LOL

I was probably one of the last people in modern society to figure out what "LOL" stands for.  I'm a perpetually late adopter, and had a flip phone until mid-2018.  But, now that I grasp the concept, I can say wholeheartedly that Sandra Tsing Loh's Depth Takes a Holiday, which is a series of essays about her life in "lesser" Los Angeles, is one of the funniest books I have read in recent years.  LOL funny.  Her self-deprecating, italic-using, LA stereotype affirming, 90s essence emanating tales were not just hilarious, they were filled with sharp social observations.  So many passages had me in splits (do people still say that?!).  Here are some of my favorites:

I spent the entire late eighties shouldering about Los Angeles  in a Hyundai Excel without air-conditioning, not caring who knew.  I was a dodger of student lans, devoid of dental insurance, a buyer of Payless shoes...Oh my god!  How had this happened?  

In college, for instance, I insisted on dating these lean, athletic Sierra Club types with Ph. Ds in organic chemistry, their can-do optimism leavened with little gristly strokes of passive aggression.  Weekends became All About Rock Climbing.  Metal carabiners were always being thrust at one; I was constantly being belayed, like a stricken head of beef cattle, against my will.  One day I slipped and fell down one thousand feet of scree on my tailbone.  

"Bagging peaks" was the obsession of one bachelor.  We'' call him Stan, because today I think he's actually head of some kind of multimillion-dollar particle accelerator.  I imagine he has some frightened little family by now ("Dad says, "Let's all climb Half Dome without ropes!""), and his blood pressure is up to a thousand or his pulse is down to forty or whatever.  

Roger is suddenly drawing sixty thousand dollars a year - perhaps four times what he's ever seen in his fort-odd years.  Job description?  "Imagineer."  Now, many of us have brilliant, idiosyncratic, cantankerous friends who we think do not quite fit into this world - and certainly not into this thing called Entertainment Industry.   They chain-smoke their way into angry girlfriends' homes in Reseda, reading Tolstoy while everyone else goes off to their day jobs.  

When the flop sweat of this desperate town becomes just too nauseating, you drive up to Big Sur in a taut silence.  

Everything is Love

Strength to Love, by Martin Luther King, Jr., is an absolute must-read.  This is the first work I have read by MLK and I now plan to read every thing he has ever published.  Every sentence, every phrase is imbued with such gravitas, wisdom, and courage, and, the language is simply stunning.  Published in 1963, this is a collection of several of his sermons.  What I found most interesting was his utilization of theology to advocate for social justice.  Also, he used phrases like "military-industrial complex" and "psychosomatic" which I think of as phrases that may be more recently used in our parlance, so it is interesting that this language was utilized over 50 years ago.  Here are some of the passages that I found most striking:

Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble.  

There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions.  Nothing pains some people more than having to think.  

Moreover, we must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.

We are called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, not social respectability.  

Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion.  

In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!  

Nonconformity is creative when it is controlled and directed by a transformed life and is constructive when it embraces a new mental outlook.  

[Noncomformity] is always costly and never comfortable.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.  

How often our lives are characterized by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anathema of deeds!  

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.  

The dawn will come.  Disappointment, sorrow, and despair are born at midnight, but morning follows.  

If man were to lose his capacity to fear, he would be deprived of his capacity to grow, invent and create.  So in a sense fear is normal, necessary and creative.  

Courage, therefore, is the power of the mind to overcome fear.  

Hatred confuses life, love harmonizes it.  Hatred darkens life, love illuminates it.  

Baldwin: Bold, Bright, Brilliant

I re-read Baldwin's The Fire Next Time last year, and think it is an essential book that all Americans should read.  Baldwin wrote it in 1963, and now, over 50 years later, it remains more relevant than ever, and stands as one of the most important, lyrical, and searing books ever written about race relations in this country.

It seems Baldwin's words are resonating, as there is a resurgence of interest in his work, as evidenced by the recent release of the documentary I Am Not Your Negro.  I also recently watched another documentary about Baldwin, first aired in 1989, called The Price of the Ticket.  Both are powerful and important films (in my opinion, especially the latter), which depict Baldwin's courage, humanity, charisma, charm, poise, and passion for social justice. 

I recently read both  James Baldwin:  The Last Interview and Other Conversations published by Melivlle House, and Letter to Jimmy written by Alain Mabanckou, a Franco-Congolese writer.  Paired together, they provide a good range of information about Baldwin's life, both his early years and his last days.  The former includes Baldwin's own thoughts and reflections, while the latter provides Mabanckou's reflections on what shaped Baldwin's ideas.  They are both very good books, but I think the best place to start is with Baldwin himself.

The Legacy of James Baldwin

The recently published collection of essays, The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward, includes 18 essays that reflect on similar themes that James Baldwin addressed in The Fire Next Time, written over 50 years ago.  Yet, as J. Ward writes in the introduction, "Replace ropes with bullets.  Hound dogs with German shepherds.  A gray uniform with a bulletproof vest.  Nothing is new."  The essays all explore race in America and are divided into three sections based on the historical, current, and future context (called legacy, reckoning, and jubilee).  Representing a diverse group of voices from academics to activists, The Fire This Time is essential, thought provoking reading. Some interesting perspectives and comments:

"If I knew anything about being black in America it was that nothing was guaranteed, you couldn't count on a thing, and all that was certain for most of us was a black death."  - Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

"It seems the rate of police killings now surpasses the rate of lynchings during the worst decade of the Jim Crow era."   - Isabel Wilkerson

"And we must know deep in our bones and in our hearts that if the ancestors could survive the Middle Passage, we can survive anything."- Kiese Laymon

"...when my Grandmama hugs my neck, I'm going to tell her that when no one in the world believed I was a beautiful Southern black boy, she believed."  - Kiese Laymon

"...the wrongheaded question that is asked is, What kind of savages are we?  Rather than, What kind of country do we live in?"  - Claudia Rankine

Baldwin's Bold Words

James Baldwin' writing, in No Name in the Street, speaks for itself.  Examples of his beautiful writing:

But for power truly to feel itself menaced, it must somehow sense itself in the presence of another power - or, more accurately, an energy - which it has not known how to define and therefore does not really know how to control.

The powerless, by definition, can never be "racists," for they can never make the world pay for what they feel or fear except by the suicidal endeavor which makes them fanatics or revolutionaries, or both; whereas, those in power can be urbane and charming and invite you to hose which they know you will never own. 

The truth which frees black people will also free white people, but this is a truth which white people find very difficult to swallow. 

White people, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded- about themselves the world they live in.  White people have managed to get through entire lives in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky...

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

For if it is difficult to be released from the stigma of blackness, it is clearly at least equally difficult to surmount the delusion of whiteness. 

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned. 

A Burning Flame

I recently re-read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and I highly recommend you read it as soon as possible.  As I was taking in Baldwin's words, I found myself earmarking multiple passages on every page until I finally just gave up and realized that every single page of this fierce book is filled with powerful, unforgettable, and essential thoughts about race and racism in America, and that it is the kind of book that should be read right now, and then re-read often.  I'm going to re-read this book at least once a year, because it rings as true now as it did in 1963 when it was first published.  It would be interesting to read it in tandem with Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, as Coates' recent memoir discusses similar themes and is written in a similar style to part of Baldwin's book (i.e. in the form of a letter to a young black man).  Bottom line - it is essential that everyone read this book.  Baldwin's message burns as bright as ever.  

Homage to National Parks

The last time I read Terry Tempest Williams, other than some of her shorter works in Orion Magazine, was over 15 years ago in my undergraduate course, American Essays of Place.  I was delighted to see that she recently published The Hour of Land, a memoir of her experiences at some of her favorite national parks and monuments.  Each chapter focuses on a different park, and is written in a unique tone.  In addition to sharing her own experiences, she infuses the history and founding of several of the parks, as well as discusses more recent political issues.  

In describing her childhood experience falling and getting 136 stitches by venturing out into nature, Williams reflected, "We learned early on we live by wild mercy."  She describes the national parks as our "public commons" that inspire humility.  

Williams starts in describing Grand Teton National Park, a park she and her family has visited every single year of her life.  She brings us to the scene of Civil War reenactments at Gettysburg National Military Park.  She tours Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota with a ranger dedicated to keeping encroaching oil fields at bay.  She interviews people affected by the BP oil spill along Gulf Islands National Seashore.  

We are taken into a scene in which she and her family came very close to being swallowed up by a wildfire at Glacier National Park.  Williams also describes the tension between the park system and the Native Americans who, in the case of Glacier, are demanding reinstatement of their treaty rights for access to the land to hunt, fish, and use cultural sites for spiritual practices.  One interesting fact I learned is that  25% of all firefighters working today on wildfires in public lands are Native American.

We are invited along to Alcatraz, to experience Ai Weiwei's (a dissident artist and prisoner in his own country) exhibit and discusses the Native American occupation of the island.  I learned that the prison was ultimately closed because it was too expensive to run and the structures were compromised by its location in the middle of the bay, in which wind, water, and salt corroded the buildings.  I thought this line particularly interesting given my recent work with the Prisoners Literature Project - "To receive mail in prison means you have not been forgotten.  A piece of your humanity is restored.  Isolation is momentarily suspended."'

We learn about the "cultural ecotones" of Acadia National Park, which she defines as border areas where two different landscapes meet (civilization/wilderness, forest/ocean, meadow/woods), and discusses the tensions, but also the bountiful wildlife, that live on these edges.  She discusses the convergence of lands around national parks (Native American, private, state owned, public, etc.), and how challenges can exist along these boundaries, by those fiercely wanting to protect the land, and by those who want to develop it.  

In her chapter on Big Bend National Park, she states, "Perhaps that is the nature of deserts - to break us open, wear us down to bedrock."  She also describes another one of my favorite writers, and a friend of hers, Edward Abbey, as "the ultimate misanthrope."  She advises the reader, "What I know as a naturalist is that if you want to see wildlife, get up before dawn."

Williams is passionate about the parks and takes us into the intimate battles that environmental activists fight to protect our land, sometimes at great personal costs.  Ultimately, my reading of this book ended with a feeling of hope, that despite threats to our beautiful national parks that have given me so much personal happiness over the last few years, that there are many people who care fiercely about the preservation of these majestic, humbling places.    

Onions in the Stew

Betty MacDonald's Onions in the Stew drew me in, as I related in an earlier post, when I stumbled upon the 818 section at the public library.  The title alone seemed intriguing.  This is a memoir published in 1954 that focuses on MacDonald's decision to move to Vashon Island with her husband and two daughters.  During the time she lived on the island, she was both a writer and housewife, and describes day to day life on the island in a witty (and sometimes even hilarious) tone.  Some of my favorite quotes/expressions:

One bleak morning toward the end of the siege, I was shuffling around the kitchen contemplating a salad of noodles, Puss'n Boots and candle stubs, when Don announced, "My God, we have run out of whisky!" and offered to mush up to Vashon and get some supplies.

Rather defiantly I ate all the mushrooms, even flouncing up and getting a second helping...I was drinking my second cup of coffee when suddenly without any warning everything went black.

Glackity adolescents

Tiger, the boxer, looks very large and powerful but he spent one evening sitting on my lap eating gumdrops, watching Mr. Peepers on television and proving that appearances are deceiving.

It was uncomfortable, like trying to play bridge while an old aunt is choking to death on a fishbone in the same room.

The stacks: 818

I had a true "Dewey Decimalist" moment while at the public library the other day.  I found myself wandering the stacks, and stumbled upon the 818 section.  Here, I found lots of old looking somewhat encrusted books, but with very fabulous titles such as Onions in the Stew, My Sister Eileen, Oranges, and, Life Among the Savages.  I wasn't sure what the common thread was (memoirs?  light reportage?), so when I went home I found out that 818 refers to the quite general "American miscellaneous writings in English."  It is very rare for me to pluck books off the shelf with reckless abandon, having no idea what these titles might contain, but I quickly perused them and they all looked like gems.  In just a few hours, I polished off My Sister Eileen, by Ruth McKenney.  Come to find out, McKenney had a fascinating life.  Raised in Ohio and a precocious student (French, debate team, etc.), she was a tomboy with a sardonic wit to boot.  She studied journalism in college and wrote for the student newspaper, the Ohio State Lantern.  She survived one suicide attempt, and eventually moved to a moldy apartment in Greenwich Village with her sister Eileen.  Their real-life experiences were featured in a series of essays published in The New Yorker.  Anthologized in My Sister Eileen, they are highly readable and entertaining, with essay titles such as "No Tears, No Good," "A Loud Sneer for Our Feathered Friends," and "Mr. Spitzer and the Fungus."  Here are a few lines from "The Prince:"

He was handsome enough, if you like that dark, beady type.  Personally, one Georgian prince was enough for me....even Eileen, the belle of the Midwest, hadn't been able to gather in, during her heart-smashing career, so much as a Belgian count.  

So, having told one whopper, I went on, as is my unhappy custom, and told several more.  

An Inspiration: Diana Nyad

I've been telling everyone I know to read long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad's memoir Find a Way, which recounts her childhood and family relationships, her travels and interests, as well as her many attempts, and finally her success, in swimming from Cuba to Key West.  It's the best kind of memoir - intimate, vulnerable, inspiring, with moments of triumph.  I was rooting for Nyad from the very first page.  It's also a very well written book (Nyad studied for a PhD in comparative literature). 

I found all of the details and challenges of her swims to be totally fascinating - how she ultimately was able to stave off delirium, sharks, jellyfish, asthma, pain, currents, weather, and other seemingly insurmountable challenges to achieve her dream on her fifth attempt at the age of 64. 

Her absolute commitment to achieving her lifelong dream despite many setbacks, and her overcoming the circumstances of her childhood and adolescence serve as an inspiration and pushes the limits of what we think we may be capable of, and for that I'm grateful for having read this fascinating book. 

Mankiller: A Chief and Her People

I highly recommend Mankiller:  A Chief and Her People, written by Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, a fascinating autobiography of Mankiller's life interwoven with her engaging telling of the history of the Cherokee people.  Mankiller spent her early childhood in Oklahoma before her family moved to San Francisco as part of the Bureau of Indian Affair's relocation plan.  Mankiller became an activist in the 1960s in San Francisco, got very involved in working to support the Native American community, was part of the Alcatraz Island occupation, and eventually went on to work for the Cherokee Nation, and made history by becoming the first female leader of a major Native American tribe (the Cherokee tribe is the second largest tribe in the U.S., after the Navajo tribe).   She was a champion of education, gender equality and creating economic opportunities for women, indigenous solutions, health access, job creation, and worked tirelessly for the rights of the Cherokee people as well as other indigenous groups.  She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton in 1998.  This was a very interesting, well written book, by and about an inspiring leader!

The Hidden Wound

I picked up The Hidden Wound, by Wendell Berry, and quite simply could not put it down.  Berry writes about racism from his own personal experiences growing up in Kentucky.  The work is lyrical, bold, and self-reflective, and I believe it would make a very interesting read in tandem with Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, a stunning work.  Some of the passages that I found the most thought provoking are as follows:

There is a peculiar tension in the casualness of this hereditary knowledge of hereditary evil; once you begin to awaken the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and the events of your own life. 

I believe she had great intelligence, which had been forced to grow and form itself on the strange struggling wildly heterogeneous bits of information that sifted down to her through various leaks in the stratification of white society.

The crisis of racial awareness - the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak. 

She was always showing you something:  a plant, a bloom, a tomato, an egg, an herb, a sprig of spring greens.  Suddenly you saw it as she saw it - and it entered shadowless into you mind.  I still keep the deepest sense of delight in the memory of the world's good tings held out to me in her black crooked floriferous hands. 

Whites fear what they feel, secretly or otherwise, to be the righteousness of the anger of the blacks;  as the oppressors feel, secretly or otherwise, morally inferior to those they have oppressed.  

...real healings and renewals in human life occur in individual lives, not in the process of adjusting or changing their abstractions or their institutions.  

In America...getting the job done is good.  Pondering as to how the job should be done, or whether or not it should be done, is apt to be regarded as a waste of time. 

We wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything - of ourselves, of each other, and of our country.  We did not enslave African blacks because they were black, but because their labor promised to free us of the obligations of stewardship, and because they were unable to prevent us from enslaving them.  They were economically valuable and militarily weak....We decided that blacks were inferior in order to persuade ourselves that it was all right to enslave them. 

Stunning writing from Stegner

Wallace Stegner's collection of essays Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs is a delightful book, brimming with insights and personal stories that serve as an homage to the time Stegner spent in the American West.  By far my favorite essay was Stegner's letter to his late mother, entitled "Letter, Much Too Late," which starts, simply, with the words, "Mom, listen."  It's gorgeous and heartbreaking. 

Some of my favorite quotes from the various essays:

A young frontier gathers every sort of migrant, hope-chaser, roughneck, trickster, incompetent, misfit, and failure.  

There are two things that growing up on a belated western frontier gave me:  an acquaintance with the wild and wild creatures, and a delayed guilt in my part in their destruction.  

For two weeks at a time we might see no one but ourselves; and when our isolation was broken, it was generally broken by a lonesome Swedish homesteader who came over ostensibly to buy eggs, but more probably to hear the sound of a human voice.  We welcomed him.  We were as hungry for the sound of a human voice as he was.

I was full to the eyes with my region's physical, sensuous beauty, and submissive to its brutal weathers, and familiar, in ridicule or respect, with its drunken cowboys and its ranting newspaper editors and its limp English barristers incapable of any spoken syllable more complex than "Haw!"

It is not an unusual life-curve for Westerners - to live in and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space, clarity, and hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment.   

How simple and memorable a good day can be when expectation is low!  

Aridity, more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character.  

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.  

The West has had a way of warping well-carpentered habits, and raising the grain on exposed dreams.  

It should not be denied either, that being footloose has always exhilarated us.  It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west. 

Native American female voices

I recently read Gloria Steinem's memoir My Life on the Road, and in this book, she discusses her friendship with Wilma Mankiller, who was the first female chief of the Cherokee nation, and herself a highly inspirational and courageous person.  Mankiller edited and compiled various contemporary indigenous women's voices in her book entitled Every Day is a Good Day.  She asked women from different Native American backgrounds to comment on a variety of core themes, such as spirituality, sovereignty, love, traditions, and governance.  From ranchers and doctors, lawyers and activists, professors and artists, Mankiller captures a breadth of voices and in doing so, certain themes become illuminated, such as the importance of cultural survival, the emphasis on maintaining knowledge to pass on to future generations, the oppression and silencing of Native American culture, and the importance of sovereignty within indigenous nations.  A fascinating and important book.  I have added more books on Mankiller, in addition to several of the books she lists in her bibliography at the end of Every Day is a Good Day, to my reading list! 

Dakota Dreamin'

I once heard someone say that when they go to the library, they will pick the book to the left or right of the book they were originally looking for, and just see what happens.  I found myself in the 900s section of the library the other day searching for a guide book for the Dakotas.  I noticed a book, aptly called, Dakota, a memoir by Kathleen Norris.  It's rare for me to start reading a book that I've heard nothing about, but there is something liberating about a literary whim!  

Being very fond of wide open plains, big sky, and rural landscapes, I've been dreaming of going to the Dakotas this year.  Norris had been living in New York City with her husband when they learned of the opportunity to live in the house built by her grandparents in an isolated town on the border of North and South Dakota, and decided to pursue small town life on the great plains.   She describes the push and pull of living in a small town, though she says, "I make no attempt in this book to resolve the tensions and contradictions I find in the Dakotas between hospitality and insularity, change and inertia, stability and instability, possibility and limitation, between hope and despair, between open hearts and closed minds."  While I felt the book lacked a clear structure and seemed thematically repetitive, there were many beautiful descriptions and passages that were illuminating for me as someone with little experience with small town rural life.  Here are some of my favorite passages:

"Magnificent old words like farrow, common English five hundred years ago, are still in use on the Plains."

"Plains speech, while nearly devoid of "-isms" and "ologies" tends toward the concrete and the personal"  the weather, the land, other people."

"Because it can't look outward, the town begins to turn in on itself, and a schismatic ultimately self-defeating dynamic takes hold."

 "Such outsiders can unwittingly pose a threat to the existing social order, and if their newcomers' enthusiasm doesn't wear off, if their standards don't fall to meet the town's, and especially if they keep on trying to share what they know, they have to be discouraged, put down, even cast out."

"Interlibrary loan is an unwelcome link to a larger world, forcing us to recognize that we're not as self-sufficient as we imagine ourselves to be."

"Hanging up wet clothes gives me time alone under the sky to think, to grieve, and gathering the clean clothes in, smelling the sunlight on them, is victory. "

"It seems a wonder to me that in our dull little town we can gather together to sing some great hymns, reflect on our lives, hear some astonishing scriptures (and maybe a boring sermon; you take your chances), offer some prayers and receive a blessing." 

A Medical Memoir

Damon Tweedy's Black Man in a White Coat:  A Doctor's Reflection on Race and Medicine, is a very readable and interesting memoir, starting from Tweedy's days in med school, ending in his successful career in psychiatry at Duke.  We follow his journey as he learns about health disparities along racial lines (as he puts it, "Being black can be bad for your health") and experiences racial prejudice himself from both patients and others within the medical field.  I would suggest pairing Tweedy's memoir with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, another fascinating look at race and medicine.  

Words on War

I recently read Tobias Wolff's memoir In Pharoah's Army as well as Phil Klay's collection of short stories, Redeployment.  It's fascinating to read these books within the same few weeks, as they both illustrate the effects of war and have many commonalities.  Wolff writes of his decision to enter the army, his experience in Vietnam, his relationship with his father, and his adjustment to life as a civilian.  Klay writes about Iraq and Afghanistan, and his stories focus on both being in the thick of daily life in a war zone, as well as what people's lives are like after returning from war.  Both Klay's debut and Wolff's memoir are very well written and engaging, and provide a great deal of insight into the intimate challenges faced by soldiers.  Recommended!

To Russia We Go

Published in 1948, A Russian Journal, by John Steinbeck, is his account of spending just over a month traveling in Russia at the beginning of the Cold War.  Steinbeck traveled with war photographer Robert Capa.  As Steinbeck explains in the book, his goal was to write about the lives of every day Russians, not to take a political or ideological stance, and ultimately has a very good experience there and enjoys his time with the generous and friendly Russian people he and Capa meet along the way.  In doing so, he reports about the various Russian cities and towns he visits, the food he eats, people's clothes and customs, and his experiencing traveling in planes, jeeps, etc. throughout the country.  The book captures Steinbeck's signature ability to write clearly to the heart of the matter, with no shortage of humor as well.  While this wasn't my favorite Steinbeck, it is an interesting one.  Some of my favorite passages:

"At last the plane took off, and as it did, a man sitting next to me opened his suitcase, cut off half a pound of raw bacon which was melting in the heat, and sat chewing it, the grease running down his chin.  He was a nice man, with merry eyes, and he offered me a piece, but I didn't feel like it at that moment."

"It was equipped with blades that were scissors, blades that were files, awls, saws, can-openers, beer-openers, corkscrews, tools for removing stones from a horse's foot, a blade for eating and a blade for murder, a screw driver and a chisel.  You could mend a watch with it, or repair the Panama Canal.  It was the most wonderful pocketknife anyone has ever seen, and we had it nearly two months, and the only thing we ever did with it was to cut sausages. But it must be admitted that the knife cut sausages very well."

"Our driver was, as usual, wonderful, an ex-cavalry man, and he had, of all things, a jeep.  The jeep does not bring out the best in anyone, and in a cavalry man it brings out the cowboy....He drove like a mad man, he was afraid of no one.  Again and again, in traffic, outraged drivers forced him to the curb, and there would be an exchange of violent Georgian language, and our man would smile and drive off.  He won all engagements.  We loved him."

Cather: The Young Adventurer

Before Willa Cather became a famous author she was a teacher in Pittsburgh, and when she was only twenty-eight years old (in 1902), she traveled to England and France to the first time.  Having grown up in pastoral Nebraska, some of the countryside she saw resonated with her own life, whereas the cities and the level of poverty within them was something she had never experienced before.  Collected in Willa Cather in Europe:  Her Own Story of the First Journey are fourteen travel articles that Cather wrote for a newspaper in Lincoln, Nebraska.  The articles contain her first impressions of the places she visited.  Even in this early writing of hers, some of the key themes of her later writing are captured, perhaps the most compelling of which is her keen interest and curiosity of the lives of the poor and working class, as opposed to high society.  My favorite quotes:

In Liverpool:  "Hats have never at all been one of the vexing problems of my life, but, indifferent as I am, these render me speechless.  I should think a well-taught and tasteful American milliner would go mad in England, and eventually hang herself with bolts of green and scarlet ribbon - the favorite colour combination in Liverpool."

In Barbizon:  "The village at first sight looks like any other little forest town; the home of hard-working folk, desperately poor, but never so greedy or so dead of soul that they will not take time to train the peach tree against the wall until it spreads like a hardy vine, and to mass beautiful flowers of very hue in their little gardens."  

"There is something worth thinking about in these brown, merry old women, who have brought up fourteen children and can outstrip their own sons and grandsons in the harvest field, lay down their rake and write a traveler directions as to how he can reach the next town in a hand as neat as a bookkeeper's."

In Avignon:  "As we carried no bologna with us, we were naturally interested in the dining-room on the afternoon of our arrival."

In Marseilles and Hyeres:  "What more of life could one wring out of twenty-four hours, if you please  At noon the wet olives of Arles; at nightfall a chorus of gay sailors, made up to the life, and the rattle of stage thunder, much blue lightening, and a great tossing of blue water; at dawn a sunrise over feathery date palms, with the sea at one's feet and a porcelain sky above.  What more could one ask for, even in the country of Monte Cristo?"

In Lavandou:  "I am sure I do not know why a wretched little fishing village with nothing but green pines and blue sea and a sky of porcelain, should mean more than a dozen places I have wanted to see all my life."

Army Wives' Lives

No Man's War:  Irreverent Confessions of an Infantry Wife is the debut book by Angela Ricketts, who has been part of the army culture for her whole life, first as an army brat as she calls herself, and then by way of marrying her husband, whom she met when he was an infantry lieutenant.  I learned of this book because of Terry Gross' interview with Ricketts on Fresh Air.  It struck me that the topic was something I know nothing about, as I don't know anyone in my life who is connected to the military in any way.  I was intrigued enough by the interview to read the book of which the main themes seemed to be the relationships (i.e. camaraderie, competitiveness, and hierarchy) among army wives, being without ones' partner for long stretches and the toll it can take on one's marriage and well being (Ricketts describes having a heart attack), raising children with your partner gone for long stretches, etc.  Ricketts describes the "buoyancy" of army wives as a key characteristic and common thread among highly divergent personalities.