Stay Positive: Cannery Row (the Movie)

Last night I watched a film that I taped from Turner Classic Movies. It was the 1982 film Cannery Row starring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger. 

I remember my friends and I renting it and watching it on VHS. After watching it, we later made beer milkshakes that the novel made famous. 

It's not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it made me want to read the two novels it is based on, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. They are Steinbeck novels, which are very much of their era.

And I've always liked Steinbeck even though in some literary circles Steinbeck is seen as "too easy" for literature professors. And there's also the stink that is attached to Steinbeck because people read his works in middle school and high school, such as my son having to write a literary analysis paper this semester about Of Mice and Men. 

Despite the literary snobbishness aimed at Steinbeck, he's an excellent writer, who actually could write literature that has humor in it. 

Random Notes from a Crank

I recently unfollowed a so-called friend on Facebook after I read a dumb-ass post of hers about a chem trails conspiracy theory. 

I need fewer nutjobs on my social media. 

The crazy thing is that I casually knew this woman in college and became FB friends a few years ago. She had some silly post about chemtrails, which correlates with the things I heard about how she and her husband believe that Covid is a US government conspiracy. 

You can't reason with stupid. 

I've been thinking of reading some classic pieces of literature that I never got around to reading during my lifetime. 

My first choice is For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway. I've read almost everything written by Hemingway, but I just never got around to reading that novel.

I also never got around to reading Catch-22 by Heller.  

I have a copy of Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner that a colleague gave to me. That's a possibility. I tried starting it once but wasn't in the mood for it for whatever reason. 

I've also been thinking of classics from Russian literature. Way back when I took a World Lit II course, we read part of A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov, which I liked at the time. 

Then other options are The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, War and Peace by Tolstoy, and Doctor Zhivago by Pasternak. 

Then I've thought about Don Quixote by Cervantes. 

Some of these could be very long reads. 

Random Notes from a Crank

I recently ordered a novel I'm afraid to admit I've never read: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It's one of those books that some people rave about, but I never got around to reading it. 

It aggravates me that my kids often take off and put on their shoes without untying them, so one night I went about untying their shoes. 

As of late, I have an aversion to corn. I still corn on the cob. That hasn't changed, but when I ate some soup a couple of times, I felt that corn should not be in the soup. My thinking was, "This soup would be be much better without this damn corn." For me, the corn in the soup just fundamentally alters the dish in too large of a way. 

Down with corn. 

Up with grapefruit.

Stay Positive: Favorite Comic Book Characters

As I was watching Avengers Infinity War on Netflix the other day, I started thinking about my favorite comic book characters and why I liked them so much. So here goes. 

Daredevil

I started reading comic books because of an initial attraction to Spider-Man. If Spider-Man was my gateway comic book, then Daredevil comic books were my main source of pleasure after I moved on from Spidey. 

For me, the reason I liked Daredevil so much was that, as comic book heroes go, he had/has a dark, brooding personality that I identified with. As much as any character in the Marvel universe, he's flawed but strongly principled, so there was always that interesting dynamism going on with Matt Murdock. 

Having grown up fairly religious, Daredevil searching for meaning connected to me even though I did not grow up with the Catholic guilt and ceremony that the books portrayed. The Catholicism angle is something the Netflix series played with some in season 1 and then returned to it in season 3, which was a welcome return. 

One of the greatest periods of the Daredevil comic book series was when I was in my youth: the Frank Miller & Klaus Janson years. 

In Tim Leong's Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe, Daredevil is shown to be statistically one of the weaker superheroes in terms of battles won, tied, and lost. In the book's "Battle Breakdown" graphical element, the Devil of Hell's Kitchen is in the lower 25 percentile. 

Like I said, he's flawed, but he's interesting. 

Scarlet Witch

Gosh, I love Wanda Maximoff. From as far back as I can remember, I've been fascinated by/attracted to red-headed women. I blame on it Daphne from Scooby-Doo. She started it all. 

As a minor unrelated tangent, when The Office was in its last seasons, didn't anyone else find it a bit implausible Dunder Miflin had three red-headed women in the office? Or maybe it's just me... 

But I digress. Besides being beautiful to my teenaged eyes when I would regularly read Avengers comic books, she has really interesting powers with her initial "hex powers" and later with her ability to wield "chaos magic." 

I never understood her attraction to Vision, but I get the storyline and why it was put into the Avengers comic book. 

Within her character's arc, initially she and Quicksilver were Magneto's kids, but I guess later on in other variations, she was not Magneto's daughter. I like her best as Magneto's daughter. 

As a member of the Avengers, I think her power was always under-appreciated.    


Hawkeye

The first image is the first issue of a four-part series, during the 80s I believe, that I still have. I have the four issues that is a short story involving Hawkeye as the main character, not the supporting character he usually is with the Avengers, 

A year or so ago, I reread the four-part series of comic books, and it's a decent story. Much to my surprise, the series ends with Cliff Burton and Mockingbird both naked and in a hot tub together. I don't remember being titillated by that image back when I read it as a kid, but I'm sure I was. 

Much like Daredevil, Hawkeye relies on his excellent fighting abilities, specifically of course the bow and arrow, which is notably old fashioned. 

You don't see a lot of purple-clad superheroes, but in a number of variations Hawkeye is often purple as can been seen in the Matt Fraction's fine run on Hawkeye, which brings us to the newest Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, pictured above. As Wikepedia relates, Kate's outfit is drawn to resemble a combo of the first Hawkeye and Mockingbird's outfits. 

Unfortunately, the recent Kate Bishop Hawkeye series was cancelled, but I hope to find her in another series soon. 


Iron Fist

It's a little strange that Danny Rand's story is quite similar to Bruce Wayne's: dead parents but rich as hell. However, the narrative of him getting the special Iron Fist power as a Westerner is appealing to white boys like me who have a fascination with Eastern philosophy, martial arts, and so on.  

I didn't buy a lot of Power Man & Iron Fist comic books when I was a kid because the drugstore where I bought comic books usually didn't stock them on a regular basis for whatever reason. From time to time, they'd be available though. 

But often those comic books provided a bit of comic relief to my reading because sometimes they would just be downright hilarious. In some respects, the recent run by Walker on Power Man & Iron Fist has taken that mantle. 

My favorite superhero comic book of recent vintage is Fraction's The Immortal Iron Fist. It's a more serious narrative arch with beautiful artwork. 


Wolverine

Going by "Battle Breakdown" again, Logan is hell of fighter. He ranks in the top third of battles won, tied, and lost, which is right below Sub-Mariner and She-Hulk and above Kingpin and Thor. That's good company to be in. 

It's not hard to see why Wolverine is so beloved by Marvel fans. He's a major character in one of the most powerful and influential superhero groups in history, the X-Men, and the whole love triangle among he, Jean Grey, and Scott Summers made plot lines interestingly uncomfortable. 

But to get to the real gist, his character's backstory and abilities are just so interesting and compelling. How great would it be to be able to live that long and be able to heal oneself? The character is basically indestructible until the adamantium covering his bones eventually poisons him. 

His personality also calls out to some of our wish-fulfillments though with his ability to unleash havoc similar to how people talked about how Vikings would go berserk in battle.


Beast

As you can tell, I was an Avengers reader, and I prefer what some readers might consider the "supporting" superheroes of the team, whereas I don't find Captain America and Iron Man all that interesting. Thor has his moments, and I like the whole Asgardian pantheon that the comic books portray, but I never read Thor on a regular basis. 

Beast, on the other hand, was a comic and literary foil to the seriousness of other characters. When I read The Avengers, he often quoted British literature, especially Shakespeare. 

He was a biochemist though with a genius-level intellect, so that is one characteristic that drew me to him. His abilities are awesome. He's basically a superhuman atavistic well-read genius. 

Hank McCoy also has the distinction of being both a member of the X-Men and the Avengers. 

Black Widow

Here we go again with a red-headed lady superhero. 

Looking at her history, I didn't know she originated as a menace to the typically boring Iron Man. I was introduced to her as a member of the Avengers, a former Soviet spy, who wed and divorced Hawkeye, and was at times the girlfriend of Daredevil. Natasha is one of the few girlfriends of Daredevil who doesn't get killed. 

She's quick, agile, and very good at combat, but much to my chagrin, I never knew she was somewhat similar to Logan in anti-aging and healing characteristics. What I remember most is that's she's awfully good with weapons with an intellect adept at manipulation and tactical strategies. 

The somewhat recent run of Black Widow by Edmondson and Noto was quite good.


Power Man aka Luke Cage

The first image is the character that I grew up with, an almost Blacksploitation version of Luke Cage. As African-American superheroes go, Power Man was a distinct contrast to the somewhat stuffy Black Panther and the helpmatey Falcon.

The guy needs cash, so he teams up with Iron Fist to create Heroes for Hire, one of the better ideas in the Marvel universe in my opinion. Instead of being a jingoistic, Captain American syle superhero, Power Man needs to get paid.  

Even though the premise of Heroes for Hire was a bit sketchy (after all, Danny Rand is rich), I liked the whole counterpoint of superheroes needing money and doing their work as a job, not for some altruistic endeavor. 

In some ways, Luke Cage is a non-flying, fallible Superman. He's indestructible and has superhuman strength ~ but not superhuman strength that is outlandish. As supermen go, he's a realistic one.


Spider-Man

Besides Wolverine and the next guy featured, who is a magnificent villain or antihero depending on one's perspective, Spider-Man is one of the major players in the Marvel comic book universe. He's beloved. 

What's been tiresome the past couple of decades though is that the Marvel cinematic universe keeps churning out Spider-Man movies to the extent that I'm getting tired of Spider-Man, which is unfortunate. But I have heard good things about the animated movie that came out recently. 

He's a great character who captured the imaginations of many young readers because Peter Parker represents the insecurities and issues teens were having. And it's an iconic story.


Magneto

If Professor X is the MLK of mutant-human conflict, Magneto is Malcolm X. 

Considering how the Marvel universe depicts how humans try to destroy mutants, it's hard for me to see him as an extreme villain. Sure, in some comic books, he's pretty evil, but to a degree he's fighting for his "race." 

There is good in him I believe, and the recent series done by Bunn, Walta, et al. presents a more sympathetic portrait of this powerful mutant. 

Random Notes from a Crank

Amid all the gnashing of teeth because of Clinton's emails, the whole deal reminds me of the millions of emails that were conveniently deleted during Generalissimo Dubya's regime: "The George W. Bush Email Scandal the Media Has Conveniently Forgotten" from Salon & "Bush Advisors' Approach on Email Draws Fire" from the New York Times. 

Which leads me to this satirical take about why certain people dislike/don't trust/hate Hillary Clinton: "All the Terrible Things Hillary Clinton Has Done - In One Big List." 

Regardless, both cases make me think about how the justice system is rigged for wealthy individuals with connections. 

Nontheless, I'd rather vote for the Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson than Trump. 

My favorite candidate is Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate, but I'm still voting for Hillary. 

I'm behind on getting some new music. The Avett Brothers and Sarah Jarosz have new albums, and I'm intrigued by the new album by Sarah Watkins. 

This article will make you think differently about the hot dog. But why do the good ones taste so damn good? 

I've only read two of of Philip K. Dick's novels, The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, both of which I enjoyed immensely. I had heard he had a troubled background as many artists do, and a new book uncovers his troublesome life. "Philip K. Dick's Divine, Amphetamine-Fueled Madness" sheds some light on the author. It's adapted from the writer's full-length book. 

This morning I was looking at a piece of art from another troubled artist, Jackson Pollock. 

Stay Positive: American Gods

Last night I finished Neil Gaiman's American Gods. 

Below are some passages that demand to be shared:

• "Ah, yes. The age of information--young lady, could you pour me another glass of Jack Daniel's? Easy on the ice--not, of course, that there has ever been any other kind of age. Information and knowledge: two currencies that have never gone out of style."
• "Good." Wednesday grinned. "Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned to suffer in silence."
• "Liberty," boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, "is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses."
• "This is the only country in the world," said Wednesday, into the stillness, "that worries about what it is." 
• "No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they've never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves being pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that."
• "I can get out of there," said Sweeney. "I can get away before the storm hits. Away from a world in which opiates have become the religion of the masses." 
• People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen." 

Random Notes from a Crank

One of the liquor stores in my town is called Gate Way Liquors. I wonder whether this name is because the owner of the place doesn't know how to spell "gateway" correctly or it's some term only a drunk person can figure out. 

I'm looking for a new TV series to get into. The Americans season is over, and I suspect Fargo is getting close to finishing its first season (and I hope there are more).

This spring I finished the full run of Gaiman's Sandman series. I really enjoyed it because of the ways he plays with mythology and religion while telling a heck of a tale. Of the Endless, Dream is obviously a great character, but I'm fond of his siblings Death and Destruction. And the issue "15 Portraits of Despair" is exceptional. Some other of my favorite characters are Matthew the Raven, Mervyn Pumpkinhead, Bast, the Three, Lucifer, Cluracan, and Hob Gadling. 

I'm now in the midst of American Gods. Good stuff so far. 

I bought a copy of the collected first volume of The Saga of the Swamp Thing that Alan Moore did. It was okay, but it didn't knock the edges off like Sandman and Mind MGMT. 

Speaking of which, I also had the pleasure of gobbling up volume 3 of that fine work. That graphic novel just keeps getting better and better. 

Stay Positive: I Never Heard a Story I Didn't Like

If you're looking for an excellent read, I highly recommend Todd Snider's I Never Met a Story I Didn't Like: Mostly True Tall Tales. 

The folk singer is known for his concerts where he tells insightful, entertaining stories in between songs. From what I can gather, many of the chapters are versions of his stories, his creative non-fiction, that he recounts before he plays certain tunes. He's a witty dude. 

Some of my favorite chapters are the where he talks about his friend Moondawg (of the song "Moondawg's Tavern"), his encounter with Slash of Gun-n-Roses in a hotel bar, the chapter about his friend Skip (who inspired "Play a Train Song"), and the chapter about Kris Kristofferson.

Snider's a raconteur. And the book has all kinds of playful moments where he calls attention to the fact that he's writing a book and that sometimes the stories he says onstage are not exactly what happened.  

To give you a taste of his wit and wisdom, here are some selected passages from the book:

• There's always a loophole. All you have to do is stare at the loop long enough and you'll find the hole.
• There they were, the football team. And I don't mean to disparage any of the other kids. I'm just saying that it could be argued that they looked like a bunch of dirty sheep standing around in a field, waiting to push a grown, screaming man on a padded sled. 
• He [Skip] said, "Never go straight, always go forward." He said, "Don't apologize, I don't care enough." And when he answered the phone, he said, "I'll play your silly little game." 
• …when it comes to slogans and fashions and bands, I like to be what I call "post-hip, pre-retro." That sweet spot, right when something isn't cool anymore and before it becomes cool in an ironic way. The cutting edge of uncool.
• Contentment, not rejection, is the enemy.
• …if someone asks you what a song is about and you don't have an answer, you might be in possession of a song that's not really about anything. 
• You may occasionally have gotten the ideas from these pages that I am a little hard on sports. But baseball's not a sport. It's an art. I will not argue this point. If you try to argue with me, I will reply with a fart. 
• Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire, he'll be warm of the rest of his life. 

Random Notes from a Crank

If you care about poetry, I suggest checking out Mark Edmundson's "Poetry Slam: Or, The Decline of American Verse" in the July issue of Harper's. While I find the article to be an academic version of a lit professor saying, "Back in the old days..." with occasional whining and pontificating, he does have some good points. Take these two examples: 

• "What happens when poets at the height of ambition somehow feel the need to be programmatically obscure? The obvious result is that they shut out the common reader. But they also give critics far too much room to determine poetic meanings--and this may be why some critics so love Graham and Muldoon and Carson and Ashbery. Their poems are so underdetermined in their sense that the critic gets to collaborate on the verses, in effect becoming a co-creator. This is a boon to critics, but readers rightly look to poets to make sense of the world, even if it is a difficult sense--and not to pass half the job off to Ph.D.s"
• "It is they [big-name poets] whom younger writers are to look up to, they who set the standard--and the standard is all for inwardness and evasion, hermeticism and self-regard: beautiful, accomplished, abstract poetry that refuses to be the poetry of our climate."

I wonder if the good Dr. Edmundson has read Sullivan's Every Seed of the Pomegranate, Vanderberg's The Alphabet Not Unlike the World, or Williams' The Road to Happiness? I also wonder if Edmundson writes his own poetry. 

Recently I became a subscriber to GoComics.com. I don't know why it's taken me so long to do something like this. First, it's free, so that appeals to my frugal nature. Second, daily I get old strips and current ones. Every day I'm reading Doonsebury, Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine, F Minus, Candorville, Off the Mark, and Strange Brew along with editorial cartoons from Tom Toles, Mike Luckovich, and Michael Ramirez. Also, I'm getting recycled strips of Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes. Those are my top two comic strips of all time, and I read them when I was a kid.

Coincidentily, I looked at Utne's nominees for the its Media Awards, checked them out, and subscribed to various Web-based magazines like TomDispatch, Grist, and OnEarth. I'm also getting updates from The American Conservative for some variety in my political reading diet, and there's an article about Calvin & Hobbes by Gracy Howard that's worth a quick read: "Imagination and the Artistic Value of Calvin & Hobbes." I look forward to watching the documentary she writes about. The strips below showcase Watterson's artistry. 

Sorry for the bleeding into the right bar, but the only way to see them well is making them extra large. 

Last night Mrs. Nasty and I went out to supper and then watched The Wolverine, the latest Hollywood offering from the Marvel universe. As comic book-based movies go, it's a good one. From my perspective, Jackman seems to get the character of Logan/Wolverine, and this movie provides a good character study. I remember reading the Wolverine four-part series in the early 80s when he went to Japan, which I think the screenplay chose parts to use in the film. I remember the comic book differently though. The love interest angle was a bigger theme, and I vaguely remember him training as a samurai, but I could be wrong. Because I enjoyed that short series back then (1982), I bought the book (below) that collects the issues. I'm looking forward to this rediscovery. 

Stay Positive: Comic Books & Graphic Novels

Recently I've gotten back into comic books, and I'm also venturing into graphic novels.

Above is one of the paperbacks I've bought recently. Daredevil was one of my favorite superheroes when I was a kid. Back in those days, I also regularly read Spider Man, The Avengers, and X-Men, but "The Man Without Fear" was always my go-to superhero. 

I've waded into the recent stories about Daredevil as told by Mark Waid, which goes to four volumes at present, and I've pre-ordered volume five, the cover of which is below. 

Obviously, like in volume 4, Daredevil and the webslinger team up. 

As for Daredevil in the Marvel universe, I don't know if experts would consider him as major of a character as Thor, Wolverine, Captain America, Iron Man, Spider Man, Hulk, et al. But I guess I was drawn to him because his comic books tended to have a darker sensibility. At least that seemed the case when I was reading Daredevil in the 80s. 

Besides the superhero stuff, I also read Fun Home, a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel that is excellent. Then I read a compendium of American Splendor by Harvey Pekar. 

And after having an email conversation with a guy I went to grad school with, a fellow who teaches courses on comic books and graphic novels at a R1 university, he recommended I check out Brian Wood's Northlanders. 

My friend is a scholar of Medieval Studies and can translate in Old Norse. Though I'm not a scholar in Medieval Studies, like him I have an interest in the Vikings, but that's mainly because I'm a quarter Danish and a quarter Norwegian. I like to think that my ancestors were Vikings of some ilk, but in reality my forebears were probably Norwegian and Danish fishing people who got killed or exploited or shook down by Vikings.

Nevertheless, I'm interested in Vikings and Viking culture. In fact, a couple of summers ago, I read A History of the Vikings by Gwyn Jones for personal enjoyment. And I may venture into other historical accounts/nonfiction about those folks in the future.

However, even though Wood's work is rooted in history, the seven volumes of Northlanders are fictional accounts about the dying out of Viking culture from various perspectives. From the looks of it, the volumes are all stand-alone stories. I've only read volume 1 (above) and 3 so far, and volume 2 is on its way. 

The artwork in Northlanders is gorgeous, and the stories are solid. Wood did his research. Lots of blood though. 

Because it seems pretty easy to convert graphic novels to the screen, I wonder if we could see Northlanders in film form sometime in the future. My hope is that HBO creates a series. I'd like to see Sven the Returned and the Shield Maidens on the small screen. 

Stay Positive: Rereading Candide

It's kind of rich that I'm writing about rereading Voltaire's Candide in a "Stay Positive" post because the title of the satire is Candide or Optimism. 

Nonetheless, I read it again. The first time I read it I was probably 19 years old. We read it in my World Lit II survey course with Professor Nancy Lovelace when I was a sophomore in college -- Fall 1990.

I enjoyed rereading it, but I recall the first read having a greater impact on me. It's one of those works of literature I think most teenagers should read. 

I could say the same about Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych," which we also read in that course. 

What I've listed below are my favorite nuggets from Candide, some of which will probably reveal why I think young people should read it:

• Candide, stunned, stupefied, despairing, bleeding, trembling, said to himself--If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like? (Chapter 6)
• Los Padres own everything in it [Paraguay], and the people nothing; it's a masterpiece of reason and justice. (Chapter 13)
• What's optimism? said Cacambo. --Alas, said Candide, it is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell. (Chapter 19)
• ... in all of them [provinces of France] the principle occupation is lovemaking, the second is slander, and the third stupid talk. (Chapter 21)
• I don't believe any of that stuff [religion], said Martin, nor any of the dreams which people have been peddling for some time now. --But why, then, was the world formed at all? asked Candide. --To drive us mad, answered Martin. (Chapter 21)
• Perhaps I should prefer the opera, if they had not found ways to make it revolting and monstrous. Anyone who likes bad tragedies set to music is welcome to them; in these performances the scenes serve only to introduce, inappropriately, two or three ridiculous songs designed to show off the actress's sound box. (Chapter 25)
• Fools admire everything in a well-known author. (Chapter 25)
• --Well, my dear Pangloss, Candide said to him, now that you have been hanged, dissected, beaten to a pulp, and sentenced to the galleys, do you still think everything is for the best in this world? --I am still of my first opinion, replied Pangloss; for after all I am a philosopher... (Chapter 28)
• I have only twenty acres, replied the Turk; I cultivate them with my children, and the work keeps us from three great evils, boredom, vice, and poverty. (Chapter 30)
• --That is very well put, said Candide, but we must cultivate our garden. (Chapter 30)

Stay Positive: The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men by Adam Prince

When I read the title of this short story collection, I was intrigued. 

Because I'm a man (and over "forty" as Mike Gundy is famous for saying) and I'm a sucker for good short story collections (the book is highly rated on Amazon), I thought I'd see what all the hubbub was about. 

On the back of the book, one person proclaims, "These stories scared the hell out of me."

Another opines, "Woman [sic] can learn more from these stories than from thousands of issue of Cosmopolitan." Well, that task shouldn't be too hard though I'm always curious about Cosmo because most of the articles in the rag mag seem to be about getting more and different kinds of nooky. What up with that? 

But I digress. 

It's a strong collection of stories. Some of my favorites are "Big Wheels for Adults," "Tranquility," "Keener," and "Bruises and Baby Teeth." Those are stories I might read again. 

Here are some snapshots:

From "Big Wheels for Adults": "And as he spoke, be began to think about the difficulty of accounting for the distance between who a person was and who that person would like to be, between ourselves and the performances we put on for those we hope will love us."

From "Tranquility": "Reaching for the coriander, Clare noticed that Miss Kim wasn't wearing any panties and that her private region was completely shaven. So instead of asking Miss Kim what country she was from, Clare decided to wash down one hundred and fifty milligrams of Sobritol with as much vodka as she could swallow." 

From "Keener": "'Because if you do. If you want me to--I will unloose the primal me.' 
'Oh, god,' said Amanda, 'Don't do that.'"

From "Bruises and Baby Teeth": "Walt had an answer. He did. It was intricate and lovely, a kind of confession."

And here's a review of the book at PANK. 

Random Notes from a Crank

The other week, my nine-year old daughter asked me this simple question, "What's a Trojan?" You see, the town we live in has one high school, and its mascot is the Trojan. It's a knockoff of the USC Trojan because there the same icon on the football helmet with the red-yellow color scheme. That got us into an interesting conversation because she already knew about the Trojan Horse, which flushed me with pride because I love classical rhetoric and literature -- Isocarates, Artistotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Sapho's poetry, The Illiad, The Odyssey, The Aenead, The Georgics, all that good stuff. So I told about the story of the Trojan Horse in The Illiad, the brave character of Hector, Aeneas' escape and eventual founding of Rome. But I've also wondered why Trojans are the chosen mascot of schools. Think about it: They lost. Why would you want your mascot to exemplify a loser? At least if you go by the depiction of them via the USC mascot, they do have awesome helmets and pointy short swords though. And the noble Hector is someone to look up to; he's much better than that sulky, dishonorable Achilles. Of the Greek force, I always preferred Ajax anyway. 

For a long time now, I've been interested in how physical environments help or hurt learning. If you have a similar interest, check out Tanner's "Explaining Relationships Among Student Outcomes and the School's Physical Environment." 

Often you suspect what a decision is going to be, but sometimes it's worth the chance that patterns of thought and behavior might change. Often they do not change though.

Random Notes from a Crank

I've read a lot of literature over the years. One lesson I've learned from various stories written by American authors from the 20th century is that if there's a married man and woman who have kids, it's not a good idea for the husband to take the babysitter home. I talking about you, John Cheever, Robert Coover, and John Updike. 

Another lesson I learned was "White folks crazy."

NPR had a story up recently about bias within a survey about young adult novels: "When A Popular List of 100 'Best-Ever' Teen Books Is the 'Whitest Ever.'" 

Sherman Alexie has some things to say in "Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood." 

Recently I rediscovered a poem I really like, so I'm sharing it:

The Loon on Forrester's Pond
By Hayden Carruth

Summer wilderness, a blue light
twinkling in the trees and water, but even
wilderness is deprived now. "What's that?
What is that sound?" Then it came to me, 
this insane song, wavering music
like the cry of the genie inside the lamp,
it came from inside the long wilderness
of my life, a loon's song, and there he was
swimming on the pond, guarding
his mate's nest by the shore,
diving and staying under
unbelievable minutes and coming up
where no one was looking. My friend
told how once in his boyhood
he had seen a loon swimming beneath his boat,
a shape dark and powerful
down in that silent mysterious world, and how
it had ejected a plume of white excrement
curving behind. "It was beautiful,"
he said.

The loon
broke the stillness over the water
again and again,
broke the wilderness
with his song, truly
a vestige, the laugh that transcends
first all mirth
and then all sorrow
and finally all knowledge, dying
into the gentlest quavering timeless
woe. It seemed
the only real and only sanity to me.  

Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood

The book (above) I finished this morning is the kind of book I don't read that often. It's Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood by Ralph F. Voss, who's a good friend of mine.

But I also am a fan of the "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood. I'm pretty sure I've read some of Capote's shorter works sometime in my life, but his masterpiece was a result of him finding a small article in the New York Times about the grisly murders in western Kansas. Based on a hunch and backing from William Shawn of The New Yorker, he traveled to Kansas, researched the story, and turned it into a literary gold mine.

I didn't know much about Capote, but I do now. And after reading the book, I want to check out the two films of Capote and Infamous because I'm interested to see how the filmmakers chose to portray the man, how he went about composing the work, how the relationship between Capote and Harper Lee is presented, and how his presence in rural Kansas is portrayed.

For me, someone who reads mostly non-fiction, one of my favorite chapters in Voss's book is Chapter 4: The Myth of the Nonfiction Novel. And because I'm very interested in how native Kansans still feel about the book that is indelibly linked with their state, I really enjoyed the final chapter, Ch. 8: The Legacy in Kansas.

If you're a fan of Capote or In Cold Blood, I suspect this book is pretty much required reading, especially because of Ch. 5: The Gay Subtext of In Cold Blood.

Stay Positive: An Excellent Second Grade Teacher & Kid Literature

There are a lot of things to be positive about these days: the start of baseball season, spring, gardens growing, summer approaching, and so on.

But I'm not interested in talking about those subjects.

I'd rather talk about my daughter's excellent second grade teacher and a book.

One of the major projects for my daughter's class this year is students writing and illustrating their own books. This teacher knows her stuff. She worked her students through the writing process. Since I volunteer every Thursday to tutor and then eat lunch with my daughter, I got to see little snapshots of the progress of these project and how her teacher guided them through the writing process, which entailed rough drafts, mandatory revisions, peer review, and polishing their books for presentation.

My daughter wrote a tale that involves a princess; a dognapping; villains named Tim, Quinn, and Bob; dragons; nefarious intent; true love; hula dancing; and plot twists.

If you're interested in reading the full story, it's after the jump. The numbers indicate page numbers, but you're missing the illustrations. I wanted to provide some shots of some of the pages; however, our digital camera doesn't want to communicate with my laptop for whatever reason.

Bitter Bierce, Again

As I noted in the comments of "Bitter Bierce," I'm providing a second installment of my favorites from the rest of The Devil's Dictionary -- N to Z.

Enjoy:

• Nectar, n. A drink served at banquets of the Olympian deities. The secret of its preparation is lost, but the modern Kentuckians believe that they come pretty near to a knowledge of its chief ingredient.
• Noise, n. A stench in the ear. Undomesticated music. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization.
• Optimism, n. The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a blind faith, it is inaccessible to the light of disproof -- an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.
• Overeat, v. To dine.
• Patriot, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
• Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
• Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
• Rational, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.
• Responsibility, n. A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.
• Rumor, n. A favorite weapon of the assassins of character.
• Sauce, n. The infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.
• Saw, n. A trite popular saying, or proverb. (Figurative and colloquial.) So called because it makes its way into a wooden head. Following are examples of old saws fitted with new teeth. A man in known by the company that he organizes... Think twice before you speak to a friend in need... He laughs best who laughs least... Of two evils choose to be the least... Strike while you employer has a big contract...
• Slang, n. The grunt of the human hog (Pignoramus intolerabilis) with an audible memory. The speech of one who utters with his tongue what he thinks with his ear, and feels the pride of a creator in accomplishing the feat of a parrot. A means (under Providence) of setting up as a wit without a capital of sense.
• Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
• Turkey, n. A large bird whose flesh when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude. Incidentally, it is pretty good eating.
• Valor, n. A soldierly compound of vanity, duty and the gambler's hope...
• Vote, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and wreck of his country.
• Weather, n. The climate of an hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting of official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.
• Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
• Zeus, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by some modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have have penetrated a considerable distance into the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many sacred names.

Bitter Bierce

As I've been doing for some time now, I'm reading three different books. It takes longer to finish books this way, but I like variety. The three I'm in the midst of reading -- an edited collection called Renewing Rhetoric's Relation to Composition: Essays in Honor of Theresa Jarnagin Enos, Allen Barra's The Last Coach: The Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant, and the Library of America's edition of The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs of Ambrose Bierce -- are all interesting but very different as you could probably imagine.

With the last book of the three listed, I started with The Devil's Dictionary instead of beginning with what the collection leads with -- Bierce's stories. 

I've read various definitions from what was called at the time it first came out as The Cynic's Word Book (before Bierce made his later publishers change it back to the title he wanted), but I'm going from A to Z in the complete work . 

As of right now, I've gotten up to N, and I'd thought I'd share some of my favorite definitions:

• Abnormal, adj. Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested....
• Accountability, n. The mother of caution. 
• Bacchus, n. A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.
• Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen. 
• Compromise, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.
• Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
• Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave-driver. 
• Distance, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs, and keep. 
• Elysium, n. An imaginary delightful country which the ancients foolishly believe to be inhabited by the spirits of the good. This ridiculous and mischievous fable was swept off the face of the earth by the early Christians--may their souls be happy in Heaven!
• Enough, pro. All there is in the world if you like it. 
• Folly, n. That "gift and faculty divine" whose creative and controlling energy inspires Man's mind, guides his actions and adorns his life
• Ghost, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear....
• I is the first letter of the alphabet, the first word of the language, the first thought of the mind, the first object of affection.... The frank yet graceful use of "I" distinguishes a good writer from a bad; the latter carries it with the manner of a thief trying to cloak his loot. 
• Influence, n. In politics, a visionary quo given in exchange for a substantial quid.
• Justice, n. A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service. 
• Laziness, n. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
• Mammon, n. The god of the world's leading religion. The chief temple is in the holy city of New York.
• Mugwump, n. In politics one afflicted with self-respect and addicted to the vice of independence. A term of contempt. 

I wished I would have started reading the complete version of The Devil's Dictionary decades ago. Bierce speaks to me. For grumpy bastards like me, selecting one's favorite definitions works like a personality test. 

And I'm looking forward to reading his stories based on his experiences during the Civil War since he was a veteran of numerous battles, such as Shiloh, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Kennesaw Mountain.  

A Serial Novel of Note

Today I found out about a serial novel just starting on the Web. It's titled Redwood. Mash the link and you'll be reading the first chapter.

It's a novel set in the future written from the first person point of view.

A new chapter will come out every Wednesday.

Norwegian Wood

Above is a picture of my grandmother's steamer chest. When she took the ship from Norway to America way back when, this trunk held all of her possessions.

The chest is now my sister's. In the process of dividing our parents' stuff that hasn't gone to where they live now, she got the trunk, and I got an antique kid's rocking chair from my parents, a chair I fondly remember sitting in as I read books and watched TV.

But there's a story behind the chest and my grandmother coming to America when she was very young. She came over when she was somewhere between eight and ten years old if I remember right. When she was sent to America, her parents stayed behind in Norway.

From what my mom has told me, my great-grandparents got a divorce in Norway at that time (sometime in the early 1900s), which had to be a badge of dishonor within a socially conservative Norwegian culture (think about Isben's A Doll House, for example). Apparently, they got a divorce, and my great-grandfather then married a Swedish woman as his second wife. For reasons unknown or possibly out of spite, my great-grandmother sent her daughter to the US at a young age.

From what my mom says, my grandmother landed in New York City like other immigrants, and then she traveled by train to Montana to live with her aunt and uncle, who raised sheep therre. Eventually, her new family, which also included her aunt and uncle's children, moved from Montana to Montevideo, Minnesota.

But what gets me is that my grandmother was put on a steamship not knowing any English at all. All she had was this trunk and a tag around her wrist directing the higher-ups on the ship where she needed to go. What a precarious situation, but maybe it wasn't all that uncommon. I don't know. My mom tells me that my grandma told her that she remembered people talking to her, but she had no idea what they were saying.

As my mom says, her mom wouldn't talk much about the trip or her parents because, as you can imagine, the whole deal had to be traumatic and the cause of much bitterness. Grandma, I'm told, did talk fondly about living in Norway though--the beauty of the towns and surrounding countryside, the fjords, etc.

In contrast the troubling history associated the trunk, I have good memories of this steamer chest made of Norwegian pine.

The first thing I can remember from when I was very young was hiding in this chest when playing hide-n-seek with my nephews who would often visit during the weekends.

This chest is connected to my very first memory, the first thing I remember. I hid in it and thought myself very clever. It was not only a great spot to hide, but the red synthetic fur that lines the inside was fun to feel.

I did get in trouble for hiding in the chest though. I don't remember why exactly, but it probably was because it's an antique. I didn't get put in a time-out back then (did they even have such a thing in the early 70s?), but I remember my mom scolding me.

And in another positive note, Deloras also stored her Xmas ornaments and holiday brick-a-brack in this chest at our house on 1051 Wisconsin Street, the home where they lived since the late 50s. And I associate holidays at my house with Norwegian Christmas cookies--cringla and fudamumbuckles--and gatherings where the whole family opened presents on Christmas Eve.

If you were puzzled why I was playing hide-and-seek with my nephews, that's because I'm the last of my siblings. I was one of those happy accidents, or as Virg told me one time as we drank a few beers in the 19th Hole after playing golf, "The damn rubber broke."

Because of the years separating my three siblings and me, my oldest brother has two sons who are actually older than their uncle (me).

But the strangeness of being the final kid is that I didn't get to know my grandparents just like my mom didn't know hers. Three of my four grandparents were gone before I popped out in 1971. I only met my grandmother, my dad's mom, once, and that meeting was at an old folks home (the old terminology) made of cinder block painted institutional white in rural northeastern Missouri. The only remark I remember her making to me, if I remember right, was "You're Judi's brother, right?" Then my dad shuffled me off to some waiting room-like area where I watched TV and he talked to his mom.

I didn't write the digression about my experience with grandparents (mainly lack thereof) in some attempt to milk sympathy from readers.

Rather, I'm just happy that my kids know their grandparents.

The mementos from the past--the rocking chair, the 4/10 shotgun I have of my grandfather's, etc.--are nice, but they don't beat the lived experience.