of color to become President.

Rest in peace, Jack. Sorry you didn't live to see your prediction come true.

Forty-five years

2008-11-22T20:27:00.005-05:00

Like most of the people in my generation, I can remember where I was when I first learned of President Kennedy's assassination. For me it was outside the cafeteria at Madison Junior High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I wasn't having an easy time in seventh grade, and the announcement of this catastrophe didn't make it any better. When it was time to go to math class, which met in one of the many barracks-classrooms erected to house the overflow of students of the postwar baby boom, I learned a little more.

I don't remember the teacher's name. I wasn't good at math, and this teacher wasn't my favorite. She had once confiscated a little doodle I made--spacemen getting out of a flying saucer while people all around ignored them--and sent it to the counselor, who decided it was a clear sign of serious emotional problems. That day she tried to calm students down, giving us in somber tones the facts as she knew them. At one pont a girl asked if Kennedy had been shot "with a rifle or a gun," causing some titters, and easing the tension. But the teacher berated the titterers and brought the tension level back up.

Mercifully, Albuquerque Public Schools decided to dismiss students before math class was over. I watched the coverage of the assassination, and the funeral, on our black-and-white TV. The news commentators referred to the new president by his full name--Lyndon Baines Johnson--which prompted my father to say that he hoped they'd stop using the Baines.

I was eleven that year, and turned twelve at the end of November. (Being a year younger than most of my classmates surely exacerbated my problems in junior high.) For me, the Kennedy assassination was tied in with sad events in my personal and family life. I had been a top student in sixth grade, but ended up with three Ds on my report card that semester. I probably would have received them had there not been an assassination, but the shock of Kennedy's death did affect my studies. My father, at a loss to know what to do , spanked me for the 3-D report card. I resented it for a long time, and fantsized about running away, escaping to the Midwest, where the world seemed more civilized.

The next year, my parents sent me to the Albuquerque Academy, where I did much better. I wasn't fantasizing about running away, but my dreams of returning to the Midwest came true, though not in the best way.

For this was also a time when my parents' marriage was deteriorating. I must have sensed it emotionally, if not intellectually. My brother, four years younger, sensed it better than I. When our mother asked him if he knew what a divorce was, he said, it was when you got "unmarried." "You're going to get one," he immediately added.

The divorce took place in the summer of 1965. My mother, brother, and I moved to Iowa City, wher she worked on a Master of Fine Arts and eventually began working for Paul Engle, who was then in charge of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

All of this turmoil in my own life, and that of my family, took place in the aftermath of that terrible day in November, forty-five years ago. I'm sure I would be a different person--perhaps less fatalistic and more self-confident--had Oswald's bullet missed the president.

On January 20 of next year, we shall, for the first time in forty-five years, have a young, attractive, energetic, optimistic, and progressive president. let us hope and pray that he is able to serve his term and be re-elected in 2012. For the sake of our nation and of all the people, at home and abroad, who have put so much hope in him, I pray that Barack Obama has a long and successful presidency.

Barack Obama, FDR, and NPR

2008-11-17T22:23:00.004-05:00

Driving from Galesburg to Elkhart Sunday afternoon, blissfully unaware of the lake-effect snowstorm awaiting me in northwestern Indiana, I was listening to Weekend All things Considered on National Public Radio. I've never met the host, Andrea Seabrook, but I think of her as a friend--someone who brings a smile to my face by just the sound of her voice. Seabrook's audience may be in the millions, but she makes you feel as though you're part of her special circle of friends.

Susan Stamberg is a woman I'd trust about anything except Thanksgiving food. I've listened to her since she was co-host of All Things Considered in the early 1970s. She doesn't have the intimacy of Seabrook, but her voice has an air of authority and experience.

But that afternoon, Seabrook got Stamberg on the line to grouse about Barack Obama's decision to put his weekly radio talks on YouTube. I'm not sure they were entirely serious, but it bothered me that Stamberg made the comment that if radio was good enough for FDR, is should be good enough for the president-elect. The trouble is, radio wasn't good enough for Franklin D. Roosevelt, as the YouTube video shows. Of course there was no YouTube during FDR's presidency, and television was in its infancy. But there was video, in the form of newsreels. I'm old enough to remember when movie theaters showed newsreels, along with cartoons and short features, before the main attraction. By the mid-1960s most cinemas had abandoned the newsreel. But in FDR's time, newsreels were the only way to see and hear the news. And FDR took advantage of them by making his "Fireside Chats" avaialble to the reels. If there had been a YouTube, he would have been on it.

I rely on NPR almost exclusively for my news. And I agree with Stamberg and Seabrook about the advantages of radio over audio-visual. For one thing, it's something I can do while I'm driving, or lying in bed with my eyes closed. But Obama has the duty to communicate with as many people as he can. That includes the people who don't listen to radio, as well as those who don't happen to be listening at the time of day he gives his weekly talk.

An outrage? Or, as Stamberg says, like having roast beef on Thanksgiving? No to the first. And as for the second, roast beef on Thanksgiving isn't such a bad idea. The Pilgrims of the Plymouth Plantation, whose 1621 harvest festival inspired the American Thanksgiving, ate venison along with turkey and fish. While a steer isn't a deer, it's still a hoofed animal. Close enough. Besides, Stamberg's ideas about Thanksgiving food are, well, a little bit suspect.

My thanks to the Millennials

2008-11-05T12:53:00.003-05:00

I first noticed the brilliance of Barack Obama’s campaign when I was looking up Hanover College on the Internet. I believe it was on the U.S. News college rankings website. When I pulled up the Hanover College page, there was an ad for Barack Obama, telling prospective Indiana students that there was only one day left to register for the primary.

My son, then a senior at Elkhart Memorial High School, voted for Obama in the primary, as did many of his classmates. Obama nearly won that primary. Hillary Clinton’s Pyrrhic victory in Indiana, coupled with her huge loss in North Carolina the same day, sealed the nomination for Obama. While Obama put together a vast coalition, the Millennial Generation--those between 18 and 30--was crucial to his victory.

Thirty-six years ago, another insurgent Democrat was counting on another huge generation to put him into the White House. He was, of course, George McGovern, and the generation was mine. I voted for him in 1972, but so many of my fellow Baby Boomers failed even to register, let alone vote.

The ‘72 campaign also occurred at a time when we were fighting an unpopular war and when the administration in power was trampling on the Bill of Rights. But the McGovern campaign (though not McGovern himself) spent much political capital righting past wrongs against fellow Democrats. Perhaps Richard J. Daley deserved to be thrown out of the Democratic Convention, but that one act cost McGovern Illinois.

McGovern gave his beautiful “Come Home, America” acceptance speech at around three in the morning, thanks to his supporters’ petty squabbles on the convention floor. Of course, he has to take responsibility for failing to control his enthusiastic, but vindictive, adherents. His failure to vet his first vice presidential choice, Thomas Eagleton, cost him dearly, in those days when clinical depression was far less understood. And his campaign was so tightly focused on opposition to the war that when Henry Kissinger announced that peace was at hand, McGovern had lost his main issue. The threat of being drafted to fight in Southeast Asia had been lifted; Richard Nixon coasted to a landslide victory.

Barack Obama was against the Iraq war, but General David Petraeus’s brilliant strategy of co-opting the Sunni militias and drastically reducing the violence in that war did not put an end to the Obama message. He did not depend on the antiwar issue, but talked as much about the economy, the environment, and America's role in the world as a whole, that his candidacy did not implode. His campaign had the benefit of Hillary Clinton’s endorsement. The prediction that her supporters would defect to the Republicans, widely touted, did not come true. (John McCain’s patronizing selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate surely hurt him with former Clinton backers.) In contrast, the 1972 credentials fight between McGovern and Hubert Humphrey was still smoldering in November.

But Obama’s greatest strength, through the whole campaign, was his unrelenting optimism and message of hope. It is was the strength of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John and Robert Kennedy. It connected with so many of us from every generation. And it brought a great new generation to the polls in large numbers. The Millennials did what we Boomers could not do: elect an insurgent Democrat to the White House.

The Pitfalls of Dog Ownership, or Contemplating 1970s Trailer Life

2008-10-31T15:08:00.007-04:00

Ten years ago this December, a dog followed my daughter Sarah home. Well, not exactly followed. Sarah coaxed him back with soothing words. Sarah had been wanting a dog for some time. She knew that my childhood dog had been a Golden Retriever mix. The dog she led home looked a lot like him. When I got home that night, Kathleen said she had a surprise. I came into the living room and saw a beautiful Golden Retriever mix, with white paws and a black spot on his muzzle, sitting on my son Jim’s lap. I couldn’t say no. Jim named him Copper, because he was the color of a copper penny.

Copper was a stray, and he had been abused. For quite a while he was afraid of me. He had no problem with women and children, but he was terrified of adult men. We checked with the city, and the animal control people said that it we had him for 30 days, he was ours. We took him to the vet, and he got the requisite shots, along with treatment for three different kinds of parasites--hookworms, roundworms, and tapeworms.

About a month after we got him, some children came to the door and said that Copper was their dog. The family who owned him had taken off for the month of December. Recreational vehicle manufacturers often shut down for a month around Christmas, giving their employees an unpaid vacation. The dog had gotten out of their yard, and the family had left town without the dog. Kathleen told them that we’d already spent $150 on the dog, and that she’d have to talk to the children’s parents. We never heard anything from them again.

He’s been a wonderful companion for the past decade. For an eleven-year-old dog, he’s in good health, and can still do a walk of several miles and (unfortunately) jump a fence. But we’ve just learned the pitfalls of dog ownership.

We own a house in Elkhart, Indiana--a big, three-bedroom American Foursquare, which we have no hope of selling until spring. We’re slowly getting the house ready to sell--drywall work, plumbing, and electrical work, along with some other less important work. And slowly moving stuff out of the house to Davenport, Goodwill, the recycling center, or the landfill.

Meanwhile I’m staying in Davenport with my in-laws, driving the 55 miles each way to my job in Galesburg, and then a seven-hour drive to and from Elkhart every week. I have a week off, so Kathleen and I came to Davenport to look for a temporary place in Galesburg--a small house or even apartment to rent between now and next year. We figured there would be lots of places to rent. There are literally hundreds of vacant houses in Galesburg, a city which has yet to recover from Whirlpool’s closing of the former Maytag plant in 2004.

But nobody wants to rent, especially to a couple with a dog. People would rather let their houses sit empty rather than take a risk on renting. We visited two real estate agencies who gave us little hope. We got the same reaction from the third, but just as we were walking off in disappointment, an agent, appropriately named Carl Admire, asked us to come back to his office. He gave us some other alternatives, and showed real concern for us.

The one alternative that seemed to make sense was to buy an older mobile home, use that as my Galesburg residence until we sold our house, and then sell the trailer and buy a real house. It’s something we might be able to afford. The mobile home we looked at is in a decent park, populated mainly by retired people.

The trailer dates back to 1978 and looks it. Those 1970s colors of burnt orange, avocado, and harvest gold predominate. There’s even a built-in radio with an 8-track tape player. I’m not bothered by such things as orange carpets, though Kathleen is. But we’d own it (though having to pay lot rent), and Copper would be with us.

Voting for the Rooster

2008-10-23T13:08:00.002-04:00

I cast my vote at the courthouse last week, just in case I get stuck working on Election Day. I voted the straight ticket, so I filled in the little oval right next to the Democratic Party rooster. In virtually every other state, the Democratic emblem is the donkey, while the Republicans use the elephant. Not in Indiana. It’s the rooster and the eagle here.

The rooster as party emblem goes back to 1840, during the presidential campaign between Democrat Martin Van Buren and Whig William Henry Harrison. It was a tight race in Indiana, and both parties were calling out their best speakers to speak, or in the lingo of the time, to “crow” for their candidates. Joseph Chapman, a Democratic state representative from Greenfield, in Hancock County, was one such speaker. George Pattison, editor of the Indianapolis Constitution, sent a letter to the postmaster of Greenfield, which read in part, “Tell Chapman to Crow.”

Somehow the letter got into the hands of Whigs, who used the line to ridicule the Democrats. But the Whig effort backfired, and soon Democrats were chanting “Crow Chapman Crow. While Harrison won the election, the slogan stuck. Sometime later the Indiana Democratic Party adopted the rooster as its emblem.

After the Whig Party imploded in the 1850s, Northern Whigs and Free-Soil Democrats (those who opposed the expansion of slavery), formed the Republican Party. When Indiana Democrats urged voters to “vote for the big chick,” Republicans adopted the eagle, and the slogan, “Vote for the bird on the dollar.”

Thus, the Indiana rooster and eagle. The rooster emblem spread to other states, especially in the South, where it had more sinister legacy. The Alabama “white rooster” became a symbol of white supremacy. In the 1968 election, the Alabama ballot listed Hubert Humphrey under the Democratic donkey, but George Wallace, the segregationist candidate of the American Independent Party, had the rooster. In 1996 the Alabama Democratic Party formally adopted the donkey as its emblem due to the rooster’s racist associations.

But the Indiana rooster had no such legacy, so it remains the symbol of Indiana Democracy. Still, the reason for party emblems is mainly to aid illiterate voters. Illiteracy is much less common now than it was in the 1840s, but it still exists. For that reason I’ve argued that the donkey and elephant--universally recognized emblems--ought to be used on the Indiana ballot. It doesn’t seem likely to happen. Hoosiers are pretty stubborn.

Madison and the Gender Migration of Names

2008-10-17T10:24:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, Kathleen learned that her twenty-something friend and coworker did not know the state capitals. The friend is intelligent, but she had never learned this basic of American geography--something that we baby boomers had to memorize.

So Kathleen decided to try to teach her. She did this by putting the capitals into categories: religious--St. Paul, Sacramento, Santa Fe, Salem, Concord, Providence; Native American--Tallahassee, Oklahoma City, Topeka, Cheyenne, Honolulu (maybe Native Hawaiian for the last); French--Des Moines, Baton Rouge, Boise, Montpelier, Pierre. There was a big category of English place names, such as Boston, Richmond, and Dover. Little Rock and Salt Lake City locate the city with a natural feature. A few, such as Phoenix and Bismarck were one of a class (Mythological Creatures and Iron Chancellors?).

But the cleverest category she came up with was women’s names. One is stretching it--Juneau is pronounced the same as Juno, but was actually named after a prospector named Joe Juneau. But the categories are mnemonic, not historical. Most of the others are pretty obvious--Augusta, Atlanta, Helena, Olympia. Annapolis, named for Anne Arundel, is also on the list. And one more that I wouldn’t have put in the class: Madison. In the past twenty years or so, the surname of our fourth president has become a popular girls’ name. And as a mnemonic, it worked.

Which is a way to get into the tendency of men’s names morphing into women’s names. And after they do, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever be used for boys again. Most of these gender-changing names seem to fall into certain patterns. When men’s names share a traditionally feminine ending, they a seem to be fair game. Names ending in the latter a, such as Sasha, Dana, and Elisha have moved into the feminine column, at least in the United States. Judith (Hebrew in origin) and Edith (Anglo-Saxon), have made Meredith (Welsh) an acceptable girls’ name. Then there are the many-ley/ly names: Shirley, Beverly, Ashley, Kimberly, etc. (Somehow, Bradley has escaped feminization.) At one time, Lesley was a girls’ name, while Leslie was for boys. But in the States, it’s almost exclusively a girls’ name, whatever the spelling. Similarly, Tracy/Tracey and Stacy/Stacey are almost exclusively girls’ names in the USA.

Then there’s the “sounds the same” category. There are quite a few young women named
Aubrey today. I suspect it became a girls’ name because it sounds like Audrey.

A lot of surnames--Kelly, Taylor, and Courtney, for example, have become girl's names. I’m not sure why Kelly is a common girls’ name, while Murphy, despite the television program Murphy Brown, isn’t. Whether Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol will start a trend for that name, I don’t know. I hope not. Ditto for her boys’ names, Track and Trig.

When names make the transition, from masculine to feminine (I don't know any that have gone the other way), they usually do so completely. But Sidney, which shows up as a girl’s name as early as 1901, in Frank Norris’s novel, The Octopus, and Jordan, which is the name of a major female character in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1922), are still used for both men and women.

And then there’s Madison. According to Wikipedia, it started with the 1984 movie Splash, in which Daryl Hannah plays a mermaid who takes the name Madison from the avenue in New York. But I suspect it wouldn’t have caught on if the nickname Maddie hadn’t been popular as a result of Maddie Hayes, the character played by Cybil Shepherd on the TV series, Moonlighting. Madeleine (or even Madolyn, the spelling of the character's name) is currently out of fashion, so it’s Madison to the rescue.

The Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory

2008-10-09T12:20:00.004-04:00

In my last post, I mentioned a Chicago folk club called the Gate of Horn, which flourished in the 1950s and '60s. While the origin of the name is fairly well-known, I'll repeat it here. The Oneiroi, in Greek mythology, were either the sons (according to Ovid) or brothers (according to Hesiod)of Hypnos, the god of sleep. These winged daemons would send dreams to mortals through one of two portals. If they came through the gate of ivory, the dreams would be false, but those through the gate of horn were true. Several years ago, when I mentioned the myth to Kathleen, she noted immediately that the true dreams came through the more common material, where the more precious ivory produced false dreams.

The earliest reference to the two gates comes from the Odyssey, in which Persephone recounts a dream that Odysseus, her husband would return:

Stranger, dreams verily are baffling and unclear of meaning, and in no wise do they find fulfilment in all things for men. For two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those dreams that pass through the gate of sawn ivory deceive men, bringing words that find no fulfilment. But those that come forth through the gate of polished horn bring true issues to pass, when any mortal sees them. But in my case it was not from thence, methinks, that my strange dream came.

-Homer, The Odyssey, book 19, lines 560-569, Loeb Classical Library translation (via Wikipedia).

The Loeb translator, in a note, comments that "The play upon the words κέρας, 'horn,' and κραίνω, 'fulfil,' and upon ἐλέφας, 'ivory,' and ἐλεφαίρομαι, 'deceive,' cannot be preserved in English."

The gates also appear in Virgil's Aeneid, in which the hero, Aeneas, returns from the underworld by way of the ivory gate, which gave classical scholars a lot of room for interpretation. It seems to me that Virgil is cautioning the reader about the veracity of his story. Wikipedia uses the Dryden translation of Virgil, most likely because it's in the public domain. But it's also simply beautiful poetry. Aeneas, after visiting his dead father in the underworld, returns to the living world with the Cumean Sibyl:

Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn;
Of polish'd ivory this, that of transparent horn:
True visions thro' transparent horn arise;
Thro' polish'd ivory pass deluding lies.
Of various things discoursing as he pass'd,
Anchises hither bends his steps at last.
Then, thro' the gate of iv'ry, he dismiss'd
His valiant offspring and divining guest.

-Virgil, The Aeneid, Book 6, lines 893-898, tr. John Dryden

The gates of horn and ivory have turned up in modern literature, most notably in Robert Holdstock's novel Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn in his Mythago Wood fantasy series.

And of course the myth of the two gates gave the name t0 the Chicago folk club, where Odetta, Bob Dylan, Bob Gibson, Hamilton Camp, and virtually every other prominent folksinger of the 1950s and '60s performed.

Obama is the One for Me

2008-10-06T22:52:00.011-04:00

I was just a bit too young to participate in the American folk revival of the late 1950s and early Sixties. Chicago's great folk clubs, Gate of Horn and the Earl of Old Town were closed by the time I got there. But the folk artists of that era continue to fascinate me, with their renditions of both new and old acoustic music, and their liberal to left-wing politics.

One of the great figures of that era was Peggy Seeger--Mike's sister and Pete's half-sister, who was married to another legendary folk figure, the late Ewan MacColl.

I was searching YouTube, hoping to find the Peggy Seeger/Ewan MaColl song, Come Fill Up Your Glasses, which used to be played every New Year's Eve on the WFMT Radio program, the Midnight Special. I didn't find it, but I found that Peggy Seeger is still active in folk music and politics. Her song, "Obama is the One for Me" reminds us that the idealism of the 1960s never really died, no matter what the last forty years have done to crush it.

As American as...Chop Suey?

2008-10-04T19:54:00.004-04:00

Sarah Palin, after finishing the vice presidential debate without saying anything really stupid, has now declared that Barack Obama “pals around with terrorists.” Yep, American presidential politics are back on the moral high ground. Which is why I’m writing about something else--traditional American food such as chop suey and German chocolate cake. Besides, it gives me an excuse to use Edward Hopper’s wonderful painting, “Chop Suey.”

“As American as apple pie.” Of course, apple pie isn’t originally American. Wikipedia shows a 1381 English recipe, which suggests that people had been eating apple pie even earlier. But there are some American dishes which most Americans believe are foreign, but are far more American than apple pie.

You won’t find chop suey in China. And while it’s harder to find it in the United States today than twenty years ago, it’s an American, or Chinese-American dish. Its origins are unclear. I had read in a Time-Life book on the cooking of the Great West that it was first served in San Francisco. The phrase means “mixed pieces” in Cantonese, and seems to have originated with Chinese immigrants in California. The dish caught on with white Americans, and chop suey houses were common all over the United States by the turn of the last century. A recipe for chop suey can be found here.

After eating chop suey at a Chinese-American restaurant, you usually have a fortune cookie. Another Chinese-American invention, though it appears to be an adaptation of a Japanese recipe. Still, the fortune cookie as we know it was developed in America.

When Americans go to Germany and ask for German Chocolate Cake, they’re likely to get blank stares, or perhaps an explanation that the cake isn’t really German. In fact, if Samuel German had been, say, Samuel Irish, then it would have become Irish Chocolate Cake.

Samuel German was an Englishman, working for the Baker’s Chocolate Company. In 1852 he created a chocolate bar with extra cocoa butter, which became known as German’s Sweet Chocolate. A little more than a century later, a Texas housewife sent in a recipe for German’s Sweet Chocolate Cake to a Dallas newspaper. The cake itself may be older than that, but its first appearance in print was 1957.

Somewhere along the line, German’s was shortened to German, and thus Americans believed the cake originated in Germany. But it’s clearly from the American South, complete with that staple of Southern dishes, the pecan. The original German’s Chocolate Cake recipe can be found here. It’s a delicious cake. It’s just not German.

Kennedy-Nixon All Over Again?

2008-09-27T20:56:00.006-04:00

I didn't watch the first presidential debate last night. I listened to it on the radio. And while I thought Barrack Obama won on points, John McCain came through as a reassuring elder statesman--a man who could soothe the public in spite of policies that promise to turn the current recession into a depression. (You don't slash government spending during a recession. By throwing more and more people out of work, such drastic cuts can cause a snowball effect. You don't tax employer-provided health insurance unless you want take away health benefits for hundreds of thousands of Americans.)

But Kathleen watched the debate. McCain, she said, came off as an "angry old man." The latest polls seem to bear this out, with Obama perceived as the winner by a skight margin.

It reminds me of another presidential debate, exactly 48 years before yesterday's debate, between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John Kennedy. I was eight years old in 1960, so I don't have clear memories of it at the time. But I've seen and heard recordings of the debates.

In the first debate, held September 26, 1960, most listeners perceived Nixon as the winner, while Kennedy was the clear victor with television viewers. Here's a summary from the Museum of Broadcast Communication:

... In August, Nixon had seriously injured his knee and spent two weeks in the hospital. By the time of the first debate he was still twenty pounds underweight, his pallor still poor. He arrived at the debate in an ill-fitting shirt, and refused make-up to improve his color and lighten his perpetual "5:00 o'clock shadow." Kennedy, by contrast, had spent early September campaigning in California. He was tan and confident and well-rested. "I had never seen him looking so fit," Nixon later wrote.

In substance, the candidates were much more evenly matched. Indeed, those who heard the first debate on the radio pronounced Nixon the winner. But the 70 million who watched television saw a candidate still sickly and obviously discomforted by Kennedy's smooth delivery and charisma. Those television viewers focused on what they saw, not what they heard. Studies of the audience indicated that, among television viewers, Kennedy was perceived the winner of the first debate by a very large margin.

I wish Obama had sounded less professorial ("He was a professor," Kathleen reminded me.) and McCain less reassuring. But if McCain came off as an angry old man on the small screen, he may just be 1960 Nixon Redux.

Hurricane Ike Hits Indiana

2008-09-18T13:01:00.001-04:00

We don’t have hurricanes in the Midwest. We get virtually every other form of natural disaster: floods, tornadoes, forest fires, snowstorms, hailstorms, ice storms, earthquakes (though the last Big One was in the early 1800s), droughts, and heat waves, but no hurricanes. Those are for people living near an ocean. The trouble is, we get the remnants of hurricanes, and they can be almost as bad as the real thing.

Last weekend northern Indiana got over a foot of rain. I should have realized that the Borman Expressway would be flooded when I started driving east from Galesburg last Sunday afternoon. The Borman (named after astronaut Frank Borman, not Nazi Martin Bormann, though sometimes I think it ought to be) is a six-to-eight-lane highway extending from the Illinois border to the Indiana Toll Road exit at Lake Station, a distance of about 15 miles. It funnels virtually all the auto and truck traffic coming from Chicago and points west to Indiana, Michigan, and points east. When it shuts down, it’s a traffic nightmare. The alternatives are to go south to U.S. 30 or to head north into Chicago and get on the Skyway.

I was blithely driving Interstate 80 (the Kingery Expressway on the Illinois side), listening to a fascinating public radio program, “To the Best of Our Knowledge” about Generation X and its resentments against Boomers like me and Millennials like my kids, when I encountered a jam blocking all but the left lane of traffic. I stayed on the right, as the left lane would take me to Wisconsin. When I got to the Lincoln Oasis (a rest stop built over the highway), I could see flashing blue lights down the road. An accident, I thought.

But when I got back on the road it was clear that it was more than an accident. I was diverted off the Kingery and headed south. There were no signs or warnings, and public radio wasn’t giving traffic updates. (I couldn’t switch to AM because the space-age radio in my car didn’t come with instructions, and there was nothing that indicated AM.) By that time, I knew I’d need to make a 50-mile detour, as truck traffic would make a shorter detour even longer.. I got back to Elkhart about 2 a.m. Monday. A little before ten that morning I got a call from my son, who said he was coming home from college. Hanover College had no electricity and no water. The school would be closed for a week.

Southern Indiana got high winds and even worse flooding. When Jim got home, he called it the Hanover Apocalypse. Students were walking around muttering, “What do I do?” First the school planned to have classes on Monday, but then realized that with the water tower empty and no power to pump water into it, Hanover would have to close. Luckily, Jim got a ride with a friend who was from Elkhart. Otherwise we would have had to drive down and pick him up.

I got back to Davenport Tuesday night with a minimum of delay, though the Borman was still blocked. Still, I’m not used to hurricanes, or the remnants thereof, causing so much damage in the Upper Midwest.

The Original Maverick

2008-09-15T11:12:00.003-04:00

In a new irritating advertisement, John McCain and Sarah Palin are described as "the original mavericks." Like so many of the other McCain ads. it's misleading. (An earlier ad proclaimed that Barack Obama was "ready to raise taxes," though McCain wants to tax employer-provided health insurance--a huge tax increase on the middle class.) But the innuendos about Obama and the half-truths about Palin's accomplishments are par for the course. But "original mavericks?" Whether the are mavericks in any sense of the word is problematic. But there's only one original maverick, and it's not John McCain or Sarah Palin.

The term maverick comes from Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-1870), a Texas lawyer, politician and rancher. He fought in the Texas Revolution, first opposed, and then supported the secession of Texas from the Union, and was a major landowner. But his nickname came from his practice of not branding cattle. According to Wikipedia, "Maverick steadfastly refused to brand his cattle. As a result, the word maverick entered the English lexicon, meaning both an unbranded range animal as well as a slang term for someone who exhibits a streak of stubborn independence. Maverick's stated reason for not branding his cattle was that he didn't want to inflict pain on them. Other ranchers however, suspected that his true motivation was that it allowed him to collect any unbranded cattle and claim them as his own."

McCain isn't the original maverick, but his television ads--from the "Summer of Love" to the Britney Spears/Paris Hilton commercial to the current "Original Mavericks" ad demonstrate the kind of deception for personal gain that Samuel Maverick was accused of.

My Vote Hasn't Counted

2008-09-11T12:59:00.003-04:00

Lisa Kenney of Eudaemonia, in a very thoughtful post about presidential politics, admitted she hadn’t voted a lot in the past. Which brought the following response from Larramie of Sieze a Daisy:

Your admission, "I think I've only voted in one other Presidential election, which just goes to show how indifferent I've been in the past.," truly stunned me since your vote counts no matter who is running in what year.

For most elections, Larramie’s statement is true. But American presidential elections are a definite exception. While I expect to vote in the 2008 presidential election, I will do so with the firm expectation that my vote will not count, as it hasn’t counted in every presidential election I’ve voted in--and I’ve voted in every one since 1972.

The reason is, of course, the Electoral College. When I cast my ballot for Barrack Obama, I really won’t be voting for him, but for a slate of electors pledged to vote for him in December, when the real presidential election takes place. Had Obama chosen Evan Bayh as his running mate, my vote might have counted for something. But chances are, Indiana will go for McCain, and the electors from Indiana will go for McCain in the real election.

While I’m proud to say that I cast my first presidential vote for George McGovern, my vote didn’t count. Iowa went for Nixon. Four years later, Jimmy Carter won the election, but without my help. Iowa’s electors voted for Gerald Ford. By the time Iowa started voting Democratic, I was in Illinois, which went for Bush in 1988. And I’ve been voting in Indiana since 1992.

It seemed possible that we might change the presidential election process after 2000, when George W. Bush lost in the popular vote to Al Gore, and won the election by a five to four vote in the Supreme Court, which gave Florida’s electors to Bush. But it didn’t happen. For one thing, a Republican Congress wasn’t likely to support a constitutional amendment making a Republican victory more difficult.

One interesting idea to reform the Electoral College is one I believe was proposed by Curtis Gans, which would allot two additional electors from each state to the candidate who wins the popular vote. While it wouldn’t eliminate the Electoral College, it would make the travesty of 2000 a near-impossibility.

I encourage everyone to vote in the coming election. Even if you’re voting for Obama in Indiana or McCain in Illinois. There’s always hope. And then we should push for a constitutional amendment to assure that all of our votes will count in the future.

Chicago 10

2008-09-05T22:39:00.003-04:00

I missed Chicago 10 during its theatrical realease, as it was shown only in large cities, while I was in Bloomington, Illinois and Elkhart, Indiana. It's out on DVD now, and it's well-worth the price. The film mixes actual footage from the demonstrations and the "Festival of Life" during the 1968 Democratic Convention with an animated re-enactment of the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial, in which eight members of the Yippies, the Mobilization Against the War, and the Black Panthers (Bobby Seale) were tried for crossing state lines to incite a riot. (When Seale was separated from the rest of the defendants, it was known as the Chicago Seven trial.) The name "Chicago 10" was taken from a quote from Jerry Rubin: "Anyone who calls us the Chicago Seven is a racist. Because you're discrediting Bobby Seale. You can call us the Chicago Eight, but really we're the Chicago Ten, because our two lawyers went down with us."

Brett Morgen's film was particulary impressive because it provided archival film not easily available, especially of the Lincoln Park police attacks. It gives me a much better idea of the actions of the crowds and the police, which until now, I've had to glean from books and newspaper articles.

Morgen was born in October 1968, after the police riots of August. Because he could look at the events without having lived through them, he gives us a fresh view. I was disappointed that the DVD did not have additional archival footage in the special features. Perhaps we'll get something like that in a subsequent DVD resease. But Chicago 10 is simply a fascinating movie, both in the use of archival footage and the brilliance of the voice actors. Roy Scheider as Judge Julius Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright as Bobby Seale, and Dylan Baker as David Dellinger stand out, but all the voice actors are thoroughly believable. According to the Wikipedia article, there will be two more Chicago 10 films. I'll be looking forward to them.

Hoosiers, Suckers, Badgers, Hawkeyes, and Pukes

2008-08-11T20:48:00.006-04:00

Tea N. Crumpet, in a comment on my last post, asked, "What's a Hoosier?" That got me musing about state nicknames. The 1860 campaign song, "Lincoln and Liberty" mentions not only Hoosiers, but an Illinois nickname that's rarely heard now.

We'll go for the son of Kentucky,
The hero of Hoosierdom through;
The pride of the Suckers so lucky
For Lincoln and Liberty too!

-"Lincoln and Liberty"

The second stanza tells us that Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky, lived for a time in Indiana, and was the pride of Illinois. That's right--Illinoisans were once known as Suckers. The Dictionary of Wisconsin History explains the nickname, by way of its definition of "badger:"

The name 'Badger' state for Wisconsin had its origin in the lead mining districts of southwestern Wisconsin. Miners from the south (Illinois) in the early days were in the habit of working in the lead mines during the summer and returning south for the winter, migrating like suckers [a species of fish], hence the name 'Sucker" state. Those who came from the east, however, could not return to their homes in the winter and made for themselves 'dugouts' in the sides of the bluffs and hills, burrowing like badgers, hence 'Badgers' or permanent residents of the Wisconsin country." From Wisconsin: comprising sketches of counties, towns, events, institutions, and persons, arranged in cyclopedic form, ed. by Ex-Gov. Geo. W. Peck (Madison, Wis., Western Historical Association, 1906).

Perhaps the Suckers were lucky, as they weren't called Pukes. Netstate also traces the origin of the Missouri Puke to the Galena lead mines:

The Puke State: This distasteful name is said to refer to the large gathering of Missourians in 1827 at the Galena Lead Mines. According to George Earlie Shankle, PhD, in State Names, Flags, Seals, Songs, Birds, Flowers and Other Symbols, 1938, "...so many Missourians had assembled, that those already there declared the State of Missouri had taken a 'puke.'

Iowans adopted "Hawkeye" before they could be tagged with something more insulting. Here's part of the Netstate entry:

The Hawkeye State: This popular nickname for the state of Iowa is said to have come from the scout, Hawkeye, in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826. According to the Iowa State web site, "Two Iowa promoters from Burlington are believed to have popularized the name." The nickname was given approval by "territorial officials" in 1838, twelve years after the book was published and eight years before Iowa became a state.

There also seems to be a reference to the Sauk warrior Black Hawk, who died in Iowa. In any case, the Hawkeye nickname seems to have been an effort to pre-empt the adoption of an offensive nickname, such as Puke or Sucker.

Or, perhaps Hoosier. While many Indiana residents, especially in the southern and central parts of the state, take pride in the label, a lot of us in the northern part of the state aren't comfortable with it. The article, "What's a Hoosier?" in the Indiana University Alumni Magazine gives a good overall summary of the term, along with a mention of Senator Dan Quayle's battle with Merriam-Webster to remove the negative definitions of "hoosier" (lower case) from the dictionary. But unlike the Suckers and Pukes, Hoosiers have stood by their nickname, even if it does mean a hick or rube.

Will The "Mother of Vice Presidents" Give Birth Again?

2008-08-05T22:22:00.004-04:00

Update: No VP announcement, thought an Obama-Bayh ticket is still possible. One drawback: Republican governor Mitch Daniels is likely to win a second term, thanks to his almost unlimited campaign chest. Should Bayh become VP, Daniels would get to appoint his successor.

Barack Obama is coming to Elkhart Wednesday morning (August 6), and there's speculation that he may announce Indiana Senator Evan Bayh as his running mate. If that's true, he'll be following a hallowed tradition in American politics--a Hoosier vice presidential candidate.

I won't be there--I'll be in Davenport, Iowa, trying to catch up on my sleep, and then heading for work on the second shift at Galesburg, Illinois. But I'll be there in spirit. And just maybe, A Hoosier running mate may be the key to Obama's success.

The first Indiana vice president was Schuyler Colfax of South Bend, who had been Speaker of the House before agreeing to be Ulysses S. Grant's running mate in 1868. He was dropped from the ticket in 1872 because of his connection with the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal. While Colfax was never formally charged, the scandal ended his politcal career; he spent his final years giving lectures about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He died January 13, 1885, of a heart attack, in a Mankato, Minnesota railway station, after walking nearly a mile in minus 30 degree (Fahrenheit) weather.

After the end of Reconstruction, Indiana was one of three swing states. The Democrats controlled the "Solid South" once the black vote had been suppressed, while Republicans could count on New England the Plains, and most of the upper Midwest. Whichever party took New York and either Indiana or Ohio would win the presidency. Indiana, being the smallest of the swing states, was more likely to get the vice presidential candidate.

Thomas Hendricks had been a congressman, senator, and Indiana governor before becoming Grover Cleveland's running mate in 1884. In 1872 he had received 42 electoral votes for president because Horace Greeley, the Democratic candidate, died after the November election, but before the Electoral College met. He ran for vice president in 1876 with Samuel Tilden, who won the popular vote, but lost in the Electoral College in what many believed to be a stolen election. Hendricks was a conservative Democrat with pro-southern views. His legacy as vice president is negligible, as he died just a few months after taking office. Cleveland was defeated in the 1888 election (though winning the popular vote) by Benjamin Harrison--the only Hoosier to win the presidency.

The third Hoosier VP was Charles Warren Fairbanks, the who was a U.S. senator until he became Theodore Roosevelt's vice president in 1904. The "Indiana Icicle," was a contrast to the ebullient president. His reputation as a teetotaler came to an end during his term, as "Lemonade Charlie" was seen drinking a Manhattan cocktail. Thereafter, he was "Cocktail Charlie." His name lives on, perhaps appropriately, in the city of Fairbanks, Alaska. In 1912, he ran for vice president with Charles Evans Hughes. Unfortunately for him, the Democrats nominated another Hoosier for the second office.

Thomas Riley Marshall, of Columbia City, Indiana, served as vice president for both of Woodrow Wilson's terms. As governor of Indiana, he had pushed through a child labor law, opposed Indiana's sterilization law, and opposed capital punishment, but most of his progressive legislation was thwarted in the legislature.

While Wilson kept Marshall on as vice president during his second term, the two men did not get on well; Marshall had little influence on the president. But he had some great one-liners. His most famous was when he was presiding over the Senate. After sitting through an interminable speech about "what this country needs," he is reputed to have said to the clerk, "What this country really needs is a good five cent cigar." Of his home state he said, "Indiana is the mother of Vice Presidents, home of more second-class men than any other state."

After 1920, Indiana became a solidly Republican state. Since the Franklin Roosevelt landslide of 1936, the last time the Hoosier State supported a Democrat for president was in the Johnson landslide of 1964. The only Hoosier VP since Marshall, of course, was Dan Quayle, whom George H. W. Bush chose for his youth and conservatism, not because he was from Indiana.

If Obama does name Evan Bayh as his running mate, Indiana could once again be a swing state. I'm convinced that had Al Gore made Bayh is running mate in 2000, he'd be finishing his second term. Barack Obama would do well to go to the Mother of Vice Presidents for the second spot on his ticket.

Virtually Out of the Virtual World

2008-07-19T21:56:00.003-04:00

I've been in exile from cyberspace for the past two weeks, and will be mainly out of the loop for three more. I'm still in the process of moving out of my Bloomington apartment while having to work in Galesburg without a day off until early August. I took my PC into Best Buy had and them put in a gigabyte of RAM and a DVD-RW. And I've got it set up in my in-laws' basement. But, sadly, I haven't been able to keep up with my friends in cyperspace. I hope to be back in the blogosphere by mid-August. By then, I may at least have my regular days off. I'll take a cue from SzélsőFa and label this post "whining."

A Three-Year Move and a Ten-Year Meme.

2008-06-25T23:54:00.009-04:00

Since I began working in the Bloomington-Normal, Illinois Amtrak station in July, 2005, I've been trying get a transfer either to South Bend, near our house in Elkhart, or to Galesburg, Illinois, near my wife's hometown of Davenport, Iowa. At the end of 2006 I had accepted a transfer to South Bend only to find that another employee, who was still on the seniority roster, was entitiled to the job. It turned out that I was lucky not to get the job, as I would have been bumped later on by the elimination of another job.

Just a couple of weeks ago, one of the Galesburg ticket clerks took a job in management, giving me a chance to bid a job there. In the next few weeks I'll be moving out of The Closet Over the Stairs in Bloomington and starting the new job in Galesburg. I'll be staying with my in-laws in Davenport until we can get rid of the house in Elkhart and find someplace to live in Galesburg.

I'll be busy trying to get resettled, so posts will be more sporadic than usual. Chapter 19 of Things Done and Left Undone may take a while to complete. Meanwhile, here's the Ten Year Meme Lisa of Eudaemonia tagged me with:

What were you doing ten years ago?

In the summer of 1998 I was working at the Amtrak Call Center in Chicago, making the long-distance commute from Elkhart (drive to Michigan City, then ride the South Shore train to Chicago). I had enough seniority to hold a 4-day, 10-hour shift, so it wasn't so bad. That fall I'd start writing a column on local history for the Elkhart Truth, which I'd continue writing until 2003.

Anne had finished eighth grade and would start high school in August. Sarah was out of seventh grade. It seems as though middle school, or junior high school, is always a traumatic time. Sarah actually had a good seventh grade, but Anne hated both years of middle school. Jim would be going into third grade. Kathleen was not working outside the home at the time, as I was essentially gone four days a week.

In some ways, 1998 seems farther in the past than 1973, when Kathleen and I were married. But it was a turning point for me: I became a regular, as opposed to a sporadic writer.

Five things on your to-do list for today

Take some more books to Goodwill and continue getting rid of stuff .

Do some laundry.

Fill up the tank in my ancient Toyota.

Drive back to Bloomington.

Get rid of more stuff at my Bloomington apartment.

What would you do if you were a billionaire?

I'm going to pass on this one. Money and I aren't friends --I wish there were some other way to get along in the world. I fear a surfeit of money would be worse for me than my current situation of being up to my neck in Direct Loans for my kids. Money would find a way to get me.

What are three of your bad habits?

General messiness.

A tendency towards pessimism (see answer to previous question).

Procrastination (To-do list was from last Thursday, though the procrastination here is doing the meme--I got all the tasks done).

What are some snacks you enjoy?

My own trail mix (Chocolate chips, unsalted peanuts, and raisins).

Greek olives.

Nutella on French bread (haven't had it in a long time).

High-cocoa dark chocolate (I can even pretend it's good for me).

What were the last five books you read?

Boom! Voices of the Sixties by Tom Brokaw--Brokaw is a journalist, and is more concerned with how the past affects the present than actually understanding the past. He makes the mistake of assuming that the Baby Boom generation made the Sixties. "They [the Boomers] made the Sixties. There's no doubt about that." Actually, there's a lot of doubt. It was his generation--the people born just before and during the Second World War who were the movers and shakers of that decade. Abbie Hoffman, Bob Dylan, John Lewis, Gloria Steinem, John Lennon, etc., etc. Plus some of the "Greatest Generation" such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (people he fails to mention in his book, The Greatest Generation). My generation gets stuck with the Seventies and Eighties. However, Jerry Rubin of Brokaw's generation had the distinction for being a Yippie in the Sixties and A Yuppie in the Eighties.

A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties by Suze Rotolo--The best part isn't Rotolo's relationship with Dylan, but her description of the Village scene in the early Sixties.

Name Withheld by J. A. Jance--Not her best work, but entertaining. It was available on cassette, which is what I have in my '90 Toyota.

No one was killed, Documentation and meditation: Convention Week, Chicago, August 1968 by John Schultz--perhaps the best of the books about the '68 convention, though Schultz does take a pro-Yippie view, while viewing the McCarthy volunteers as smug and arrogant (even though his wife was one).

The Self Under Siege - Philosophy in the 20th Century by Rick Roderick (course on tape). Roderick's Philosophy and Human Values course is perhaps the best introduction to philosophy around. Self Under Siege is classic Roderick--brilliance in a West Texas drawl. He discusses Sartre, Heidegger, Marcuse, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Roderick's lectures are available on the Web, now--click here.

What are five jobs you have had?

Working the grill and fryer at Henry's Hamburgers in Coralville, IA.

Bus driver (campus bus, Cedar Rapids Transit, and Iowa City Transit).

Rail coordinator for the Midwest office of CIT Tours (agent for the Italian State Railways).

Reservation Sales Agent.

Rate Desk Clerk--dealing with complicated fares and difficult people.

What are five places where you have lived?

Iowa City, Iowa

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Oak Park, Illinois

Elkhart, Indiana

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I was born in Peoria, Illinois. Some people find that fact hilarious--kind of like being born in Dull Center, Wyoming.

I'll forgo tagging anyone else. Virtually everyone whose blog I read has done this one anyway.

Hanover--Just up the road from Transylvania

2008-06-23T11:14:00.006-04:00

In my last post on my visit to Hanover College, SzélsőFa commented, "It never ceases to amaze me how the names of European cities appear and STAY on the map of the USA." Most of the European city names come from the hometowns of the first white settlers. Lots of Londons, Bristols, Hamburgs and Amsterdams. I think the many Milans (almost all of which are pronounced to rhyme with smilin') and Parises were named because those cities had class and sophistication which the founders hoped would rub off on their towns. Some of Parises and other French-named towns may have been named by the voyageurs who plied the rivers of North America in the years before the French and Indian (Seven Years') War. In what would become the Louisiana Purchase, the French had even more time to name towns. Warsaw, Indiana, county seat of Kosciusko County, was named not by Polish immigrants, but for the capital of Poland, the home country (though not at the time a nation-state) of Thaddeus Kosciusko, the Polish patriot who had fought in the American revolution. A lot of the Spanish names in the Midwest are named for battles in the Mexican-American War--Churubusco, La Paz, Buena Vista, Cerro Gordo, etc.

But I came across one European name that has nothing to do with the region in Europe. While at Hanover, Kathleen and I met some very nice people from Kentucky. We were talking about colleges at lunch, and the Kentuckians were talking about "Transy." I asked if this was Transylvania University, and whether there was any connection between that institution and the Carpathian mountains.

It turns out that Transylvania University was founded in 1780, in Danville, Virginia, and moved to Lexington (now Kentucky) in 1789. What would become Kentucky was known as the Transylvania Colony, from the Latin, "across the forest." So the name came independently of the European region, though from the same Latin root. (According to Wikipedia, the European Transylvania is a Latinization of the Hungarian Erdély, which is derived from Erdő-elve meaning "beyond the forest.")

Thanks to Bram Stoker, the name Transylvania conjures up images of dark castles and vampires, at least in the minds of Britons and Americans. But when Transylvania University was founded, the novel Dracula was more than a century in the future. For Virginians, it just meant the land to the west of the great forest.

Off to Hanover

2008-06-18T22:19:00.003-04:00

Kathleen and I will be driving down to Hanover, Indiana with our son Jim for the orientation program at Hanover College. The campus overlooks the Ohio River and is said to be one of the most beautiful campuses in the country. The picture, uploaded from WikiMedia, is of Parker Audiorium. We'll be back Saturday night. Beginning this fall, Jim will be a Hanoverian, though not of the Georges of England variety.

John Ruskin, John Millais, and the Ideal of Womanhood

2008-06-17T15:37:00.010-04:00

A lot of us men idealize women, especially the women we love. I'm guilty. Unfortunately, when the woman falls short of our ideal, which inevitably happens, things can go very wrong. In most cases, we come to realize that our beloved is just as human as we are, and we go on to love her with all her imperfections. Yet sometimes the idealization can go too far. Take the famous case of the critic John Ruskin and Euphemia "Effie" Gray (the model in the painting at left, Peace Concluded, by John Millais). Ruskin had fallen in love with Gray when she was very young, and had written the fantasy novel, The King of the Golden River, for her when she was twelve. They married when she was 18. According to Gray, he was an oppressive husband. That wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that Gray was still a virgin five years after her marriage.

Ruskin had championed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists and had taken a special interest in the painter John Everett Millais. Effie Gray had posed for a Millais' painting, Order of Release (right). Millais then accompanied the Ruskins on a trip to Scotland, where he fell in love with Effie. She had her marriage to Ruskin annulled on grounds of non-consummation and subsequently married Millais.

Why had Ruskin refused to make love to his wife? In a letter to her father, Effie wrote, "He alleged various reasons, hatred to children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and, finally this last year he told me his true reason... that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April." And Ruskin confirmed it in a statement to his lawyer during the annulment proceedings: "It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it."

What was it about this beautiful woman that so repelled Ruskin? Mary Luytens, in a biography of Ruskin, suggested it was pubic hair--he expected her to look like a classical Greek statue underneath her clothes. Other historians have suggested menstrual blood or body odor. We shall never know, but I think Luytens' theory makes the most sense.

Millais seems to have had no problem with Effie's body; they had eight children together.

And there's one more bizarre note to this story: Millais painted this portrait of Ruskin while he was in love with Effie: there must have been an incredible strain between the two men, but they stoically finished the portrait.

The story of Ruskin, Gray, and Millais has inspired a number of stories, plays, films, and even an opera. Check out Wikipedia for the particulars.

Although it's very much a Victorian tale, it's a reminder to those of us who idealize the beloved in body, mind, or personality. These beautiful beings are just as human as we are. (Peace Concluded and Order of Release uploaded from WikiMedia; Ruskin's portrait uploaded from Victorian Web.

Folk Etymology: Gringos and Long Knives

2008-06-12T06:03:00.003-04:00

I recently checked out a tape called "Spanish for Gringos." On the cover of the the accompanying workbook was the following:

gringo n, pl gringos [Sp, alternate of griego Greek, stranger, fr Latin Graecus, Greek] (1849); a foreigner in Spain or Latin America, esp. when person is of English or American origin....
(Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary)

I'm pretty sure the dictionary is right about the word's etymology. But I had learned a more colorful story: that Mexican-American vaqueros came into contact with Irish-American cowboys after the United States acquired first Texas, and then New Mexico and California. The Irish cowboys were constantly singing the song, "Green Grow the Lilacs." The first two words of the song were slurred into gringo.

What I had learned was folk etymology--what Wikipedia calls "A commonly held misunderstanding of the origin of a particular word, a false etymology." Folk etymologies are usually more interesting than the actual word origin. Sometimes folk etymologies can unfairly cast a bad light on some perfectly innocent words, such as picnic, or phrases such as rule of thumb. But for the most part, folk etymologies can be a lot of fun.

One folk etymology (and who knows, maybe it's true), is the story of how American Indians came to call white Americans "Big Knives," or "Long Knives." The term was first applied to Virginians, then to all white Americans. Here's the story: Francis Howard, Fifth Baron Howard of Effingham, and royal governor of Virginia (served 1683-1692) traveled up to New York Colony to treat with the Iroquois tribe. He had brought with him a translator of Dutch origin. In the course of the treaty making, one of the Iroquois wanted to know the meaning of the name Howard. The Dutch translator, thinking of a Dutch word meaning "hanger" (I'm doing this from memory, so I don't remember the exact word), translated it as "big knife." Thus Virginians, and later all white Americans, became Big Knives, or Long Knives.

Most likely, the term came from the swords the Virginians carried. But the mistranslation story is a lot more fun.

White Ducks: Jim's Senior Speech

2008-06-05T23:50:00.001-04:00

I've had a week off so I could attend my son's graduation from Elkhart Memorial High School. He was chosen to give the senior speech at commencement, so I'm including exerpts from it. I've taken out some of the local and school-specific comments, but gist of the speech is here. A couple of things: Memorial's team is the Crimson Chargers. And Philoctetes was one of the Greeks who sacked Troy; specifically, he slew Paris, the guy who carried off Helen and started the whole sorry business. Photo uploaded from etruth.com. He did a wonderful job with the speech, in spite of some rather bad acoustics. Here it is:

The thing is that even though I've lived here all my life, a whole 18 years, I have never seen a white duck.Yes, I have been to zoos, public parks--even Wisconsin--and I have yet to see one single colorless snow glazed feather. That bugs me. I've heard people whine about the failings of their life, never doing this or that, never having kissed her, found time for him, gotten that job, gone bungee jumping, and through all their griping I can't help but think that I haven't even seen a white duck. I think I'm down on points here. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "The Future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." It turns out that's our commencement topic by the way. And you're probably wondering what that quote has to do at all with ducks. White. Fluffy. Ducks. My Dream is to see this duck. It may be odd, it may be silly, but I believe in this dream. And I really want to see that duck! Obviously, and for the reassurance of my parents, since they're probably crossing their fingers up there about now, I have more life goals then that! I have college in a few months--hopefully I'll pull out a degree in something palpable, and later on a career and family. Those are pretty broad dreams, nearly universal, and something I probably share with most of you here graduating today.

What makes wanting to see that little duck special is the infinitesimal smallness of it. It's like the first stepping stone in a pond, and I intend to dream my way across one stone at a time. I believe in this dream...

Okay, Do you remember when you were five, and you wanted to be not a firefighter, a cosmetologist, a lawyer, or a doctor, but a Jedi? (beat)This seemed to me the perfect career choice for me, a way to browbeat my way to the future and a perfectly reasonable career choice to expend my life on.I didn't limit myself to that career choice though, I also considered being a cowboy, pirate, free range chicken, and Godzilla. However, I have yet to achieve any of these lofty childhood goals. These wishes consumed me, burning my insides like a ghostflame, and brought forth the sustenance for my daily trials...

But now that we can separate fact from fiction, our dreams are not so far-fetched, and we can attain them if we can dig up that cinder we have inside us, believe in it, and nurse it into a fire. Not so we can spit-roast that white duck when I find it, but to give ourselves those devastating dreams powerful enough to burn harder then mere crimson whisps, and charge forward to light the lives ahead of us. These dreams can give us the future sight, to aspire to the best in everything we do. Though we can all still feel like Jedi when we go through those automatic doors at Kroger's. We are consigned to dream the best we can.

And we have--in four years we've had so many dreams, and we've worked for them. In four years we've had a plethora of sports teams go to State, and Steve Stahl conquered that [state wrestling] title like Philoctetes over Troy. We've had some of the best artists in the country.

We've dreamed big. And we've dreamed small.
We've dreamed of not having those silly tardy lockouts.
We've dreamed of chasing those geese off the lawn.
We've dreamed of long nights out, and we've dreamed of senioritis.

We've lived life to the fullest, just like every pop song has ever told us to. And now high school is done. But there are so many more dreams we have to live, so let's keep sleeping in, so years from now we can say we lived in our dreams. So don't forget that burning wish, that yearning wish. It is no death wish, no out of scale dream; it is merely an ember that if we foster, can light a fire for the rest of our lives.

Jim will be going to Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana this fall. He's majoring in English/Creative Writing.