While Reading To The Dog

Vision of the Future

2011-05-03T22:42:00.003-04:00

"Why, Sal, do you realize the shelves they build these days crack under the weight of knickknacks after six months?....Same with houses, same with clothes. These bastards have invented plastics by which they could make houses that last forever. And tires. Americans are killing themselves by the millions every year with defective rubber tires that get hot on the road and blow up. Same with tooth powder. There's a certain gum they've invented and they won't show it to anybody that if you chew as a kid you'll never get another cavity for the rest of your born days. Same with clothes. They can make clothes that last forever.

"They prefer making cheap goods so's everybody'll have to go on working and punching timeclocks and organizing themselves in sullen unions and floundering around while the big grab goes on in Washington and Moscow."

On the Road, written by Jack Kerouac in 1951 "to amuse his wife, or at least the wife he had then".

Body Count

2011-01-14T22:27:00.003-05:00

"I was once told by a man in a subway station that I should be turned into a vending machine. That way people could put in their money and get out a small piece of me whenever they wanted. This book is as close as I'll ever come to fulfilling that man's fantasy.

"I'm twenty-seven and I still feel as innocent as when the body count started. I stopped counting long ago, but I still believe the next one will really love me.

"Every man I ever loved got something different from me. Push this button for wifely allegiance, that one for exotic whore, that one for a pal. I've been a little of each I suppose. Body Count is whole raw truth, so it's unlikely that any two people will have the same reaction to it.

"A lot of men will say "That chick sure picks bastards. I'm nothing like them."

"All I ask is that you not understand it too quickly."

Body Count, by Francie Schwartz, 1972, Stated First Printing. Offered for sale by Chewybooks as of 1-14-2011.

A History of Exploration

2010-12-14T22:04:00.004-05:00

From the Earliest Times To the Present Day...

By Brigadier-General Sir Percy Sykes....Gold Medallist of the Royal Geographical and Royal Empire Societies

Originally published in London, England, in 1935...but this particular copy was purchased in a second-hand book shop, by an American serviceman in 1944 and sent home to his young nephew...

"Bought at W.H. Smith & Sons Ltd, Strand House Portugal St, London, England. Sent to me by my uncle Bill Corbin. Mailed in England March 29, 1944 and received by me on May 8, 1944... William A. Burkhardt

And pasted inside the front cover is the original shipping label...

Addressed to Master William Burkhardt...

Complete with vintage British stamps...

May 3, 1944 ...this book arrives in New York Customs and is stamped with the official date.

The book itself is a treasure for any explorer...color frontiespiece, black and white photographic plates, and thirty-five fold-out detailed maps.

Maps of the Itineraries of Marco Polo...

With detailed listings of towns like Kasariya and Odessa, and exotic countries like Turkey and Syria.

For a frame of reference: on the day this book cleared New York Customs and began it's journey to Master William Burkhardt in Long Island, New York...... Anne Frank was still safely hidden in an attic in Amsterdam.

On May 3rd, 1944, she wrote in her diary that she thought "all people are guilty for a war like this, not just the big politicians and war-mongers. " She thinks "wars will continue until the average people no longer have an inner desire to kill".

A History of Exploration by Sir Percy Sykes (published 1935), offered for sale by Chewybooks on Amazon as of December 14, 2010.

Home

2010-11-23T21:50:00.007-05:00

The shop was full of bays formed by bookshelves protruding at right angles from the walls. The first bay was well-lighted and tidy; but the others, as they receded into the gloomy backward of the shop, were darker and darker, and untidier and untidier.

The effect was of mysterious and vast populations of books imprisoned forever in everlasting shade, chained, deprived of air and sun and movement, hopeless, resigned and martyrised.

At the back of the rather spacious and sombre shop came a small room, with a doorway, but no door, into the shop. This was the proprietor's den. Seated at his desk therein he could see through a sort of irregular lane of books to the bright oblong of the main entrance, which was seldom closed.

There were more books to the cubic foot in the private room even than in the shop. They rose in tiers to the ceiling and they lay in mounds on the floor; they also covered most of the flat desk and all the window-sill; some were perched on the silent grandfather's clock, the sole piece of furniture except the desk, a safe, and two chairs, and a stepladder for reaching the higher shelves.

Riceyman Steps, by Arnold Bennett, Grosset and Dunlap 1923

Top photo of Shakespeare & Company, the bookstore-to-end-all-bookstores, located in the Left Bank, Paris, France

A Wild Howling

2010-10-25T22:11:00.004-04:00

Jonathan Harker's Journal, May 3rd.

"As the evening fell it began to get very cold, and the growing twilight seemed to merge into one dark mistiness the gloom of the trees, oak, beech and pine, though in the valleys which ran deep between the spurs of the hills, as we ascended through the Pass, the dark firs stood out here and there against the background of late-lying snow.

"Sometimes, as the road was cut through the pine woods that seemed in the darkness to be closing down upon us, great masses of greyness which here and there bestrewed the trees, produced a peculiarly weird and solemn effect, which carried on the thoughts and grim fancies engendered easlier in the evening, when the ailing sunset threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds which amongst the Carpathians seem to wind endlessly through the valleys.

"Sometimes the hills were so steep that, despite our driver's haste, the horses could only go slowly. I wished to get down and walk up them, as we do at home, but the driver would not hear of it. "No, no," he said. "You must not walk here. the dogs are too fierce." And then he added, with what he evidently meant for grim pleasantry - for he looked round to catch the approving smile of the rest - "And you may have enough of such matters before you go to sleep."

"Then amongst a chorus of screams from the peasants and a universal crossing of themselves, a caleche, with four horses, drove up behind us, overtook us, and drew up beside the coach. I could see from the flash of our lamps as the rays fell on them, that the horses were coal-black and splendid animals. They were driven by a tall man, with a long brown beard and a great black hat, which seemed to hide his face from us. I could only see the gleam of a pair of very bright eyes, which seemed red in the lamplight, as he turned to us.

"As I looked back I saw the steam from the horses of the coach by the light of the lamps...Then the driver cracked his whip and called to his horses, and off they swept...As they sank into the darkness I felt a strange chill, and a lonely feeling came over me...Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road, a long agonized wailing,as if from fear....the sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another till borne on the wind...a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night."

Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)

Under the Sway of Some Witching Power

2010-10-18T21:34:00.004-04:00

Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie.

They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions; and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air.

The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole nine fold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.

The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region,and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head.

It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war; and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk, hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind.

His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance.

Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper, having been buried in the church-yard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head; and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the church-yard before daybreak.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving, published 1820, one of the earliest examples of American fiction, but written by the author while he was living in England.

Things That Go Bump In the Night

2010-10-16T18:59:00.005-04:00

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

~Scottish Saying

Some of the basic Scottish ghoulies, ghosties and long-leggedy beasties....

Black Donald - the devil

Brownie - good-natured, invisible brown elves or household goblins.

Clootie - another Scottish name for the Devil. The name comes from cloot, meaning one division of a cleft hoof.

Ghillie Dhu - a solitary Scottish elf.

Kelpie - a water devil.

Monster of Loch Ness - First seen by St Columba in 565 a.d., still seen today

Scotia - a goddess but frequently portrayed as an old hag

Selkie - a marine creature in the shape of a seal.

Shellycoat - a Scottish bogeyman who haunts the rivers and streams. He is covered with shells, which rattle when he moves.

Sidhe- the Gaelic name for Fae (fairies) in both Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland

A Chained Form

2010-10-12T17:19:00.003-04:00

A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently back. For a brief moment I hesitated -- I trembled. Unsheathing my rapier, I began to grope with it about the recess; but the thought of an instant reassured me. I placed my hand upon the solid fabric of the catacombs , and felt satisfied. I reapproached the wall. I replied to the yells of him who clamoured. I reechoed -- I aided -- I surpassed them in volume and in strength. I did this, and the clamourer grew still.

It was now midnight, and my task was drawing to a close. I had completed the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth tier. I had finished a portion of the last and the eleventh; there remained but a single stone to be fitted and plastered in. I struggled with its weight; I placed it partially in its destined position. But now there came from out the niche a low laugh that erected the hairs upon my head. *

* The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allan Poe,1846

The Woeful Time

2010-10-06T23:10:00.003-04:00

The night has been unruly: where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confused events
New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure bird
Clamour'd the livelong night: some say, the earth
Was feverous and did shake. *

Scotland's Glamis Castle, the scene of William Shakespeare's fictional MacBeth, and the actual site of the murder of King Malcolm II in 1034. The bloodstain left on the floor has never been removed. Despite all attempts at cleaning, it still remains, albeit boarded over to hide the evidence.

*MacBeth by William Shakespeare

Nevermore

2010-10-04T10:30:00.004-04:00

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door -
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; -
This it is, and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you"- here I opened wide the door; -
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" -
Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice:
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore -
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
'Tis the wind and nothing more."

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door -
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven,thou,"I said,"art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door -
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered- not a feather then he fluttered -
Till I scarcely more than muttered, "other friends have flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said, "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of 'Never - nevermore'."

But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite - respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore:
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted- tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend," I shrieked, upstarting -
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!

The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe, 1845

A Perfect Haunting

2010-10-02T20:16:00.003-04:00

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. **

**the very first, and the very last paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)

The Risks of A Strenuous Social Life

2010-09-12T23:54:00.003-04:00

"Our busy life, our manner of dress, with all its attending demands are causing havoc with the health of women who are under its terrible strain. The number of women undergoing operations in our public and private hospitals from day to day bears witness to the ravages of the strenuous social life and mute testimony of the neglect of the laws of nature.

"The conduct and health of our women represents the life of our nation; individually, in a measure at least, health governs the happiness of the home.

"All a woman has to do in this world is contained within the duties of a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother.

"But how many girls grow to womanhood untaught; enter wifehood in ignorance, and assume motherhood wholly inprepared for the duties that are thrust upon her?

"Above all things, parents of young ladies should remember that HEALTH is more important than high grades in school. Do not offer prizes for high marks and otherwise add to the pressure of the present school system. Relieve her of worry, do not add to it."

From Mother's Remedies: Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers of the United States and Canada (1917) Offered for sale by Chewybooks as of September 12, 2010.

Yes, we are barbarians.

2010-09-06T12:33:00.003-04:00

"Damn your economic science...bring me money. I don't care how you get it. The masses shall be eternally disenfranchised...they are fools, donkeys and sterile old men..Our aim is to appeal to their baser instincts.

I am freeing man from the restraints of intelligence...from the dirty and degraded self-mortifications called conscience and morality...the world can be ruled by only fear...We are above clinging to the old bourgeois notions of honor and reputation. We have no time for fine sentiments...it will be unbelieveably bloody and grim.

Yes, we are barbarians...we may fail, but if we do, we shall drag the world down with us...a world in flames."

---Adolf Hitler, to his associates at Berchtesgaden, via the testimony of Dr. Hermann Rauschning, History of World War II, Francis Trevelyan Miller, Armed Services Memorial Edition, 1945

Sobering enough, but more so considering at time of publication we were just comprehending how narrow our escape actually was.

Will our grandchildren be able to say the same in 2075?

From One Heretic To Another

2010-09-02T09:00:00.003-04:00

"I was born a heretic. I always distrusted people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows."

— Susan B. Anthony

Heretic:

From Middle English heretik, from Old French heretique, from Late Latin haereticus, from Greek hairetikos, able to choose, factious, from hairetos, chosen, from haireisthai, to choose.

Shining Bright Since 1609

2010-08-25T08:44:00.003-04:00

Sonnet LXV

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Simply because William Shakespeare remains the master.

We were mountain men and we liked it.

2010-07-19T21:10:00.004-04:00

"My old grandad said that when he had at last made his way to the top of the big rim where he could see over into the Carolina Piedmont, he expected to start down the mountain slope. But, when he got there and looked, all he could see was a great blue ocean of peaks stretching out into the haze of the distance as far as he could see.

"Laurel and rhododendron were in great plenty, along with sweet shrub and witch hazel, wild sweet williiam and holly, alder and sassafrass, sumac and buckeye. The herbs were there too. "Yarb" doctors have dug them up for generations. There are still those in the hollows who know how to brew for distempers and aches -dog hobble and mullein, horsemint and wild cherry, boneset and queen of the meadow, ginseng and lady-slipper...

"There had never been any pillared mansions in those remote slopes and valleys. Nor had there been any ease from labor. The cabins had been not much better than those of slave quarters on the plantations.

"When you think about the mountains in the old days, don't you go thinkin' about them in terms of picnics and these little walks you call hikes. I remember the ox-carts strainin' and creakin' and complainin' along the ridges. I think of men walking a hundred and fifty miles and fetching back things they needed on their backs, or maybe packin' it in on a horse. Some drove oxen and it took a couple of months to come and go. It was long hard work.

"We were mountain men and we liked it."

The South and the Southerner, Ralph McGill, 1964. Offered for sale by Chewybooks as of July 19, 2010

I will, then, be a toad.

2010-07-14T22:08:00.002-04:00

"In 1894, Stephen Crane called on his friend, bringing a roll of manuscript for him to read. It was a group of poems he had written during the past few days, poems which amazed his friend with their power. When asked if he had any others, Crane replied,"I have four or five up here," and he pointed to his forehead, "all in a little row. That's the way they come - in little rows, all ready to be put down on paper." He had written nine the day before, and he "put down" another before he left.

"Crane, then twenty-two, was struggling to earn his living as a journalist.He himself had paid to publish his first novel, Maggie:A Girl of the Streets, and found no one wished to buy it. His life was miserable: he slept on the floor of a studio and had little certainty of eating three meals a day.

"He wanted to experience everything possible, to be a participant in whatever happened. He was an angry young man, in rebellion against easy respectibility and the genteel tradition. He had a fierce sense of justice and a hatred for cruelty, whether he found it in the vengeful God of his forefathers, or in man's inhumanity to man. He was determined to be his own judge of what was right or wrong. He placed kindness and integrity among the highest virtues and set for himself a heroic ideal. "There was in Crane a strain of chivalry," said Joseph Conrad, "which made him safe to trust with one's life."

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," repied the universe,
"the fact has not created in me
"A sense of obligation."

******************

"Think as I think," said a man,
"Or you are abominably wicked;
"You are a toad."

And after I had thought of it,
I said, "I will, then, be a toad."

Poems of Stephen Crane, Selected by Gerald D. MacDonald, Woodcuts by Nonny Hogrogian, First Edition, Second Printing ,1964. Offered for sale by Chewybooks as of July 14, 2010.

The Enchanted Playhouse

2010-07-10T19:48:00.004-04:00

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." ~ CS Lewis~

"It was the visit to Cousin Alice that began it, for Cousin Alice's little 'Lizbeth Ann, who was just about as big as Patty and Polly, had a playhouse - the loveliest little playhouse!

"It had a porch on the front, and a path leading to the door. There was a row of bright red geraniums at either side of the path, and 'Lizbeth Ann had even put an even row of cockleshells right in front of the red geraniums, for all the world like Mistress Mary's garden!"
"From that day Patty and Polly could think of nothing but a playhouse. They talked and talked about it.

"The tent made quite a nice playhouse, but not as nice as the Pigpen House, and neither one was half as nice as 'Lizbeth Ann's."

"While they nibbled seedcakes and drank cambric tea, they told Miss Merriweather all about 'Lizbeth Ann's playhouse and how they had tried to have one too. "I remember one I had when I was little," said Miss Merriweather. "My brothers made it for me, up in an apple tree."

"Come, come you youngsters, I've thought of something," said Cap'n Holly. "How'd you like a house under that old dory back there? It's way above high-water mark. I'll tip it over, then we can brace it up with logs on end, so you can crawl underneath." Then he told them all about Mr. Peggotty's house, made out of a boat, in a book written by a man named Charles Dickens. Patty, Polly and Alec listened eagerly and couldn't wait to have a house like Mr. Peggotty's."

"Then tomorrow came, and the wind blew, and there was an awful storm.

"Was it a hurricane Daddy?" they asked. "Yes it was." Daddy said.

"Everything was sopping wet, but Patty, Polly and Alec had to go and see it all. On they went, through the long wet grass, and there, right on their own field, stood the most enchanting little playhouse. It was tipped to one side, and its windows were broken, but it was still an enchanted playhouse. They looked in through the broken windows, and there, all piled up in one corner, and soaking wet, were little tables and chairs, and a little bureau too.

"That very day Joe started repairing the little house. He put in strong cement underpinnings; he put new glass in the windows, fresh paper on the walls, and painted inside and out. Mother made pretty flowered curtains for the windows and bought a gay new rug for the floor.

"It was such a lovely little playhouse! "It's almost too good to be true," sighed Polly happily. "Yes but it is true," said Patty. "We have a real playhouse at last!"

The Enchanted Playhouse, by Mabel Betsy Hill, First and Only Edition, 1950. Offered for sale by Chewybooks, as of July 10, 2010.

The kings sleep in the ground

2010-07-08T22:49:00.003-04:00

Ind raith i comair in dairfhedo,
Ba Bruidgi, ba Cathail,
Ba Aedo, ba Aillello,
Ba Conaing. ba Cuilini,
Ocus ba Maile Duin:
Ind raith dar eis caich ar uair,
ocus ind rig foait i n-uir.

The fort over against the oakwood,

It was Bruidge's, it was Cahill's,

It was Aed's, it was Aillil's,

It was Conaing's, it was Cuiline's,

It was Mael Duin's:

The fort remains after each in turn,

And the kings sleep in the ground.

"And so it was first told of to a mortal, this crown that was in the well, and if it had not been told about, this crown of Bruin, the war that the rest of Ireland waged against Cncobar's kingdom, the war for the Brown Bull of Cooley, would not have been.

"For when Nera went back to the world of mortals he told the King and Queen of Connacht, Ailill and Maeve, about the treasure in the well. They broke into the Fairy Mound of Cruachan to possess themselves of the crown of Bruin. Some say the treasure was taken by them and some say they could neither reach or nor take it, but the storytellers of Ireland have to speak about it because the foray brought the Battle Goddess Morrigu into the Fairy Mound of Cruachan.

The Frenzied Prince Being Heroic Stories of Ancient Ireland, Told by Padraic Colum, Illustrated by Willy Pogany, 1943, Stated First Edition, embossed green cloth with gold gilt titling, illustrated endpapers,color plates throughout, includes original dust jacket. Retained for personal collection.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear

2010-07-04T22:31:00.007-04:00

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Orwell (June 25, 1903- January 21, 1950)

A Death In Belmont

2010-06-27T17:02:00.003-04:00

A picture is worth a thousand words. And sometimes, a picture is as easily misunderstood as a thousand words.

Here's a lovely multigenerational family photo: young mother beaming down at her toddler on her lap, the proud handsome father standing behind her, both watched lovingly by a grandfather? Favorite uncle maybe?

Hmm. Images are not always what they appear to be.

The older man is actually a carpenter -one who built the house the young woman lives in. He and his assistant have spent the better part of the last two months building an studio addition to the young woman's home - going in and out at all hours, generally unsupervised, while her husband is away at work.

The young woman is an artist, and the child on her lap is most definitely loved and cherished.

That child will grow up to be an accomplished author, one with no memory of the day this photo was taken.

And the proud young father? That handsome young man is actually a part-time laborer, the assistant to the carpenter. He is strong and muscular, quiet and polite, conscientious about his work -always arriving on time and always particular about details.

His name is Al.

Albert DeSalvo. And he is about to become better known as The Boston Strangler.

A Death in Belmont is the strange story of author Sebastian Junger's brush with the infamous. It's the story of the day his mother hired a carpenter to build an addition to her home, and found herself staring down her basement steps, into the eyes of a man that would turn out to be a serial killer. That particular day, Albert DeSalvo had murdered a woman several blocks away, and then reliably showed up for work. When called to the top of the basement steps, something about his eyes served as warning, and the young mother stepped back, shut the door, and threw the bolt. In hindsight, entire lives turned on that one little uneasy feeling, that one small thought, that one glimmer of premonition.

This is one of those books you can't put down.

A Death in Belmont, by Sebastian Junger (2006).

Crazy Horse and Custer

2010-06-16T21:22:00.004-04:00

"On the sparkly morning of June 25, 1876, 611 men of the United States 7th Cavalry rode towards the banks of the Little Bighorn in the Montana Territory where three thousand Indians stood waiting for battle. The lives of two great warriors would soon be forever linked in history.

"This is the story of two men who died as they lived - violently. They were both war lovers, men of aggression with a deeply rooted instinct to charge the enemy, rout him, kill him. Men of supreme courage, they were natural-born leaders in a combat crisis, the type to whom others instinctively looked for guidance and inspiration. They were always the first to charge the enemy, and the last to retreat. Both became leaders in their societies at very early ages; both were stripped of power, in disgrace, and worked to earn back the respect of their people. Both had much to win and only life to lose.

"There were other parallels. Neither man drank. Both were avid hunters, for whom only the excitement of combat exceeded the joy of the chase. Each man loved horses, and riding at full gallop across the unfenced Great Plains of North America, day after day, was a source of never-ending delight for both of them.

"Yet Crazy Horse and Custer, like their societies, were as different as life and death."

Crazy Horse and Custer, by Stephen Ambrose (1975 BCE with dj). Offered for sale by Chewybooks as of June 16, 2010.

A Moveable Feast: Sketches of Paris in The Twenties

2010-06-14T12:01:00.002-04:00

"You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people sat outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard.

"There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when he was hungry.

"I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry.

"Later I thought Cezanne was probably hungry in a different way."

A Moveable Feast:Sketches of the Author's Life in Paris in The Twenties (Ernest Hemingway), First Edition, BMC (1964). Offered for sale by Chewybooks, as of June 14, 2010.

Fly Boys

2010-06-12T22:36:00.004-04:00

Wartime is the mothership of invention. So many words and phrases were created by soldiers and sailors during World War II; figures of speech that we've long since forgotten the origin of (not just the immortal FUBAR) but more obscure "slanguage", such as....

Tin fish (an aerial torpedo), flak (Abbreviation of "Fleiger abwehr Kanone", a German phrase meaning anti-aircraft cannon fire), grease monkey (any member of a aircraft ground crew), lame duck (a crippled airplane) and....

V-Mail (Mail for World War II military, where the original was written on a specially printed form, then photographed on 16mm microfilm, sent to its destination by air, where it was enlarged and delivered to its recipient. V-Mail forms were available at any post office, and could be dropped into any mail box. 200,000 microfilm letters fit into one mailbag.

In 1942, it was also necessary for pilots to know how to dock and pilot airships, a skill now sadly lost.

There were several sorts of airships: non-rigid, pressure-rigid, rigid, and semi- rigid. There were airship stations, airship hulls, airship gangplanks, airship cabins, bumper bags, an aerostat center of buoyancy, bridles, axial cables, and bow-weighing devices. All of those long-lost definitions are described and illustrated in exquisite detail, straight from 1942 and those who lived it.

Jordanoff's Illustrated Aviation Dictionary, (1942). Offered for sale by Chewybooks, as of June 12, 2010.

Thoughts From Will

2010-06-08T12:55:00.004-04:00

Sonnet XXX.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

The canary in the coal mine

2010-06-03T22:24:00.002-04:00

"In migratory flights most birds apparently progress at a speed of twenty to fifty miles an hour, and the long journeys made by some are accomplished by moving for long hours at a steady rate rather than by tremendous bursts of speed for short distances. Observations of birds flying by night, made at lighthouses and other favorable points, have shown that migrants pass in regular unhurried flight. If we postulate ten hours as a fair period for a nonstop migration flight over land, the speeds that have been cited would in that period carry the smaller birds from 200 to 270 miles, and ducks and geese from 420 to 590 miles. These are instances of magnitude, particularily when travel is in a direct air line, and would enable the birds to cover the ordinary migration route from Canada or the northern States to the Gulf coast region, or even to Central and South America....."*

Wonder how the birds will be able to make the non-stop flight when the "Gulf coast region" is closed due to oil?

*Smithsonian Scientific Series, Vol 9, Signed Patrons Edition, 1934. Complete 12-volume set offered for sale by Chewybooks as of June 3, 2010.

In Memory of Memorial Day

2010-06-01T10:34:00.004-04:00

World War II

It was over Target Berlin the flak shot up our plane

just as we were dumping bombs on the already

smoking city

on signal from the lead bomber in the squadron.

The plane jumped again and again as the shells burst

under us

sending jagged pieces of steel rattling through our

fuselage.

It was pure chance

that none of us got ripped by those fragments.

Then, being hit, we had to drop out of formation

right away

losing speed and altitude,

and when I figured out our course with trembling hands

on the instruments

(I was navigator)

we set out on the long trip home to England

alone, with two of our four engines gone

and gas streaming out of holes in the wing tanks.

That morning at briefing

we had been warned not to go to nearby Poland

partly liberated then by the Russians,

although later we learned that another crew in trouble

had landed there anyway,
and patching up their plane somehow,

returned gradually to England

roundabout by way of Turkey and North Africa.

But we chose England, and luckily

the Germans had no fighters to send up after us then

for this was just before they developed their jet.

To lighten our load we threw out

guns and ammunition, my navigation books, all the junk

and, in a long descent, made it over Holland

with a few goodbye fireworks from the shore guns.

Over the North Sea the third engine gave out

and we dropped low over the water.

The gas gauge read empty but by keeping the nose

down

a little gas at the bottom of the tank sloshed forward

and kept our single engine going.

High overhead, the squadrons were flying home in

formation

—the raids had gone on for hours after us.

Did they see us down there skimming the waves?

We radioed our final position for help to come

but had no idea if anyone

happened to be tuned in and heard us,

and we crouched together on the floor

knees drawn up and head down

in regulation position for ditching;

listened as the engine stopped, a terrible silence,

and we went down into the sea with a crash,

just like hitting a brick wall,

jarring bones, teeth, eyeballs panicky.

Who would ever think water could be so hard?

You black out, and then come to

with water rushing in like a sinking-ship movie.

All ten of us started getting out of there fast:

there was a convenient door in the roof to climb out by,

one at a time. We stood in line,

water up to our thighs and rising.

The plane was supposed to float for twenty seconds

but with all those flak holes

who could say how long it really would?

The two life rafts popped out of the sides into the water

but one of them only half-inflated

and the other couldn’t hold everyone

although they all piled into it, except the pilot,

who got into the limp raft that just floated.

The radio operator and I, out last,

(did that mean we were least aggressive, least likely

to survive?)

we stood on the wing watching the two rafts

being swept off by waves in different directions.

We had to swim for it.

Later they said the cords holding rafts to plane

broke by themselves, but I wouldn’t have blamed them

for cutting them loose, for fear

that by waiting for us the plane would go down

and drag them with it.

I headed for the overcrowded good raft

and after a clumsy swim in soaked heavy flying clothes

got there and hung onto the side.

The radio operator went for the half-inflated raft

where the pilot lay with water sloshing over him,

but he couldn’t swim, even with his life vest on,

being from the Great Plains—

his strong farmer’s body didn’t know

how to wallow through the water properly

and a wild current seemed to sweep him farther off.

One minute we saw him on top of a swell

and perhaps we glanced away for a minute

but when we looked again he was gone—

just as the plane went down sometime around then

when nobody was looking.

It was midwinter and the waves were mountains

and the water ice water.

You could live in it twenty-five minutes

the Ditching Survival Manual said.

Since most of the crew were squeezed on my raft

I had to stay in the water hanging on.

My raft? It was their raft, they got there first so they

would live.

Twenty-five minutes I had.

Live, live, I said to myself.

You’ve got to live.

There looked like plenty of room on the raft

from where I was and I said so

but they said no.

When I figured the twenty-five minutes were about up

and I was getting numb,

I said I couldn’t hold on anymore,

and a little rat-faced boy from Alabama, one of the

gunners,

got into the icy water in my place,

and I got on the raft in his.

He insisted on taking off his flying clothes

which was probably his downfall because even wet

clothes are protection,

and then worked hard, kicking with his legs, and we all

paddled,

to get to the other raft

and tie them together.

The gunner got in the raft with the pilot

and lay in the wet.

Shortly after, the pilot started gurgling green foam from

his mouth—

maybe he was injured in the crash against the

instruments—

and by the time we were rescued,

he and the little gunner were both dead.

That boy who took my place in the water

who died instead of me

I don’t remember his name even.

It was like those who survived the death camps

by letting others go into the ovens in their place.

It was him or me, and I made up my mind to live.

I’m a good swimmer,

but I didn’t swim off in that scary sea

looking for the radio operator when he was

washed away.

I suppose, then, once and for all,

I chose to live rather than be a hero, as I still do today,

although at that time I believed in being heroic, in

saving the world,

even if, when opportunity knocked,

I instinctively chose survival.

As evening fell the waves calmed down

and we spotted a boat, not far off, and signaled with a

flare gun,

hoping it was English not German.

The only two who cried on being found

were me and a boy from Boston, a gunner.

The rest of the crew kept straight faces.

It was a British air-sea rescue boat:

they hoisted us up on deck,

dried off the living and gave us whisky and put us

to bed,

and rolled the dead up in blankets,

and delivered us all to a hospital on shore

for treatment or disposal.

None of us even caught cold, only the dead.

This was a minor accident of war:

two weeks in a rest camp at Southport on the Irish Sea

and we were back at Grafton-Underwood, our base,

ready for combat again,

the dead crewmen replaced by living ones,

and went on hauling bombs over the continent of

Europe,

destroying the Germans and their cities.

Edward Field

Reprinted from Poets of World War II
(The Library of America, 2003), pages 195–200.
© Copyright 1967, 1987 Edward Field.
By arrangement with University of Pittsburgh Press.
From Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems 1963–1992 (1992).
Reprinted in After the Fall: Poems Old and New
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007).

A Great Salt Marsh

2010-05-21T22:59:00.004-04:00

“To stand at the edge of the sea,

to sense the ebb and flow of the tides,

to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh,

to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up

and down the surf lines of the continents

for untold thousands of year,

to see the running of the old eels

and the young shad to the sea,

is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly

eternal as any earthly life can be.”

Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (1955)

Grand Isle, Louisiana.

Now irreversibly drenched in oil.

What Is Left In Our Hands

2010-05-12T16:35:00.005-04:00

"I can show you what is left. After the pride, passion, agony, and bemused aspiration, what is left in our hands. Here are the scraps of newspaper, more than a century old, splotched and yellowed and huddled together in a library, like November leaves abandoned by the wind, damp, and leached out, back of the stables or in a fence corner of a vacant lot.

Here are the diaries, the documents, and the letters, yellow too, bound in neat bundles with tape so stiffened and tired that it parts almost unresisting at your touch. Here are the records of what happened in that courtroom, all the words taken down. Here is the manuscript he himself wrote, day after day, as he waited in his cell, telling his story.

The letters of his script lean forward in their haste. Haste toward what? The bold stroke of the quill catches on the rough paper, fails, resumes, moves on in its race against time, to leave time behind, or in its rush to meet Time at last at the devoted and appointed place. To whom was he writing, rising from his mire or leaning from his flame to tell his story? The answer is easy. He was writing for us."*

Robert Penn Warren was the quintessential Southern writer, orginally from Kentucky (but his mother's people, the Penn's, were from a county just south of us. He was that elusive writer that excelled in holding up a mirror to the face of the 1940's and 1950's south, and he made sure that the reflection was accurate, whether flattering or not. Although raised a segregationist, by the 1950's he had converted (yes, at that time it was a conscious conversion and acknowledgement of societal wrongs) to a very public position as defender of the civil rights movement, writing Who Speaks for the Negro, a collection of interviews with black civil rights leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in 1965, setting himself apart from his contemporaries.

World Enough and Time is an exercise that toys with history, memory and the truth, and how they blend in the mind.

"We have what is left, the lies and half-lies and the truths and the half-truths. We do not know that we have the Truth."*

*From World Enough and Time, Robert Penn Warren, 1950

It Didn't Look Like A Yankee Person Could Be So Mean

2010-05-09T12:29:00.002-04:00

"Ex-slave Nancy Johnson's testimony was recorded after the War as she and her husband tried to recover $514.50 from the victorious Union, in compensation for their horses, hogs and provisions:

"the Yankees had ripped up the beds, scattered the feathers and carried off the ticking, blankets, and coverings of every description and had burned her clothing and her children's clothing. And the Union men killed their cattle. All their provisions had been taken from them, so they were compelled to find another country. Whenever the Yankee officers were remonstrated with for burning and destroying property which was valuable only to the owners, their universal reply was: 'I'm sorry for you, but must obey orders'."

"Nancy Johnson's testimony informs us that the soldiers treated master and slave alike. During the 1930's ex-slave Sam Word recalled that a Yankee stole a quilt from his mother. She retaliated, "Why you nasty stinking rascal. You say you come down here to fight for the negroes, and now you're stelaing from them." The soldier replied, "You're a goddamned liar. I'm fighting for $14 a month and the Union."

And that was the treatment of the slaves that encountered the Union Army.

As for the white folks?

"The armies took anything that could be eaten, drunk, worn, or slept under. Soldiers stripped beds, from the big house to the slave cabins. Women often directed their servants to bury their quilts with the silver. the sentimental value of the quilts was probably as important as their functional value."

From Quilts From the Civil War: Nine Projects, Historic Notes, Diary Entries by Barbara Brackman, offered for sale by Chewybooks on Amazon as of May 9, 2010.

2010-05-05T22:03:00.003-04:00

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's.

Mark Twain's letter to W.D. Howells, 2 April 1899

In Memory of Lucky

November 11,1998- May 5, 2010

The Poet's Pen

2010-04-26T16:39:00.003-04:00

"Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known." Henry James

In 1907, Rudyard Kipling became not only the youngest recipient (and remains so), but also the first English language writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author".

Depending on any given political climate, Kipling's reputation has rose and fallen, particularily in India. Born in 1865, many of his stories and verse center around the colonial rule of India and long-forgotten military conflicts.

From Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling:

Buddha at Kamakura (1892)

‘And there is a Japanese idol at Kamakura.’

O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when ‘the heathen’ pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!

To Him the Way, the Law, apart,
Whom Maya held beneath her heart,
Ananda’s Lord, the Bodhisat,
The Buddha of Kamakura.

For though He neither burns nor sees,
Nor hears ye thank your Deities,
Ye have not sinned with such as these,
His children at Kamakura,

Yet spare us still the Western joke
When joss-sticks turn to scented smoke
The little sins of little folk
That worship at Kamakura—

The grey-robed, gay-sashed butterflies
That flit beneath the Master’s eyes.
He is beyond the Mysteries
But loves them at Kamakura.

And whoso will, from Pride released,
Contemning neither creed nor priest,
May feel the Soul of all the East
About him at Kamakura.

Yea, every tale Ananda heard,
Of birth as fish or beast or bird,
While yet in lives the Master stirred,
The warm wind brings Kamakura.

Till drowsy eyelids seem to see
A-flower ’neath her golden htee
The Shwe-Dagon flare easterly
From Burma to Kamakura,

And down the loaded air there comes
The thunder of Thibetan drums,
And droned—‘Om mane padme hum’s’
A world’s-width from Kamakura.

Yet Brahmans rule Benares still,
Buddh-Gaya’s ruins pit the hill,
And beef-fed zealots threaten ill
To Buddha and Kamakura.

A tourist-show, a legend told,
A rusting bulk of bronze and gold,
So much, and scarce so much, ye hold
The meaning of Kamakura?

But when the morning prayer is prayed,
Think, ere ye pass to strife and trade,
Is God in human image made
No nearer than Kamakura?

Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling, 1935,Offered for sale by Chewybooks as of April 26, 2010.

Growth of the Soil

2010-04-23T15:55:00.006-04:00

"The man comes, walking toward the north. he bears a sack, the first sack, carrying food and some few implements. A strong, coarse fellow, with a red iron beard, and little scars on face and hands; sites of old wounds - were they gained in toil or fight? Maybe the man has been in prison, and is looking for a place to hide; or a philosopher, maybe, in search of peace.

"Here and there, where the moors give place to a kindlier spot, an open space in the midst of the forest, he lays down the sack and goes exploring; after awhile he returns, heaves the sack to his shoulder again, and trudges on.

"The worst of his task had been to find the place; this no-man's place, but his. Now, there was work to fill his days.

"He had sought about for a woman to help each time he had been down to the village with his loads of bark, but there was none to be found.....And the man himself was no way charming or pleasant by his looks, far from it; and when he spoke it was no tenor with eyes to heaven, but a coarse voice, something like a beast's.

"Well, he would have to manage alone.

"Spring came; he worked on his patch of ground, and planted potatoes. his live stock multiplied...he made a bigger shed for them...and put a couple of glass panes in there too.

"And then at last came help; the woman he needed. She tacked about for a long time, this way and that across the hillside, before venturing near; it was evening before she could bring herself to come down.

"They went into the hut and took a bit of the food she had brought, and some of his goats' milk to drink; then theymade coffee, that she had brought with her in a bladder. Settled down comfortably over their coffee until bedtime. And in the night, he lay wanting her, and she was willing.

"She did not go away next morning; all that day she did not go, but helped about the place; milked the goats, and scoured pots and things with fine sand, and got them clean. She did not go away at all.

"Inger was her name. And Isak was his name."

Norwegian author Knut Hamsun was a Norwegian author praised by King Haakon VII of Norway as Norway's soul. In 1920, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his 1917 epic novel, Growth of the Soil.

Unfortunately, Hamsun was a devotee of the Nazi movement, both before World War II and even after Germany invaded Norway. In 1943, to show his devotion he mailed his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels, and even wrote an obituary for Hitler shortly after news of his death in a bunker in Berlin. After the war, Hamsun nearly stood trial for treason against Norway, but due to his mental state and advanced age, the charges were dropped.

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun. Not offered for sale by Chewybooks as of April 23, 2010 (retained for personal collection)

The Wisest and Best

2010-04-22T20:11:00.002-04:00

"Once upon a time there were two little Princesses whose names were Violetta and Gambetta; and they lived in Mountainy Castle. They were twins, and they were so like each other that when Violetta came in from a walk with her feet wet, Gambetta was sometimes told to go and change her stockings, because the Queen couldn't tell which from the other.

"But that didn't often happen, because if Princess Violetta was out for a walk, Princess Gambetta was almost sure to be out with her. Indeed they were so fond of one another that you might have thought they were tied together with a piece of string. All the same, the Queen used to be so fussed and worried by the confusion that, what with one thing and another, she persuaded the King to appoint a special Lord to distinguish between them.

"And he was called the Lord High Teller of the Other From Which."

Owen Barfield was a British philosopher and a founding member of The Inkling Society while at Oxford University. Fellow members of The Inkling Society included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein among others. Regular meetings were held on Thursday nights for the purpose of reading and discussing the members unfinished works. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings was the first to be read to the group.

Barfield was extraordinary close to C.S. Lewis during his life, serving as Lewis' legal and financial advisor, and executor of his estate. Lewis called Barfield the “wisest and best of my unofficial teachers,” dedicating the first Narnian chronicle to his friend’s adopted daughter Lucy.

The Silver Trumpet (1925) , a children's fairy tale, was the first published work of Owen Barfield.

"And now the story must hurry on, for there are many more things to be told yet, so many, that if you knew all that is still to happen you would say it had scarcely begun. Therefore you must try to imagine to youself what took place...."

The Silver Trumpet, by Owen Barfield, offered for sale by Chewybooks, as of April 22,2010.

April 21, 1910

2010-04-21T14:48:00.002-04:00

In Redding, Connecticut, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, most popularly known as Mark Twain, died at the age of 74 years.

"I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year [1910], and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almight has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.' "

Words from Mr. Clemens that are more than immediately relevant and appropriate:

"In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them. "

Bone-Covered Barns

2010-04-01T20:56:00.003-04:00

"How many folks have a whole barn side covered with bones?

"The side of a large barn-like structure was covered with a mixture of large bones and slogans, especially warning all persons against the abuse of drugs. I wondered what Oscar considered the "potions" dispensed by most of his ilk. Surrounding the property were pens containing pigs, turkeys, chickens. By far the most interesting cages were a series of wire tunnels connecting several buildings 20 to 30 feet apart. I soon learned this was a "run" for the "30-some" squirrels that are a part of Oscar's collection of critters. Inside the large barn was a red van-like Detroit monster elaborately decorated with the most outrageous set of moose antlers. Out back of his house...there was an open field with a scarecrow silhouetted against the stark and distant swamp. Oscar told me this is where many of the herbs and roots come from that he uses in his practice...with a sly glance he told me "I get some of my bones there, but when I was in the service, we dug up a graveyard and that was interesting to me.

"Oscar Gilchrist has impeccable credentials as a hoodoo man, as he is a third generation bones doctor. His grandfather was a practitioner in Jamaica.

"...if your quest is a visit with "the bonesman", you can find the answer to everything...When you see Oscar, pains disappear, debts go away, and "if you take that power stick to the county seat and walk around the courthouse, they won't have no trial 'cause they can't get a jury. Friend of mine borrowed that one with all the bones and won the lottery; gave me a couple of thousand when he brought it back."

"People got troubles everywhere and they come to the Bonesman."

Interview with Oscar Gilchrist (The Bonesman), Nicols, South Carolina, by author Dr. A. Everette James from Essays in Folk Art, offered for sale by Chewybooks, as of April 1, 2010

Travels in A Donkey Trap

2010-03-14T14:15:00.003-04:00

It all began with a telegram...

"Daisy Baker was born in 1894 in Shoreditch, London, but bred in the country, where her father was a milkman. She went from elementary school into domestic service, married in 1921 and later moved back to her beloved countryside again. [As of 1974] she lives with her daughter and son-in-law in North Devon, together with her Darkie [the donkey], several goats, six cats and a rabbit.

"In 1970, at the age of 76, Daisy Baker acquired a donkey and a trap and regained her mobility in North Devon, England. She calls it "the freedom of the universe". This little book is a story of reconciliation with her past: her childhood in the country, her period as between-maid to the bishop's daughter, her first love during the first World War, and her marriage."

For the modern-day reader, it is a glimpse into the past, traveling down English lanes drawn by a donkey with a mind of its own.

I was lucky in being one of those for whom the speed of a journey was its least important aspect - I didn't have appointments to keep and I was under no pressure from time in any way, for it really wouldn't matter if I were home late to dinner. I felt I had slipped back a century, or at least to the days of my childhood, when the pace of life was so much more relaxed. For here I was, moving through the lane at a lingering pace, needing neither to brake nor accelerate, feeling as much a part of it all as the rooted trees and the magpie flashing black and white just beyond the donkey's nose.....None of this would have occurred to me had I been whisked there by car.

Not for everyone, perhaps, the peace of a wood on a summer day. yet to be solitary there is not to be lonely. My mind teems with thoughts and impressions, with fancies and realities. Although I thought of these as storybook woods, when I looked at them from the donkey cart they are not only real when I walk in them, but impress me with the feeling that nothing is quite so real as a wood. here in this community of trees I am aware of life, and never have I been so aware as now of the two aspects, the seen and the not seen. I muse on the unseen element in all things.

Travels in A Donkey Cart, by Daisy Baker. Offered for sale by Chewybooks, as of March 14, 2010.

One does not love breathing.

2010-03-03T19:59:00.003-05:00

Absolute most favorite book:

"I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church- was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills To Be Enacted Into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow - anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."

"I could not remember not being able to read...."

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, published 1960 (First Edition cover pictured).

For Us the Living

2010-02-09T16:09:00.004-05:00

When thinking of historic sites, the mental picture is usually one of an old historic building, perhaps colonial, Victorian, or early 19th century.

But there are also historic sites that are chillingly ordinary. Just another house on a suburban block. Nothing unusual. Any of us might have grown up there.

2332 Margaret W. Alexander Drive, Jackson, Mississippi

Doesn't ring a bell?

On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers pulled up in the driveway, and stepped out of his car. As he walked into his home, ready to greet his wife and children, he was shot in the back with a bullet that richocheted into his home. He died 50 minutes later, just as President John F. Kennedy was concluding a nationally televised speech in support of civil rights.

The South being what it was, the shooter, a member of the White Citizens Council and the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, was arrested over a year later. The South being what it was, the shooter (who will remain nameless here, because why contribute to his memory?) was acquitted twice by all-white juries.

And yet again, the South being what it is now, brought the shooter to trial 30 years later, in 1994, and this time the jury convicted. The shooter, after living free for three decades, spent the rest of his life in prison, dying incarcerated in 2001.

From For Us, the Living, by Mrs. Medgar Evers, written in 1967:

Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my husband. Sometimes at night when my new house in Claremont, California, is quiet and the children are in bed I think about him and wonder how he feels. I have never seriously admitted the possibility that he has forgotten what I can never forget, though I suppose that hours and even days may go by without his thinking of it. Still, it must be there, the memory of it, like a giant stain in one part of his mind, ready to spring to life whenever he sees a Negro, whenever his hate rises like a bitterness in the thraot. He cannot escape it completely.

And when that memory returns to him, I wonder if he is proud of what he did. Or if, sometimes he feels at least a part of the enormous guilt he bears. For it is not just that he murdered a man. He murdered a very special man -special to him, special to many others, not just special to me as any man is to his wife. And he killed him in a special way. He is not just a murderer. He is an assassin.

For Us, the Living by Mrs. Medgar Evers (Myrlie B. Evers) published 1967, offered for sale by Chewybooks, as of February 9, 2010.

The Medgar Evers Museum

2332 Margaret W. Alexander Drive

Jackson, Mississippi 39213

1-601-977-7710

Open by appointment

Crackers in Bed

2010-02-03T22:31:00.003-05:00

Except that this is a boy, this could be my childhood.

Always reading in bed, with more books piled up next to me so that I wouldn't run out. Pup curled up on end of the bed and a handmade quilt.

Life should be so good for everyone.

Crackers in Bed (1921) by Norman Rockwell.

Happy Birthday Norman! Thanks for painting the memories that matter.

Monarch of All I Survey

2010-02-02T20:14:00.003-05:00

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, where-in all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself, or Robinson Crusoe, is a novel by Daniel Defoe.

But before Defoe wrote his novel there was a real Robinson Crusoe by the name of Alexander Selkirk, an Scottish seaman. In 1704, he was serving on the ship Cinque Ports when it dropped anchor at the uninhabited islands of Juan Fernandez to re-stocking fresh water and supplies.

Selkirk had his doubts about the ship's seaworthiness and tried to convince his crewmates to desert and remain on the island. Unfortunately, his fellow sailors saw no need to jump ship, however the irritated captain decided he would grant Selkirk his wish, dropping him off on the island with only a musket, gunpowder, carpenter's tools, a knife, a Bible and his clothing.

Robinson Crusoe island, Juan Ferandez archipelgo, 418 miles west of South America, now a World Biospheres Reserve

Although Selkirk was marooned on the island for five years, he was correct about the Cinque Port. It later was lost at sea, along with most of its hands.

On this date, 301 years ago, February 2nd, 1709, Alexander Selkirk was rescued from his island by a privateer. He returned home to Scotland and great public acclaim, was interviewed by journalists, and then eloped to London with a sixteen year old dairy maid, whom he did not marry. By 1721 he had gone back to sea, managing to catch yellow fever and finally dying at sea off the west coast of Africa.

Statue of Alexander Selkirk in Lower Largo, Fife, Scotland

From Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe:

"September 30, 1659 - I, poor miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked during a dreadful storm in the offing, came on shore on this dismal, unfortunate island, which I called "The Island of Despair"; all the rest of the ship's company being drowned, and myself almost dead.

"All the rest of the day I spent in afflicting myself at the dismal circumstances I was brought to; I had neither food, house, clothes, weapon, nor place to fly to; and in despair of any relief, saw nothing but death before me; either that I should be devoured by wild beats, murdered by savages, or starved to death for want of food. At the approach of night I slept in a tree, for fear of wild creatures; but slept soundly,though it rained all night."

Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, published April 25, 1719.

A Radical Change in Social Consciousness

2010-01-29T21:46:00.003-05:00

One of the joys of homeschooling your child is teaching them what you deem important. In our home, what was important was history. Accurate history, not the pablum presented in most high school textbooks.

One of my favorite historians was Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States.

A People's History was first published in 1980 with little-to-no promotion, and a first run of only 5,000 copies. Somehow, mostly through word of mouth, it became the people's bestseller, achieving sales of one million in 2003.

Howard Zinn was definitely on the far outside edges of unapologetic liberalism. He told stories of suffragettes, union organizers and war resisters. Instead of exalting Christopher Columbus he accused him of genocide. He dissected presidents from Andrew Jackson to FDR.

My favorite Howard Zinn quote:

What does it take to bring a turnaround in social consciousness - from being a racist to being in favor of racial equality, from being in favor of Bush's tax program to being against it, from being in favor of the war in Iraq to being against it? We desperately want an answer, because we know that the future of the human race depends on a radical change in social consciousness.

It seems to me that we need not engage in some fancy psychological experiment to learn the answer, but rather to look at ourselves and to talk to our friends. We then see, though it is unsettling, that we were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness - embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television.

This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas. It is so simple a thought that it is easily overlooked as we search, desperate in the face of war and apparently immovable power in ruthless hands, for some magical formula, some secret strategy to bring peace and justice to the land and to the world.

Howard Zinn, The Progressive, 2005

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010.

If God Had Intended....

2010-01-19T21:18:00.007-05:00

Every once in a while, it strikes me just how different it is now to 50 or so years ago. Probably if you aren't old enough to remember it, you really can't appreciate it. Just sitting in a restaurant, watching elderly people of both races eat in the same dining room and realizing that 50 years ago that very simple act wasn't legal. The capacity of (most) humans to adapt to widesweeping change is astounding. Several years ago a friend from college brought her mother over to my mother's for Thanksgiving. She told me it was the first time her mother had ever eaten in a white person's house.

Coming from that time period, The Help by Katherine Stockett is a masterpiece. Briefly set, a young white woman in Jackson, Mississippi, decides to make a collection of stores told by black maids of what it's really like to work for white women. This happens in the dangerous climate of the early 1960's, and it's a deceptively simple act that could get someone killed.

Brief excerpts:

"See, I think if God had intended for white people and colored people to be this close together for so much of the day, he would've made us colorblind. And while Miss Celia's grinning and "good morning" and "glad to see"-ing me, I'm wondering how did she get this far in life without knowing where the lines are drawn? I mean, a floozy calling the society ladies is bad enough. But she has sat down and eaten lunch with me every single day since I started working here. I don't mean in the same room, I mean at the same table. That little one up under the window. Every white woman I've ever worked for ate in the dining room as far away from the colored help as they could. And that was fine with me."

"Even though its the third week of October, the summer beats on with the rhythm of a clothes dryer. the grass in Miss Celia's yard is still a full-blown green. the orange dahlias are still smiling drunk up at the sun. And every night, the damn mosquitoes come out for their bood hunt, my sweat pads went up three cents a box, and my electric fan is broke dead on my kitchen floor."

"She brushes a clump of blond hair out of her face, looks at me like it kills her that I got hit. Suddenly I realize I ought to thank her, but truly, I've got no words to draw from. This is a brand-new invention we've come up with.

All I can say is, "You looked mighty ..... sure a yourself."

"I used to be a good fighter." She looks out along the boxwoods, wipes off her sweat with her palm. "If you'd known me ten years ago..."

"She's got no goo on her face, her hair's not sprayed, her nightgown's like an old prairie dress. She takes a deep breath through her nose and I see it. I see the white trash girl she was ten years ago. She was strong. She didn't take no shit from anybody."

"Louvenia tells me how her grandson, Robert, was blinded earlier this year by a white man, because he used a white bathroom. I recall reading about it in the paper...there is no anger in her voice at all. I learn that Lou Anne Templeton, whom I find dull and vapid and have never paid much mind to, gave Louvenia two weeks off with pay so she could help her grandson. She brought casseroles to Louvenia's house seven times during those weeks. She rushed Louvenia to the colored hospital when the first call came about Robert and waited six hours with her, until the operation was over. Lou Anne has never mentioned any of this to us. And I understand completely why she wouldn't."

*The Help, with it's UK cover, deemed too racial for the American market.

Not offered for sale, and in fact I need another copy myself, since I was reading it too intently this morning and broke the spine on my copy.

Where We Live

2010-01-15T23:18:00.002-05:00

The perfect way to start out a new year of the bound and printed word:

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

A film for 4th Estate Publishers' 25th Anniversary. Produced by Apt Studio and Asylum Films.

Hearts-Ease

2009-12-31T20:12:00.004-05:00

Today's find at the local antique store, for your viewing pleasure ( but not offered for sale).

A hard-to-find 1948 edition of Hearts-Ease:Herbs For the Heart by Mrs. C.F. Leyel, founder of The Herb Society of the United Kingdom.

I especially love the dedication:

This book is dedicated to the memory of Viscount Plumer, who died at the end of the last war. His personal influence created considerable sympathy for herbalists. As Chairman of the Society of Herbalists, he greatly helped the work of Culpeper House, notably in persuading the House of Lords to amend the Pharmacy Act of 1941. The unamended bill would have deprived Herbalists of privileges bestowed by Henry VIII, and Lord Plumer's amendments made the Act, as finally passed, not quite so damaging.

After Mrs. Leyel studied the work of the famous herbalist Nicolas Culpeper, she founded both the Society of Herbalists and the Culpeper shops. The Society maintained its rooms over the Shops on the upper floors primarily for treatment of patients, mixing the necessary herbal medicines on the ground floor. In addition to medicinal herbs, the Culpeper Shops also sold culinary and aromatic herbs.

The services of Mrs. Leyel's friend Viscount Plumer came into play in 1941, when the devastating Pharmacy Act was passed (middle of World War II and the House of Lords was worried about British herbalists, it boggles the mind).

For the next 27 years, the only legal way to obtain herbal treatment in the United Kingdom was to be a member of the Society of Herbalists, now known as The Herb Society.

The cover features the common pansy, and is elaborated on in the introduction:

The affection of the English people for this flower can be measured by its familiar names: 'Leap up and kiss me', 'Call me to you', 'Hearts Pansy', and "Kiss me at the garden gate'.

Shakespeare called it 'Love in Idleness' and 'Cupid's Flower', and in Elizabethan days there seems to have been a prevalent idea that a pansy actually carried the dart of Cupid.

Sir William Bulleyn, another Tudor writer, says: 'Pray God, give the but a handful of heavenly Heartsease, which passes all the pleasant flowers that grow in the world'.

The pansy, though only a herbal simple, has gained the name of Hearts-Ease, because it tranquillizes and puts the Heart at Ease.

One other line from the introduction stands out, as true today as it was in 1948:

This mania for standarizing medicines has done more to retard the development of experimental work on natural remedies than anything else.

Included are fourteen separate indexes: General, Botanical, Familiar Names, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Arabian, Persian, Indian, Chinese, Malayan, and Sanscrit.

While this prized edition goes on the shelf next to my other herbal books, I'm still searching for Mrs. Leyel's other volumes.

Fiddle Dee Dee

2009-12-15T20:51:00.004-05:00

With a total disregard for political correctness, today is the 70th anniversary of the premier of one of my most favorite movies.

Growing up with Southern grandparents who referred to The War as if it happened last week, and who would casually mention Cousin Tunis who died in The Wretched North in a prisoner-of-war camp (100 years previously), there was no way for me to avoid Gone With the Wind.

There was no way for Margaret Mitchell to avoid writing it either -she a child of the South herself, much closer to that generation than I would ever be.

"So that day when I sat down to write I did not have to bother about my background for it had been with me my whole life. The plot, the characters, etc, had not been with me. That day I thought I would write a story of a girl who was somewhat like Atlanta - part of the old South; part of the new South; [how] she rose with Atlanta and fell with it, and how she rose again. What Atlanta did to her; what she did to Atlanta - and the man who was more than a match for her. It didn't take me any time to get my plot and characters. They were there and I took them and set them against the background which I knew as well as I did my own background." Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" Letters: 1936-1949, Introduction, page xxxi ;Richard Harwell, Editor

There were initially 50,000 copies printed in May, 1936. This is a first edition copy, sold for a then unheard-of-price of $3.00 (approximately $45 in today's dollar). Bootleg copies of the book sold in Europe for $60.00 ($670.00 today) even though anyone found possessing the book in Nazi-occupied countries was shot.

Within six months, at the height of the Great Depression, over one million copies had sold. Eventually, GWTW would be translated into 40 languages, sold in 50 countries, and today, has sold over 30 million copies. A facsimile copy was published in 1964 (centennial of the Civil War), and is identical in every aspect, except for the 1964 copyright.

Obscure GWTW trivia: Seventy years ago tonight, the 1939 film premiered at the Loews Grand Theater in Atlanta, attended by most of the glamourous cast members, and anyone else who could get their hands on a ticket. An old black and white photo of the pre-movie presentation shows a children's choir that includes a six-year-old boy. The old saying about justice rolling down like water surely came full circle that night. The little boy was none other than Martin Luther King Jr., singing with his church choir, in a theatre which refused to seat Hattie McDaniel with her white co-stars.

This Most Balmy Time...

2009-12-07T13:35:00.004-05:00

There is nothing finer than waking up each morning to a Shakespearean sonnet.

Literally.

Sonnet CVII.
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

Translation, in brief:

Love will conquer all.

Love will outlast any chaos, any tragedy.

Love is worth more than any title, any statue, any amount of money.

See? Nothing better than Shakespeare-in-the-morning.

Read here for a daily fix of Shakespeare's Sonnet-a-Day delivered via email.

Wrapped in the Flag

2009-11-23T23:21:00.002-05:00

An eternal favorite of mine (and a book that should be required reading for every American), Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here (1935).

"Buzz" Windrip, a power-hungry politician, is elected President of the United States on a populist platform. He promises to restore the country to prosperity, as well as promising each citizen five thousand dollars a year.

Once in power, however, he becomes a dictator who outlaws dissent, putting his enemies in concentration camps, and creating his own militia force called the Minute Men who terrorize dissenting citizens. By making changes to the Constitution, he gives himself sole power over the country and renders Congress obsolete.

This is met by protest from outraged citizens, but Windrip declares a state of martial law, throwing protesters in jail with the help of his Minute Men. As Windrip dismantles America and democracy, most Americans either support him wholeheartedly or reassure themselves that surely this is not fascism, and if it is, it surely cannot happen in America.

A brief excerpt:

"Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical -yes, or more obsequious!- than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio - divine oracles to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees?

"Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's be worse? remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles "Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the - well, feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist...

"Remember our Red Scares and our Catholic Scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G. P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimize their children?

"Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?

"Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition - shooting down people because they *might* be transporting liquor - no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We're ready to start on a Children's Crusade - only of adults - right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!"

"Well, what if they are? It might not be so bad. I don't like all these irresponsible attacks on bankers....Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism'? Just a word- just a word! And might not be so bad, with all those lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays and living on my income tax and yours -not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini - like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good ol days - and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again.

"Cure the Evils of Democracy by the Evils of Fascism!

"But- it just can't happen here in America.

"The hell it can't!"

My favorite quote by Sinclair Lewis, from It Can't Happen Here:

Remember Mr. Lewis and his only semi-satirical book of 1935 when you read of tea parties and death panels, and watch those hysterical American people marching in front of the U.S. Capitol carrying Nazi swatikas.

The Lady of Shalott

2009-11-18T23:10:00.002-05:00

Several weeks ago at a library sale we found this 1882 edition of The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson, beautifully bound with detailed florals on the front (and a snail shell intertwined with the T in Tennyson), and detailed engraved ilustrations throughout all 843 pages.

The endpapers are a tiny precise brown floral, and each of the poems starts with an elaborate engraved capital letter that morphs into a work of art.

On the front loose endpaper, a previous owner has made a notation that they acquired this volume when it was "Bot at sale of A.W. Carmike, Dec. 1912". Eight months after the Titanic sank, which has nothing to do with this volume, I just enjoy placing items within their time.

At the time of this volume's publication, Lord Alfred Tennyson was still alive and writing. Two years later, in 1894, he would be created a baron by the Crown, and eight years follwoing, in 1892, he would be buried in the Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey.

No artist is listed for the engraved illustrations, but they include forest paths, full-rigged ships sailing stormy oceans, ravens soaring between Gothic arches, medieval beggars and maids and other flights of artistic fancy.

My favorite Tennyson, from page 83, and possibly Mr. Edgar Allan Poe's judging from his allusion to it in the December 1844 Democratic Review: "Why do some persons fatigue themselves in endeavours to unravel such phantasy pieces as the 'Lady of Shallot'? As well unweave the ventum textilem":

The Lady of Shalott, Part II:

There she weaves by night and day

A magic web with colours gay.

She has heard a whisper say,

A curse is on her if she stay

To look down to Camelot.

She knows not what the 'curse' may be,

And so she weaveth steadily,

And little other care hath she,

The Lady of Shalott.

And moving thro' a mirror clear

That hangs before her all the year,

Shadows of the world appear.

There she sees the highway near

Winding down to Camelot:

There the river eddy whirls,

And there the surly village-churls,

And the red cloaks of market girls,

Pass onward from Shalott.

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,

An abbot on an ambling pad,

Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad,

Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad,

Goes by to tower'd Camelot;

And sometimes thro' the mirror blue

The knights come riding two and two:

She hath no loyal knight and true,

The Lady of Shalott.

But in her web she still delights

To weave the mirror's magic sights,

For often thro' the silent nights

A funeral, with plumes and lights,

And music, went to Camelot:

Or when the moon was overhead,

Came two young lovers lately wed;

"I am half-sick of shadows," said

The Lady of Shalott.

The Strange Man of the Oglalas

2009-11-08T20:03:00.005-05:00

In 1942, Mari Sandoz wrote a biography of the great Native American leader Ta-Shunka-Witko,known to white America as Chief Crazy Horse.

From her own childhood:

"The home of my childhood was on the upper Niobara River, the Running Water of the old-timers, at the edge of the region they called Indian County. It was close to the great Sioux reservations of South Dakota - the final places of refuge for many of the old buffalo-hunting Indians...such men are often great story-tellers, and these my father, Old Jules, drew to him as a curl of smoke rising above a clump of trees would once have drawn them...

"Around our kitchen table, or perhaps at the evening fires of the Sioux camped across the road from our house, I heard these old-timers tell ...stories of hunting the buffalo, the big-horn, and the grizzly, and of Indian fights and raidings... but most often they talked of the battles in what the whites called the Sioux wars, from that climatic summer day on the Little Big Horn all the way back to the beginning...

"As I listened to these stories it seemed that through them, like a painted strip of rawhide in a braided rope, ran the name of one who was a boy among the Oglalas the day the chief of his people was shot down. He must have been twelve then, quiet, serious, very light-skinned for an Indian, with hair so soft and pale that he was called Curly...but by the end of those wars, twenty-three years later, he was known as the greatest of the fighting Oglalas, and his name, Crazy Horse, was one to frighten the children of the whites crowding into his country, and even the boldest warriors of his Indian enemies, the Snakes and Crows.

"In 1930 I made a three-thousand-mile trip through the Sioux country, locating Indian sites and living among the people. We interviewed the few old buffalo-hunters still alive, including such friends and relatives of Crazy Horse as Red Feather, Little Killer, Short Bull, and particularly He Dog, his lifelong brother-friend. It was well that this was done then, for now He-Dog is dead.

Crazy Horse was born about 1840; he was killed treacherously through betrayal by his own people in 1877. This is the story of that betrayal, and the woman for whom the great warrior would one day risk everything he knew of his people and their earth.

The author August Derleth called this book: "a portrait of a man and a people so vividly drawn that no reader will ever completely forget it...one of the great biographies."

Crazy Horse- Sacred Warrior Original artwork by Cherokee artist Michael Gentry

Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, Mari Sandoz, Sold by Chewybooks on November 8, 2009

An American Saga

2009-11-02T19:34:00.002-05:00

Carl Christian Jensen, was born a Danish peasant in 1888, and ran away to sea at age 12. Eventually arriving in New York, then setting out for the western frontier in Minnesota he joined a Doomsday Religion and then studied physics. An American Saga, published in 1927, is a one-of-a-kind autobiography, only possible in America.

A brief excerpt:

"During the mackeral season I hired out in Bette-Fanden's cutter...Late at night we put to sea...The silence of night was broken by the splash of mackeral upon the surface, by the cutter, creaking under the weight of fish, and by the distant shoal waters...The nets were like bundles of silk, dyed in gorgeous tints and hues. The glazed eyes of themackeral glowed like heaps of pearls. Their scales glittered like diamonds.

"During dark nights and during moonlight nights, while we waited to heave the nets aboard, the sea was like a magic crystal ...There was one sea, but nine varieties of tides and winds to change the sea. When a storm chased the surges into the bowlders' arms, they laughed and wept in their first love.

"At the age of sixteen I began to live on the high seas in a small room with two potholes on the hull side...whatever I possessed I kept in my bunk. At dawn a sunbeam stole through the porthole...atnight I lay awake, gazing down into the magic depth...The starry sky twinkled above;pitch darkness ahead."

An American Saga, Carl Christian Jensen, Offered for sale, as of November 2, 2009, by Chewybooks.

A Trail Through Leaves

2009-10-29T11:44:00.007-04:00

From A Trail Through Leaves: The Journal As A Path To Place:

"It took many years of writing, thousands of pages, to discover that I could not find the fit between experience and record by writing with "summing up" words. To say that a canoe trip was wonderful, and that the river was beautiful, and that I had many adventures accomplished nothing in the journal: I didn't even have the pleasure of reliving the best moments while writing about them. And yet this ingrained tendency to generalize I still have to fight daily.

"A journal filled with "nices", "wonderfuls", "terribles", and "interestings" is one drained of any live juice. If that kind of writing merely reflects habit, there is hope for change. If the writer insists in it, consider it a sign of a deep-seated fear of the real."

This is the most intimate book on the craft of writing I have ever read. It falls somewhere between a suggestion of how and why to keep a journal, and a detailed, vividly illustrated book of nature. I've seen it featured on other sites as a way to teach writing through science. I believe it's closest cousin would be the much-loved Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden (1906).

Highly recommended to any aspiring or accomplished wordscribe or naturalist.

"Sometimes the pen on the page is alive, and sometimes it seems stupid and stumbling. Often I wait, bending over that dark pool full of hidden words, and suddenly the right ones surface. I'm ready for them, and feel something of the keen pleasure as I did when speed and strength became equipoise over a jump.

"Other times the pool stays blank, just a maddening lifeless flatness. The presence or absence of flow can't be dictated, but a person can remain agile and alert, ready to recognize and act on whatever comes.

"The pleasure of encountering the next blank page-spread in the journal seems never to diminish...."

A Trail Through Leaves: The Journal As A Path To Peace, Hannah Hinchman. Offered for Sale by Chewybooks, as of October 29, 2009.

Magic Descending

2009-10-27T21:07:00.004-04:00

In 1833, there was a now-legendary, magical display in the heavens...the Leonid Meteor Shower. From New York to California, from Canada to Alabama, all the world seemed caught up in the trail of the comet Temple-Tuttle.

A firsthand account, from the early morning hours of November 13, 1833:

"See! The whole heavens are on fire! All the stars are falling!" These cries brought us all into the open yard, to gaze upon the grandest and most beautiful scene my eyes have ever beheld. It did appear as if every star had left its moorings, and was drifting rapidly in a westerly direction, leaving behind a track of light which remained visible for several seconds.

"Some of those wandering stars seemed as large as the full moon, or nearly so, and in some cases they appeared to dash at a rapid rate across the general course of the main body of meteors, leaving in their track a bluish light, which gathered into a thin cloud not unlike a puff of smoke from a tobacco-pipe. Some of the meteors were so bright that they were visible for some time after day had fairly dawned.

"Imagine large snowflakes drifting over your head, so near you that you can distinguish them, one from the other, and yet so thick in the air as to almost obscure the sky; then imagine each snowflake to be a meteor, leaving behind it a tail like a little comet; these meteors of all sizes, from that of a drop of water to that of a great star, having the size of the full moon in appearance: and you may then have some faint idea of this wonderful scene." Samuel Rogers, circuit preacher, Toils and Struggles of the Olden Times, 1880.

Many years later, in 1934, Carl Carmer would write a fascinating book Stars Fell on Alabama, an authentic collection of folkways, customs, and an honest look at Alabama circa 1934, complete with poverty and racial violence. Illustrations were provided by the incomparable Cyrus Leroy Baldridge. The frontiespiece was a carefully drawn state map, designating The Red Hills, The Foothills, Black Belt, Cajan Country, and Conjure Country, with a Baldridge illustration for each section, in addition to smaller drawings tucked in along the page edges.

A brief excerpt:

"Alabama felt a magic descending, spreading, long ago. Since then it has been a land with a spell in it - not a good spell, always. Moons, red with the dust of barren hills, thin pine trunks barring horizons, festering swamps, restless yellow rivers, are all a part of a feeling - a strange certainty that above and around them hovers excitement - an emanation of malevolence that threatens to destroy men through dark ways of its own.

"...once upon a time stars fell on Alabama, changing the land's destiny. What had been written in eternal symbols was thus erased - and the region has existed ever since, unreal and fated, bound by a horoscope such as controls no other country."

A bit later in Conjure Country:

"I saw them walking down the hill from the direction of the old house...they wore their Sunday-best - black suits and white shirts and collars for the men, black skirts and white shirt-waists for the women - adding to the silhouette effect as I looked up at the long line of them in sharp outline against the red clay of the barren slope and the light blue of the sky behind it. They were singing a spirtual, one I have rarely heard, 'Break Them Chains', and they were swaying slowly in time to its minor cadences."

From Tuscaloosa Nights:

"Beneath the tall elms on Queen City Avenue rode three horsemen robed in white. As they passed the black background of the big tree trunks the moonlight picked them out distinctly...

"Behind the mounted trio stretched a long column of marching white figures, two and two, like an army of coupled ghosts, their shapeless flopping garments tossing up and down in the still night air.

"Look," he said, "can you see their shoes? They tell alot."

"Moving under the edges of the white robes were pants-leg ends and shoes, hundreds of them. A pair that buttoned and had cloth tops, a heavy laced pair splashed with mud, canvas sneakers, congress gaiters - a yellow pair with knobbly toes swung past. At the very end a lone figure in sturdy grained oxfords, his sheet twisted awry, stepped gingerly - a little uncertainly."

"So I have chosen to write of Alabama not as a state which is part of a nation, but as a strange country in which I once lived and from which I have now returned...."

Stars Fell on Alabama, Carl Carmer, Offered for sale by Chewybooks as of October 27,2009.

No Regrets

2009-10-20T20:41:00.004-04:00

In 1935, FDR endeavored to provide jobs for the 20,000 - 30,000 unemployed actors, directors, writers, stagehands, and designers left idle in the Great Depression. The Federal Theatre Project ran from 1935-1939, and was overseen by Hallie Flangan (above) a drama professor from Vassar. FDR personally chose Flanagan to run the national program that eventually employed 13,000 people in various theatres in thirty-one states.

Eventually, this very successful program ran afoul of the political redbaiting of the time and Hallie Flanigan (having had visited Russia at one point in her life, and therefore obviously being a Communist) had to testify to a government committee as to exactly what the theatres were up to. Need I say that the Representative who saw a Communist behind every theatre curtain was Republican?

A brief excerpt from Arena, The History of the Federal Theatre Project:

"Just as it sometimes happens that a drop of water in a certain light mirrors a landscape, so the Federal Theatre was a microcosm reflecting changes in American attitudes. The Federal Theatre cost money; it represented labor unions, old and new; it did not bar aliens or members of minority parties. It was perhaps the triumph as well as the tragedy of our actors that they became indeed the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.

"Thus the Federal Theatre ended as it had begun, with fearless presentation of problems touching American life. But I do not believe that anyone who worked on it regrets that it stood from first to last against reaction, against prejudice, against racial, religious and political intolerance.

"Anyone who thinks that those things do not need fighting for today is out of touch with reality."

Arena, The History of the Federal Theatre Project,by Hallie Flanagan, 1980 printing,

Offered for sale by Chewybooks, as of October 20,2009

Toledo Reeks of Mysticism

2009-10-16T20:22:00.003-04:00

In 1928, the European Tour was a rite of passage for upper class American college kids (much the same as for their 1960s and 1970s counterparts). For both generations, half the fun was bumming around Europe, ferreting out the cheapest deals on good food, places to stay and late night entertainment.

Enter The Hand-Me-Down-1928. Created at the end of the summer in 1927 "by several hundred students who pooled their European hotel findings and their pet discoveries that they might be passed on to future student travelers, to save their pocketbooks and enrich their trips."

"The result is the 1928 Hand-Me-Down, which you have just received in exchange for fifty cents...Amended Hand-Me-Downs will be handed down to students to come in 1929 and everafter.

"There are a number of blank pages at the back of the book for memorandums and instructions as to how to record your information. At the end of the summer those pages may be torn out and sent to..."

"Don't expect the book to be perfect - romance for Sally may not be romance for John; what pleases Peter may not please you. It goes without saying that the Hand-Me-Down is not public property. It is for STCA passengers only, and only 1500 of them."

And what sort of impressions did the 1928 student traveller leave?

"In Arles, France, the Treviot Restaurant....has a sawdust covered floor but serves delicious meals for 12-15 fr

"In Carcassonne, France, Notes: A very, very old lady who sits outside the walls near entrance will teach you how to weave fish nets

"In Paris, France, Chateau Madrid Restaurant: Dancing out of doors, tea is less catastrophic

"Winchester, Great Britain,Black Swan Hotel: Don't get a room on the road if you want to sleep

"Florence, Italy, Picchiole Hotel: excellent and cheap, but pigeons have a habit of flying right into your room

"Krak0w, Poland, De France Hotel: Cheap and delightful, chambermaids are barefooted

"Toledo, Spain, Notes: Unexcelled location on top of hill, accessible only by two very fine bridges. Don't fail to overlook lower city at night... Toledo reeks of mysticism."

Offered for sale, The Hand-Me-Down 1928, as of October 16, 2009, by Chewybooks.

The First Oil Rush

2009-10-12T22:33:00.004-04:00

"A Seneca woman knelt by a creek in the Allegheny hills and spread an open blanket over a rainbow of colors that shimmered on the water. Then she carefully pulled in the heavy, dripping blanket and squeezed it over a pail. A dozen times she repeated the process until at last the pail was filled with.....oil. The year was 1750.

"Just as they stored meat, so the Senecas stored crude oil. They dabbed it on wounds and bruises. If a wound was slow to heal, they wrapped a stick in dry vines, dipped it in crude oil, and set fire to it. The flaming stick was used to burn away dead, decayed skin. Frequently they swallowed the crude oil a gulp at a time to cure fever and headache. When mixed with colored juice squeezed from berries and leaves, it became a war paint that stayed on through the sweat of battle. Each year after the spring floods, the Senecas would gather by the banks of the oil creek, bringing their sick and wounded to be healed in the soothing water. At the end of the day, the oily slick on the water would be set afire with a torch. As the flaming waters lighted up the night, shout after shout would burst forth from the assembled Senecas.

"A little over a hundred years later Colonel Edwin L. Drake brought up from the bowels of the earth near this creek the first oil ever mined in America - and the world's most lucrative business was born."

An interesting read, as we argue whether or not we've reached "Peak Oil".

The First Oil Rush, by Frances G. Conn and Shirley Sirota Rosenberg, Stated First Edition, 1967, with dust jacket. Offered for sale as of October 12, 2009 by Chewybooks.

Take Your Family To Work Day

2009-10-06T20:47:00.002-04:00

"The Williams family sailed the seas in the great days of American whaling. Eliza Azelia Williams set out from New Bedford in 1858 aboard her husband's vessel, the 'Florida', for a three-year voyage. She had two children born at sea, and the boy William grew up to go whaling in his turn, while the girl married Edgar Lewis "the Whalebone King." William was only twelve when the Williams' ship was abandoned with thirty-one others in the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean. He was fifteen when he became a junior office on the whaler 'Florence'.

So much for the old sailor's prejudice against having women onboard a sailing ship. Actually, reading the entries of Eliza's diary, there are more than a few meet-ups with other whaling ships, and their captains, along with their respective wives.

Not only did the good Captain Williams take his wife to sea with him, but she was four months pregnant when they set sail. On January 12, 1859, Eliza delivered a boy and continued filling her journal pages with whales, assorted tropical islands they stopped at, exotic natives and so forth. Not until late January does she mention "we have a fine healthy Boy, born 5 days before we got into Port".

That's it. The woman delivered a boy, by herself, onboard a whaling ship, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and didn't even blink.

One Whaling Family, Edited by Harold Williams, First Edition, 1964, Offered for sale by Chewybooks, as of 10-6-2009.

So Bends the Bamboo

2009-10-04T22:27:00.004-04:00

Hiroshima

After it all has been said,

Can ought be left to say?

Havoc has spread down its bed

With the dead in the night.

Rains cannot hope to smother

Hope, rising through the mist.

Man and forgotten brother

Clasp hands, in faith, again.

Poems of 1959 Japan, from a Western point-of-view, written by Virginia L. Lantz.

So Bends The Bamboo, 1959, First Edition without dust jacket; signed by author on reverse of first title page.

Offered for sale by Chewybooks as of 10-4-09.

The Gateless Barrier

2009-09-29T11:15:00.004-04:00

In Victorian England, women of good breeding were not encouraged to stand out for much more than their pretty looks or fashionable parties. they definitely were not encouraged to become authors, much less popular authors.

Therefore Mary St. Leger Kingsley became Lucas Malet, author of some fourteen books from the late 1880's to 1930. Her father was author Charles Kingsley (Water Babies) and several years after her first book was published she married William Harrison, Minor Canon of Westminster, and Priest-in-Ordinary to the Queen.

To protect her identity, she remained Lucas Malet in print.

Lately we have come across The Gateless Barrier, Lucas Malet's seventh book. It is a paranormal historical romance, with an Preface to the reader discussing a belief of the Zen Dyhana sect, specifically Mu-Mon-Kwan, which means "The Gateless Barrier".

Malet's subject, Laurence, has had a blessed life - everything has gone his way, family, fortune, education, even recently he has acquired the perfect wife. As the book opens we meet him leaning on a ship-railing, traveling to the bedside of a dying uncle in England. His thoughts dwell on how easily everything has gone for him, without much exertion or interest on his part. And how empty it seems, when he should be delighted.

In his uncle's brooding old mansion, Laurence encounters a beautiful ghost, one who seems more intriguing than familiar. After several glimpses, he finally manages to approach her:

"Listen to me," he said. "We are strangers to one another - so strangely strangers that I half distrust the evidence of my senses, as only too conceivably, you distrust the evidence of yours. I don't pretend to understand what distance of time, or space, or conditions, separate us. I only know that I see you, and that you are unhappy, and that you search for something you are unable to find. Look here, look here - listen to me and try to lay hold of this idea - that I am a friend, not an enemy; that I come to help, not to hinder you. Try to enter into some sort of relation with me. Try to cross the gulf which seems to lie between us. Try to believe that you have found someone who will keep faith with you, and do his best to serve you; and believing that, put sorrow out of your face."

And then, hidden away in a dusty pigeonhole of an old desk, he finds the letters, dated some eighty years earlier, some still bearing rusty red stains. On his deathbed, Laurence's dying uncle asks if he has seen the spectre...

Written along the lines of Peter Ibbettson, and during the time of Spiritualism's great popularity, this book remains surprisingly readable, with a twist at the end.

The Gateless Barrier, by Lucas Malet, offered for sale, as of September 29,2009 by Chewybooks at: http://www.amazon.com/shops/chewybooks

When the Cossacks first surrounded the house...

2009-09-28T16:38:00.003-04:00

How many times do you run across a line like that?

Several, if you are reading The Paderewski Memoirs.

This 1938 collection of the great composer's memoirs was told directly to the author Mary Lawton. Born in 1860 in Poland, to a mother named Polixena and a estate administrator named Jan, Paderewski lived through the tumultuous Polish revolutions and constant war with Mother Russia.

So when he says the Cossacks surrounded the house, they did:

"My country was always torn with revolution. My first childish knowledge of it was revolution, and it was in the revolution of 1863 that my father was taken to prison. It was very sad and terrifying to us, and we cried bitterly together...we could not understand it when our father was taken away from us and we were left alone.

"It was this revolution of '63 and '64 which ruined many thousands of people in Poland. Many were executed or sent to Siberia; their properties were confiscated and given away to Russian functionaries...they had been guilty of some intrigue or some participation in the propaganda against the Russian government. My father supported all that, and whatever he could do, he did.

"Suddenly the house was surrounded by Cossacks, and nobody was permitted to leave before a thorough search was accomplished. There was a large company of the Cossacks, perhaps 150 on horseback. They seemed very big and terrifying to a small boy. They completely encircled our house, and proceeded with the search. I was frightened of course, and could not realize then what was going on, and I wanted to know, to understand; so I approached the tallest of the Cossacks very timidly and asked him about my father.

"But he never answered or even looked at me."

from The Paderewski Memoirs, 1938 edition, as of 9-28-09 on Amazon by Chewybooks
http://www.amazon.com/shops/chewybooks

When Are Men Dangerous?

2009-09-25T15:56:00.004-04:00

In today's uber-patriotic atmosphere, sometimes it is forgotten that in every war, there have been those who believe violence is wrong, for any reason. This was true even during the Great War (World War I) and The Good War (World War II).

William Stafford, a World War I conscientious objector, published Down in My Heart in 1947, through the Brethren Publishing House.

An excerpt, set on a Sunday afternoon in spring, 1942, at an Arkansas Civilian Public Service Camp:

"When are men dangerous? We sat in the sun near the depot one afternoon in McNeil, Arkansas...Bob was painting a watercolor picture; George was scribbling a poem in his tablet; I was reading off and on in Leaves of Grass and enjoying the scene.

"When are men dangerous? It was March 22, 1942. The fruit trees at the camp farm were in bloom...we spoke of the war and of camp and of Sunday as we hiked through the pine woods and past the sagging houses. We knew our way around...our project superintendent had warned us against saying "Mr." and "Mrs." to Negores, and we had continued to use the terms...one stormy night when no doctors would come out, some of the men in camp had given first aid to a Negro woman, who husband led them through the pine woods to the cabin where the woman lay screaming. Thus we had become friends with some of our neighbors...but it was harder with others.

"When we had hiked into McNeil we had found a few men loafing around in the shade. The stores were closed...we too relaxed for our Sunday afternoon. Bob set up his drawing board; George got out his tablet and pen; and I sat leaning against a telephone pole and began to read - among dangerous men.

"It takes such an intricate succession of misfortunes and blunders to get mobbed by your own countrymen - and such a close balancing of good fortune to survive - that I consider myself a rarity in being able to tell the story...but just how we began to be mobbed and just where the blunders and misfortunes began, it is hard to say. We might have lived through a quiet Sabbath if it had not been for Bob's being an artist; or especially if it had not been for George's poem; and on the other hand, we might have become digits in Arkansas's lynching record if Walt Whitmen had used more rhyme in his poetry...

"I went back to my book, and I'll never be able to remember whether I was reading, when it happened, "Come, I will make the continent indissoluble..."

"A young man spoke, not directly to us, but to other townsmen...about us being CO's. There was more muttering, in which we began to hear the quickening words - "yellow" and "damn". At first these words the men said, about us, to each other; then the faces were turned more our way when the words were said.

"We ought to break that board over their heads," someone suggested. Several others repeated the idea; others revised the words, expanded the concept, and passing the saying along. Some spoke of "stringing them up."

"Finally to our great relief, the police car from Magnolia rolled up. A policeman was driving; a man in plain clothes was beside him. These two representatives of the law took over, got our names, and gravely considered the indictments of the crowd.

"The mob scene was over; our possessions were returned to us. At camp we doubled the night watch, for fear of trouble, but nothing happened.

"The next morning before work, we three stood before the assembled campers and gave our version of what had happened, in order to quiet rumors and to help everyone learn from the experience.

"Our camp director, a slow-talking preacher, gave us the final word: "...don't think our neighbors here in Arkansas are hicks just because they see you as spies and dangerous men.

"Just remember that our government is spending millions of dollars and hiring the smartest men in the country to devote themselves full-time just to make everyone act that way."*

*Sold yesterday from Chewybooks on Amazon, the memoir of a World War I conscientious objector: Down in My Heart, by William E. Stafford, published 1947.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book; books are well written or badly written.

2009-09-23T16:46:00.008-04:00

My favorite Oscar Wilde quote, just in time for Banned Books Week.

I'm proud to say many of my favorite books have been regular contestants on the Banned Book list, apparently offending everyone but me.

I would have counted my childhood lacking if I had been spared To Kill A Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn or I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. At one point in our nation's questionable history, even The Wizard of Oz was removed from school library shelves.

While the common perception is that the South is most likely to produce challenges to various titles (being known as the Bible Belt with all that implies), the kneejerk reactions against books are fairly common across America.

In light of this spreading insanity, your author would like to offer a healthy alternative.

Each day, one click at The Literacy Site will help provide children with books they can keep. You, my gentle reader, can join 80,000 other world citizens each day to give books to those kids who need them the most.

Across income lines, gender, and geographic location, the one variable that affects reading scores directly is the number of books that surround a child in their home.

The Literacy Site has provided more than 1.6 million books to children - books they can keep and take home with them, for their very own.

One may presume that some of those titles were on the banned book list.

I certainly hope so.

The World of Language

2009-09-15T20:08:00.004-04:00

"My father taught me to read. Long before I could decipher the black squiggles on a page, he had me reading the meadow and mountain woods.

"Dad taught me strategies, to look for movements, patterns, or breaks in patterns. An exclamation mark in the march became a great blue heron; the V on the river, a swimming muskrat...The shiny spot under a log became the salamander's tail; the whirling speck in the sky, a red-tail hawk. I read with fascination and glee.

"But my whole family also read in the written world. Every day Mom and Dad read the newspaper. My older sister scowled at my interruptions of Nancy Drew. Magazines and novels spilled from the coffee table, and most winter evenings, I knew I could find someone in the den, face hidden, at that moment consumed by language.

"In this house of readers, I read ravenously. I still do."

excerpt from:

Finding A Clear Path by Jim Minick

The jacket review:

"Another shining writer has emerged from the Southern landscape. Jim Minick has written an exquisitely beautiful book about his Appalachian farm, and his engagement in a life that makes sense."

Hmm....consumed by language, in a life that makes sense.

Finding a Clear Path, offered for sale as of September 15, 2009, at:
http://www.amazon.com/shops/chewybooks

In Need of A Modest Proposal

2009-09-06T16:41:00.004-04:00

My daughter's current assignment to write a summary of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal has brought to mind a most perfect modern-day counterpart.

All of the shouting, blathering and general indignation being expressed at the so-called Town Hall Meetings on health care reform and the dilemma of providing health care for every citizen, should take a note from the 1729 pennings of Jonathan Swift, who was also concerned about the tremendous burden placed on Irish society by the number of indigent children, the diseased, the aged and infirm.

Perhaps they can appreciate his satirical solution, and insist up on its inclusion in any health bill that is passed by our esteemed Congress.

General Premise: There are too many poor children, who do not contribute and are a burden both upon their parents and society as a whole.

Solution: Let's eat them.

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust."

Advantages to this Solution: It gives the poor a constant source of income, and young people a reason to marry.

Possible Complications: What to do about those who are old, sick or disabled? Or what of those young people who cannot find gainful employment to provide themselves with food?

Solution: Leave them alone and they'll die.

"I am not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is very well known, that they are every day dying, and rotting, by cold and famine, and filth, and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected. And as to the young labourers, they are now in almost as hopeful a condition. They cannot get work, and consequently pine away from want of nourishment, to a degree,that if at any time they are accidentally hired to common labour,they have not strength to perform it, and thus the country and themselves are happily delivered from the evils to come."

The author was so fond of his proposal that he begged the reader not to discuss any other solutions such as:

"... introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence and temperance: Of learning to love our country, wherein we differ ... : Of quitting our animosities and factions: Of being a little cautious not to sell our country and consciences for nothing: Of teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants. "

Unless, of course, there was even a "at least some glympse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice."

"After all, I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion, as to reject any offer, proposed by wise men, which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual (as simply eating the children). But before something of that kind shall be advanced... I desire the author or authors will be pleased maturely to consider two points.

"First, As things now stand, how they will be able to find food and raiment for a hundred thousand useless mouths and backs.

"And secondly, There being a round million of creatures in humane figure throughout this kingdom, whose whole subsistence put into a common stock,would leave them in debt two million of pounds sterling, adding those who are beggars by profession, to the bulk of farmers,cottagers and labourers, with their wives and children, who are beggars in effect;(unemployed, with mounting debt and foreclosures)

"I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food at a year old, in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes, as they have since gone through, by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor cloaths to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of intailing the like, or greater miseries, upon their breed for ever."

So there's a solution - for all those without health care and employment, both legal and illegal (because they are in fact an equal drag upon the country), forget the idea of providing humanitarian care and opportunity with compassion.

Let's just invite them for dinner and cut short their sufferings.

Read the complete phamplet at: http://www.fullbooks.com/A-Modest-Proposal.html

A Consummate Wordsmith

2009-08-21T19:14:00.006-04:00

This little book is a mystery inside a mystery, by an author inside an author.

1339...Or So Being An Apology For A Pedlar is based on "the vigorous oral tradition of Welsh prose, in which the author Professor Nicholas Seare, toiled amongst the ballads, poems and tales of Welsh Mabinigion mythology".

Or not. But first, an excerpt from the book (simply because it's a great read, no matter what it's based on, or who it's written by):

"...early Christians labored under the assumption that the end of the world was at hand; as indeed it was...for them. The promise of obliteration enabled them to withstand their deprivations and self-denials, sustained by the grim conviction that there were only a few years left anyway, and that the life-lovers would soon get theirs too.

"These misguided men wasted the gift of life, covered to the lee of beauty and surprise, denied their bodies, constricted their minds, and dimmed their visions on the gamble that they were storing up treasures in heaven, albeit in small change.

"Whatever bitter disappointment the Chosen felt when the un-co-operative world did not end on cue, they had sacrificed far too much to let it go at that. Doomsdays continued to be predicted... Among the Greater Endings, A.D. 88 stands out, as does 700, 707, 770 and 777.

"...{In 1339} the Great Snow was not the only omen attending the End of the World....Stars had fallen in showers, and March had been muddled. All across north Wales good people gathered around fires and whispered of things unspeakable...

"But most amazing and foreboding of all was the mystic transportation of Llewellan, Cleric of Caernarvon. He was discovered in a sheepcote with Magin the Slops...it was learned upon interrogation that they had both been spirited from their distant and lonely beds by forces best not named aloud."

The author, Professor Nicholas Seare, was actually created by Peter Trevanian.

And there's the mystery in the mystery: exactly who was Peter Trevanian? To start he was a best-selling author, who never made a personal appearance, or attended a book-signing, or agreed to an interview until 1975. Fans and web sites ran rampant speculating on his true identity. Some thought he was actually author Robert Ludlum (he wasn't), others speculated that he was a Department of Labor employee named Jack Hashian (he wasn't).

As a writer he refused to stick to a particular genre. But each book he wrote in its respective genre was a masterpiece. With each new genre, Trevanian used Method-acting to imagine himself as the author, then sat down to write his book. Each book carries itself with a unique style, particular to that book. Trevanian sold millions of books that were translated into 14 languages.

Finally, a literary gift in March of 2006 confirmed his identity: His name was Dr. Rodney William Whitaker, and he had passed away in December of 2005, in the West Country of England. He wrote under at least five pseudonyms and kept his true identity a mystery for decades. Before he turned to novels, he was a playwright, compared in one obituary to the likes of Mark Twain, with a naturally witty and graceful gift of writing "well-structured dialogue", being "ever the consummate wordsmith".

What better epitaph for a writer: "the consummate wordsmith".

1339...Or So Being An Apology For A Pedlar, First Edition, 1975, currently offered for sale as of August 22, 2009 at: http://www.amazon.com/shops/chewybooks

Noble Poetry

2009-08-18T22:28:00.004-04:00

Besides Sherlock Holmes, and his devotion to spiritualism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was also the author of Micah Clarke, His Statement as made to his three grandchildren, Joseph, Gervas and Rueben, During the Hard Winter of 1734.

Published in 1888, this copy discovered today (and not offered for sale by this bookseller, she preferring instead to retain it for her personal collection) is a 1899 edition, with a previous owners name and acquistion date).

Micah Clarke is an example of a type of novel from the German Enlightment period, a bildungsroman, or a novel that tells the lifestory of a central character while enumerating the psychological and moral forces that shape that character. The entire life span of the character is presented, with a major loss or tragedy at the beginning of the book, inspiring a long, treacherous journey, with many opportunities for growth along the way. At the conclusion of the book, the character has been successfully accepted into society, and is a shining example of moral perfection that can be achieved.

In this case, we are introduced to Micah Clarke, a young boy, who falls under the mentorship of a mercenary soldier, and manages to survive a variety of adventures. Along the way, the author presents a complete history of the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, told from a 17th century viewpoint. (The Duke of Monmouth was the illegimate son of Charles the II who made an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow James II. Monmouth's main attraction was that he was Protestant, versus the Catholic persuasion of James II.)

From Micah Clarke:

"From the day that I first learned my letters from the hornbook at my mother's knee I was always hungry to increase my knowledge, and never a piece of print came in my way that I did not eagerly master. My father pushed the sectarian hatred of learning to such a length that he was averse to having any worldy books within his doors. I was dependent therefore for my supply upon one or two of my friends in the village, who lent me a volume at a time from their small libraries, theseI would carry inside my shirt, and would only dare to produce when I could slip away into the fields, and lie hiden among the long grass, or at night when the rushlight was still burning, and my father's snoring assured me there was no chance of his detecting me....

"There were times as I rose up with my mind full of the noble poetry and glanced over the fair slope of the countryside, with the gleaming sea beyond it...when it would be borne in upon me that the Being who created all of this and who gave man the power of pouring out these beautiful thought, was not the possession of one sect or another, or of this nation or that, but was the kindly Father of every one...

"If you, my dears, have more enlightened views, take heed that they bring you to lead a more enlightened life."

The Author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Biography of R.S.

2009-08-15T19:21:00.004-04:00

Consider the lowly head lice.

Besides being an increasing irritant in the life of any mother with elementary age children in a public school, they are almost indistinguishable from body lice.

Hans Zinsser recognized body lice as the scourge of armies, and as the chief trasmitter of typhus. In fact, he spent his entire life studying bacteria and transmission of disease.

After developing the first anti-typhus vaccine in 1933, he authored Rats, Lice and History, still in print, and still readable (including a word with the following footnote: "If the reader does not know the meaning of this word, that is unfortunate." An educator after my own heart.)

Zinsser wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, played the fiddle, traveled the world, and eventually, while examing his own blood under a microscope, identified and diagnosed himself with chronic leukemia. Knowing his time was limited, he wrote his own autobiography in the third person: As I Remember Him: The Biography of R.S.

"An affectionate, voluble, energetic, terrierlike man, Hans Zinsser had a strong fondness for wine, women, horses, books. Two years ago, returning from a junket to China, he noticed that the sun on ship board turned him not healthy brown but lemon yellow. He knew then that there was something serious the matter with his blood. Back in Boston, he consulted a colleague and friend, who told him, with "affectionate abstinence from any expression of sympathy," that he had leukemia. Looking out at the white sails on the Charles River, Zinsser realized that he was going to die. A great lover of life, he began soon to fall in love with death.

"In his book Zinsser revealed that he was an agnostic, that he did not know what lay beyond the last door. But he said that the imminence of death had made his perceptions keener and lovelier. "When he awoke in the mornings," he wrote of himself, "the early sun striking across the bed, the light on the branches of the trees outside his window, the noise of his sparrows, and all the sounds of the awakening street aroused in him all kinds of gentle and pleasing memories of days long past. . . " *

The "R.S." was short for Romantic Self, a self-description by Zinsser himself.

As of 8-15-09, offered for sale by Chewybooks at:
http://www.amazon.com/shops/chewybooks

*Time Magazine, Romantic Self, Monday, September 16,1940 (obituary for Hans Zinsser)

Curling At the Edges

2009-08-12T22:14:00.003-04:00

The Old Postcards

I have often thought

of justice, of setting

my own square inch in order

of sending them back, of finding

someone to send them to

or of some simple ritual

involving water

but the old postcards of Prague

are still there in my room.

My grandfather found them

in a London street during the war

and for no good reason

took them home.

They were in a handsome album

with family photographs and the next time

he came to see us he brought the album

as a present for his small grandson.

My parents first removed the snapshots

and threw them on the fire - I could see people

curling at the edges. Laying the postcards

out on the floor I used to wonder

at so many synagogues

at tangled cemeteries with headstones

curiously inscribed, and turning them over

at captions in several languages

with German always carefully struck out.

Having since grown

a language away from my family

I offer these words

to one who may have lost the need for them.

By Keith Bosley, from The Young British Poets, Edited by Jeremy Robson, St. Martin's Press, 1973

Offered as of 8-12-09 by Chewybooks: http://www.amazon.com/shops/chewybooks

The Magic of the Hour

2009-08-11T15:03:00.003-04:00

"The moon was coming up over the eastern hills, flooding the pastures and fields with a silvery radiance, and bringing the dark outlines of the encircling forest into bold relief, like an etching.

"A whippoorwill was calling from down the road, and a screech owl sent his plaintative cry from the edge of the timber. The myriad insect life was tuning up for the night's orchestration. The earth seemed to be at peace.

"Eric Brown felt the magic of the hour and was thinking of what little account are all the vain and futile strivings of man." *

*Greater Love Hath No Man, David P. Allison, 1938, currently offered as of 8-11-09

Chewybooks at
http://www.amazon.com/shops/chewybooks

Saturday, August 9, 1969

2009-08-10T21:07:00.004-04:00

"It was so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes way down the canyon.

"It was hot that night, but not as hot as the night before, when the temperature hadn't dropped below 92 degrees. The three-day heat wave had begun to break a couple of hours before, about 10 p.m. on Friday - to the psychological as well as the physical relief of those Angelenos who recalled that on such a night, just four years ago, Watts had exploded in violence.

"Though the coastal fog was now rolling in from the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles itself remained hot and muggy, sweltering in its own emissions, but here, high above most of the city, and usually even above the smog, it was at least 10 degrees cooler. Still, it remained warm enough so that many residents of the area slept with their windows open, in hopes of catching a vagrant breeze.

"All things considered, it's surprising that more people didn't hear something.

"But then it was late, just after midnight, and 10050 Cielo Drive was secluded.

"Being secluded, it was also vulnerable."*

I forgot how engrossing Helter Skelter is - tragic, sad, frightening, and completely mesmerizing.

My copy is packed away, so I borrowed my daughter's (yes, this morbid fascination is apparently genetic). It's one we bought at a library sale. Today we opened it up and found the oddest thing.

On the first loose endpaper, in the top outside corner, the previous owners name, and date, December 1974.

And there in the center, in a large scrawl:

"To Sharon Tate Aug 5, 1975"

Sent chills down my spine.

* Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, Vincent Bugliosi

What Was It?

2009-08-05T20:48:00.004-04:00

It was a fearful page in the record of my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher them, but in vain; while ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done a deed - what was it? *

Since the very first mystery flowed from Edgar Allan Poe's imagination, what was it and who did it have consumed both authors and readers.

From The Tell-Tale Heart to The Premature Burial, Poe dug deep until he found the deepest fears of both his contemporaries and modern man.

By the turn of the century, mystery had turned from describing horrible mysteries to solving them, thanks to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Inspector Sherlock Holmes.

I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes ...with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evcidently newly studied, near at hand. Besides the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracke din several places. A lens and forceps lying upon the seat of the chair suggested that the hat had been suspended in this manner for the purpose of examination. ..."I suppose....that as homely as it looks, this thing has some deadly story linked on to it - that it is the clue which will guide you in the solution of some mystery and the punishment of some crime."**

Modern mysteries are not my favorite genre, but as a bookseller, I have hundreds in stock. What I do enjoy immensely are their titles - usually a twist of wit and magic:

An Unkindness of Ravens (Ruth Rendell)
Legend in Green Velvet (Elizabeth Peters)
Where There's A Will (Aaron Elkins)
The Quiche of Death (M.C. Beaton)
Murder, My Suite (Mary Daheim)
Dance Hall of the Dead (Tony Hillerman)
Footprints in the Butter (Denise Deitz)

And my absolute favorite (and more-than-appropriate): The Bookwoman's Last Fling (John Dunning).

But as entertaining as these titles are, no one compares with Poe himself:

Out -out are the lights- out all!

And over each quivering form,

The curtain, a funeral pall,

Comes down with the rush of a storm,

And the angels, all pallid and wan,

Uprising, unveiling, affirm

that the play is the tragedy, "Man",

And its hero the Conqueror Worm. ***

*Bernice, Edgar Allan Poe

**The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

***Ligeia, Edgar Allan Poe

Beneath Tropic Seas

2009-07-27T21:21:00.003-04:00

"You are standing on a metal ladder in water up to your neck. Something round and heavy is slipped gently over your head, and a metal helmet rests upon your shoulders.

"Turning your head you see emerald waves breaking upon the distant beach of ivory, backed by feathery palms waving in the sunlight against a sky of pure azure.

"You wave goodbye ..and slowly descend, climbing down step by step. Then the world changes.

"There is no more harsh sunlight, but delicate blue-greens with a fluttering of shadows everywhere. Huge pink and orange growths rise on all sides -you know they are living corals.

"Now your feet touch ground ..an ostrich feather of a sea-plume as tall as yourself sweeps against you...at your elbow is a rounded table of lapis lazuli on which are blossoming three flowers...Their petals are resplendent in hues of gold and malachite,and are fluted and fringe like some rare unknown orchid.

"You are troubled with a terrible sense of loss that twenty, thirty, or fifty years of your life have passed and gone without your knowing of the ease of entry into this new world.

"Only a moment has passed since you left the world overhead, or was it many hours?

"All I ask of each reader is this- Don't die without having borrowed, stolen, purchased or made a helmet of sorts, to glimpse for yourself this new world. Books and aquaria are, to such an experience, only what a time-table is to an actual tour, or what a dried dusty piece of coral in a parlor is to this unsuspected realm of gorgeous life and color existing with us today on the self-same planet Earth"

From Beneath Tropic Seas: A Record of Diving Among the Coral Reefs of Haiti, by William Beebe, published by Blue Ribbon Books, 12th Printing, July 1936

Offered for sale as of 7-27-09:
http://www.amazon.com/shops/chewybooks

The Value of Military Discipline

2009-07-26T21:33:00.003-04:00

You never know who will show up when you throw a Revolution. Could be a young officer, thirsting for his first success, destined to be the Father of His Country. Could be a fiery Virginian, shouting Give me Liberty or give me Death.

Or it could be a penniless, unemployed, recently discharged-for-dubious-reasons, German captain who arrives dressed in a red -and-blue British general's uniform.

Enter the man who would become General von Steuben, said to be a curious mix of "Baron Munchausen and Don Quixote".

Enter the man who would become the second most important man in the American Revolution, the first being Washington himself.

Steuben contributed the incomparable ingredient of military discipline to the ragtag Continental Army.

From General Von Steuben*:

"The progress attained seemed almost miraculous...as the soldiers grew in skill they grew in soldierly pride and that a new morale nevermore to be extinguished soon pervaded the ranks of the Continental Army. The army grew rapidly in numbers and in discipline at the same time. This new birth of the Continental Army as a trained fighting machine is Steuben's contribution to the history of the War for Independence."

No small contribution. Translation: If it wasn't for Steuben, we might still be British subjects.

His contemporary Alexander Hamilton stated:

"I never knew or conceived the value of military discipline till that day."

Listed this evening through Chewybooks at Amazon, this particular copy includes some interesting extras tucked inside its covers:

A letter from the author Brigadier General John McAuley Palmer dated January 1938, to The Steuben News, thanking them for the most kind review of his book, and ordering extra copies of the paper.
A letter from the Chairman of The Steuben News, attached, dated February 1938, with both letters sent to Bertha Schrader, the author of the book review and also the owner of this particular book edition (her name is written on the first loose endpaper)
An original newspaper clipping of the actual review Ms. Schrader wrote
A newpaper clipping of an eloquent plea for recognition of General Steuben, with the enigmatic dates of 1777-1927
The remains of the original front and rear panels of the dust jacket

All foldout maps are present and in pristine condition. Pages 206 and 331 have carefully tape-mended corner tears.

*General Von Steuben, by Retired Brigadier General John McAuley Palmer, published 1937, Yale University Press

The Innumerable Silences of Stars

2009-07-23T23:15:00.005-04:00

The photo above is often attributed to being the wonderful T.E. Lawrence and his favorite camel, unfortunately it's a fake, nevertheless, it conjures up the spirit of his best-known work: Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.

Blood was always on our hands: we were licensed to it. Wounding and killing seemed ephemeral pains, so very brief and sore was life with us. With the sorrow of living so great, the sorrow of punishment had to be pitiless. We lived for the day and died for it.

Lawrence wrote his memoirs back in the day when an author was expected to enchant and seize the reader with the first sentence (Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances).

Tell me, did it enchant you?

The Very First Book

2009-07-19T19:33:00.006-04:00

Do you remember it?

The very first book you ever read.

The very first book you ever read......by yourself.

I do.

It was Mabel the Whale by Patricia King.

It was part of the Follett Beginning-To-Read Book Series , and it was illustrated by Katherine Evans.

Mabel was a whale. She lived in the Pacific Ocean. The water was very deep. The water was very blue.

(I lived on the Gulf Coast. The water was very deep, and it was very blue. We didn't have whales, but we did have dolphins that would swim next to our boat).

Mabel was a happy whale. She lived with her cousins. She played with her cousins. They swam in the deep blue ocean.

One day some men came. They came in a ship. The men caught Mabel. They did not hurt her. They put Mabel in the ship.

Then the men took Mabel away from the deep blue ocean. They took her to live in a place called Marineland. In Marineland fish and sea animals live in big pools or tanks. People come to see all the fish and sea animals.

(One of the reasons I spent so much time on the Gulf Coast was because my dad was a fisheries biologist. He spent time putting fish in big pools or tanks, so that people could come to see all the fish and sea animals).

Mabel was put into a tank. The tank was small. The water was not deep or blue. the water was not deep at all. Mabel could not hide in it. The sun shone down. It was very hot. Mabel could not hide her top fin under the water. So the hot sun burned Mabel's fin.

(The sun was very very hot on the Louisiana Gulf beaches. From time to time we would help dolphins back into the water, splashing them with water so they didn't get sunburnt).

People came to see Mabel. They looked at her through the glass. The people liked Mabel. But Mabel did not like the tank. The water was not deep. Mabel was very unhappy and she was very sad. Her fin hurt. Soon, Mabel was very sick.

She even stopped eating. Then the men at Marineland had an idea. There was a very big round tank in Marineland. If they moved Mabel to the big tank, she would have more water.

The men brought a big crane. Then they brought many mattresses. Then they bought a raft.
They put Mabel on the mattresses. Then the men lifted the raft, the mattresses, and Mabel with the big,big crane. They put the raft, the mattresses, and Mabel on a big truck. The truck moved Mabel to the big tank.

Soon Mabel felt better. She swam around her new tank. The water was deep. The water covered Mabel's fin. Mabel was happy. Mabel was a happy whale. Everyone at Marineland was happy because Mabel was well again.

Of course, even my little 4 year old mind wondered why the men just didn't put Mabel back in the deep, blue ocean.

Then we'd have a story about free whales, that swim anywhere they like, and people that wander about in boats, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mabel and her cousins.