Emily Dickinson could not stop for death but could for poetry

How did the Dominican sisters think I could understand an Emily Dickinson poem, "I could not stop for death?"

Sister Miriam Catherine: What is this poem about Mr. Shay?

16-year-old Me: Death, sister.

Sr. MC: What about death?

Me: She could not stop for it.

Sr. MC: Anything else?

Me: There's a carriage.

Sr. MC: Are you a dunderhead, Mr. Shay?

Me: Yes, Sister. Please don't smite me.

There was no smiting on that day. 

I am now smitten with Ms. Dickinson's poetry. I did not, would not, could not understand its full meaning then. I was a kid. She began writing as a youngster but her lifetime of creativity was enormous and almost unknown at the time of her death.

I turn my attention to the poet who became "The Belle of Amherst" on stage but was anything but. Since her death in 1886, Dickinson's reputation has been battled over by family, friends, and biographers. Lyndall Gordon tried to make sense of it all in his biography, "Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds." And Jerome Charyn writes of Dickinson in his 2010 W.W. Norton historical novel, "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson." You guess that this is a different kind of look at a literary legend because the cover shows Dickinson's bloomers illuminated by candlelight under her hoop skirt.

I'm only through Charyn's first section but know this is a different look at an American poet who bored high schoolers and even college English majors. 

I now know that I didn't get it when I was young. Why does knowledge come so late in life? 

It's a dangerous time to be woke to literature. Liberal arts majors are being threatened in the U.S., maybe no more so than in Florida where I came of age as a writer. If I can identify a fellowship of dunderheads, it rests in the Florida governor's office. He aims to gut everything I treasure at the University of Florida: The College of Liberal Arts, English majors, arts programs, "wokeness" in general, and the Independent Florida Alligator. As a movie hero of mine once said, "This will not stand, man."

Back to Emily Dickinson. Charyn notes in his intro that he is obsessed with her poetry and has been for decades. His first sentence in the author's note: "She was the first poet I had ever read, and I was hooked and hypnotized from the start, because in her writing she broke every rule."

I returned to her poetry and I know what I was missing. I read and reread "I could not stop for death." I couldn't get enough. I went to the Emily Dickinson Museum web site. I read about her and more of her poetry. 

I laughed when I read this on the museum's online Q&A (thanks AI): 

"Q: Is Amherst close to Boston? A: No, Amherst is not close to Boston. It is located in the western part of Massachusetts, about a 90-minute drive from Boston, which is a significant distance for a quick trip. The two locations are in different regions of the state, with Amherst being further west in Pioneer Valley."

I laughed because when I lived in Boston 1972-73, my woman friend and I hitched regularly to Storrs, Conn., to see friends. The two of us had logged some 7,000 miles the summer of '72 by thumb, ending up in her hometown of Boston. My pal Tommy and I hitched from Boston to Putney, Vt., passing just minutes from Amherst, on our way to get high with friends among the colorful foliage. I spent my career driving Wyoming and Colorado. Significant distance, indeed.

I wish I had gone. I still could. For now, I will finish Charyn's novel and read more Dickinson. I live in memory and imagination. 

Read more about Dickinson's "Secret Life" in upcoming posts.

 

Pardon me boy is this the Pennsylvania Station? No, Ormond Station, and the train is a comin'

We live in a place called Ormond Station. It is located in Central Florida on a line where Volusia County and Flagler County meet. Our mailing address is Ormond Beach. Our mail is routinely lost. Perhaps the postal delivery person is looking for a railroad station because Ormond Station's logo is railroad tracks. The roundabout located just outside our Groveside neighborhood's gates bear some fine railroad tracks on the sand-colored-brick structure that surrounds a fountain. We can sometimes hear trains rolling down a Florida East Coast Railroad line. When we are driving beachward down Grenada Avenue (Fla. Hwy. 40) and we hear the lonesome whistle blow, we know that our motoring excursion will be delayed at the railroad crossing. Grenada is one busy avenue. 

Groveside is not beside any orange groves. That's what I think of when I think of Florida groves. It is aside groves of wetland trees and bushes so I guess that counts as a grove. Developers develop hereabouts by clearcutting forests. It is easier to build without trees. The thinking is that this is Florida and greenery grows so fast you can almost watch it burst into maturity. So, build the houses, plant some trees, and in ten years you have groves. 

There used to be orange groves here. When we moved to Florida in the mid-1960s, oranges still grew. You could drive down county roads in the spring and smell orange blossoms. A beautiful sweet smell. There was a roadside store along U.S. 1 close to my new location that sold oranges and anything orange you could dream of. You could buy a bunch of citrus and ship it home to Michigan or even Wyoming. Too many hard frosts killed citrus north of Orlando. You could find groves all the way up to Ocala on the road to Gainesville. In Patrick Smith's wonderful novel "A Land Remembered," the poor schmucks settling post-Civil-War Florida, were growing oranges in the sandy soil. They needed the shade as Mr. Carrier had not yet invented A/C. 

Here at Ormond Station we expect a train any time. In our imaginations. I can see a train line running down Airport Road, from its terminus at Hwy. 40 to its end at U.S. 1. It passes Ormond Airport thus its name. Shuttlecraft not yet designed will fly you to college football match-ups around the state. The trains will also be modern, possibly a solar-powered streetcar or light rail. Other neighborhoods are being planted along the way. There are two schools along the line . I walk my neighborhood to the Groveside marker and pick up the early afternoon train. It takes me to the Ridgewood Line which travels down U.S. 1 to Jackie Robinson Ballpark, home to the Daytona Tortugas. I love a good baseball game on a spring afternoon. My wife Chris, also a baseball fan whose father once took her to Atlanta Braves games, is with me. My children, too, Kevin and Annie. We are spirits together, our little family who settled these parts back in its infancy, when we left the Rocky Mountains behind for a place in the sun, something aside a grove, a rail stop to the future here at Ormond Station.

In Percival Everett’s historical novel “James,” the whole world relies on the naming of names

I spent the past couple weeks with James. I knew him in my youth as Jim, Nigger Jim, from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” On the eve of the Civil War, Jim and Huck go on a spree down the Mississippi. In Percival Everett’s novel, “James,” Huck’s name remains the same while Nigger Jim becomes Jim and then, at long last, becomes James. No accident that these are the last lines of the book:

“And who are you?”

“I am James.”

“James what?”

“Just James.”

I guess that I should issue a spoiler alert, that the main character is speaking at the end of the novel. But you don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. You don’t even know if it’s not an imagined scene, something from the always creative mind of Everett. So I’ll leave it at that.

James is a slave on a journey, sometimes with his white pal Huck and sometimes not as he and Huck get separated. We revisit a few of Twain’s characters, the Duke and the Dauphin among them (I’m thinking of you Jason Burge, The One True Dauphin of Mississippi) and others are new creations.

But as the Kindle pages turned, I was less interested in Everett’s Twain trail as I was by what Everett was doing with his own creation. It’s crystal clear early on when James is still in Hannibal talking to other slaves about proper diction. And it’s hilarious. Slaves know how to speak white man’s English (I would say proper English but this is the South) but they also need to master slave’s English. A hilarious scene, one that caused me raucous laughs that awoke the family. Slaves must dumb down their language to make sure white people are not offended by the possibility of a smart Negro. Even language is a slaveholder’s weapon. That scene really nails down what’s at stake in “James.” If you are a slave, everything you do must conform to the white man’s image of you and the owner’s sense of mastery over you. To challenge that leads to death.

As a slave, James sneaks into Judge Thatcher’s study to read. He knows Voltaire's "Candide" and John Locke even appears to James on the trail for verbal sparring matches. This journey is so much fun that you almost forget the stakes. But not quite. As I read, I thought deeply about slavery and its continuing hold on America. We are in the midst of a fascist coup by the same white men who gave us slavery and the KKK and Auschwitz. Massa Ron DeSantis gloats over his concentration camp in the Glades and plans to open more. Trump’s White Nationalist Stephen Miller plots the creation of a white nation, one without those pesky people of color.

But back to the book. It’s clear why it won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. A work of genius. I cringed in spots but I fear that not cringing would make me unrecognizable to me and to James, Just James.

A couple things about Everett. He grew up in South Carolina, educated in Florida and Rhode Island, but went West as soon as he could, as the saying goes. He spends time and writes about the West of Wyoming and New Mexico. I look forward to reading “Walk Me to the Distance” and “God’s Country.” There’s a funny Twain quote that might have come from Everett. “I’ve only been as far West as California.” It sounds like Twain but I can’t find confirmation that he said it. He traveled in what we know as the real West: Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada, the gold-mining fields of California. But the quote has been used sarcastically by those in the inner West who say “California ain’t West.” Twain knew it. As you see in Everett’s books, he does too.

In the “James” acknowledgements, Everett writes this:

“Finally, a nod to Mark Twain. His humor and his humanity affected me long before I became a writer. Heaven for the climate; hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain.”

Always read the acknowledgements. You find gold nuggets there.

Post #4,000

A good time to ponder "The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World"

I am rereading "Love in the Ruins or The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World" by Walker Percy. He will always be a favorite of mine for his mournful yet witty 1961 novel of depression "The Moviegoer," winner of the National Book Award and considered a classic. It's well known that Percy assisted John Kennedy Toole's mother get "A Confederacy of Dunces" published. Toole left the manuscript behind when he committed suicide. Percy had many suicides in his family: his  grandfather, father, and (probably) mother. As a teen, he and his two brothers were taken in by his uncle, a poet in Mississippi. The die was cast.

"Love in the Ruins" is set in a future Paradise, Louisiana. Percy, a trained physician and one-time mental patient, spent much of his life in New Orleans, the setting of many of his novels. 

Love in the Ruins" (Open Road Media 2011 version on Kindle) was introduced to me via a reading list for a contemporary literature class taught by Phil Drimmel at Daytona Beach Community College in 1973-74 At the time, I was returning to college after two years as a college dropout and survivor of the 1969 Selective Service Draft Lottery (#128). A 1969 high school grad, I had failures  behind me as a biology major and as a Navy midshipman. I traveled some and lived in an educated northern city where I thought I might be a nursing student like my girlfriend but decided to break with the girlfriend and return to Florida and pursue the lucrative career as a fiction writer. The joke was on me, of course, but along the way I read plenty of good books. 

Percy's dark humor was a good match for the time as I also was entranced with the books of Vonnegut, Heller, and Kesey. I read Rolling Stone mainly for its gonzo journalism and National Lampoon for its wicked humor. And, like Percy's character, I was also a bad Catholic, renouncing the title of Mr. Catholic conferred on me by the Knights of Columbus in Daytona Beach at our Catholic high school graduation awards ceremony. A 50-dollar U.S. Savings Bond came with it, a little something to help with my education or writing career or maybe even some bad choices.

"Love in the Ruins" 1973 was a different read that "Love in the Ruins" 2025. I didn't really get it when I was 22. I liked the satire of this imagined future and psychiatrist Dr. Tom More's journey. I was entranced by his Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer which reads the state of a person's soul and later is fine-tuned to read a person's mental imbalances. I was a bit creeped out by More's middle-ager's sex drive, my prudish Mr. Catholic eclipsing my own yearning for community college women. 

So I didn't get it all then. But now, I decided to pay attention to "another person's voice." That's what Borges told his students when they asked why they should read the books of others. 

This Bad Catholic is still reading this 1971 novel about an imagined Bad Catholic. I've been thinking a lot about this subject especially since Pope Francis's death. Just what is a Bad Catholic these days? Is it someone who religiously obeys every tenet of Catholic doctrine? Or all those questioners like Tom More, all those I knew from the 10:30 Catholic Community in Denver. Dutiful questioners all. 

Percy needs my attention, especially now. I am a bad Catholic living near the end of the world. A pope with the heart of St. Francis has died. The Antichrist is in the White House. Books from my past speak to me.

The book's July 3 section recounts a day in The Pit, the slang for the hospital's weekly Q&A among physicians and students. Dr. More speaks of his lapsometer. Meanwhile, a rival has arrived and hands out copies of the doctor's new lapsometer which disturbs its creator. 

As Dr. More says: "This device is not a toy. It could produce the most serious psychic disturbances... If it were focused over certain frontal areas or region of the pineal body, which is the seat of selfhood, it could lead to severe Angelism, an abstraction of the self from itself, and what I call the Lucifer Syndrome: that is, envy of the incarnate condition and a resulting caricature of the bodily appetites."

All hell breaks loose in The Pit. Male and female students glom on to each other. A professor admires the beauty in a male student's face. Fistfights break out. 

Human appetites are unleashed with the predictable results. As one of the doctors tells More: "Your device has triggered a mass hysteria. Like the St. Vitus's Dance in the Middle Ages. These are strange times." 

Indeed. Maybe it takes a Bad Catholic to write about strange times.

I am at the 71% mark on Kindle. I will finish this book. 

The Irish keep defining dark comedy in books and movies

Blame my errant imagination.

As I read "Glorious Exploits," a new novel by Irish writer Ferdia Lennon, I kept hearing Roddy Doyle. Not that Lennon is copying Doyle's distinctive Irish patter, but the way the two main characters spoke and approached life conjured Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy, specifically "The Commitments." Jimmy Rabbitte's mission is to bring the soul music of Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, and Otis Redding to 1990 working-class Dublin. The mission is doomed from the start but boy is it a fun ride. 

In "Glorious Exploits," unemployed potters Lampo and Gelon want to stage a Euripides play in 412 BCE in  Seracuse, Sicily (Syracuse now. in both Sicily and N.Y.). They decide to enlist a cast of starving Athenian warriors whose invasion has been defeated and the captured, starving, warriors imprisoned in a dismal rock quarry. Why starving Athenian players? Because the duo's favorite poet is Euripides of Athens and these Athenians are the only ones in Seracuse and they just happen to know The Master's latest work that includes Medea and The Trojan Women. Their quest is doomed, of course. But boyo, it's a fun ride, no bollix.

Irish writers tingle my Irish genes. I have never been to my grandfather's country nor to his rural county of Roscommon. But I've read their best writers and they live in me. Doyle, Yeats, Maeve Binchy, Flann O'Brien, James Joyce all tell wonderful stories grounded in Irish wit and lore. The Irish story is riven with heartache. The latest Irish-set movie, "The Banshees of Inisherin," focuses on a long male friendship that breaks up for unfathomable reasons and leads to tragedy in 1923. There are laugh-out-loud moments, a dose of charm, memorable Celtic music, and then the ending when doom shows up. Meanwhile, the Irish Civil War, where neighbor kills neighbor, wages across the newly-formed country. These two friends' relationship is doomed. But the telling is marvelous. 

It's the voice, nurtured over the centuries. Lennon has found it. In an interview, he says that he wanted to make sure that the book did not have that Merchant Ivory voice of serious dramas of the Classical Age. He succeeded. Lampo and Gelon are  Sicilian-Irishmen on a lark, spending most of their time chatting over flasks of suspect wine at Dismas's place. Must hand it to Lennon. Many sickening things going on in Seracuse. Wine is the only answer. But the author describes in detail the wine they drink and you will thank Dionysus for the local Tiki Bar (we have several here in Ormond Beach). It's illuminating to hear lines of Euripides from the lips of emaciated Athenians, all wearing leg shackles, dressed in ill-fitting costumes and gowns. There is a performance and I won't tell you how it ends once the curtainless stage is cleared. And there is a surprise ending which is very sweet.

I have to admit that the book's cover grabbed me. It's a traditional bust of the historian and philosopher Herodotus with googly eyes. 

Lennon was the subject of a Q&A interview in the Aug. 31, 2024, Observer. I include an excerpt here because it speaks to Ireland’s rich literary tradition and info about how contemporary Irish writers are supported by their Arts Council. I worked with writers for 25 years at the Wyoming Arts Council and for two years assisted with creative writing fellowships at the National Endowment for the Arts in D.C. It’s instructional in a time when the NEA, the NEH, and the Institute of Museums and Library Services are under the gun by Trump, Musk, and their techie minions who wouldn’t know James Joyce unless you wacked them on the head with a hardcover edition of “Ulysses.”

The Guardian's book critic wrote a review of "Glorious Exploits." Header: "Uproarious am-dram in ancient Sicily." I had to look up am-dram and it's British slang for amateur drama, those plays put on by your local community theatre.

From the Guardian:

Q: How do you explain the current wave of successful Irish novelists? 

A: I remember that when I was a student, James Joyce’s house was five minutes up the road: just seeing that plaque, there’s something nice about having that literary history celebrated around you. On a practical level, the structures in Ireland make it easier for writers. An Arts Council grant helped me write this book. I wasn’t in any way established, but you could submit a work in progress to a panel of your peers and if you’re lucky, you might get money that will give you a couple of months that could be the break. I feel part of the burgeoning moment in Irish literature has to do with the financial crash. A whole generation was devastated, in Ireland maybe more than most. There were no jobs, so you felt freer to do what you wanted, even if it made no money; I started writing in Granada [in Spain] while unemployed.

Discovering obscure maladies just one of many reasons to read John Dufresne’s “My Darling Boy”

Reading contemporary fiction has many rewards.

First, you get a whopping good story.

Second, when the writer knows their stuff, you feel it in your bones. This writer can write!

Third, you never know when you might run across a mysterious malady that might be one that you could have, really, personally. Alerted, you check it out.

Since Dufresne obviously delights in the odd, let’s talk about Dupuytren’s Contracture. In “My Darling Boy,” protagonist Olney Kartheizer mentions this malady of the hands as he contemplates a character in a story he might write for an imaginary family.

I thought, “I might have that.” As Johns Hopkins describes it on its web site:

Dupuytren contracture (also called Dupuytren disease) is an abnormal thickening of the skin in the palm of your hand at the base of your fingers. This thickened area may develop into a hard lump or thick band. Over time, it can cause one or more fingers to curl (contract) or pull sideways or in toward your palm. The ring and little fingers are most commonly affected.

Hopkins includes a video and photos. The contracture makes it hard to cut steak, hold hands with a loved one, and write a thank-you note. People over 50 from a Northern European background (it’s sometimes referred to as “Viking’s hand”) are the most susceptible. I viewed the video and thought, “I definitely have that.” So I’m calling my primary care physician to refer me to a hand doctor.

Dufresne is a writer who does his research so it’s hard to imagine he just pulled this out of thin air. There’s a reason to mention an infirmity that makes it hard to write or type with all fingers. It’s hard to write, period.

After many novels, story collections, and writers’ self-help books later, Dufresne has his craft well in hand.  

“My Darling Boy” is funny as hell and it will break the heart of any parent. It broke mine.

Olney’s mission is to rescue his son Cully from an opioid addiction. He might want to swim the Atlantic Ocean or fly to the moon instead. If you have experience with addicted children or any addicted loved ones, the first message you get at an Alanon meeting is “you have to let them fail.” That comes from AA too. At some point, there is nothing you can do that won’t take you down too. Tough love, I guess.

Olney won’t listen. He may be made of sterner stuff (offspring of Vikings?) but he isn’t. He loves Cully. Olney’s job at the Anastasia (Fla.) Daily Sun has been downsized from staff writer to book reviewer to copy editor to obit writer and then out the door. He is divorced and Kat, his wife, is remarried and in another town. He is the Elwood P. Dowd of Anastasia, stopping to talk with strangers and befriend them if possible. They become his cohorts in the search for Olney that takes him through the underbelly of Florida. And if you don’t think Florida has an underbelly, you ain’t looking out the window as you crisscross the state. Seedy motels, junkies on street corners, abandoned mini-malls with weed-choked lots. Oh, and street corner kiosks for time-shares. All there if you look. I always looked for underbelly when I traveled across Wyoming. I found plenty (no time-share kiosks in Rawlins though).

Dufresne has so much fun noticing. Maybe that’s why his work is included in the “Miami Noir” anthology (1 & 2) edited by Miami resident Les Standiford, a Ph.D. grad in creative writing from UU and once a seasonal park ranger in the Beehive State. Dufresne can be noir but he has so much fun with word play. The proprietor of a rundown motel uses malapropisms which wordsmith Olney shows mercy and only occasionally corrects.

The names of his small towns are wonderful. Melancholy is where his ex-wife lives and is the scene of much of the novel’s second half. At book’s end, Olney and his pal Dewey are off to find Cully. They come to a crossroads along one of those pine-straddled secondary roads. One way takes them to Gracious and the other to Whynot. come to a crossroads for Gracious and Whynot. Guess which one he takes?

Dufresne’s not Southern-born but he got here as quick as he could. He teaches creative writing at Miami’s Florida International University. He keeps company with Florida’s riotous writers. He shares the pages in “Naked Came the Manatee” with “Florida’s finest writers,” so says the New York Times Book Review. In it with Dufresne are Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, Edna Buchanan, Dave Barry, and Carolina Hospital.

I read Dufresne stories before I tackled this novel. Dufresne’s name often comes up with other Southern Gothic fiction writers such as Lewis Nordan who grew up in Itta Bena, Miss. I once worked with Nordan and, after hearing him speak to a group of writers, realized I had to read all his books. He blends the tragic with the hilarious which doesn’t seem possible until you read “Wolf Whistle,” a novel of the notorious Emmett Till murder. Read it and see.

But first, Dufresne’s “My Darling Boy.”

The ballad of Baba the Thin Man and the Good Ship Cameronia

My sister sent me a packet of stuff she cleaned out of her attic. In it, I found a printout from The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. I took it from there.

My maternal grandfather, Irish immigrant Martin Hett, boarded the S.S. Cameronia on a late May afternoon, 1915. He was 15. The ship was five years old. Spiffy little vessel, the Anchor Line, flew the British flag, built in Glasgow. 10,963 gross tons, 515 feet long, 62 feet wide. Top speed 17 knots. Two masts and two funnels, steel hull with four decks. Carried 1,700 passengers, 250 in first class, 450 in second class, and 1,000 with Grandfather in third class. Port of departure: Liverpool. Port of arrival: New York City. Arrived with all hands June 7, 1915.

RMS Lusitania: First British four-funneled ocean liner, called an “ocean greyhound” by the Cunard Line, six passenger decks carried 2,198 including almost 600 in sumptuous first-class compartments, Launched June 7, 1906; sunk on its voyage from New York by Germany’s SM U-20 on May 7, 1915 with loss of 1,197 souls, some bodies found floating, some washed up on Irish beaches, some just disappeared into The Deeps. A Vanderbilt was among the dead. 

Grandfather was originally booked on the Lusitania along with more than 1,000 other third-class passengers. Now shipless, Grandfather had to hang around the Liverpool docks looking for an alternate booking. Apocryphal family stories have him booking steerage on another ship that is also torpedoed and sunk. We like this because we can tell listeners that our teenage Grandfather tempted fate during the war but made it to America after all. Grand tale, no?

I don’t know why I keep calling him grandfather. As a precocious American toddler, a future English major and writer, I called him Baba so everyone else did. My cousins called him Gramps. My father, his son-in-law, called him Mart. Mom called him Dad.

Not sure what Liverpool looked like in spring 1915. My guess is that it looked a lot like the post-war city of 1919-1920 in the first episodes of “Peaky Blinders.” The Great European War was wrapping up its first year with hellish fights in France and Belgium and the Battle of Gallipoli in far-off Turkey. The war in what we now call the Middle East doesn’t get much movie time except for “Gallipoli” and “Lawrence of Arabia” but it was crucial to what came after and the fate of The Good Ship Cameronia.

Baba made his way from Ellis Island to Chicago and in 1917 worked on the El with his brother.

In 1919, David W. Bone’s book “Merchantmen-At-Arms: The British Merchants’ Service in the War” was published. An experienced merchant seaman and author, Bone explores in great detail the war at sea. He relives the April 15, 1917, sinking of the troopship Cameronia in Chapter XII: 'THE MAN-O'-WAR 'S 'ER 'USBAND'. The ship carries almost 3,000 troops to Egypt. You can read the full text at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31953/31953-h/31953-h.htm#. It features drawings by Muirhead Bone, an etcher and watercolorist who was a war artist in the First and Second World Wars. Here are excerpts:

An alarmed cry from aloft—a half-uttered order to the steersman—an explosion, low down in the bowels of the ship, that sets her reeling in her stride!

The upthrow comes swiftly on the moment of impact. Hatches, coal, shattered debris, a huge column of solid water go skyward in a hurtling mass to fall in torrent on the bridge. Part of a human body strikes the awning spars and hangs—watch-keepers are borne to the deck by the weight of water—the steersman falls limply over the wheel with blood pouring from a gash on his forehead. . . . Then silence for a stunned half-minute, with only the thrust of the engines marking the heart-beats of the stricken ship.

*****

Uproar! Most of our men are young recruits: they have been but two days on the sea. The torpedo has gone hard home at the very weakest hour of our calculated drill. The troops are at their evening meal when the blow comes, the explosion killing many outright.

*****

Many of the life-boats reach the water safely with their heavy burdens, but the strain on the tackles—far beyond their working load—is too great for all to stand to it. Two boats go down by the run. The men in them are thrown violently to the water, where they float in the wash and shattered planking. A third dangles from the after fall, having shot her manning out at parting of the forward tackle. Lowered by the stern, she rights, disengages, and drifts aft with the men clinging to the life-lines. We can make no attempt to reach the men in the water.

*****

It is when the most of the life-boats are gone we realize fully the gallant service of the destroyers.

*****

We are little more than clear of the settling fore-end when the last buoyant breath of Cameronia is overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to the debarking of the last man. There is no further life in her. Evenly, steadily, as we had seen her leave the launching ways at Meadowside, she goes down.

Many of the troops were rescued by destroyers Nemesis and Rifleman.

Baba loved his ice cream. The Thin Man died at 90.

P.S.: There was another S.S. Cameronia built by the Anchor Line that sailed on its maiden voyage in 1921. It too was requisitioned as a troopship at the outbreak of World War 2 and took part in the 1942 invasion of North Africa, was torpedoed and towed to Algiers for repairs. She was the largest troopship to participate in Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944. She carried passengers to Palestine in 1948. Scrapped in 1957.

This aging M.F.A.-trained writer vs. Copilot's A.I. mind

This is my version of a prose poem that I dashed off late last night. Maybe it's not a prose poem. A ramble, maybe, or just a burst of words that flew out of my head. I've been doing that a lot lately. Words bursting from my mind with very little rewrite. It's fun, really, just to let the words flow. Freewriting is what I used to call it when teaching college composition. I would tell my students just freewrite for 10 minutes and then let's see if anyone wants to read their pieces. Don't think about it -- just write! Do as I do. And I would write for 10 minutes about any darn thing I wanted. Things like this:

So what do you think of Florida my old friends ask. I think what is it they want me to say that I find it the most magnificent spit of land in the U.S. of A.? They are friends so I can't lie. I find it confusing after 46 years elsewhere many elsewheres. Warmer than my recent home Wyoming but confusing. Old landmarks no longer exist or they exist in puzzling forms. The beach seems less magnificent maybe because it’s so managed. The 60s and 70s we drove the wide low-tide beach any time day or night. We drove high tide too with all the attendant risks. Mostly we were pushing Yankees out of the soft sand and sometimes they paid us because they were so grateful that their 1968 Buick LeSabre did not get gobbled by the salty-sea. We surf as the sun peeks over the flat line of the horizon. A tortoise surfaces beyond the breakwater and we hope it’s not a shark. The waves are surfable but just barely and it’s OK because there always is tomorrow and tomorrow after that. My old rental west of the interstate is now a development and the beat-up two-lane road is now named for a gated community called Tymber Creek and yeah that Tymber with a Y and all the timber cut down for new houses says thank you alphabet. On Hartford Ave my father is not out by the street, dressed in shorts and flapping button-down, with beer in hand, yelling at the surfers to slow down. I go to a funeral for a high school friend last week and the widower a guy who was my classmate and teammate and relies on a wheelchair post-stroke looks up and says, “You look just like your old man.” And I take it in stride because I do that’s a fact and I’ve heard that the old friend is incapacitated and it is not true not true at all. We share quips about our conveyances, him his fancy wheelchair and me my fancy spine-assisting e-scooter. We are a fine pair of ballplayers 1969 and we make scholarship choices and it works out for him and he returns hometown and I’m cast off into the cold and I don’t regret it now but I did hundreds of times. Our links to past lives are pulled until they almost don’t exist. I tell my new friends: Yes, this place is too crowded and this is a voice from the Capital City of the nation’s least-populated state. It’s a place where newcomers my students from Torrington and Hanna and Meeteetse say THE CROWDS!!! THE TRAFFIC!!! and we city-born ones say it will grow on you boys and girls it will grow. So what do you think of the new Florida my green-eyed senior citizen? I open the bedroom window, hear the waves breaking at night. The waves. 

MS Copilot rewrite: 

My old friends ask what I think of Florida now. After 46 years elsewhere, I'm confused. It's warmer than Wyoming but different. Old landmarks have changed or vanished, and the beach feels less magnificent because it's so managed. In the past, we drove on the wide low-tide beach anytime, even at high tide with risks. We helped Yankees stuck in the sand, sometimes for a fee. We surfed as the sun rose, hoping to spot tortoises, not sharks.  

My old rental is now a development, and the two-lane road is named after a gated community called Tymber Creek. Hartford Ave has changed too; my father no longer yells at surfers. Last week, I attended a funeral for a high school friend. The widower, a former classmate now in a wheelchair, remarked that I look like my father. We joked about our conveyances, reminiscing about our scholarship decisions from 1969.  

Living here in Florida, I tell my new friends it’s crowded, especially compared to Wyoming. But I hear the waves breaking at night, and that remains unchanged. 

MS Copilot is not wrong but it's bland is it not? It just doesn’t get some things. Surprisingly, it does get other things. I thought about breaking up my big block of type into separate paragraphs. Copilot detected the change and did exactly that. AI scares me a bit. There are times, usually late at night when I am writing things down, when I wonder why I write at all. Really, why?

Happy New Year: Fear and Loathing in 2025 America

A friend once asked me to name my favorite writers. It's a long, long list, but I gave him the top five: Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Flannery O'Connor, and Hunter S. Thompson. Fine writers all.

My friend who shall remain nameless made an astute observation: "But you don't write like any of those authors." 

A fair point. I don't write like any of them. But how could I? These writers had their own styles that are much admired and frequently copied. That's what beginning writers do: imitate their maestros. But you eventually move on to find your own voice if you stick with it. I've stuck with it and crafted my own style and it apparently has few fans in the publishing world but that's life in the fast lane. 

I haven't given up and I'm called to write for a number of reasons that make up my 74 years. My parents read to me and I gobbled up Yertle the Turtle and Winnie-the-Pooh. I read cereal boxes at the breakfast table and billboards as I peered out those big windows in post-war automobiles. I wrote stories for my third-grade teacher Jean Sylling and she put one up on the bulletin board. It was about aliens in a flying saucer landing in my Denver backyard. I was embarrassed but also thought it a bit grand, a story I wrote put up for all my classmates to see. 

My father the accountant had a big library and I read through many of them without really understanding what was going on. My mother usually had a baby in one arm and a book in the other. That's who introduced me to "Catch-22." She read and laughed and I was curious but was only 11 and not interested enough until I was in high school and close to draft age and Heller's novel haunted me and made me laugh. I turned on my chums to the book and its hilarity resonated with them but we rarely talked about the war part. 

Strange happenings were all around and I soaked them in but did not write about them. My parents and eight brothers and sisters were all distinctive entities and I inherited their nuances. My forebears visited my dreams. I attended Catholic School and irony and metaphors surrounded me but I was not aware of it until later, much later. I watched "Get Smart," "The Monkees," and the evening news and they all kind of blended together. Sex was a puzzle that we Catholic teens were left to figure out on our own and it's still a work-in-progress. 

My childhood and teenhood were all precursors to hard lessons to come. I really thought I had it made at 18 and the world was my oyster although I'd never eaten an Atlantic Ocean oyster as I surfed in that salty sea whenever I didn't have to take care of my siblings or go to school or go to work to afford that school. I dated the most beautiful creatures on Planet Earth but they might as well have been the imaginary aliens that landed in my yard in my third-grade story. 

Speaking of alien life forms: I am no closer to understanding the human condition than I was in the third grade. I refer to recent happenings in the U.S. of A. It is past time to revisit Thompson's Fear & Loathing chronicles and Yossarian's naked self and Billy Pilgrim's time jumps and the residents of Macondo and O'Connor's Misfit. I may not fully understand them but they live inside me every second of every day.

How does the fog come in on the day after Christmas?

The fog comes/on little cat feet

Thought of this Carl Sandburg poem as I sat watching the ocean as fog crept in. Cats weren't on my mind as much as the view from Tom Renick Park in Ormond-by-the-Sea. My visiting daughter stood beside me. Waves rolled through the fog and crunked on the shore. The surf wasn't bad. Rollers breaking outside but you could ride them out of the fog like a vampire surfer. Three young surfers appeared suddenly, boards under arms, walking north on the beach. No wetsuits. Gotta admire those guys. Two days ago there was sun and a bit of wind and all the surfers wore wetsuits. Must be the wind. The fog today traveled on a light north breeze. We were shielded by the adjacent condo high-rise. Still, tiny mist dabs fell on my exposed legs and dotted my windbreaker. I kept expecting a cat to appear but the only sound was traffic along A1A and kids on winter break cavorting in the playground. No way to hear little cat's feet. I imagined it just the same.

The sea calls my name

Wind from the ancient sea

A hurricane-force wind blew down the pine onto my roof on a February day. The house shook and I looked out the front window to see the pine cantilevered from the ground to the roof. Damn it’s Super Bowl Sunday and I have a game to watch but that’s how it is in Wyoming where there are plenty of mighty winds but no hurricanes. Like in “Oklahoma” where “the wind comes sweepin’ ‘cross the plains,” in Wyoming, the wind comes sweeping across the Gangplank of the Laramie Range right through Cheyenne and on to Nebraska. Wind from an ancient sea, nothing to stop it but my tree and my roof and a limited imagination.

We slept with bedroom windows wide in the middle of winter. Furnace so efficient we cranked it down but were still warm as toast in our beds. I came to bed late, Chris already sleeping, and the wind would ruffle the dainty curtains etched with palm trees. The wind lulled me to sleep. Trees might come crashing down or maybe just big branches but this was Wyoming and trees were scarce and far between. As I fell asleep, I imagined the wind with a salt tinge, fresh from the ocean, traveling the thousand yards from the beach to our little house and through the wide-open jalousie windows and the beat-up screens and into my memory where it remains.

And last night, I heard the ocean while reading in my house a short walk away from the Atlantic. It’s wide, the ocean, wider than Wyoming and the entire West with its gangplanks and sweeping plains and rock-ribbed cliffs. I threw open the window and realized the ocean was kicking, stirred up by some force beyond the horizon. It was loud, as if waves were breaking at my tympani. I rushed to bed, tucked myself in, memories of the surf kicking up and into my teen-age room, promise of big waves tomorrow, surfing with my brother, gone these ten years, the sea calling us as if it knew our names.

Winter is coming and it's time to stockpile soup for a nasty 2025

I blame Max Brooks.

Yes, the guy who wrote “World War Z” and the excellent graphic novel, “The Harlem Hellfighters” (artwork by Caanan White).

In his 2020 book, “Devolution,” Brooks combines a gigantic eruption of Mount Rainier and a Sasquatch invasion and civil war and the bumbling of clueless techies. All hell breaks loose.

Most people are woefully unprepared because we are Americans and live for the moment and ourselves. We do not stockpile food and supplies like the LDSers and Preppers. Why bother? Nothing’s gonna happen.

In “Devolution,” residents of the wired Greenloop community high in the scenic Washington state mountains must find ways to do without grocery deliveries by drone, solar power, and cell connections as they struggle to survive. The elderly artist in the co-op knows how to grow spuds from potato eyes and how to trap and dissect rabbits for a yummy stew.

I was thinking about that while staring at the canned soups at Publix. Look at all of those cans. They don’t need refrigeration. They don’t really need to be cooked as they are MREs. So, acting on instinct and paranoia, I grabbed a bunch of Progresso soups. You don’t even need a manual can opener as you can open the can yourself even if you have difficulties with aging hands as I do. I imagine that all of the refrigerated food is eaten or spoiled. We have long since eaten all the packaged crackers and cookies and snacks.

Soup will save us. I grabbed a dozen cans. Piled them high in the cart. When Chris caught up with me, she surveyed my shopping cart and asked, “Why all the soup?”

“Winter is coming.”

“This isn’t ‘Games of Thrones’ “

“Winter, it’s still coming.”

“I know. But not this week. And we have a fridge and freezer filled with food.”

“People are talking about a civil war. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”

“You watched ‘Ghostbusters’ again?”

“But what if…”

“What if what?”

A crowd gathered by the soups. People stared at us, and then at the beautiful red-and-white cans of original Campbell’s, tiny tributes to Andy Warhol. Some wanted to get their own soup to stockpile for a looming disaster such as one the USA will face on Jan. 20, 2025.

Chris, alas, had her way. I put back most of the soups. We kept Campbell’s chicken noodle and Progresso creamy tomato and basil.

The rest of the shopping trip was uneventful. I managed to slip in a box of saltines and boxes of Band-Aids, the large kind, the kind you would use for post-apocalyptic wounds. I checked out and went home to continue reading “Devolution,” large-print edition.

And I had to ask myself: What if?

The biopsy van stops here

Crash

Grief clouded my sight and

I rear-ended the van bearing biopsies

Bound for the cancer lab, one of them snipped

From my wife. The rear door flew open

I expected an avalanche of plastic bags, little slips

Of skin, viscous liquids, knobby tumors. But

nothing. And then a blooming flower, pink and white, on

a long green stem grows through the open door.

Out of the open door amidships

More blooms, others bright with purples and white

And oranges, many colors, fanciful shapes.

I knew then everything would be all right, there

Were no ugly lab-bound surprises, just a field of

Flowers at their peak, gloriously and forever alive.

We were readers once, and young

Chris, Annie, and I took in “Dune 2” at the Capitol City Digital Cinemas LUXX Studio Theater. It’s new. Not quite as fancy as the ARQ Theater and a step up from one of the boring standard spaces. We sat in handicapped seating in the second row. There’s a first row but you have to recline and bend your neck to take it all in. The place wasn’t packed although there was a chatterbox who sat a few rows behind us. We took him out with one of those wicked Fremen bazookas. I enjoyed the movie, thankful that the story moved along quickly and I didn’t notice the passing of 180 minutes. Long movies used to have an intermission. That’s gone the way of Ben Hur’s chariot. I plan to write a nasty letter to someone about this.

In my youth (early 1970s), I was a Frank Herbert fan and read “Dune” and “Dune Messiah.” Many of my friends read the books. We were readers, absorbing Vonnegut, Heller, and Tolkien, even Heinlein. My roommate was a former outlaw biker from Milwaukee who had to leave his hometown for some reason he didn’t want to share. My landlord was a friend who lived next door in a matching concrete block house. He worked in construction. His roomie was my brother who also worked construction – there was a lot of it in Daytona Beach those days – and he eventually got fed up with banging nails and joined the USAF. I worked as an orderly in the county hospital by night and attended community college by day. We all were readers and enjoyed talking about books over beer and weed. On weekends, we were in and on the water.

“Lord of the Rings” was probably the favorite. Fantasy and adventure, cool characters like the Ents, Orcs, and Gandalf. We really had no sense that Mordor was created from Tolkien’s war memories. We knew about the war origins of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” because he writes about it in the introduction. War had been on our minds quite a lot those days. I had not yet read the great novels by Vietnam vets as they didn’t yet exist. I had no concept of what war could do to the psyche. Tolkien fought in the far-off Great War and Vonnegut (and my father) were in the now-ancient war against totalitarianism. Those battles may loom large as this election season approaches.

“Dune” was a favorite because of the turmoil of Paul Atreides and the giant sandworms of Arrakis. That was the part of “Dune 2” that thrilled me and I could watch again. The Fremen and Paul ride the sandworms! Amazing special effects. Our seats shook. This was also my favorite part of the novel, Paul and the Sandworms. Herbert did a great job creating them and Denis Villenueve and crew recreated them wonderfully. These characters and creatures invented by writers and recreated on the screen became a part of us, a part of me.

One other result of all of this reading. We were steeped in satiric humor and (I haven’t yet mentioned “Catch-22”) the ridiculousness of being human. Billy Pilgrim reacts (or he doesn’t) as he time travels through absurdity. Yossarian does everything he can to cheat death. He is flummoxed at every turn. Paddling in a small boat from a small island in the Med to neutral Sweden may seem crazy until Yossarian finds out his tentmate Orr has accomplished it. He ridicules Orr throughout, wants to bonk him on the head for his endless fiddling with the tent stove and his absurd stories. He won’t fly with Orr because he crashes all the time. Turns out, that was Orr’s way of practicing for his desertion. Yossarian runs away in the book and sets out on a tiny dinghy in the movie. I thought it was unfortunate that in the last episode of Hulu’s “Catch-22,” Yossarian flies off on yet-another mission in a B-25.

I really liked “Masters of the Air.” I did wonder in one episode what Yossarian might make of the Bloody Hundredth. On one mission to Munster, only one of the unit’s planes makes it back to base. Earlier, we see others on fire and many airmen in their chutes trying to escape. The novel’s Yossarian spends three years in combat on 55 missions. His commanding officers want to make pilots fly 80 missions which means Yossarian may never get home. He runs.

Flying 80 combat missions may seem outrageous. Rosie in “Masters” flies his 25 missions and is cleared to go home. He tells his C.O. he will stay on to lend his experience to the new, untested pilots. The C.O. then tells him that the men will have to fly more missions and keep flying. They will be targets, a lure to bring up the Luftwaffe to get shot down by our swift long-range fighter planes like the  P-51 Mustang. The C.O. says something like “we plan to sweep the Luftwaffe from the skies for the coming invasion.” Rosie flies 52 missions and survives.

They were brave and many died. It does remind me of Yossarian’s observation: “The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”

Elmore Leonard: great stories, memorable characters, and snappy banter

There’s magic in Elmore Leonard’s writing. In his novels, he tells a whopping good story and entrances the reader with the banter among characters. I can’t get through one of his books without laughs and a few sighs. Audiobooks do justice to his work and I’ve passed a few engaging hours with “Out of Sight” and “Tishomingo Blues,” among others that I’ve listened to driving through miles of Wyoming sagebrush. The wide-open spaces figure in Leonard’s early writing, when he wrote westerns as stories (“3:10 to Yuma”) and novels (“Hombre”). I’ve seen the movies, too. “Out of Sight,” “Get Shorty,” and Tarantino's “Jackie Brown” (based on “Rum Punch”) were delightful.

Just finished “Cuba Libre,” a bit different from most of his work. Cuba during the Spanish-American War is the setting. Just a snippet of Cuba’s long and violent history. I sometimes forget that Havana was capital of Spain’s New World Empire going back to the 1500s. It was a thriving city while Seminoles ruled the Florida Glades and panthers roamed the forests. Air conditioning was just a distant dream. Leonard sets some of his books (“Maximum Bob,” “Be Cool,” "Pronto" which led the “Justified” series) in South Florida. And why not – kooky characters and Florida are a match made in heaven and/or hell, depending on your POV.

“Cuba Libre” begins in 1898 with one of the main characters surveying the wreckage of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. I won’t tell you how it ends – it’s a wild ride, and worth reading. Intriguing characters encounter one another and all hell breaks loose. There’s an American cowboy escaping a shady past, a young marine from Arizona who survives the Maine sinking, a rich American expatriate, bad guys from Spain, barefoot Cuban revolutionaries, a hotel filled with U.S. reporters trying to drum up a war, many horses, and many, many guns.

Leonard keeps the story moving. Along the way, he violates all the rules that seemed important in MFA writing workshops. That’s something I’ve been learning reading historical fiction. Keep the story moving. No Proustian monologues. No settings in academia. I had just come from reading Ann Beattie’s stories featured over the decades in The New Yorker. Way too much academia. I liked the early stories better. They were leaner and meaner and more fun. Maybe they had the caring attention of a good editor? I did like the one story I read from her new collection which all center on the Covid-19 Emergency. I want to read the rest of those. Lauren Groff teaches writing at my alma mater UF yet writes amazing stories of Floridians in wild places. Check out her collection "Florida" that features a panther as cover art.

Look, I have an MFA in Creative Writing. I wanted nothing more than a career in the academy but that wasn’t in the cards. I still love teaching but take my writing cues from other sources, other lands, other time periods. The most fun I had recently was watching “White Noise,” a send-up of academia as well as American life. Don DeLillo – that guy can write and the folks who did the movie like it too. Hitler Studies! Airborne Toxic Event!

Go read Elmore Leonard. Plenty to choose from at your local library. Better get them before Moms for Liberty get their grubby mitts on them for the big book burning. 

"Sergeant Salinger" by Jerome Charyn will rip your heart out

I was gobsmacked by an historical novel written about a famous author’s experiences in World War II.

“Sergeant Salinger” by Jerome Charyn is about J.D. Salinger, the most reclusive of American authors. His war experiences and the PTSD that followed helps explain why he kept his distance from his fellow humans for most of his adult life.

But that’s not the whole story. We first meet Salinger as a young single on the make in New York City. He dates Oona O’Neil, the vampish daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, and hangs out at the Stork Club with the likes of Walter Winchell and famous people we recognize by their last names or nicknames. Papa “Hem” Hemingway is one of them. Salinger writes radio scripts and short stories and readers like them but they are nothing to write home about. The letters home come later when he has something to say.

Salinger gets drafted even though he’d been previously diagnosed with a heart murmur. It’s the spring of ’42 and Uncle Sam needs everybody, even “half-Jewish writers with heart murmurs.” You’d think that Salinger (he goes by the nickname Sonny) would land in a cushy stateside job writing press releases or speeches for generals. What happens is something horrific and unexpected, even for someone like me who knows Salinger’s stories of PTSD veterans (“For Esme with Love and Squalor” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”). Salinger told these stories from the inside out. The author’s “Nine Stories” broke my heart when I first read them all in my 20s. Another heartbreaking story about returning vets is “Hemingway’s “A Soldier’s Story.” In “Sergeant Salinger,” there’s a scene when a jaded Hem visits Salinger in a Nuremberg psych ward and calls his own story “amateurish.” Hem groused that everything was behind him. He published “The Old Man and the Sea” in 1952 and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and Nobel Prize in 1954.

Lest you think Charyn has employed his magnificent storytelling skills to make it all up, think again. I did too. Until Part One: Slapton Sands, the section that follows Prelude: Oona. Salinger is a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) NCO, who accompanies invading troops to interview prisoners and others who might spill the beans on Nazi war plans. He speaks German. He’s been drilled in all the tricks of the interrogator’s trade. While preparing for the D-Day landings, he’s witness to one of the army’s biggest tragedies. In a practice run for Normandy on Lyme Bay on the Channel side of England, a live-fire exercise goes astray and German’s Kriegsmarine speedboats sneak in an torpedo LSTs, spilling overloaded troops into the ocean. There are 749 casualties, some interred in mass graves, and Charyn documents it.

I told myself this couldn’t possibly happen. I looked it up. It happened. That’s when I knew we were off on a wild ride. We go to Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Salinger is in the thick of it with the Fourth Division. They get into hedgerow battles with dug-in German troops and 82^nd Airborne “sky soldiers” (paratroopers) who are keen to even the score with Nazis who shot their comrades out of the sky when they dropped into the wrong spot. I looked that up too and it was much more gruesome than featured in “The Longest Day,” book or movie. Anywhere, for that matter.

Kudos to Charyn for doing his homework. He is a brilliant writer, one I’ve liked since getting hooked on his Inspector Isaac Sidel novels. We are in the shit with Salinger all the way through occupation duty in Germany. And he comes home which we all know. Salinger humped his “Catcher in the Rye” manuscript through Europe and wrote until he couldn’t write any more. The novel ends with the manuscript in his tiny retreat on Sleepy Hollow Lane, a street that Salinger invents because of its locale near the setting of the famous Washington Irving story. Nobody but family can find him there. Until he finishes his war-battered manuscript and it becomes a best seller. "Catcher in the Rye" still makes waves. 

Publisher is Bellevue Literary Press of New York, a small press with origins at Bellevue Hospital, noted for its Psychiatric Unit (the Ghostbusters were interned there, briefly) and the medical offices where Dr. Lewis Thomas wrote the best-selling “Lives of a Cell.” I haven’t read most of its authors who write, Bellevue notes, “at the intersection of the arts and sciences.” They’ve also published other books by Charyn, including his latest “Ravage & Son,” a “vintage noir” set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the turn of the last century. I have pre-ordered it. Charyn has other historicals. Look them up at his web site at jeromecharyn.com

A look at the past and possible future in A Gentleman in Moscow and California

I’m reading two books concurrently. One is labeled historical fiction and is Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow.” The other is a sci-fi post-Apocalyptic novel “California” by Edan Lepucki. Meanwhile, here I am, living in the present tense.

Towles wrote a historical novel I am very fond of, “The Lincoln Highway.” The title grabbed my attention because I live a mile or maybe two from the route of the original Lincoln Highway. A history marker in downtown Cheyenne speaks at length about it, calling it “The First Transcontinental Highway.” A huge bust of Abraham Lincoln marks the high point on the Laramie Range where the highway crests and then shoots down Telephone Canyon, a long, looping downhill run that is an adventure during a blizzard (if the road’s open) and leads you to Laramie’s fine craft beers and indie restaurants if you make it.

An NPR reviewer in 2021 described the book this way:

The Lincoln Highway is a joyride. Amor Towles' new Great American Road Novel tails four boys — three 18-year-olds who met in a juvenile reformatory, plus a brainy 8-year-old — as they set out from Nebraska in June, 1954, in an old Studebaker in pursuit of a better future. If this book were set today, their constant detours and U-turns would send GPS into paroxysms of navigational recalculations. But hitch onto this delightful tour de force and you'll be pulled straight through to the end, helpless against the inventive exuberance of Towles' storytelling.

So, it’s 1954 in Nebraska and points south and east. Quite a ride. As an admirer of “road novels,” this is a great one. “West with Giraffes” by Lynda Rutledge is too although I’ve already written about it. Must mention here that Kerouac’s “On the Road” features a pivotal scene at Wild West Week in 1948 Cheyenne. What we have in miles and miles of asphalt and concrete are roads. Recently, I was pleased to see that Gen. Pershing, commander of all the armies who married a young woman from Cheyenne (a strategic move – she was the daughter of a U.S. senator), commissioned in 1921 a roadmap of the U.S. showing the Lincoln Highway as a priority number one route and the road from Cheyenne to Denver as priority number two. Take that, Colorado! Pershing hated your guts.

“A Gentleman in Moscow” is a very different story. It is a big novel and I just had to have a hardbound copy from B&N.com. It is 1922 in Moscow, U.S.S.R., and Count Alexander Rostov has been quarantined at Moscow’s famous Metropol Hotel. He’s not sick. But he has the ability to infect the populace with highfalutin attitudes, a crime in the new communist state, where everyone is equal but some, we suspect, are more equal than others. The count is a snob and what we might call a ladykiller. He’s accustomed to women swooning over him and the pickings are quite slim on the corridors of the commie hotel. Still, he finds a way. Government apparatchiks check up on him and his dwellings and they try to train hotel staff to not call the count Count or Your excellency. To no avail.

The Count is charming and it’s great fun to read about him and his situation even though you know it’s going to end terribly. Not as terribly as it did for the Romanovs but still terrible. The ending of Book 1 clued me in on a possible fate for the Count.

Lepucki first got my attention through a recent interview in the Los Angeles Times. While most of it is about her new novel of time travel and family, “Time’s Mouth,” “California” is about family and apocalypse. Very down to earth and that’s the way the author likes it:

“I want there to be sex in my books. I want there to be periods and childbirth and feeling bad. There’s a lot of vomiting,” she says, laughing. “I feel like in a lot of contemporary fiction, the characters are not in their bodies in the way that I think in life we are.”

I read that and agreed that there is not a lot of periods and childbirth and sickness in most books. If described at all, sickness often is described romantically, as in the ravings of a sick Cathy in Wuthering Heights or the pining of a tubercular John Keats ("Bright Star" a fine Jane Campion film about Keats and Fanny Brawne). There is shit in “California” and it stinks. But that’s not the main story. A pregnant woman and her husband try to navigate the confusing and dangerous future world where all things fall apart. I’m only 120 pages into my Kindle version checked out from Libby but the author has my attention.

Is it wise to read historical novel and post-apocalyptic fiction at the same time? God only knows, if there was a God and he/she/it actually knew anything.

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. 

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.