In "Alas, Babylon," The Big One drops and we see what happens

I was eight years old in the fall of 1959. We lived in the southwest Denver suburbs and my father worked at the Martin-Marietta plant further south. Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant was seven miles to the northwest. Further north were swarms of missile silos in northern Colorado, southeast Wyoming, and eastern Nebraska. During the school year, we participated in duck-and-cover drills at our neighborhood school. Nukes were a fact of life. The Cold War was in its prime. 

1959-1960 is the setting for Pat Frank's novel, "Alas, Babylon." The title (I read the 1993 HarperCollins trade paperback edition) is taken from scripture, the origin of so many book titles for classic novels. This from Revelation 18:10 in the King James Bible:

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

Randy Bragg and his brother Mark grew up in the hamlet of Fort Repose, Florida. Randy served in the Korean War and went home to live the life of a bachelor attorney. Mark went into the Air Force and was a colonel in the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. He and Randy shared a code, “Alas, Babylon,” if it looked as if World War III was about to break out. One day, Randy gets the code from his brother who sends his wife and kids to Fort Repose because it will be safer than Nebraska’s Ground Zero.

Fort Repose was like so many 1950s Central Florida small towns. Its history included Native Americans, Spanish conquistadors, Confederate troops, and rednecks. It’s sleepy, hot and humid for half the year, site of Florida natives and a smattering of Yankee retirees known as snowbirds. African-Americans were called Negroes and some unflattering names by the ruling Whites. The living was easy but also separate and unequal. Disney existed only on TV and the movies. 

Bam! As Randy Newman wrote much later in his song, "Political Science:" 

Let's drop The Big One, and see what happens

And then:

Boom goes London, boom Paree/More room for you, and more room for me/And every city, the whole world 'round/Will be just another American Town.

Newman's satiric take is closer to my Strangelove-style attitude of "WTF were we thinking?"

Fort Repose is just another American town surrounded by important Russki targets in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Miami. Boom goes Tampa and boom Miami. Nobody really knows how it started but survivors have much to deal with.

That's the great thing about Frank's novel -- he writes in detail about the daily struggles of a small town beleaguered by a Cold War turned hot. Randy is the only Army Reserve officer in town so he assumes command. He’s a good officer, mainly, although he does boss people around a bit. He also organizes a vigilante squad to go after “highwaymen,” nogoodniks who have beaten and murdered people in the town. They even hang one as a lesson to all.

The book is about survival, post-apocalyptic-style. It made me wonder how I would survive. I have no skills to speak of. Randy is a shade-tree mechanic, hunter, and fisherman. His cohorts in the town know which end of the rifle to point at deer and the occasional ruffian. They knows how to catch fish and crabs, where to find salt, which plants are edible. There’s a doctor in town and a retired admiral with his own fleet of small boats. There’s a love interest. And the ending is sort of happy.

As I read, I had to put aside my 2023 aesthetics. The Whites treat the Blacks as second-class citizens except when they need their automotive or farming skills. The attitude is not much different from characters found in Flannery O’Connor stories and William Faulkner novels. They were born into it and acted accordingly. Our family moved to Central Florida in 1964 and attitudes hadn’t changed much. My father worked on rockets at the Cape where before he had worked on the kind of missiles that rained down on the Reds in “Alas, Babylon.” Our integrated high school basketball team got into many scrapes when we ventured outside our beachside tourist town to play teams in the hinterlands. Places like Fort Repose.

If I was reviewing this book now, I’d call some of the language and attitudes archaic even racist. The book itself is solid. Frank knows how to tell a story and he did his research, not surprising when you learn a bit about his background. He was a Florida writer, too, living in a place like Fort Repose. He asked the question: what would my neighbors do if the Big One dropped? The author delivered. I read a book about nuclear war set and written in 1959, 63 years ago, a book I had never heard of. My sister Eileen sent me her copy which she already read. Not surprisingly, the cover features a bright red mushroom cloud.

Let’s drop The Big One now!

Poem for two doomed poets

On Philip Levine's birthday, a sad poem about two doomed poets from the Poetry Foundation web site. It's beautiful, really. I'll let Levine say the rest. Go to "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane."

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, captures the city between the wars

I’ve always been fascinated with Paris in the 1920s and 30s. The inter-war period. The tensions of those years add pizzaz to any book. So many writers lived and worked there. A sojourn to Paris was almost mandatory. Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce. Artists, too, notably Picasso. Discovered some others as I read “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932,” a 2014 novel by Francine Prose. The author tells her story of the 1930s and wartime occupation through the pages of imagined letters, memoirs, and journals by the book’s principals. The two main characters were inspired by real people. Gabor Tsenyi is a Hungary-born photographer who hones the craft of low-light nighttime photography as he prowls Paris streets, brothels, and bars. Lou Villars is a French woman athlete who ends up torturing prisoners for the Gestapo. Gabor is based on the famous photographer Bressai. He is best known for his pics of the demimonde who hung out at Le Monocle, the “Cabaret”–like club that attracted the city’s artists and LGBTQ crowd that dared to be cross-dressing club regulars in the thirties but risked danger when the war came. Villars is based on Violette Morris, a lesbian athlete who came under Hitler’s spell at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

The era is an attractive one for writers. Many of those who fled to Paris were survivors of the Great War and facing Great War Part 2 in 1939-45. Some 70 million residents of Planet Earth died in the Great War. It was, as historian Barbara Tuchman and others have written, the war that changed everything. Four-plus years of horror were embedded into the conscience of a generation that was tagged with the term “lost generation.” Survivors may have been lost but not as lost as the millions of ghosts who roam Ypres and Verdun and forever inhabit Europe’s psyche. An entire generation of young people was almost wiped off the planet. Small villages in England, France, and Germany lost every one of its young men. The world never got over it, nor should it.

This showed up in the work of the era’s creatives. Bressai’s famous photo, “Lesbian Couple at Le Monocle 1932,” shows a hefty woman in a man’s suit sitting next to a thin woman in a sparkly dress. The look on their faces can be interpreted many ways. To me, they look to the future with a mixture of dread and hope. It attracted the book’s author, was even the catalyst for years of research and writing. Did they stay together? Were they rounded up like other “undesirables” by the Nazis? Prose wondered too, as a similar photo by her fictional photographer is crucial to the arc of the novel. As I read the novel, I decided to look up this photographer and found his work all over the web. He captured a Paris that was both romantic and squalid.

It took awhile for me to get into the novel’s rhythm. It seemed a bit contrived at first. And then I got into the flow of the intermittent narratives. I was both a reader and a writer studying the technique as I went along. Most of the samples picked up where the other left off. But not always. The reader has to do some work to tie together the narrative threads. After a hundred pages, that became part of the book’s charm. Who is speaking, and when, and can this narrator be trusted? Don’t we always wonder if the teller of a tale is trustworthy or not?

Hair stylist at the Cancer Infusion Station

Lorna of the luxurious brown hair. The first time I saw her. Not a streak of grey in it. I knew it wouldn't last because she's right here in the Cancer Infusion Center waiting room. This is where hair goes to die so the patient can live even if it's a little bit longer. Lorna hasn't yet stopped at my station to talk about styling options or maybe a wig; we have orange and blue ones. Stylin' scarves too, and caps with funny sayings, funny to all of us anyway, women of the lost hair -- yeah me too, and mine grew back curly and seal brown with silver tips. "Kissed by the sun, I said. "Touch of grey" said my husband, a Jerry Garcia fan. "I will get by," the song goes. "I will survive." As the weeks went on I missed seeing Lorna and wondered if she'd given up. She finally came by, hair strands sticking up in a topknot and tied in a bow. Reminded me of Zippy the Pinhead from those days when hair meant everything. Lorna walked by alone, as always. "Like my hair?" She tended it with her right hand, twirled around so I could get a good look. We both laughed. I saw her weeks later, head shiny as a baby's bottom. "Just a comb-through," she said. I held up a bare hand. "Got my comb right here." For the first time, she cast her burden aside and sat in my chair. I massaged her scalp with some feel-good ointment that smells of lavender and vanilla. I feel the ridges of her skull beneath the hairless skin. Cancer started in her breasts -- they've been banished the damn troublemakers. Lorna and I reminisced about the touching that went with them. When done right, it lit us up. My touch on her bald head is one small thing, a tiny pleasure. Small things are what's left when the big things go.

You will forget things, micro-essay

You will forget things. As you age, that’s the mantra you hear from people who think they know better. Nobody tells you this: you forget how to forget. The past rolls in like the Florida East Coast waves I once surfed. That’s me on my long board walking the nose on a wave spawned by a tropical storm. I am 16 and my shoulders already are scorched by the sun. I will be riding this wave as a 71-year-old living in Wyoming’s high prairie as my dermatologist burns off a rough patch birthed that day at the beach. I am 28 making love with my girlfriend in a Colorado mountain stream. The water so cold, our skin warms from the friction of our bodies. Do you remember… starts my wife, 66, the one from the stream, and I say I cannot forget and it seems like the right thing to say but what I really mean is there is no way that I can forget, that even if we had split up during the awful times that we want to forget I could not forget how, in the shade of quaking aspens, the sunlight vibrated across your skin, your blue eyes on me. My last thoughts will be of waves and water, you and me. I will not and cannot forget. That’s old age, the truth of it.

Grandma and Grandpa were in France on November 11, 1918, when the guns grew silent

World War 1’s Meuse-Argonne offensive began on Sept. 26, 1918, and halted with the announcement of the Armistice on Nov. 11. It was the largest in U.S. military operation in history with 1.2 million American soldiers. Deadliest, too, with more than 350,000 casualties on all sides and 26,277 U.S. deaths. Many of the troops were inexperienced which probably added to the casualties. The so-called Spanish Flu was raging at the time which swelled the ranks of the soldiers being treated at American Expeditionary Force hospitals.

My grandfather, Lt. Raymond Shay of Iowa City was there serving with the Headquarters Troop, 88^th Division, U.S. Army.

Late in the day on Nov. 11, 1918, my grandmother, Florence Green of Baltimore, was a U.S. Army nurse serving at Evacuation Hospital 8 in France. She and other medical staffers still were treating casualties of the Meuse-Argonne campaign and would be for some time. Armistice Day (later Veterans Day) didn't yet have a name but here’s the entry in her diary:

November 11: Am so happy tonight to think the war is really over. I cannot believe it. Haven’t heard a gun since 11am. Great celebrating everywhere. Can almost hear the city hall in Baltimore ringing, and what a wonderful time for Paris.

The next day was Nov. 12 and she was still in France. She finally arrived back in the States March 10, 1919. She met my grandfather at Army General Hospital 21 (later Fitzsimons Army Medical Center) in Aurora, Colo. Raymond and Florence were married in 1922 and their first grandson, me, arrived on the planet on Dec. 18, 1950. Their son, my father Thomas, served overseas in the follow-up war to end The War to End All Wars from 1942-46. My mother, Anna Hett, was trained as a U.S. Navy nurse at Denver’s Mercy Hospital but the war ended before she could be shipped overseas.

More wars followed.

"All Quiet on the Western Front" not the remake we expected

Some negative reviews have come in for Netflix's remake of  "All Quiet on the Western Front." They all say the same thing, that the movie is not loyal to the book. That's true -- it leaves out some crucial scenes and adds scenes between the German and French armistice-seekers on the war's closing days. Also, the ending. The famous butterfly ending of the 1930 movie vs. this version which takes its time settling Paul Baumer's life and the armistice. He dies and the camera lingers on his young face, so young and so dead. 

I read Erich Marie Remarque's novel in the sixth grade. It wasn't a class assignment. My father had a massive library and I had a library card as soon as I could walk. Dad's World War II collection was a doozy. "Guadalcanal Diary," Ernie Pyle's "Brave Men," Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe cartoons, "They Were Expendable," "PT109." He was a WWII veteran, an infantry radioman in France, Belgium, and Germany. He also had World War 1 books, probably because his mother and father both served in that war. I was entranced by the pilots of those rickety old airplanes. I was obsessed with the Lafayette Escadrille and the "The Red Baron" Richthofen's aerial battles. I read all Nordhoff and Hall books, as  both had been pilots in The Great War. I also read their Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy. Even now, I equate their "The Falcons of France" with "Mutiny on the Bounty." Adventure books. Boys' books. They made me yearn to be a fighter pilot and Fletcher Christian. Only in my imagination.

I was a kid and really had no idea what I was reading about any war. As bodies piled up in books, I viewed that as part of the adventure. My viewpoint has changed over the decades. I never went to war, the one of my generation in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos. I was 18 when I graduated high school in 1969. I never served in the military although I was in the Navy ROTC program for 18 months. I felt guilty about my lack of service for a long time, especially in the 1980s when Reagan told us we had licked the Vietnam Syndrome. I had Viet Vet friends. I had peacenik friends. I read a lot of books about Vietnam. There always some nagging sense that I had missed out on something. How odd that seems now. 

I reread "All Quiet" prior to watching the Netflix movie. I also rewatched the 1930 movie, released just a year after talkies appeared. The book and the movie both cover Paul's recruitment and his leave when he confronts those who were so eager to send him to war. They are at the heart of the book. Paul was subject to "the old lie" in Wilfred Owens' poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est." After recounting the deadly effects of a gas attack, Owen ends his poem with this:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.

That sentiment appears in the new "All Quiet on the Western Front." It just doesn't get the starring role I expected.  

Saturday morning round-up

Election day is Tuesday. I will vote and keep my eyes open for those who would try to prevent it. As an election judge and poll watcher, I never actually feared the other side on election day. I hear tales of mid-term election judges being called in by the county clerk for briefings on what to expect on election day and what to do about it. I worked next to Republicans and we all were charged with staffing the first electronic voting machines used in the county. In the 2000s, there was a feeling by some Democrats that the e-voting machines were hooked up with the corporations who made them and they were beholding to the GOP. Both Dem and GOP election judges agreed that the system was secure. Now Republicans question the integrity of the process because their guy did not win in 2020 and their guy -- and FOX -- keep bitchin' about it. The most proactive thing we can do is vote and not let anyone keep us from our appointed task. 

Chris just went through her third round of chemo and is looking forward to the fourth and last infusion the day after Thanksgiving. We plan to give thanks on that day as our kids will both be there for the first time in a decade. The next day, Chris goes to the CRMC Cancer Center for the four-hour task. Then we can give thanks again that the chemo part of the treatment is gone and so is Chris's hair. She has a nifty new wig courtesy of the Center's gift shop. It's brown with red highlights which is kind of what my hair looked like before it turned white. She looks great in it and plans to show it off the next time she goes out in public. Yes, cancer sucks but it can also help you appreciate what you have instead of what you might eventually miss. 

I'm reading "Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age" by Annalee Newitz. Fascinating study of four lost cities: Catalhoyuk in Turkey, Pompeii in Italy, the Angkor civilization in Southeast Asia, and Cahokia of the Mississippian culture in the U.S. All advanced and crowded cities that disappeared. Not that exactly, but each of these advanced urban centers that were abandoned in different ways. We all know about Angkor Wat but that actually was a small and not very important monument in a much larger city. For five centuries, rulers built monuments to themselves but also nourished the working class that built them. Floods, drought, and mismanagement doomed the place although Cambodians still live in and around this tourist site but also spread out to inhabit all areas of the country and founded the bustling city of Phnom Penh. Early Western World explorers marveled at the site and wondered what the poor Khmer did to screw it up. Newitz explains that it was much more complicated than that and much more interesting. Cahokia is intriguing because it existed for so long and the site of an advanced culture is now East St. Louis which has a reputation of poverty and civic strife. So much of what Cahokia (1050-1350 CE) developed was geared not for the elite but for the populace of 30,000, which made in larger than most European cities of the time. This is why we read history books, right, to fill in the blanks of the things we do not know or thought we knew. Hats off to Newitz for her fine research and entertaining writing style.

On Tuesday, don't vote us back to the Dark Ages

 

Something to think about as we face this important midterm election on Nov. 8. A Republican takeover of Congress dooms our democratic republic. VOTE!

Resistance is futile. Read The Three-Body Problem trilogy before it enters the Netflix universe

Have you ever heard the term “Dark Forest” in reference to one of the universe’s big mysteries?

I had not until I read Richard Powers’ wonderful novel about an astrophysicist’s dilemma that crosses space and time in “Bewilderment.” Then I came across a novel on Kindle called “The Dark Forest” by Chinese sci-fi writer Cixin Liu, Liu Cixin in Chinese as the last name is listed first.

This concept posits that the universe is the Dark Forest. Intelligent lifeforms are making their way through the forest and are afraid. There are other lifeforms out there but what are they like? Are they powerful but helpful giant octopus-like creatures in “Arrival.” Or are they savage multi-limbed killers as in “Independence Day,” the creeps who just want humans to “die.”

As lifeforms make their way through the Dark Forest, they don’t know what they’re going to find. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to shoot first and ask questions later rather than being ambushed themselves? Forget “Star Trek” and its non-interference directive. Those strange-looking bastards on the other side of the trees are dangerous and can’t be trusted. Our very existence is threatened. Fire!

This helps explain why Earth, after sending our radio and TV signals and Voyager space probes for the last 100 years, has been met with silence. Maybe others have picked up the signals, have investigated us further, and decided that we are killers, which we are, invaders that have wiped out entire civilizations all over the globe.

In Liu’s novel, second part of “The Three-Body Problem” trilogy, scientists have made first contact with extraterrestrials. Residents of Trisolaris answer the call. Trisolarans are telepaths so everyone on their planet knows what others are thinking. When told that Earthlings speak from their mouths and tend to hide their inner feelings, the aliens assume that we are keepers of dark secrets and are dangerous. They plan to eliminate us as soon as they can get their space fleet to our solar system in some 400 years. Humans begin to plan for the encounter. Wallfacers are selected to come up with ways to staunch the upcoming alien invasion. Some Earthlings secretly ally with the aliens as they believe the aliens just might be more sensible than their earthly neighbors. They also suspect that resistance is futile, as the Borg like to say.

I read it with a dose of dark humor as it is true that humankind is dangerous and can’t be trusted. If I was a Trisolaran, I would get to earth ASAP, before we perfect interstellar travel and keen new weapons and pursue them in the Dark Forest.

Interesting to see that Netflix is turning Liu’s trilogy into a series due out in 2023. The Netflix web site says the series will debut next year. Director is “True Blood’s” Alexander Woo with “Games of Thrones” writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. In 2020, Netflix farmed out the English-language rights for the books which was only available in the original Chinese. So, if you choose, you can read the trilogy or get it on Kindle and start with the second book as I did. It can be a hard slog at times and wonderful in its moments.

I have read only two other trilogies in the sci-fi/fantasy category: “Lord of the Rings” and “Foundation.” Also, John Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.” trilogy. Dos Passos incorporates different points of view and newspaper snippets as he recounts his view of the U.S. in the post-World War I era. A neat blend of fiction and fact, a series ahead of its time. Eduardo Galeano and “Memory of Fire,” 500 years of Latin American history. Again, a wonderful mix of fact and fiction. Magical-realism is involved.

Do you have other trilogies to suggest?

If I may make a modest suggestion: start with book one when tackling a series. I’m pretty sure I missed out by starting in the middle. 

Me and MyAmigo

We cruise through the Cheyenne grocery store like angels on the wing. We ride MyAmigo scooters, tidy charged-up EVs that transports you through the valley of soft drinks and into the foothills of baking supplies and to the mountaintop of the candies you crave but say you’re buying for the grandkids who never visit. We greet other grayhairs as we pass, josh about drag racing down the aisle at 3.521 mph. I round a corner and encounter Floyd Lopez in his own MyAmigo and we adjourn to Starbuck’s for coffee and talk about Spanish declensions. I insist it’s MiAmigo and he agrees but argues that my idea will make no sense to the majority of Anglo geezers like me. He says that “MyAmigo” is the perfect Spanglish term. “Pancho used it all the time on The Cisco Kid.”

Caffeinated and informed, we return to our respective routes. We try to avoid returning to the other end of the store for items left off the list somehow. That drops the MyAmigo charge to dangerous levels, causes us to seek out a staffer to transfer us and the groceries to a fully-charged EV if one is available and not in the hands of another retiree who breezes around the store as if there was no tomorrow as there may not be. Most shoppers avoid eye contact. What we need is on top shelves. Elders who walk upright ask if they can help. Young couples too, guys in middle age who just got off work and we remind them of their parents tooling around a store in Case Grande or Fort Myers.

Check-out is odd. Cashiers are nice but young ones especially try not to look at you, as if grayness is catching. They hope you will not pay in bills and small change, or labor over a check, or redeem too many coupons clipped out of the Wednesday print ads. They move you right along as they don’t want any repeats of the old lady who yelled about how the leaking deli chicken got all over the muffins. The baggers ask to help you out but you lack any small bills and the kids won’t usually take tips but you never know. You cheat a bit by scooting outside into the lot even though the cart’s label reads “indoor use only.” Some people stop to help as you load groceries into the trunk. Some days you need it. The snow comes down, bitter winds blow. Once I forgot my gloves and it took too long to unload; spent 15 minutes in front of the car’s heater to defrost the claws of my fingers.

I drive home through the blowing snow. My son unloads my haul at home. It's done.

Miami Herald drops a word bomb on Florida governor

From today's article in the Business Insider piece about a Miami Herald op-ed about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his "Christian Nationalist shtick:”

"The governor's Christian nationalist shtick only separates us," the paper says, adding that Democrats should "counter it more boldly and bring back into their tent voters who feel that, on the issues of religion and faith, the party has nothing to say to them." Read entire article at Business Insider.

I would send you to the full Miami Herald but it has a very sturdy paywall. I already subscribe to several notable newspapers and the Herald is one but not now. Also, it sometimes drops the paywall in emergencies such as killer hurricanes. So stay tuned...

So shtick is the word of the day. You've probably heard it thousands of times. It’s from the Yiddish: Shtik, schtick, shtick, schtick. It means a “bit” or “bits of business” and usually pertains to a performance such as the one delivered to his Trumpian base every day by DeSantis.

Here are precise definitions:

Cambridge Dictionary: a particular ability or behaviour that someone has and that they are well known for (note the U.K. spelling)

Free Dictionary: An entertainment routine or gimmick.

Definitions.net: A contrived and often used bit of business that a performer uses to steal attention

All apply. I suppose you can catch the Governor’s shtick on his official web site. I just couldn’t bear to look.

A change in the Wyoming weather

It happens fast. One afternoon in September you sit in the easy chair, fan blows the sweat off your body. Next morning, you reach for a blanket against the chill that you haven’t felt since May. The heat had been getting to me. Our portable AC broke just when the August-September heat wave settled on us. Those long days, 85, 90, 95. Our house built without AC in 1960 because that was what you did, post-war building boom still roiling the prairie. It changes quickly. I turn on the furnace, open all the registers which is a funny name when you think of it. Spiders crawled through the open vents. Nothing poisonous, as far as I could tell. A Daddy Long Legs. A small brown spider (not a Recluse). Chris was concerned. “The spiders are coming! The spiders are coming!” We gave them little time to rejoice. The first burst of heated air carries with it Halloween and Christmas and those long nights of January and February. The gas jets click on and then the fan blows. I lay awake at night listening. Many nights, the heat challenging 45 and rainy. Summer is over. I am glad.

Almost as much fun discovering new novels as it is reading them

My sisters sent my wife Chris some Barnes & Noble gift cards to ease her path through chemotherapy. I went right to B&N Online and ordered three novels. Chris requested "Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald," a NYT bestseller by Theresa Anne Fowler. It sounds fascinating. The book apparently was the inspiration for the streaming series "Z: The Beginning of Everything." I watched it and was a bit disappointed and I can't really say why. I can read the novel (the book is always better!) when Chris finishes.

The story of the Fitzgeralds is high drama by which I mean terribly sad. I wrote a prose poem, "Rockets Over Fitzgerald," after watching Fourth of July fireworks from St. Mary's Churchyard in Rockville, Maryland. It was published in Poetry Hotel. 

I remembered another author with the last name Fowler as I was browsing. Connie May Fowler is a Florida native who writes beautifully, about people and about Florida, about everything really. After meeting Connie at Literary Connection in Cheyenne, I read her excellent novel, "The Problem with Murmur Lee." I ordered for Chris "How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly." I lost track of time as I read its opening section at the B&N site. It takes me back to summer solstice days in central Florida when the temp is 92 degrees at 7 a.m. and rising. 

The best batch of stories I've read in a long time is "Florida" by Lauren Groff. My favorite may be "Dogs Go Wolf" published in the New Yorker and available on audio at online when you go to the August 21, 2017, issue (I listened for free for some unknown reason). The story is about two little girls who get stranded on on an island and the creative ways they find to survive. Groff's style is captivating. What a story. I look forward to talking to Chris about it, see what she thinks of it. 

Micro-essay: Denver

Denver

When you’re gone you’re gone. That first house you bought on South Grant Street, some kids you don’t know slide down the driveway on skateboards. A stranger sits at your desk in the Broadway brick building, never heard of you, the building is a different business now, has nothing to do with the fan-belts and radiator hoses they make in the spooky factory across the street that’s now a condo complex. That dive bar where you got shitfaced after college hockey games is a fashion boutique next to a pot shop. Those softball diamonds all over town, you can watch twilight games in July with players your kids’ ages or maybe your grandkids’ ages. On one of those diamonds, you played in January’s annual Sno-ball tourney and froze your ass off. Your favorite bookstore moved across town. You and your girlfriend walked down Fillmore to the old place, it smelled of books and not coffee and the two of you found books and a quiet place to read for hours. Fourth of July at your aunt’s and uncle’s house you and your cousins almost burnt down the wooden fence with Wyoming fireworks. A procession of strangers have lived there and they keep on moving out and moving in and you don’t recognize any of them when you drive by. Camping near Grand Lake, we skip rocks in the shallow creek that grows into the mighty Colorado as it tumbles down the Rockies. Concerts at Red Rocks, you can see where you sat in the middle seats, surrounded by those with their own memories, the Eagles and The Dead, full moon coming over the mountains, lights of Denver down below. You’re not there. Days and weeks, months and years. Memories orbit like planets, find you where you are now. At the old Stapleton airport named after the KKK mayor of the 1920s, you drove to down Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard to get there. You linger outside the boundary fence, stand on the car hood to almost touch the arriving planes, hear the blast and feel the whoosh of the engines. It was 1978 on that July afternoon you first flew into Stapleton for a new job. On that day, you didn’t know it yet, but you were already gone.

Is it possible to write contemporary epistolary fiction in a world without letter-writing?

I took a chance on reading one of the Amazon Original Stories on Kindle. It was "Evidence of the Affair" by Taylor Jenkins Reid. One of the site's many offerings, I took a chance on it because it was an epistolary story, told entirely in letters. This is a dangerous genre because, number one, letters can be incredibly boring. Number two, it can be very formulaic and limits POV. Number 3, nobody writes letters any more.

That final reason makes it an historical short story because it takes place in 1976-1978. This was back before email and the Internet. People sat down, wrote a letter on paper, put it in an envelope, addressed and stamped in, drove to the post office to mailed it. You then had to wait several days or weeks or even months before a reply came. You sometimes got an instantaneous reply if, maybe you were ending a relationship. A quicker reply might come via long distance phone call and someone (maybe you) might be a few drinks into the night when you took that call and got an earful from a wounded former partner. Let me give you an example. I got a late night call, summer 1973, from my girlfriend in Boston. She broke up with me, saying there was no future in our relationship because she was going to nursing school in Connecticut and I was working at a lumber yard in Florida barely making ends meet and it looked from afar that I had no future. I was upset after saying farewell and wrote a long sappy letter that included an entire Kahlil Gibran poem. Gibran's work is very accommodating for almost any occasion. I did not get a reply.

The epistolary novel has a fine history. In 1740, Samuel Richardson wrote the first epistolary novel I studied in English class, "Pamela." It was immediately parodied by Henry Fielding's "Shamela" in 1741 and later by Monty Python. The most well-known contemporary epistolary novel is "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky and "The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Society" based on letters and telegrams to and from the female protagonist. I liked this book and the TV limited series wasn't bad. 

Reid is known for her romances and this story is one. At first, it doesn't seem so as the two main correspondents in "Evidence of the Affair" find out their spouses are cheating on them. The letters fly back and forth. They unearth letters from the cheaters in briefcases and recipe books. The drama builds and I won't ruin it for you but the ending is more dynamic than I expected and very sweet. 

What is this thing Amazon Original Stories on Kindle? Look them up on Amazon, the keeper of all things (most recent purchase: belts for my vacuum cleaner). You can sign up for Kindle Unlimited and read some for free. I do that, I have to admit, although I paid $1.99 for Reid's story. Sometimes you pay for the print edition and get the Audible audiobook version for free (or vice versa). 

I came across a new collection entitled "Warmer" which is described this way:

"Warmer," a collection of seven visions of a conceivable tomorrow by today’s most thought-provoking authors. Alarming, inventive, intimate, and frightening, each story can be read, or listened to, in a single breathtaking sitting. 

Stories include three by writers whose work I admire: Jane Smiley, Lauren Groff, and Jess Walter. The four others must be pretty good to be in such company. You can read and listen to all seven stories for free. I can anyway. These free stories are designed to get you to buy the authors' books. Sign up for Kindle Unlimited and you get the stories free along with free shipping for vacuum cleaner belts.  

PS: I have republished a story collection on Amazon, "The Weight of a Body." You have to pay for it although it's also a free offering on KU.

Jane Campbell explores the "persecution of remembering" in her Cat Brushing story collection

The cover of Jane Campbell's story collection, "Cat Brushing," shows a ringed hand sweeping across the fur of what must be a very large cat or maybe the gorgeous gray locks of one of the author's elderly women characters. It could be both as you will discover reading her 13 wonderful stories in the POV of women in their 70s and beyond. This is her first book, published in her 80th year, as it says on the book jacket. I'm nine years younger than her which puts us, approximately, in the same age cohort.  

These tales are quite personal, erotic in spots. Am I surprised that women of a certain age have erotic thoughts and sometimes more than thoughts? No, but as a person in this age group, I am impressed by the directness of the stories. It challenges the idea that women of a certain age must be handled carefully lest they fall and break a hip or leave a pot burning on the stove. It's the "I've fallen and I can't get up" woman sprawled on the kitchen floor who would be lost without her handy Medic-Alert bracelet and her male rescuers. Old and helpless.

Fuck that.

In "The Question," the narrator gulps down a dose of morphine and describes the rush that results. I figured she was a goner, in the last stages of cancer, but she's actually a feisty woman who chased after her cat on a winter night and fell on her porch's icy steps. The idea that she likes the buzz of the morphine helps us get to know this woman in a rehab center who has no intention of staying abed. Tests surprisingly reveal she has no broken bones and only sustained a few bumps and bruises. When released, she asks her male nurse if she can have a to-go portion of the opioid. He genially refuses but as we read the interaction between patient and nurse, we find that she knew him in the past and knows his dark secret. 

The writer has a sure touch in turning tales on their head. In "Kiskadee," a woman lies by a pool in Bermuda and hears the melodious song of the Kiskadee, a predatory tropical bird with a big beak designed for killing. Interspersed are memories of her "special relationship" with her father. She recalls years of touching and cuddling, sleeping together, syrupy words from the father. Story's end has a horrible twist which I won't spoil here.

Most of these women recount loves gained and loves lost. The memories are clear and immediate, no brain fog here.

I reread Campbell's second story, "The Scratch."  Nell wonders how she scratched herself, a cut that bled profusely. 

What drawers had she opened carelessly, perhaps knives rearranged, had she handled scissors?

She forgets about phone calls with her grown children. She forgets things even though she writes everything in her diary.

But it's not the forgetting that concerns her most. 

The old barriers behind which she could once shelter... they all tumble down as the years pass. Just as running upstairs becomes a lost art and skipping down becomes impossible, so the capacity to forget is lost. There is a persecution of remembering. Remembering so much. Those midnight hours, dark nights of the soul, where remorse bites hard and the past presses against you.

Nell, in her 70s, forgets how to forget. 

I too, in my 70s, have forgotten how to forget. Memories become crisp and clear, even those I want to forget. This hit me so hard. Since retirement, I've been wondering why old memories come flooding back to me. As an old person, aren't I suppose to forget things instead of them rushing back to me with incredible force? It's not like I'm bored, lazing about in a tepid pool of nostalgia. 

Still, the memories flow. 

As you climb toward retirement, friends and family urge you to be busy when work ceases and you have all the time in the world. People get bored, get sick, get careless. But that's not it at all. Memories can overwhelm your present if you are not busy making more memories. They don't tell you about the "persecution of remembering." We have to leave that up to Campbell and her fictional characters. 

I roll into the polls, switch my registration, and eagerly await the results

The Wyoming primary elections have come and gone. Rep. Liz Cheney lost to Harriet Hageman who likely will be the next lone House member from the state. She is a Trumper and we can only expect her support of his every move including a bid for the 2024 presidency. If Trump does not run, Hageman will do anything she can to promote the GOP agenda which mainly consists of demonizing Democrats and what she and her ilk refer to as the Democrat Party. They apparently see nothing democratic about liberal policies that promote free and fair elections, a livable wage, women’s right to choose, free medical care for all and other dangerous practices. GOPers love to chide us about calling our country a democracy when it is really a “constitutional republic.” It’s chilling to note that the GOP wants nothing to do with democracy as a term or as a practice.

I rollated my way to the polls on Tuesday at the Lions Park Community House. Not sure if "rollated" has made it into the dictionary but I find it’s a great term to describe how I wheel myself around on my rollator. It’s basically a walker that rolls. Mine is a red Drive Nitro Aluminum Rollator. You can find it on Amazon. Several companies now make them as more Boomers need assistance getting around without the annoying clanking that goes with traditional walker walking. In my early rollating days, I used a traditional walker footed with tennis balls which act as kind of a silencer for the walking impaired. It allows grandparents to sneak up on their grandchildren before they have a chance to run away.

I was the only one using a rollator during my 30 minutes at the polls. A gentleman in a wheelchair came in behind me and I saw him assisted by an election worker to one of the accessible voting machines. Nobody asked me if I needed assistance which, in a way, was a compliment on my perambulating skills.

There was no waiting to register. My ID was checked at the door. I went over to a friendly face and she asked me all the appropriate questions. This person is a Republican and we have served together on several non-profit boards and never once got into a fight. We have broken bread together and never feared poisoning. I told her I was switching parties from Democratic to Republican. She did the appropriate things on her computer screen, printed me out a ballot and handed it over, directing me to the bank of machines against the far wall. While I waited for a spot to open, another poll worker came to me and said I had forgotten to fill out the paperwork for switching parties. My old colleague had forgotten this step probably because this was her first time working the polls. This poll worker guided me to the Group W Bench where I was told to fill out and sign the paper on line 11. 

“It goes all the way up to 11?” I quipped. She stared. “Excuse me?” I replied "Nevermind" and went about my task. No other miscreants joined me on the Group W Bench and I was a bit lonely.

I finally got to vote. A slick process. I voted in every category because I had done some homework and knew who the loonies were. I remembered back in the oughts when I served as a poll worker for the first time. This was back in the precinct voting days, the first year for electronic voting machines. Some of my colleagues had been suspicious of this switch from paper to electrons. I had my doubts too. But the county clerk’s training crew led us through the process and it seemed bona fide to me. I’ve also served as a poll watcher for my political party. My task was tracking the registered Dem voters on a printout of county residents and keeping an eagle eye on the proceedings. There was a Republican next to me doing the same thing although he quit halfway through the day after realizing that eight of every ten voters were Republicans and the Grand Old Party was certain to retain its hegemony.

On the way out, I put my ballot into the ballot-gathering machine. This was the last step in the process, put in place after much quibbling over ballot security, voting by dead people, ballot harvesting, and other imaginary voting malfeasance. The machine swallowed my ballot, a poll worker gave me a sticker, and I left. There were some news crews out on the street questioning voters. One young man was from ABC. He interviewed the person in front of me and behind me. He probably took one look at me and thought there was no way he wanted to interview a grouchy, semi-disabled old dude rant about various topics close to the heart of right-wing conspiracy theorists. I would have fooled him.

You can view the polling results on the county clerk’s and secretary of state’s web sites. They were expected but troubling just the same. I will switch my registration before the next election. I may be living elsewhere when the general takes place in November. We rollatrists are always looking for greener pastures. Make that blue or at least purple pastures.

FMI: See WyoFile's round-up of the primary results 

Flash fiction, zeppelin style

The Loneliness of Zeppelin Denver

Zeppelin Denver was my name. Christened LZ-17 in August 1915 and only later did I get a proper name. One of many airships created in the early years of the twentieth century at the great zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen. My origin story showed promise. Finding a chum did not seem like a problem. There were so many new ships. Then came the war. We sailed off to Britain with as many bombs as we could carry. Hurled them from the gondola like Zeus's lightning bolts. Friends and potential partners were blown from the sky. LZ-24’s crew was killed but the ship stayed alive and and it motored off into a North Sea cloudbank. Engines stopped when the fuel ran out but it kept going, lifted by the winds, until it ended up in the Arctic, we suppose. Never found. He was my brother and best friend. Later, I was part of postwar reparations. The United States came to Germany's big rummage sale (all things must go!) and claimed me, naming me for an American city nobody in Germany or even the U.S. had ever heard of. I was off to America. Zep friends were built but it was not the same. My German accent got in the way. American zeps avoided me and then, in 1937, the Graf Zeppelin Hindenburg exploded and that’s all she wrote. Self-immolation was suspected, one of the first blows against Hitler, or so they say. I would not be surprised if GrafZepHin staged the farewell as he always was theatrical. It left me alone and heartsick sailing through the sky cleared of everything but clouds and aeroplanes. Many aeroplanes. They were the future and I was not. I sailed on. They kept me around through the next war, mostly as a curiosity. Spent a few years filming football stadiums from on high. But that was it. Dismantled me from the outside in. Skin peeled. Skeleton removed. Bled of helium. The heart was the last to go.

Fiction welcomes us into strange new worlds

Lisa See's latest novel, The Island of Sea Women, could have been set on a distant world. On a little known volcanic island , women have been harvesting their food from the sea for generations. They are called haenyeo. They go into the ocean year-round but only when the shaman says so. These women practice rituals for the sea goddess. They float out to likely spots, breathe deeply, and dive to the sea bed for edible sea creatures. They eat some of the catch but keep most for family and to sell at the market. Many have been lost to wicked currents or injury. They persevere through genocide and famine and family feuds.

Otherworldy, right? Reminds me of the Fremen of  Arrakis harvesting spice and fighting off sand worms. 

But the island of sea women is a volcanic island named Jeju south of the Korean mainland. The women are real and have been diving for generations. See bases her excellent novel on these women.

“Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back. In this world, the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life."

The story opens with the main character, Young-sook. We experience the culture through her life, from a child during Japan's World War II Korean occupation to 2008 as to old lady who still dives.  Her life is a series of challenges within her haenyeo clan, her family, other islanders, and invaders from Japan (World War II) and the U.S. (Korean War). See's story time travels, jumping from a present-day setting with Young-sook as a clan elder all the way back to her turbulent youth. Jeju now is a tourist hot spot with the usual assortment of clueless visitors. One of them is the granddaughter of her childhood friend Mi-Ja. Now the fully Americanized granddaughter butts into Young-sook's life and wants the real story about the conflict that shattered a friendship and sent Mi-ja off to America. The island people are survivors. Young-sook may be the most stubborn member of her clan. She resents the young woman but ends up opening up her life to her. And to us. 

Think about your image of 21st century Koreans. BTS, BlackPink and K-Pop. The bustling modern city of Seoul. The new Korean cinema, films such as Train to Busan and the Squid Game series, and comedies like Kim's Convenience about a Canadian-Korean family's convenience store. The Korean-made Korean War film Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War, may be an even more in-your-face war film than Saving Private Ryan. There is also the hermit authoritarian kingdom of North Korea which, to many Koreans, seems like another world. And is. Witness some wonderful novels about the North. My favorite thus far is The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson. It's illuminating how Americans are seen through the eyes of others. Those who know their history would not be surprised. 

The imaginary world helps us see the world in all its glory and horror.