Flashback to Peru

Photos from Peru - May 2005

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In Peru, the earliest solar observatory

Mom

I've just returned from a visit with Mom in my hometown, Auburn, Alabama. She will turn 89 on May 4 and continues to live at 244 Woodfield Dr. in the house where I grew up. Born Vera Louise Harrison near Wilkes-Barre, PA, she had an older brother and sister. Her mother died when Mom was 13; Granddad, a school math teacher, told the children, "We'll be fine if none of you gets sick." And they never got sick. They lived in a duplex on Gates Street, a house built by my great grandfather, who was a contractor from Askum. They rented out half of the house to pay the mortgage. After Aunt Lois died a few years ago, Mom took us on a tour of her old haunts, including the house where she was born. The lady living there now allowed us to come inside for a look around.

Mom played the violin as a teenager. I had the bow restrung many years ago, but Mom never played it. She graduated from Mansfield State Teachers' College, where she was president of the women students. She studied home economics and became a high school home ec teacher in Dushore. She met Dad one summer when she went to take some grad courses at Iowa State. Dad was working on his Ph.D. in dairy science at the time. They met at a dance, and we still have Dad's diary in which he recorded the event. They were married in 1942, after Dad's graduation and before he took a job at University of Georgia. He wasn't there long before he joined the Navy. At that point Mom returned home to Wilkes-Barre, where I was born in 1945, 10 months before Dad got out of the Navy and came home to hold me for the first time.

After WWII ended, Dad took a job at Penn State for a brief period, maybe only a year. Then they moved to Auburn where they remained. Mom was the second woman to become an elder in the First Presbyerian Church. She taught Sunday School for years. She took a job in Pre-College counseling at the University for several years. Up until recently, she helped organize and sewed dresses for the annual church project to provide new school clothes for impoverished children in the county. She has played bridge at least twice a month for years. Each Christmas she makes coffee breads--something all her friends look forward to. One year she made over 40, but she's cut back to just a few each year. She was always able to tell a good story or joke. She has hardly ever been sick and has literally never been hospitalized for illness or surgery. She doesn't exercise, and she eats what she wants (th0ugh not much these days), yet remains in good health, taking only a small dose of blood pressure medicine daily. Her health and longevity are probably largetly due to her positive attitude, her refusal to worry about things she can't change. She's about the most laid back, unworried person I know. I hope some of that has rubbed off on me.

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Terry Teachout on histories of jazz

Ron Rash

I've seen Ron Rash several times over the past month, first at the James Dickey Conference, then at the South Carolina Book Festival, and then yesterday at his reading at Columbia's Richland County Library. I have been reading and admiring Ron's poems and stories for years, since well before his novel One Foot in Eden drew national attention, well deserved. His subsequent novels, Saints at the River and A World Made Straight have both done well. All three have been read by Dick Estell on Radio Reader, the nationally syndicated NPR show. We adopted One Foot in Eden as a text for composition classes a couple years ago at Francis Marion University, inviting Ron to campus in connection with that. The book was a tremendous hit among the students.

Although I was already familiar with his work, I first met Ron maybe 6 years ago when we both taught for 3 weeks in the South Governor's School for the Arts Summer Program. He taught fiction, while I handled the poetry for the creative writing students. One of the most gifted of those students, Sarah Saylor, enrolled at USC, and I've run into her several times at readings on campus.

At Ron's library reading yesterday, which I attended with Janne, he was his usual relaxed and articulate self, his distinct Appalachian drawl spinning out stories both funny and poignant as he set up readings from two published novels and one forthcoming novel, the be called Serena. The longest piece he read was from the new novel, and it was about a strong woman, Serena, married to a timber baron, who is as adept at timber work as any of the men in their employ. Ron read a section about how she brought an eagle into the mountains and trained it to attack the rattlesnakes that were such a scourge in the woods. In the Q and A following, speaking of research, Ron told how he tracked down one of the few men who still hunts with eagles, corresponding with him and then I suppose visiting him to find out more about this arcane art. He said when you're doing research on a topic, the best thing to do is to find the person who's fanatical about it, who thinks it's the most important thing in the world, and you get your material from that source.

After responding to the inevitable question about his influences, he noted that he keeps a photo of Flannery O'Connor above his writing desk and imagines that every day she tells him, "You ain't there yet, boy." I can't wait to read Ron's new book of stories, Chemistry and Other Stories, due out next month--and then the novel, which won't be out for another year or so.

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Rash at Western Carolina

Ten Poems by Ron Rash

"The Exchange" in Poetry 180

2004 Interview with Rash

2005 Interview with Rash

Another 2005 Interview with Rash

Reviews of The World Made Straight

Tracy K. Smith

Poet Tracy K. Smith's website and the poem "A Hunger So Honed"
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Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. as the last great public historian
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William Safire on the word, "sucker"
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Review of "The Unknown Monet"--early drawings at the Royal Academy
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Poet Frank Bidart wins the 2007 Bollingen Prize

Origami

Paper Art in a San Francisco Gallery, April 2005

Origami

scissors cut paper
paper covers rock
rock breaks scissors
origami crane
many folds away
from flatness
flies above the game

in Japan children bring
their hands together
scissors paper stone
V-fingered flat balled
choki paa guu
so fast you want
to see it again

now different one loses
one wins in contrast
the slow folding
of paper to bring
dimension as poets fold
one word on another
at right angles and wrong

scissors paper rock
mother’s jagged sewing
scissors called pinking shears
the paper I cut dulled them
forming little sawteeth
she rocked me
to dull me to sleep

origami makes paper lyrics
a thousand cranes bring
luck and folded words
choki paa guu
the poet knows paper
cuts rock crumbles
and scissors fly

Schlesinger, Monro, Starkey

The New York Times obituary of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. reports that he died of a sudden heart attack in a New York restaurant at age 89. He was most famously an advisor to President Kennedy, writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of his "Thousand Days" in office. In 1945, at age 27, he also won a Pulitzer--that one for The Age of Jackson. Schlesinger grew up in Iowa City, where his father was a professor before moving to Harvard. He never got an advanced degree but was a prolific writer, continuing to produce until very recently. He wrote a book adamantly condemning the Iraq war, calling it a "ghastly mistake."

Thinking about Schlesinger reminds me of my Tougaloo College colleague John Monro, who died 5 years ago and was also 89 at his death. John knew Schlesinger at Harvard and often told stories about him and other Harvard luminaries such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Pusey. John's obituary in the Harvard Gazette recounts his decision to leave Harvard and work in historically black colleges in the south.

Speaking of former colleagues (this one alive and well and nowhere near age 89), I just came across David Starkey's blog for The Creative Community TV Show, which he hosts in Santa Barbara. Starkey also edits King Log, an online poetry journal in which several of my poems appeared back in 1998. In a couple weeks, I'll see David in New York at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. David is writing plays these days, including his most recent, How Red the Fire, in which Emily Dickinson is a main character. For old time's sake, here are three poems by David, complete with audio.

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New York Times review of Tom Bissell's book about his father and Vietnam

Origami and Poetry

Origami Goliath Beetle designed and made

by Robert Lang from a 7" square of paper

(as pictured on his web site)

Two articles from The New Yorker's Anniversary Issue (February 19 and 26, 2007) interested me. Susan Orlean, one of my favorite nonfiction writers, contributed "The Origami Lab," a profile of Robert Lang, an accomplished physicist who now devotes his energies to origami. He applies mathematical modeling to new origami designs. He and various other practitioners have revolutionized the art (and science) of paper folding in the past 20 years. Some of the paper insects shown on his web site would seem to be a challenge to construct by any means, much less using the process of folding a small (6- or 7-inch) square of paper without making any cuts. I discovered amazing origami web sites by other artists (such as Joseph Wu).

In the same issue, Dana Goodyear's "The Moneyed Muse" tells what has happened at The Poetry Foundation in Chicago since Indianapolis heiress Ruth Lilly (at left) donated $200 million to it (and the magazine it publishes) in 2002. John Barr, the Wall Street executive and poet who was hired as president of the foundation, is overseeing plans to buy land and build a 25,000 square foot building to house the foundation, the magazine, a lecture hall, and a library. He wants it to be a "national home for poetry." Goodyear writes, "Money is a shocking thing in poetry, and Ruth Lilly's gift was greeted with a measure of ambivalence." That's putting it mildly. While some poets and critics cheered, others sneered and have continued sneering in the wake of some of the foundation's initiatives. I'd like to see at least some of the money dissiminated more widely among various excellent and established but financially struggling magazines. Perhaps the foundation will find a way to do that in the future.

Meanwhile, I'm pondering this juxtaposition of origami and poetry business (po-biz) in The New Yorker. Both arts involve giving a sort of dimension, literal or figurative, to a simple piece of paper. Both require only the simple work of hands to bring about a complex result. Robert Lang's origami pieces convert a 7-inch square of paper to shapes of almost unbelievable complexity. The Lilly bequest endows the ancient process of writing poetry with enormous consequentiality. Few, if any, poets will be enriched by the money. But if the foundation uses the money wisely, poetry itself could be enriched.

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Poetry Foundation's response to Goodyear's New Yorker article, along with a series of related links

John McCain on Campus

State Senator Hugh Leatherman and U.S. Senator John McCain

Senator John McCain with Prof. Alissa Warters

Senator John McCain was on the Francis Marion University campus on February 20, one of his several appearances this month in South Carolina as the 2008 presidential campaign cranks into motion. In the state during the same week were Barak Obama, who drew a huge crowd in Columbia at the Convention Center, and Hilary Clinton, who appeared before a more limited crowd of about 500 in Florence. David White, the political scientist down the hall (who once worked for McCain in Arizona), says the large rallies are unusual for this early in the election cycle. Perhaps the lack of any clear favorites among Dems or Repubs has led the many would-be candidates to charge out of the gate early.

McCain, who was introduced by Dr. Eddie Floyd, S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell, and S.C. Senator Hugh Leatherman (of Florence), spoke for only 10 minutes or so in the Nursing Building Lobby to a crowd of 200-250. Then he took questions, and I was pleased that most of them came from students: "How did you get into politics?" "What would you do about the partisanship that currently paralyzes our government?" "What's the future of Iraq?"

There was an awkward moment when an 87-year-old man from N.C. walked right up to the podium and began holding forth on his own war record. He went on and on and didn't seem to have a question. McCain was very patient, at one point asking him to summarize. Finally, after much too long, there was a break in the man's monologue, McCain thanked him, and the crowd applauded, thus ending the little filibuster. McCain circulated through the crowd shaking hands and signing autographs. I had my Founders Hall neighbor, Alissa Warters (a political scientist), shake the Senator's hand while I took her photo.

I am not a McCain supporter, though I honor the fortitude he showed during his long imprisonment in North Vietnman. I think he is a man with strong and honorable convictions, although I disagree with his stance on Iraq, his commitment to Bush's intransigence.

The Mother

Occasionally I have my poetry students write a "flash poem," a poem drafted quickly on a topic I announce in class on the spur of the moment. Yesterday I took into class my print of James McNeill Whistler's "Arrangement in Gray and Black" and had them write about it. My own flash poem:

The Mother
is locked in her son's frame. His dark paint
fleshes her out. Her porcelain hands
rest on a black smock's blur. Unblinking,
her gaze fades into the curtains.
She gives off nothing, wrapped in repose.
The bonnet on her severe head
covers a bunched cascade of hair
as muted as her pursed lips.
The geometry of mother and son
extends to infinity, to all the late suppers
and blighted nights. Pungent oils
have hardened on the canvas, brushes
abandoned. The painter has left her
to her own stark desires.

Frost

Adam Kirsch reviews The Notebooks of Robert Frost in The New York Sun.
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Mick Brown reviews In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton.

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More on Frost's notebooks.
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Excerpt from Christopher Benfey's review of the Frost notebooks in The New Republic:

The biggest surprise in The Notebooks of Robert Frost, sixty years of private jottings in preparation for poems and prose, is the spectacular profusion of epigrams, aphorisms, and what Frost called "dark sayings." Frost once wrote, in relation to Emerson, that "I don't like obscurity and obfuscation, but I do like dark sayings I must leave the clearing of to time." He remarks in an early notebook entry that "It is best to be flattered ... when your simile passes for a folk saying from a locality." Certain phrases recur many times in these notebooks, as Frost worries them into final shape: "Great thoughts grave thoughts" or (later used as the title for a poem) "Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length." Another saying, repeated at least a dozen times in the course of the notebooks, consists of three stark words, "dark darker darkest"--a sort of ominous refrain for the whole.

Jonathan Kirsch (no relation to Adam) reviews Richard A. Posner's The Little Book of Plagiarism.
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Jonathan (no relation to Kirsch) Yardley pans Vikram Chandra's massive Sacred Games, most hyped HarperCollins title of the season.
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Michael S. Hopkins reviews Made to Stick, an explanation by the Heath brothers of why some ideas stick and others don't.

Iowa City

Prairie Lights Books - Iowa City

For the past three days I've been in Iowa City where I had a chance to visit the best university art museum and one of the best bookstores (Prairie Lights) I know of. Temperatures Thursday and early Friday were bone-chilling. Thursday morning the reading was -9 on the bank clock on Dubuque Street. By midday Friday, the weather was more humane. Saturday was a gorgeous clear day--perfect for walking in the town and university. I spent time with Cile and David Goding on the northside on Brown Street, several blocks down from where Kurt Vonnegut used to occupy a rambling house on a hill.

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Iowa City

A cirrus sky

bleeds blue onto

half-plowed morning,

brings a promise

of corn to the prairie.

The river with frozen fringes

stutters north. Forgotten,

it tongues past

sturdy churches, pleads

with scalloped bridges.

An eagle spans a copse

of barren trees.

In Iowa City, I read Rebecca McClanahan's The Riddle Song, a series of essays about her family. Achingly honest, she writes as well as anyone about the complexities and mixed feelings of families. The collection opens with a piece called simply "Aunt." It concludes as follows, referring to her Aunt Bessie:

Now all these years later I hold her to me--a tribal instinct perhaps. Or perhaps I simply want to give back some of the words to the young woman in the diary. I sit in my study where shelves of books line the green walls. I finger the dictionaries and search for what lies beneath: aunt. From old French, ante, an offshoot, hall leading toward the main room. Latin root, amma: mother. Or amare: to love. As in amigo, as in amour. As in amateur, one who works for the bare love of it.

Rebecca McClanahan will visit our campus on Thursday for meetings with students and an evening reading. I look forward to seeing her again so that I can tell her how much I admire her poetry and nonfiction.

Tony Huggins

Tony Huggins in Party Mode - circa 1990

Tony Huggins in His Office - circa 2004

Tony Huggins retired from the Francis Marion University English Department last spring after spending most of his career there. We're still feeling the aftershocks of his sudden death by heart attack on January 9 while with his wife Marion on the beach near their Pawleys Island house. This was all the more stunning given Tony's fitness, his regular cycling, walking, and running. I put out a request to our department and various people formerly at FMU for written memoirs about Tony. 20 people responded, and with the help of Beckie Flannagan, I put them together in a bound album for Marion. Here's the piece I wrote about Tony:

I knew Tony before I knew anyone else at Francis Marion College. We both took Carolyn Matalene’s Composition Theory class at USC in 1983 and often went to the Humanities Building café for coffee afterwards. I had just enrolled in a Ph.D. program, while Tony was commuting from Darlington twice a week, taking courses toward his own degree. Right off, I admired Tony’s intelligence coupled with his finely-tuned bullshit detector. If he thought a reading assignment was off-base--or didn’t square with his teaching experience-- he said so and didn’t mind explaining why.

We became friends partly because we were the oldest students in the class but also because we were both graduates of Davidson College and had that background in common. I discovered that he had maintained a close friendship with Douglas Houchens, one of my Davidson art professors. Although our years at Davidson didn’t quite overlap, we shared numerous memories and acquaintances. From the outset, Tony was evasive about his post-undergrad activities in the sixties when he was involved in military intelligence, but he told me all about his weekend at Woodstock in 1969.

Arriving at Francis Marion for a job interview in 1989, I was eager to talk with Tony. In those days, job candidates were subjected to a gauntlet of small-group interviews in faculty offices, along with meetings with the Department Chair, the President, and the Vice President for Academic Affairs (now the Provost). For my interview in Tony’s office, I stood up the whole time; there was no room to sit down. Nath Dresser was there, and the three of us had a good conversation about music. I decided Francis Marion was a place I could settle into.

Tony always loved talking about music, art, film, and literature. He had little patience for anything that distracted him from those fundamental interests. Even when our paths crossed in the gym locker room, we wound up talking about Raging Bull or Mystic River, Atonement or The Lovely Bones.

Tony’s well-formed opinions about teaching, and his skepticism about composition assessment—in fact, his skepticism about many classroom practices—were often maddening. He had the audacity to ask why we were collecting data in this way or that, to ask how we knew our test results were valid. He would ask why this book was preferable to that one, why it was important to collect student portfolios. Tony was a gadfly, and his querulous manner drove me crazy, especially when I chaired the Freshman Writing Committee. But underlying this attitude was a desire for rigor, an aversion to wasted effort, and a commitment to serving our students well.

Tony’s real value to the Department came out during interviews with job candidates. When the rest of us were tossing softballs to our prospective colleagues, Tony would wind up and throw a nasty curve that just nicked the outside corner of the plate. The interviewee would invariably look startled as if to say, “Where did that come from?” The good ones could handle it. Those who struck out wound up looking for work elsewhere.

Tony once did us the great favor of asking a modern drama candidate to name her favorite Arthur Miller play (not exactly a curve ball). When she paused for agonizing seconds and responded, “The Iceman Cometh,” it was game over for her, and we went on to hire Jon Tuttle, who was fortunately able to name a play that had actually been penned by Miller.

For years, Tony had an inflated green plastic dinosaur hanging from his office ceiling. By the time he retired, it was faded but showed no sign of deflating. I asked Tony if I could have it to hang in the Faculty Lounge, and he gladly donated it. It hangs there now.

In some ways Tony was a dinosaur—a bit larger than life, holding the line on old traditions and standards, skeptical of new fangled technology and teaching, wedded to the old liberal arts values that he and I soaked up at Davidson College. But mostly, Tony’s ideas were new, different, unpredictable, probing, challenging. These are the characteristics that drew our best students to his classes and kept them seated for hours on the pastel blue chair in his office, talking with him beneath the dinosaur, surrounded by the books that Tony loved.

Please Don't Feed the Poets

Jim Harrison in The New York Times - "Please Don't Feed the Poets"
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Middlebury College History Department bans Wikipedia as a source.

7 Wonders

Janne at Machu Picchu - May 2005

Stonehenge - August 2001

Of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one (the pyramids of Egypt) still exists. The original list dates from the the 2nd century B.C. Now, voting for the New Seven Wonders of the World is underway. 21 sites have been nominated. The results will be announced in Lisbon, Portugal on July 7 (070707). I've seen 6 of the 21, and perhaps not surprisingly, 4 of those are among my 7 choices. My votes go to Angkor Temple in Cambodia, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, Kiyomizu Temple in Japan, Machu Picchu in Peru, Stonehenge in England, and Timbuktu in Mali.

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How Baghdad has Changed--from NY Times Week in Review

Robinson, Mozart, and Others

Scott Donaldson essay on Edward Arlington Robinson in New Letters
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Review of Hurricane Blues (poems about Katrina and Rita) by Ellen Steinbaum in The Boston Globe
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"The Triumph of Mozart" an essay by by Jon Pott in Books and Culture: A Christian Review in the year of the 250th anniversay of Mozart's birth
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New York Times obituary for Ryszard Kapuscinski, author of The Emperor
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The drawing and selecting of New Yorker cartoons--from The Washington Post
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National Book Critics' Circle Award Nominees

The James Dickey Conference

James Dickey's son Christopher, author of With the Contras and Summer of Deliverance, now Newsweek Paris Bureau Chief

Pat Conroy

I attended most sessions of The James Dickey Conference at the University of South Carolina last Friday and Saturday. Oddly, the venue was the 8th floor of the Business School. The panels featured scholarly papers on Dickey's work as well as personal reminiscences. Attendance was respectable but not quite as heavy as I expected. A number of the presenters, such as Lorrie Goldensohn from Vassar College and Edward Larrissy from the University of Leeds in the UK (both on my Saturday afternoon panel) had their expenses paid. I expected to see far more students, especially grad students, in attendance. Perhaps the conference fee was a deterrent, but you'd think the English Department would wave costs for students. The only undergrad I saw there was my friend Akane, who showed up particularly for my session, which pleased me.

I particularly liked the session featuring writers John Lane, James Applewhite, and Ron Rash, as well as the fascinating panel discussion by Dickey's sons Chris and Kevin, his daughter Bronwen (now in grad school at Columbia University), and his second wife Deborah. They acknowledged his drinking and carousing but all praised his parenting, agreeing that despite his work, he never turned them away. He could be stern but never violent. He often devised inventive, unorthodox games and elaborate fantasies with them. He taught them all to shoot a bow and arrow. Chris and Kevin, who were growing up just as Dickey's star was rising and he was traveling extensively, commented on the poet's contacts with celebrities, such as the time Robert Redford came to visit their Lake Katherine home to discuss movie projects--or the time Bob Dylan called in the middle of the night to discuss creativity.

Pat Conroy, who actually attended some of the other sessions, delivered a funny and poignant closing talk to a packed auditorium. He gave a hilarious account of his own trip down the Chattooga River with a friend, emulating the guys in Deliverance. He spoke for a good 40 minutes from a text hand-penned on yellow legal sheets. He recalled his fascination with Dickey's work when he was in his early twenties, working on the book that would become The Water is Wide. He eventually commuted two days a week to USC to audit a poetry course with Dickey. Conroy admits to being a lousy poet but claims to have learned much from the man he reveres as his best teacher. As much as he admired Dickey, he said, "I got to see James Dickey fall in love with being James Dickey. This taught me something. He was heading straight for 'sock-em dog' [an infamous stretch of rapids on the Chattooga, which had done in Conroy on his outing]." Conroy went on, "It was deleterious to have moon-eyed groupies such as me follow him like turtles around campus."

Conroy, in a characteristic bit of hyperbole, claimed that Poems: 1957-1967 is "the best book of poetry published by an American." Dickey "strung language up to his bow and aimed it at the carotid artery of poetry itself."

About his first book, The Boo, Conroy said that the Citadel officer who was the book's title character was (unlike his father) "a hard man who was also a soft man." And "Dickey was that way too."

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Joe Queenan writing about astonishing books

James Dickey and Music

James Dickey circa 1985, about when I took his poetry classes at the University of South Carolina

James Dickey Playing Guitar at Home, 1993

Photo by Gene Crediford

Friday and Saturday this week, the University of South Carolina hosts the James Dickey Conference, which comes on the 10th anniversary of his death. The James Dickey Newsletter and Society provides a schedule of events. My presentation Saturday afternoon concern's Dickey's own interest in music, specifically guitar playing, and its manifestation in the poetry--especially in Buckdancer's Choice, his fourth volume, which won the 1966 National Book Award.

Dickey was never better than in that collection, though some of his subsequent poems, such as "Falling" and "The Eye-Beaters" are among his best. Most critics agree that the poems of his last two decades do not measure up to the stunning, innovative early work. There's an argument to be made that his interests turned more to fiction as he attempted to follow up the blockbuster success of Deliverance with the less successful Alnilam and To the White Sea.

Two biographies of Dickey published since his death haven't helped his reputation: his son Christopher's bittersweet memoir, Summer of Deliverance, and Henry Hart's massive James Dickey: The World as a Lie. The bulk of his huge library is now housed in The James Dickey Library and Seminar Room in the Thomas Cooper Library at USC.

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Favorable New York Times Review of Buckdancer's Choice in 1966 by Joseph Bennett

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All reviews and articles on Dickey published by the New York Times

Monet in Raleigh

Wednesday I went with 12 colleagues to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh to see the "Monet in Normandy" exhibit--70 or so paintings showing the artist's development from the 1860's, when he was in his twenties, to his final work among his water lilies at Giverny. It's always fascinating to see a chronological record of a master's work, albeit a selective one. The earliest pre-Impressionist work, as colorful as it often is, seems drab and static in comparison to his mid-career and later work, in which waves, trees, grain stacks, cathedrals, or seascapes are often stripped to their abstract essentials but come to life in a stunning scattering of light and brush stroke.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse, 1867

As remarkable as the evolution in his appreciation of and skill in evoking light was Monet's persistence in capturing just the effects he wanted. He would sometimes keep 14 or more paintings of one scene going, shifting his attention from one to the other as the light changed during the day. Thus, he produced multiple renderings of a few scenes that drew his attention: the cathedral at Rouen, the dramatic seaside rock formations at Etretat, or, most famously, his beloved water lilies in his Giverny garden. Perhaps success for an artist (as for an inventor such as Marconi) requires an obsession with the work.

The Needle Rock and the Port d'Aval, Etretat, 1885

I like best his paintings of the middle period, from 1880-1895, but I'm also fond of the somewhat later Houses of Parliament series. One of those I saw in 1965 at Grace Underwood Barton's mansion in Brooklyn Heights. It was Houses of Parliament, Effect of Sunlight (1903). I was visiting along with a group working at Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, where we were working for the summer. Barton was an aging member of the church and invited us over. I didn't know much about Monet, but I knew to be impressed when I saw the painting hanging above the mantel. She bequeathed it to the Brooklyn Museum.

Larson, Rosengarten, and Ray

Eric Larson's nonfictional Thunderstruck follows a strategy the author used to stunning effect in The Devil in the White City: the juxtaposition of two parallel story lines that initially seem to relate only tangentially but begin to complement and intersect with one another. In this case, one of Larson's accounts involves Marconi's tireless work on wireless communication, much of which took place in London, where he thought he had a better chance to have his work recognized. The other story line follows the career and relationships of Hawley Harvey Crippen, an American homeopathic doctor who made some money selling patent medicines and married a would-be opera singer with marginal talent. Living in London, the couple seemed happily married for a while, but the relationship ended in murder, a crime solved aboard a U.S.-bound ship with the aid of Marconi's wireless radio. Marconi's doggedly worked to perfect a technology that he had no real assurance could ever work. He proceeded largely by intuition, a sense that wireless communication over long distances was possible. His faith in this, his persistence, and his ability to develop it into a lucrative business, were almost superhuman. This story I find more engaging than that of the ill-fated Crippen.


After finishing Larson's book, I started in on All God's Dangers, a life story narrated by "Nate Shaw" (a pseudonym for Ned Cobb) transcribed by Theodore Rosengarten. Coincidentally, Cobb's life unfolds at the same time as the events in Thunderstruck. Cobb was born in 1885 and was interviewed in 1969. His powers of recall and the intensity of his narrative are amazing, especially for a man of 84. He grew up in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, not far from my hometown of Auburn. Although the locations in the book are fictionalized, I was able to identify many of the actual places by studying a map. He lived near the miniscule town with the actual name of Notasulga, only 20 miles or so from Auburn.

The third nonfiction book on my holiday reading list was Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, which I reread with pleasure in anticipation of Ray's visit to our campus later in the spring. I'll use this book as a text in my English Composition course. As with Larson's book, there are two story lines here. The first is an account of her life up through college, her upbringing in the town of Baxley, Georgia with parents who operated a car junkyard. The second is the awakening of her interest in nature, especially the charm of the longleaf pine forests that once dominated Georgia and the surrounding states but were decimated, overcut for lumber and turpentine. Her campaign is to save and expand these forests, which in turn means saving the entire ecosystem that they support.

Remembering a Writing Teacher

Donald Murray

The deaths of three prominent men have dominated the news recently. Former President Gerald Ford was laid to rest in Grand Rapids, Michigan accompanied by countless retrospective accounts of his short-lived but critically important presidency. As far as I can tell, he had no detractors, no enemies. Having been appointed by Nixon to replace Spiro T. Agnew, who resigned in the shadow of financial scandal, he was our only president elevated to the office without having been elected as vice president. His pardon of Nixon was the single most ontroversial act of his presidency, but history has gazed sympathetically on the pardon, many pundits arguing that it was an essential step in the process of national healing that had to follow the Watergate coverup and the dramatic Senate hearings that gripped the country for months in 1973 and then again (with Judiciary Committee deliberations) in 1974.

Simultaneous with the news honoring the life of Gerald Ford was the sudden announcement that Saddam Hussein had been hanging following his conviciton in an Iraqi court. Magnifying the impact of that grisly event was the video recording surreptitiously made (apparently by cell phone) and distributed almost immediately on the internet. The outrage expressed by Sunni Muslims is predictable, although his death was not followed by as much turmoil and violence as some had anticipated. The Bush Administration has tiptoed around Hussein's death, careful not to appear too gleeful, while reminding everyone of the evils he wrought. Christopher Dickey's commentary on the hanging, as well as full coverage of Gerald Ford's death may be found in Newsweek.

Another recent death worth noting is that of James Brown, "The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business," who has a legitimate claim to his title as "Godfather of Soul." In recent years, his reputation has been marred by a string of arrests on firearms and domestic abuse charges. He was jailed for two and a half years as a result of a police chase between Georgia and South Carolina. Brown's BBC obituary.

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As notable, in radically different ways, as the lives and deaths of those three men are, of more significance to me personally is the December 30 death of Donald Murray, which was announced in The Boston Globe on New Year's Eve. Murray, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with The Boston Herald, joined the faculty of the University of New Hampshire in the sixties and forged a highly successful second career as a writing teacher. He, along with Peter Elbow, was a primary influence on the "writing as process" movement that took hold in the seventies and has continued in composition classrooms to the present. His countless articles, as well as books such as A Writer Teaches Writing and Write to Learn, have motivated a generation of teachers and students. A characteristic excerpt:

Writing is a craft before it is an art; writing may appear magic, but it is our responsibility to take our students backstage to watch the pigeons being tucked up the magician's sleeve. The process of writing can be studied and understood. We can re-create most of what a student or professional writer does to produce effective writing. (AWTW, 2nd ed., p. 4)

Murray, more than anyone else writing about composition, was capable of instilling confidence in the writing process. He demonstrated this repeatedly in a rare openness about his own writing and in his practical in-the-trenches approach to gathering and gradually working through ideas on the page. Although retired from teaching, he continued to write a newspaper column about aging, often focusing on his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife, Minnie Mae, until her death in 2005. He was an admirable, approachable man in person as well as in print.

Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Lecture

The December 25/January 1 fiction issue of The New Yorker reprinted Orhan Pamuk's recent Nobel Prize lecture (curiously leaving out the final paragraph). The full text is available at Nobelprize.org. It is essentially a narrative about his father, his father's unpublished personal writing coupled with his remoteness, and ultimately his father's support for and appreciation of his son's work. EXCERPTS (translation from Turkish by Maureen Freely):

This suitcase [containing his father's unpublished writing] was a familiar friend, a powerful reminder of my childhood, my past, but now I couldn't even touch it. Why? No doubt it was because of the mysterious weight of its contents.

I am now going to speak of this weight's meaning. It is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and retires to a corner to express his thoughts – that is, the meaning of literature.
...

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.

...

The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind.

...

But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other peoples' stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us.

...

All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a centre.

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As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

Tough Choices

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce issued its report (Tough Choices for Tough Times) on December 14. The executive summary is available here. This builds on and modifies the report of the original commission issued in 1990. Now, the New Commission notes that 16 years ago it was clear that unskilled work would increasingly be outsourced, performed by workers in developing countries, but that few anticipated that even skilled jobs would be performed efficiently and for lower pay in other countries such as India and China. Currently, an Indian engineer earns $7,500 annually as compared to $45,000 for an American engineer with the same qualifications. The increasing prevalence of digitized work makes it possible for the Indian engineer to do the required work from overseas. At the same time, the digital revolution is increasing the number of unskilled jobs that can be automated.

The New Commission makes the case that creativity will increasingly be as important to the American worker as technological skill. It notes, "This is a world in which a very high level of preparedness in reading, writing, speaking, math, science, literature, and the arts will be an indispensable foundation for everything that comes after for most members of the workforce." This sounds to me like an argument for a liberal education, an education in critical thinking and communicating, as well as in technical proficiencies.

The study group makes a series of recommendations, including the following:

• A system of exams given at the end of 10th grade that would determine what path students take--to a community college, to further accelerated high school study via AP or International Baccalaureate course, or to a trade school.


• Universal early childhood education beginning at age 3.


• Recruitment of the best high school students to become teachers.


• More open-ended, less multiple-choice testing.


• More schools operated by independent contractors.


• More state (vs. district) oversight of school financing, etc.


• Easier access to adult education.


• "Personal Competitiveness Accounts" for everyone to start at birth and to be available to use for educational expenses.

Best of 2006

Los Angeles Times Best Fiction and Poetry of 2006

2006 Kenyan Blog Awards

Metacritic: Best Albums of 2006

Time Magazine Best Inventions of 2006

Christian Science Monitor Best Fiction and Poetry of 2006

Christian Science Monitor Best Nonfiction of 2006

Amazon Best Books of 2006

National Board of Review Best Films and Actors of 2006

ifilm Best Video Postings 0f 2006

Popular Science Best of What's New in 2006

NPPA Best Photojournalism of 2006

Publisher's Weekly Best Books of 2006

Time Magazine Best Photos of 2006

Fimoculous Comprehensive List of All "Best of 2006" Lists

1776 and Christmas Trees

David McCullough

I've just finished listening to the tape of David McCullough's 1776, a gripping account of the events in that pivotal year (read by the author). As Commander-in-Chief, Washington made several major blunders in his attempt to defend New York, and had the British generals managed their strategy better, the war might have been over before it started. By December 1776, hope was dim, and the Continental Army was in sorry condition. Many soldiers had completed their terms of duty and were on the verge of returning home, but the promise of a bonus coupled with Washington's pleading persuaded most of them to stick it out a little longer. Against all odds, Washington's decision to cross the Delaware and surprise the Hessians at Trenton on Christmas Day during a miserable spell of cold, snowy weather turned the tide and lifted the spirits of the country. Some stories claim that the Hessians were vulnerable because of their drunken partying, although McCullough points out that few contemporary accounts bear this out. Whatever the case, undoubtedly the Hessians had erected Christmas trees, transplanting that German tradition to U.S. soil. And it is possible that their carousing and inattention as they huddled at their trees were in part responsible for the rebel victory that turned the tide of the American Revolution.

This Year's Tree, a Douglas Fir

• Many cultures, including the Egyptians and Romans, treasured evergreens as symbols of everlasting life or the promise of spring renewal. The Romans celebrated Saturnalia at winter solstice, decorating with greens and exchanging gifts.
• Druids used evergreens in winter solstice celebrations, placing mistletoe and evergreen branches above their doors for good luck.
• Legend has it that 1,000 years ago St. Boniface, who converted Germany to Christianity, came across a group of pagans worshipping an oak tree. He angrily cut it down, whereupon a fir tree sprang up in its place. He took this as a sign of the Christian faith.
• From the Middle Ages, Germans and Scandinavians brought evergreens indoors to show hope for spring. Martin Luther began decorated indoor trees with candles around 1500. The candles supposedly represented the light of Christ or the star of Bethlehem.
• In New England, the Puritans banned not only Christmas trees but Christmas itself. So if the Hessians erected trees at Christmas in 1776, that was still an alien custom.
• Queen Victoria visited relatives in Germany, where she met Albert, whom she eventually married. Prince Albert brought the Christmas tree tradition from Germany to England, and the custom, including the practice of hanging blown glass balls from the branches, caught on.
• In 1851 Catskill farmer Mark Carr hauled two ox sleds of evergreens into New York City and sold them all. The Christmas tree tradition had begun to catch on. By 1900, one in five American families had a Christmas tree, and within 20 years, the custom was widespread.

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More Christmas Tree History

Fran Mancuso and John Burrows

Fran and Steve

I've known Steve Jonas since 1969 when we both taught at Roosevelt Junior High School in Syracuse. He continued on as a teacher and school administrator in Syracuse and Fulton until he retired several years ago. He and Fran Mancuso lived briefly in Saranac Lake, and upon her retirement, they moved to Sciacca, Sicily. Janne and I last saw them in 2004 during our usual summer stay in the Adirondack Mountains near Tupper Lake (where Fran taught high school Spanish for many years). Early today, Steve sent email to tell us that Fran died on Tuesday following hospitalization for acute leukemia. It all happened very fast. We'll miss her and will do our best to stay in close touch with Steve. Fran kept a wonderful blog about their life in Sicily (Sicilianmama). Her incredible photos posted on Flickr are accessible at Sicilianmama.

John Burrows Sailing Into the Sunset

I've just heard about the loss of another old friend, John Burrows, who was my colleague at Tougaloo College from when I joined the faculty there until John and Suzie (and son Joey) moved to Miami in 1981, where they lived for a time on a wooden houseboat. John took a job running the Writing Center at Florida International University. We had been out of touch with them in recent years, though we've always exchanged Christmas cards. It was in this year's card that Suzie told us John had died of cancer in October. Earlier this year, his brother Jim had also died of cancer. John was a great friend and fellow poet. He, along with our colleague John Monro, introduced me to the discipline of composition--still in its infancy in the late 70's. We attended CCCC conventions together and talked for hours about the teaching of writing. He had worked with Mina Shaughnessy when he was doing his grad work at the City University of New York. John was a New Yorker, grew up on Long Island. He loved sailing, Ireland, and W.B. Yeats (on whom he wrote his master's thesis--the "Crazy Jane" poems). He could play piano by ear. For a couple years, John, I and our families met for breakfast each Saturday, alternating houses. Joey was Nell's age. John was a smoker, and perhaps that did him in.

Sweet Jane Desserts

Tess's Sweet Jane Catering business featured on Washington, D.C. Daily Candy
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The short life of James Clerk Maxwell
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Russell Jacoby's assessment of Hannah Arendt
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Beyonce Knowles' "Deja Vu" from her new CD, B'day
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Daphne A. Brooks' review of B'day
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4oth Anniversay of Truman Capote's Black and White Ball
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Whatever happened to Robert Pirsig?
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A Jackson Pollock painting sells for $140 million.
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The Goncourt brothers' journals

Family

This year's holiday photo collage, to be accompanied in the mail by Janne's annual list of extended family members, their locations, and occupations.

Here's Akane Igarashi, our "adopted" Japanese daughter from Sapporo, Japan. She enrolled at Francis Marion University, where I was introduced to her by exchange students from Russia and Ukraine. Akane subsequently transferred to the University of South Carolina, where she is majoring in journalism and minoring in photography. Her parents have visited us twice before and will return for Christmas--followed up by a trip to Orlando and then New York. Akane will graduate in May.

Magazines

In addition to the rhetoric and composition journals I subscribe to (College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and Writing on the Edge), as well as The New Yorker, Newsweek, and The New York Times Book Review (Do I subscribe only to weeklies whose titles start with "New?"), I take various literary journals, altering my choices year to year. My current subscriptions include Southern Poetry Review (edited by my friend Bob Parham), Tar River Poetry, Atlanta Review (which I like for its international flavor), Crazyhorse, and Iron Horse Literary Review.

The current issue of Iron Horse contains a series of "readings," by various well-known poets, fiction writers, and essayists. Each reading consists of a bio, a story/essay/series of poems, and a brief Q and A with the writer. One question to Kelly Cherry is "Have these poems undergone revisions?" She responds, "I started work on the sonnets in 1999 (though there'd been a half-sonnet from 1994 or thereabouts that I'd hung on to) and have rewritten all of them many, many times."

In contrast, Bob Hicok claims of his three poems, "These three were not revised, beyond how they were revised during composition. I tend to revise a great deal as I write, which is why I bow down to the computer.... While I don't believe 'first word, best word,' I trust the intention of that philosophy and want to come as close as I can to capturing my thoughts and emotions in a given moment. There's something lost for me once I rise from a poem into the day, something particular to each poem that I find almost impossible to get back. However long it takes, I try to finish each one on the initial go-round."

After her five poems, each motivated by a different line from a poem in Spanish, Leslie Ullman explains the origin of this series in her reading of a bilingual anthology of 20th-century American poetry edited by Stephen Tapscott. She chose this as a text for a poetry class. Then, she says, "My professionalism gave way to enchantment and then to irresponsibility as the energy in those poems entered me like a tonic and made me itch to write poems of my own rather than think about classes. I was particularly seduced by elements easiest to preserve in translation--swiftness of association, a delicious mixing of the senses, astonishing juxtapositions, and incantatory rhythms."

Reading this makes me want to return to my own free-form translations from poems by Eugenio Montale in Italian, a language I don't know. It also reminds me of the series of poems Melissa Morphew wrote in response to Pablo Neruda's questions in Libro de las preguntas (Book of Questions - 1974).

Pat Hoy

Pat Hoy

In an interview with Mel Livatino in the current issue of Writing on the Edge, essayist Pat Hoy says,

I usually start out with a problem. I usually start out with a question I'm trying to answer. I seldom start out knowing what my idea is. I discover that in the process of assembling the stories, or they allow me to discover it because they've already assembled themselves.

The images have already coalesced in my imagination and built up enough energy that they do what the Jungians call breaking the threshold of consciousness. And I have to pay attention to the images. They are presenting me with the thing I need to figure out. So I have to start with the image that's bugging me the most.

And later,

The joy and the value of the familiar essay is that it operates under the requirement that we deliberately see the writer's mind in motion. It is an illusion of the highest artistic order that we are actually seeing in the final form of that essay all of the writer's mind in motion. There are lots of things that get subtracted. There's a lot of shaping that goes on, but the requirement is that we retain the mind's movement, the reflection of it, so that we create the illusion that the listener, the reader, is actually getting to see the mind figuring out whatever it's figuring out. And the mind's got to be trying to figure out something other than itself.

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Zefrank's video blog

Mongo

My friend Bill Sherling, who owns The Gnu's Room used book store in Auburn, Alabama, loaned me Ted Botha's book, Mongo. The term mongo, new to me, refers to any discarded item that is retrieved. Botha, himself something of a mongo hound, profiles people in New York City who regularly cruise the streets looking for useful (or not so useful) discarded objects. He interviews people whose apartments are packed with rescued items, methodical treasure hunters who have unearthed valuable loot in their wanderings, and book scrounger cart pushers who know just where they're likely to locate a pricey first edition or a packet of old magazines at 3 a.m. There's even a chapter on food scroungers, who have learned where the best castoff produce, tofu, or sweets are likely to be found.

This book reminds me of my own modest life as a mongo hunter in Hiroshima, Japan. There were occasional scheduled days in the neighborhood when "oogomi" (large trash) was put out for pickup. If you hit the narrow streets early on those days, you could salvage all sorts of useful stuff. Japanese houses and apartments tend to be small and cramped enough so that no one can afford to keep too much, so some pretty desirable items wind up on the curb. I had arrived for my year in Japan with only several bags,and I rented an unfurnished apartment, so I was a shameless scrounger. I found a bicycle, several useful tables, and a chair or two, all within several blocks of my apartment.

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Poets tend to be verbal mongo hunters. I've just read Joel Brouwer's 2001 Whiting Award winner, Exactly What Happened. In it, he gleans poems from news headlines ("Kelly, Ringling Bros. Oldest Elephant, Goes on Rampage"), from the world of magic ("Houdini"), and Russian lore ("Krushchev's Shoe"). One good one is "The Plastic Surgeon's Wife," who

over the years was sculpted lovelier
and lovelier: lips pillowed, buttocks lifted
to a tight split peach. When her body

was flawless, pure leopard, he began
experiments. He tried time-release
injection--vanilla bean, lilac, rose--

Brouwer's second collection, Centuries, is a series of prose poems, each 100 words long. Here's half of one called "N"--showing the poet's mongo-loving lust for words:

So much that's not nice: napalm, nettles, nemesis, noose. Not to mention the basic no. Even the dictionary's blissful path from neck to nectar--a trembling fingertip fliding over her nipple, down around her navel--is choked by morbid vines from the intervening necro-root: -mania, -phagia, -philia. A few pages later, too fractious to define, six single-spaced columns of non-'s.