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themikithornburg · 8 months

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ELMER MCCURDY

In honor of September, or of outlawry, perhaps... or maybe just of nostalgia, I’m getting this online, where I hear that it, like everything else, will stay ineradicably until doomsday or until the Yellowstone volcano goes off, whichever comes first.

This poem was written in 1977 by my late husband, Thomas R. Thornburg. It’s included in his Collected Poems, available on Amazon. It presents the history of the 20th century in a nutshell – a largish nutshell but a nice, knobbly, crunchy one.

Elmer McCurdy (1869-1911) (1911-

1976)

(HISTORICAL NOTE: At the bicentennial celebrating the birth of these United States, a curious discovery was made. The mummified remains of Elmer McCurdy, who was known in his first life as The Oklahoma Badman, were discovered hanging in a Los Angeles carnival called “Laugh in the Dark Funhouse.” Elmer, who was discovered by a crewman for the Six Million Dollar Man television show, had in his first life been a train robber operating out of Pawhuska, Oklahoma. In 1911 he was slain in a desperate gun battle, thus ending his first life. The sheriff who killed Elmer sold him to a carnival sideshow. So began Elmer’s second life, a life in which he was mistaken for a wax dummy and exhibited all over the United States. In 1940, Elmer was stored in a warehouse with a collection of wax dummies [real dummies, if we assume that Elmer was never a dummy] and in 1968 Elmer was sold again, then again, then again, and he hung around until the TV crewman, fiddling with him, caused his arm to fall off and reported that one of the figures was no dummy. After he was formally identified, Elmer McCurdy was trundled back to Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and buried under a large granite boulder. Thus his career, begun in 1869, ended in 1976.)

In Pawhuska, Oklahoma, where the rolling purple plains

Have turned to dust beneath the wheel of Time,

At the turn of this last century, having come around to crime,

Elmer McCurdy turned to robbing trains.

There the ghost of John Brown’s body walks the bloody Kansas flat,

And the shades of Frank and Jesse James ride by in mask and hat;

What the freezing winds of winter or the deadly summer suns

Will not tender, men may render with a gun.

O, there’s just as many live outside as live inside the law

And old Elmer was as far-out then as any ever saw;

When he strapped a reputation on and rode to Dead Man’s Pass,

He said the world could kiss his outlaw ass.

He was so mad, so truly bad, so dangerous to know,

He was Manfred in a cowboy suit; he was Grendel on the go;

He’d a six-gun for his Cicero and dynamite for brains,

And he hated anything as straight as trains.

Hurdy-gurdy

Down and dirty

Elmer McCurdy

Whoopee ti

Now when Elmer commenced blowing up the bends of all the track,

Stationmasters of disaster started crying for some slack,

And bankers started bitching as they sang the business blues

And they asked their sassy sheriff what to do,

What to do?

What to do, do, do?

O, they asked their sassy sheriff what to do?

Now, this sheriff was as bad an inlaw as you ever saw;

He was Donder on a drunk man, he was Blitzen on the draw;

He was Una in a union suit, a buckskin Charlemagne,

And he hated folks for robbing, hopping, or for pulling train.

So he printed up a circular and sent it all around,

And it said that they intended to put Elmer in the ground,

And it said if anybody else would like to join the fun,

There was money for a posse to keep Elmer on the run.

It was nineteen and eleven in the merry month of May

When Elmer saddled up and rode to rob one sunny day,

And he rode from dawn to daylight and he yodeled as he rode

For the silver in the saddlebags of swag that he bestrode;

And he whistled quite merrily as he rode out of the draw

But dumb behind him rode the dogging Law.

Elmer went about his work through June and through July,

And he robbed quite conscientiously as summer cantered by;

Through the grim dog days of August and in warm September rains

Old Elmer never missed a day of work at robbing trains.

In the dappled chase of Autumn when the wild October wind

Raced the chuffing locomotive down the chute to Dead Man’s Bend,

Elmer rode like sixty-seven, like the Devil on the loose

Going crazy in the saddle when the iron from his cayuse

Was arcing fire from rail to rail coming up on that caboose;

He’d a hotbox on his starboard hip and a cog caught in his brain,

While underneath his Stetson ran a single-track refrain,

And he would have died unsatisfied if he could not rob trains.

All the passengers was puzzled until Elmer made it clear

To stick ‘em up as he threw down against the engineer;

And when he ran things down for them the crew began to shake,

But the whistle blew, and the brakeman knew, and he threw down the brake.

Then the people started grinning when he reined up on the track

And he nabbed a couple railroad cops and robbed ‘em back to back;

He was laughing like a goblin as the people passed the word

That it was hurdy-gurdy

Down and dirty

Elmer McCurdy

Whoopee ti

But it was his final caper there that Elmer ever turned

For he had infuriated far too many he had burned;

You may read it in the papers there, the Oklahoma press

Says he tried to draw against John Law and came out second best.

O, the Pawhuskans applauded when they brought old Elmer in

And their preachers copped an opportunity to steal on sin;

And the teachers taught the sons and daughters truths about the gun,

But the truth of truths

they could not use

and still abuse

Elmer did it all for fun.

Hurdy-gurdy

Down and dirty

Elmer McCurdy

Whoopee ti

It’s down in books in libraries if any think I lie:

How they claimed they could cool Elmer’s act and hang him high and dry;

But Elmer fooled the hangman and the folks when he went West

With a 32:20 dum-dum slug behind his Sunday vest.

Well, the undertaker undertook to empty Elmer out

And had boxed him up quite proper when the folks began to shout

(Underneath the rouge and lipstick you could see old Elmer grin)

That there was no ground for miles around that he could put him in.

Well, that puts the undertaker into something of a stew,

So he goes and asks the Sheriff what the hell he’s gonna do?

And the Sheriff said, “I delivered him dead; now you’ll have to decide.”

Well, the undertaker wrung his hands, and stomped his feet, and cried,

And I think he went and took a drink, and walked around outside

A little while (about a mile) and shook his head and sighed;

Then he went back home and got a comb and parted Elmer on the side,

And he put his robber outfit on him like he used to ride,

And then, dig: he took his biggest rig and ran him up on formaldehyde,

And this coroner hung him up inside his corner closet where he dried,

And he said, “God! He’s purty!”

Hurdy-gurdy

Down and dirty

Elmer McCurdy

Whoopee ti

So, though they could not make, they could not take, nor put him into jail,

They socked his hard-case carcass on the old South-Western Mail,

And if you laid a sawbuck down you drew nine dollars change

To see old train-robbing Elmer robbing people from the train.

And they hung a sign around his neck that said to come and see

The Oklahoma Bad-man (women and children admitted free).

So from Tulsa down to Ponca City Elmer made the scene,

From Shawnee down to Bartlesville and all spots in between,

From Wichita to Enid Elmer made a million miles

Exchanging trains through sun and rain, and all the changing styles.

The years ran by like rabbits; people did what people do;

The Yanks went over and came back, and twenty- three skidoo;

America went on the wagon, people stayed at home,

And Henry Sinclair pulled a caper called the Teapot Dome;

We kidnapped Tutankhamen and put him in the bank

And Richard Loeb and Leopold kidnapped Bobby Franks;

We dedicated Lincoln and earned the world’s applause

And then we put Marcus Garvey in the can for breaking nigger laws;

An Oklahoma Walton tried to stand up like a man

And in due process was impeached by the local Ku Klux Klan;

Half the nation spun around when the wild tornadoes blew

And the other half hummed right along to Rhapsody in Blue;

Folks pitched in to bathtub gin or radiator raw;

Jack Scopes got busted for trying to make a monkey out of the law;

The eight-hour workday was declared to be When Day Is Done,

And Our Lord Ford sent down the word to give everybody one;

Gene Tunney took a funny count that made the people swear

And Sacco and Vanzetti took a hot-squat in the chair;

Alphonse Capone took a fall one Philadelphia morn,

Steamboat Willie made the scene and Mickey Mouse was born;

And folks said, “Hi!” to passersby, or “How ya doin, fine?”

And Al Capone sent Bugs Moran a funny valentine;

Mrs. Harding showed the world the inconstancy of class,

And funny Albert theorized the inconstancy of mass;

The Scottsboro Boys got bum-rapped for that Alabama thing,

And Herbert Hoover signed into law a song no one can sing;

FDR cut his new deal to keep us free from fear

And when he asked us what we wanted, we said, “We Want Beer!”

One hundred thousand homeless kids roamed the Big Apple’s digs,

And Walter Disney pork-barreled an empire from Three Little Pigs;

The bottom broke out of the joke; the nation was a sink;

We prohibited Prohibition and everybody took a drink;

The Catholic League of Decency decided what was meet,

And Irish Catholic coppers killed strikers in the street;

John Dillinger took in a movie one Chicago day,

He took his ticket C.O.D. and came back D.O.A.

Joe Louis flattened Maxie Baer to let the whole world know,

And John L. flattened Bill Hutcheson and started the C.I.O.

Then Roosevelt ran past Alf Landon; Jesse Owens ran like scat,

And fourteen thousand Goodyear Rubber Workers sat down flat.

Three thousand Americans organized to fight the King of Spain

While General Motors tried to flush their families down the drain.

Three thousand Americans dead in Spain to support the commonweal,

While in Chicago their brothers died fighting U.S. Steel;

The Garment Workers dropped a stitch; labor buttons were worn;

We gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler—and Wrong-Way Corrigan was born;

Then Hitler gave Lindbergh a medal and Lucky Lindy made the news

Again by blaming the Second World War on Roosevelt and the Jews;

And the lid blew off like Krakatoa; America went to war,

And then came home and went to work in the Army Surplus Store;

The century passed the halfway mark, the nation changed its clothes,

We busted half of Hollywood and then busted Tokyo Rose;

The filthy bearded communists with their filthy bearded bombs

Crept in and hid beneath the bed in loyal American homes;

Kids signed their letters S.W.A.K. and sealed ‘em with a kiss,

And Good Sir Richard saved the day and busted Alger Hiss;

Hello, Young Lovers, whoever you are, I’ve been in love like you;

It was craaaazy, man, the times were rare, like— twenty-three skidoo.

Twenty-three skidoo?

Great googlie-wooglies! I almost forgot

Old Elmer McCurdy hanging in here somewhere, left to rot;

They gave old Elmer a flattop and they combed his hair in ducks,

And by some means they pegged his jeans and dressed him in white bucks;

Then the fella who owned Elmer had to hock him for a while,

So they hung him in a fun-house up above the main turnstile.

But your customer there didn’t seem to care, nor noticed nothing funny

About the scene—you know what I mean—at least he paid his money

To see the show—and rightly so, if Elmer was a dummy.

Give a Hippy marijuana and you know how he’ll act:

He’ll rape your wife and your whole damn family: IT’S A PROVEN FACT!

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test! Mr. Natural! Window Pane!

We took a toke on a little dope, and then did it all again:

Hell, No, I Won’t Go; I’m leaving on a jet plane;

Here’s the word from Thunderbird (you know it makes you sick)

Acid made our face break out, and so did Tricky Dick.

We decimated Viet Nam; Calley took a rap;

We gave the Orient our grain, and they gave us the clap.

We learned to hate the word Watergate; we learned about the fix,

But the rednecks all went Hippy; the Hippies all went arty,

And we invited all of us to our own birthday party,

And it was Nineteen-Seventy-Six.

They say the Six Million Dollar Man can jump a country mile,

They say he has an eye can see behind your whitest smile,

They say he has the baddest moves the outlaws ever saw,

They say, in the modern world of today, he is The Law.

Well, the whole thing blended when they intended to make a TV show

About the Six Million Dollar Man for less than half that dough

(The little children in Appalachia laughed and clapped their hands

While their little rickety knees stuck out like rubber bands):

They cast it in a fun-house, where the lights and cameras run,

And they sent a dude to rearrange the dummies, just for fun;

So when he climbed through layers of Time the dust there made him cough,

And when he leaned too hard on Elmer, Elmer’s arm fell off!

Yep, it was old hurdy-gurdy

Down and dirty

Elmer McCurdy

Whoopee ti

Well, they called the Sheriff right away and he rode through the town

And handcuffed half the carnival and third-degreed the clown,

And made the folks stand outside the ropes while they cut Elmer down.

And then they told the story through—a little less than I’ve told you,

I guess because I’m wordy.

And there’s your story, ain’t it funny about a fun-house mummy

Who lived to hang and hanged to live; now tell me, who’s the dummy?

But there it is. . . the whole damned shot, and now the song is sung,

But the thing that hangs around for me is: was he hanged? Or was he hung?

Was he right, riding into night? Or was he wrong, dead wrong?

Or can we finish Elmer off, even in a song?

Is there some reason (is it treason?) that keeps a man from harm

It took two centuries of Law and Order to disarm?

Well, one day when your children steal enough horsepower from the sun

And their children laugh like maniacs and light out on the run,

I trust they’ll sup a stirrup-cup and live life hurdy-gurdy

When I am down, and dirty, like

Elmer McCurdy

Whoopee ti

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themikithornburg · 3 years

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This story was first published in ILLUMINATI AT MY DOOR, D. L. Russell, editor, 2015 THE POINTY-HEADED EGGHEAD THEORY The school cafeteria wasn't crowded, but the fact that it was even half full was a testament to the curiosity of the people who had driven across town through a blizzard to see and hear the candidate scheduled to speak. Unfortunately, the candidate's flight had been cancelled, as the mayor who'd agreed to act as the master of ceremony was forced to announce. "But you're all here now," said the mayor, "so perhaps we can have our town-hall meeting anyway. If anyone wants to leave, go ahead. But if you decide to stay, I suggest that we have questions from individuals in the audience. We'll work it like this: I'll take a question, and then anyone who wants to answer can do so. And we'll go from there. All in favor, say aye." The audience responded with a loud Aye, and only a few people got up from their seats and quietly walked out. "All right!" said the mayor. "Who wants to start?" Immediately a woman in the third row shot up her hand. The mayor pointed at her. "Go ahead, ma'am. Please come up front and speak into the microphone, so everyone can hear your question." The woman, a cheerful-looking middle-aged woman with reddish-gray hair, dressed in jeans and boots and a green sweater, got up and went to the microphone. "Hello," she said. "My name is Norma MacDonald. I'm actually not from town, here – I'm from a small town in Ontario, Canada, and I'm visiting my niece and her husband for a few weeks. But I do have a question. "I hope this doesn't offend anyone," she continued, "but I'm curious about the way a lot of you Yanks treat and talk about your President. I understand that there are political differences, but it seems to a lot of us Canadians that the discourtesy and disrespect for Mr. Obama goes a lot further than that. Early on, there was a member of your House of Representatives who yelled out 'You lie!' in the middle of a state-of-the-union speech the President was giving. Then there was all the fuss from people who say he's a secret Muslim and wasn't even born in the United States, even though there's absolutely no evidence for either of those things – and plenty of evidence that neither one of them is true. And I've heard a lot worse from ordinary people whose comments aren't reported in the news. "That isn't all, either. I don't understand why so many of you seemed to be positively in love with some of the Republican candidates for president whose campaigns were based on obvious lies, and who said things that no intelligent person should have been able to respect, let alone agree with. A lot of us Canadians just don't understand any of this. I'm sure everyone here tonight is more, well, civilized. But maybe someone could help me to understand those who aren't. In other words, I guess my question is – what's the matter with a lot of people in this country?" Norma MacDonald smiled, nodded to the mayor, and went back to her seat, amid gasps and horrified looks from the audience. The mayor stood at the microphone. "Well," he said, "does anyone want to answer Ms. MacDonald?" After a few seconds, a woman in one of the center rows put up her hand and stood. "I'm not sure," she said, "but I think it's… the Illuminati. You know, that's a secret organization, a conspiracy going back centuries. I think they've done some scary things that no one knows about. First they put fluoride in the water, which as everyone knows drives people crazy if they drink enough of it. Then they started inserting little flashes of pictures and words into the movies and TV programs… I forget what that's called… but it makes people think and say things without knowing why they're doing it. And bunch of other stuff. It's the Illuminati! They want to take over!" Her face red, the woman sat back down again. The voices of the audience became a muffled roar that threatened to become louder. At that moment, a man in the back row stood up and held up his hand. "May I speak?" he shouted. The audience quieted down; the mayor beckoned the man forward. "Yes," he said. "If you have another answer for Ms. MacDonald, please come up and take the microphone." The man stepped forward and stood on the platform until all eyes were on him. "Thank you all," he said. "And thank you, Norma MacDonald, for your question. "Here's my opinion. Americans on average are no more stupid and no more intelligent than people everywhere else, including Canada, on average. We may be, on average, more ignorant, although I couldn't prove this. Our cultural values, unfortunately, include a high degree of contempt for intellectualism and educated behavior and decisions; this has been true probably since before the United States was established as an independent country. It was noted by Alexis de Tocqueville after his visit to the U.S. in the early 1830s, and it is true in the 21st century – see everything from the widespread disdain for John Kerry (he spoke French and therefore must be a wimp) and widespread love for George W. Bush (he could hardly speak English and therefore must be a tough, manly man), promoted by Republicans in the 2004 election campaign, to the widespread disdain for and bullying of students who get high grades in U.S. high schools (who read and think and must therefore be nerds, geeks, and deserving of scorn). We love physical strength and sneer at mental strength. Our contempt for and fear of the intellectual increases exponentially as time goes on, as we become more and more suspicious of anyone who thinks logically and seems to know more than we do. We do not respond by wanting to know more ourselves; we respond by wanting to avoid thinking logically and knowing things, because we're afraid that to do so will somehow make us perceived as (and maybe even turn us into) the thing we fear and hate, the thing we can name but are mostly too ignorant to define – LIBERALS! "The reasons for this mindset are complex, but one of the reasons has to do – as de Tocqueville noted – with our racial history and divisions and the collective feelings of guilt and fear of karma held by white Americans of northern European, "Christian" (read: "Protestant"), ancestry. We did our best for almost three centuries to eradicate Native Americans, and did succeed in reducing their numbers and their economic status substantially. It took technological and economic advances and finally a disastrous civil war to bring about an end to African-American slavery, and when it was ended our resentment of the former slaves and their descendants resulted in our enforcement of economic and social and political behavior that not only condemned those people to well over a century of second- (or third- or fourth-) class citizenship but also condemned people of both races to the racially polarized society, characterized by suspicion and hate and fear, that we all live in today. "Barack Obama's presidency – his election and reelection, which awakened many up-till-then smug white racists to the fact that they were becoming a minority, and his rational, intelligent way of speaking and method of governing – brought this fear-driven, guilt-driven, racially bigoted anti-intellectual mindset to a head. The formation of the so-called Tea Party, and the sharing of its general views by large numbers of white U.S. citizens, was a result. Traditional, relatively middle-of-the-right-lane Republicans were voted out of office and replaced by radical right-wingers whose strength is their appeal to those people. These new office-holders are now in control of the U.S. House of Representatives and bid fair to control the U.S. Senate. They are not experienced or accomplished politicians, and to satisfy the people who elected them they have no real agenda except to disagree with President Obama, to insult him whenever they see an opening, and of course to comply with the orders of the lobbyists and contributors who supported their campaigns. "The lobbyists and lobbyist employers, and the multi-billionaire right-wing contributors, while they themselves are sometimes bigots, are not necessarily so, nor are they ignorant. They are driven wholly by their desire to increase the wealth of the wealthy and their need, in order to do so, to increase the ignorance of the ignorant. They are the puppet-masters of the radical office-holders and office-seekers, and they are now almost wholly in charge of the United States – or so they hope, and so they wager. "These people are your 'Illuminati.' They are not members of an ancient Jewish conspiracy, as traditional 'Illuminati' believers would have us think. They are powerful, but they are not all-powerful. We, the citizens of the United States of America, are still allowed to read, to think, and to vote, although those we have put in power are doing their best to deprive us of those freedoms. It is up to us to take advantage of our freedom to read, to think, and to vote. And, in my opinion, it would be best to do that soon. The power we Americans still possess is the only thing these people fear, and they are speaking noisily through their puppets and spending enormous sums in efforts to silence us, deprive us of our power, and turn us all into mindless, flag-waving, science-doubting, frightened, angry loud-mouths who have no real power left at all." The man who'd been speaking turned, nodded at the mayor, turned back and nodded at the audience, and left the platform. The people in the cafeteria looked at one another in stunned silence. Could the man be right? After a few moments, one man in the front row turned and looked at another man on his left. "Whaddya think, Ed?" he asked, in a whisper that could nevertheless be heard throughout the room. "I dunno," Ed responded, as people strained to hear what he thought. "That guy… did you ever see him before?" "No," said the first man. "Never." Ed nodded. "What I thought. He looks like a foreigner, don't he? I bet he's one of them Ay¬-rabs. He talks funny. All them big words. Sounds like one of them pointy-headed eggheads. Prob'ly a college professor or something. You know, a liberal." There was a general sigh of relief through the cafeteria. Ed had explained it all, thank God. There was nothing in the world the matter with Americans, except for too many pointy-headed eggheads. Only one man muttered, to his wife, "How can you be pointy-headed and an egghead at the same time? Eggs aren't pointy…" And the woman in the middle row kept shaking her head, neither pointy nor egg-shaped. "It's the Illuminati…" she said to herself, as everyone put on their coats and walked back out into the blizzard. THE END

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themikithornburg · 4 years

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School Days (Ring Ring Goes the Bell)

I've been seeing a few memes featuring parents driven to drink by their sudden experience of home-schooling their kids. Not too many memes, I should add. It's probably not all that funny.

So, something occurred to me this morning, and I'm going to pass it on for what it's worth.

Almost every K-12 public school in the US is going to be closed for the rest of this school year, and may still be closed next fall. For the summer months, kids like adults will mostly be confined to their homes. During the school term some will be engaged in distance or on-line learning through their schools, but not all of them will have this advantage (if advantage it is). Some parents are trying their hands at home-schooling, and – if the Facebook memes I've been seeing reflect even some of these parents' experience – this is not as easy as many of them might have thought it would be. If nothing else, they'll come away with a new respect for teachers.

But I wonder if there isn't an opening here for some enterprising and progressive-minded educators (and others) to get together online, develop a curriculum including reading lists, lesson plans, etc., and offer it free of charge to some of these new home-schooling parents. I'm sure there are things like this out there and available, but even so there's room for another, especially one tailored especially for this year and for families who have been forced into the situation rather than choosing and planning for it. This can start out small, with your own families. But it could grow. There's a real need.

Considering many of the issues we've been concerned about for years – climate change and the environment for a start, racism and racial equity, the function of government, and the list goes on – I think most of us have little doubt that schools could and should have been doing more for a long time to combat the pervasive and terrifying ignorance in evidence through large swaths of our country. This is not to cast blame on the schools themselves, nor on university departments of education, let alone on individual teachers; once a system is in place, it's almost impossible to change or dislodge. But now that the system is faltering, for a time at least, we have a unique opportunity to set something better in motion.

Here are a few ideas I've had about what might be done to some effect:

Teach Survival. Lessons in basic survival will be better late than never for too many kids (and parents), but they'll have the advantage of being lessons whose practicality is obvious. Start where the students are. Think about safety, nutrition, physical and mental health. Think about what challenges could present themselves.

Teach Critical Reading, Listening, and Viewing. What is bias? Why might the author or presenter of a text, advertisement, video, etc., want to make you feel a certain way or believe a certain thing? Advertisements are an obvious place to start.

Teach Logical Thinking. How – and why – to separate intellect from emotion. How to judge if a statement or argument is valid. Children as young as six or seven (and some even younger) can begin to grasp the concepts of logic, but don't push too hard. With older kids – push harder. Logical fallacies can be persuasive, and there are clever persuaders out there who profit from keeping us from thinking about thinking.

Teach Ethics. Almost everyone wants to do the right thing, but it's often hard to decide what that is. Too often we confuse ethics with "morals" – i.e., we confuse what is right with what is the traditional, agreed-upon thing to do in any given situation. Too often we confuse ethics with religion. Personally, I'd teach ethics with fictional examples, characters who must make hard choices. Do they make the right choice? Why, or why not?

Teach History. Many students find history boring, and one reason is that it's almost always badly presented in school texts. Find unbiased sources if possible. (Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is one. Chris Harman's A People's History of the World is another. Both are easily available online or off.)

Use books, videos, sources you have available, including on television and the internet. Take advantage of the fact that you know your children and can move at their pace. Then challenge them to increase their pace. Kids are hard-wired to learn things and to want to learn. Many kids don't do well in school, or don't like school, because it moves at a pace either too fast or too slow for them. Some things you'll be learning with your kids, which will make you a better teacher if you let them see you're in this with them, not an all-knowing authority but a fellow student.

I'm sure you'll think of more ideas. Share them!

And for anyone (everyone!) not old enough to get what that title is about, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHG5-GxI_Es

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themikithornburg · 4 years

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COVER REVEAL FOR A BEAUTIFUL NEW CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE FROM JANA RICHARDS…

TO HEAL A HEART

Garrett Saunders' world changed two years ago on a road in Afghanistan. Back home, he feels like a stranger. As he struggles to find his place in the world, he meets a horse destined for the slaughterhouse and a woman bent on rescuing the strays of the world, including him.

Blair Greyson moves to Masonville to look after her ailing grandfather and give her rescue horses a home. Right away she butts heads with a surly former Marine. Despite a rocky start, they come to an agreement: Blair will board Garrett's rescue horse and he'll help with repairs around her farm.

Garrett finds purpose working with Blair—and falls in love with her. But she's hiding a secret. Can she forgive herself and accept Garrett's love, or will she let guilt and regret continue to rule her life?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jana Richards has tried her hand at many writing projects over the years, from magazine articles and short stories to full-length paranormal suspense and romantic comedy. She loves to create characters with a sense of humor, but also a serious side. She believes there’s nothing more interesting then peeling back the layers of a character to see what makes them tick.

When not writing up a storm, working at her day job as an Office Administrator, or dealing with ever present mountains of laundry, Jana can be found on the local golf course pursuing her newest hobby.

Jana lives in Western Canada with her husband Warren, and a highly spoiled Pug/Terrier cross named Lou. You can reach her through her website at http://www.janarichards.com

.....

I discovered Jana's books going on six years ago and have been a fan ever since. She knows her characters inside and out, and she writes like a dream, so she lets you know them too -- and care about them. Trust me, this is contemporary romance as good as it gets. This one will be out and available soon. I'm SO looking forward to it!

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themikithornburg · 4 years

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Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 21st Century

When my brother and I were children in the 1940s and early '50s, our great-aunt used to send us books on our birthdays and at Christmas, children's classics like Tom Sawyer and Robin Hood for Bill, Heidi and Alice in Wonderland for me. Auntie May was not one to question the pink and blue conventions of gender-appropriate reading. I still have most of these books, hard-bound on quality paper. Among them is my copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin, in a bright pink cover featuring, on the front of the sleeve the artist's conception of Uncle Tom – a gentle-appearing old black man with snowy white hair and beard – and on its spine an illustration of two smiling little girls – pretty, blonde Eva in a pure white dress and silly, multi-pigtailed Topsy, knock-kneed, with her bare toes turned in.

I'm fairly sure I started to read the book, and just as sure I didn't get much beyond the second page, if that far. Harriet Beecher Stowe's mid-nineteenth-century style and vocabulary must certainly have defeated me at age eight; then (as now, I confess), if a book didn't grab me and nobody was forcing me to read it, I let it go. The world was full of books, and my time was precious. If I had managed to read it, I would have discovered that the cover illustrations misrepresented the story. And also, perhaps, that it wasn't a children's book.

About twenty years ago, a friend who was working as editor for the company that then owned CliffsNotes – those slim, bright yellow and black volumes that some students and teachers think of as aids to cheating on assigned reading – had trouble finding someone to write a new Note on Uncle Tom's Cabin and, nearing her deadline, asked if I'd be willing to give it a try. "Why not?" said I, being constitutionally unable (like that girl in Oklahoma!) to spare a moment's thought about anything before diving right in.

So, finally, I read Stowe's great book. Closely. Carefully. Thought about it. Wrote about it. Not a bad little bundle of condensed scholarship, if I do say so, and it might have been even better had I realized at the time that my words, once written, weren't set in stone and could be cut.

Several weeks ago, another friend asked if I had anything to contribute to a collection of essays in literary analysis and criticism on her area of a website designed to assist college and university students in their studies. I thought about Uncle Tom's Cabin; actually, I'd been thinking about it, again, for some time. Thinking about Christians and Christianity and Jesus Christ and "Uncle Toms" and Stowe's character, Tom. And Topsy and Eva and the others. Thinking about the probability that people who haven't been forced to read that book haven't read it, and why they haven't.

Thinking about the nature of slavery, as Stowe saw it, which is based on one central assumption: that wealth and profit are more important than human beings, human bodies, human souls. Thinking about the fact that, although slavery in the United States has long been abolished, that assumption is still alive and well and still sitting in the seats of power.

I wrote an essay, then – at considerably less length than the CliffsNote – and it's been published on my friend's site: https://www.24houranswers.com/literature/1800-1914-Gothic-and-Victorian/Why-Read-Uncle-Toms-Cabin. I invite you to read it.

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themikithornburg · 4 years

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A Shameful Irony (review of The Source of Self-Regard, by Toni Morrison)

One of Toni Morrison's most important criticisms of our time and contemporary culture concerns the centrality of wealth, the primacy of profit above every other consideration. It is a shameful, sad irony that Knopf chose to toss this collection of essays, speeches, and "meditations" together without identifying sources or dates except in a confused and confusing index. The result is a troublesome and unnecessary redundancy and a lack of focus that can seem to reflect badly on the writer; the reason can only be the publisher's careless pursuit of profit above every other consideration -- including the writer's reputation. Fortunately, a badly-edited book will hardly make a noticeable dent in this Nobel-winning writer's reputation. Readers and scholars familiar with Morrison's non-fiction, including her literary criticism, will no doubt be pleased to have these pieces collected in one volume, and they will certainly be able to supply the immediate identification of occasion, audience, and date, along with helpful references needed to make sense of certain of the author's quotations and other passages. They will ignore the frequent repetition, often word for word, of long passages, recognizing that such repetition serves a speaker who is addressing at different times and in different venues a variety of specialized audiences. But in supplying these things, such readers will be doing the work that ought to have been done by an editor, work that a writer of Morrison's reputation and dignity would expect (and if necessary would demand) of an editor. More importantly, Morrison's new readers, often not scholars, often familiar only with her fiction -- if that -- will be confused and put off by what appears to be carelessness, and may ascribe it to the author herself. Moreover, the cheapness and carelessness of the publisher will allow some of these new, non-specialist readers to give some credence to such reviews as that published on the Amazon.com site, which I quote: "Difficult to read subliterate gibberish. Long-winded, verbose, repetitive and pointless." This would be extremely unfair to any author. If I may say so, it is especially unfair to Toni Morrison, a black woman writer of high intelligence and great skill.

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themikithornburg · 5 years

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NON-SCIENTIST WRITES SCIENCE FICTION!

That would be me. My new Novel Byte (novella) for Uncial Press, "Eating Bugs," is undeniably science fiction, its science is undeniably insect-centered, and I am undeniably not an entomologist. I did once read a fascinating and fun book about bugs, but still...

Am I cheating? Well, maybe just a little. In fact, now that "Eating Bugs" has been released (today!), I've discovered a glaring inconsistency in the facts presented by the character who really is a scientist. So, just to be fair, I'll send a $10 Amazon gift certificate to the FIRST READER who FINDS THAT SAME INCONSISTENCY and TELLS ME ABOUT IT IN THE COMMENTS BELOW.

But "Eating Bugs" isn't really, seriously, about bugs. It's a lighthearted story about a young woman who has signed a contract without reading all the small print. If it's seriously about anything else, it's about the pitfalls of getting language a little bit wrong. The pitfalls of ignoring ecology and ignoring the will of the people you're trying to govern. And the pitfalls of sex… Wait – sex has pitfalls? Really?

"Eating Bugs" is available as an e-book from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo, as well as from the publisher, Uncial Press.

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themikithornburg · 5 years

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Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler

Do you love contemporary science fiction? Then you can probably stop reading right now. You're already acquainted with Octavia E. Butler. You've read her books and short stories, you know how skillfully she can create a world that's not the world you know and how irresistibly she takes you into that world and makes you believe it.

Above all, you know that she drives right to the heart of what great science fiction is all about. Not possible or improbable futures, alternate worlds, fictional characters and species and events, places we can visit for the excitement they provide. Not escape, but focus. Mirrors that reflect, metaphors that illustrate our own world and our own time and give us new ways to view and understand who we are.

I must confess that some years ago I'd more or less given up on science fiction, with only a few exceptions. In my teens and early 20s I'd read it eagerly, buying the new pulp magazines every month and catching up on all the big books and short stories of the so-called Golden Age and before. But working toward degrees in English and American literature left me little time to indulge in writing that was outside the academic canon, and – maybe more importantly – I found I just wasn't much interested in adventures in exploration and technology that didn't seem to lead to anything relevant to my immediate (and admittedly narrow) interests. Very few of the new writers I sampled seemed to have anything to say to me, so I sampled fewer and fewer of them.

So about ten years ago, when a friend asked me what I'd read by Octavia Butler, I had to tell him I'd never heard of her. I soon remedied that ignorance, first reading Bloodchild and Other Stories, a collection of two short essays and seven short stories, which I found intriguingly diverse in theme and setting, beautifully written, and almost incredibly imaginative. Next came her last novel, Fledgling, a very unconventional vampire story, and then her first, Kindred, which Butler called "a kind of grim fantasy" and I'd classify as science-fantasy – the story of a twentieth-century woman who inexplicably time-travels back to the American South in pre-Civil War days. And I kept on reading her work; I haven't finished yet, and I've already re-read a few things. Butler, sadly, has finished writing; she died in 2006 at age 58.

If you're not a reader of science fiction already, I won't suggest you start with the books I've already mentioned. Although they're quite approachable, I know that a lot of people are scared of science fiction (and fantasy) for one reason or another. Instead, I'd tell you to try my favorite, the two-novel Earthseed series, beginning with Parable of the Sower and then moving on to its sequel Parable of the Talents. Here's Wikipedia's brief description: "The books depict the struggle of the Earthseed community to survive the socioeconomic and political collapse of 21st-century America due to poor environmental stewardship, corporate greed, and the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor." This sounds pretty dry, but I assure you the book itself is anything but! Yes, these are dystopian novels, and the dystopias they imagine are frighteningly close to today's realism. But, unlike many such, they're filled with hope and with optimism that the human race can overcome its worst self-inflicted nightmares and survive.

Here’s the Amazon link.

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themikithornburg · 6 years

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The Last Longhouse, by Anna Goins

Christmas shopping? Yes, some of us are already doing that… or at least thinking about it. If you have a reader on your list, maybe you're looking among the top best-sellers for a good book.

Or maybe you'd like a suggestion. If so, here's one: How about a book that's currently fifteen-million and some down on the Amazon sellers list?

No, I'm not joking. The Last Longhouse has never sold more than a scant handful of copies. Virtually no one has ever heard of it, and there are reasons for this. The book is its author's first, published when she was 89 years old. A New York publisher had read it and expressed a great deal of interest, but before any negotiation could take place, the agent for another author – this one a well-known entertainer – had offered another book on a similar subject, and Anna Goins' book, unagented and unedited, was turned down with regrets. So she self-published it. As those of us who've self-published know, this meant it would have to be self-promoted as well, and Ms. Goins knew nothing about promoting her book. Even its Amazon page has only a meaningless half-sentence of description: "With her adventure memoir"… It's not even punctuated.

Calling The Last Longhouse an adventure memoir is like calling Moby Dick a sailing story. It is that – among other things. It's one of the most moving and most memorable books I've ever read. It is carefully and beautifully written, by one of the most remarkable women I've ever met. Anna Goins, born in 1915, is no longer alive, but her only book vibrates with life and will do so as long as readers have access to it. Here's my Amazon review, written after the first time I read it, and I stand by every word:

Writing at its best can make the reader know the truth of the writer's experience, imaginative or factual. It can put the reader, for the duration of the reading and for as long as memory endures, in the writer's place.

Anna Goins' The Last Longhouse puts us in a place where few readers of English have ever been, and where none will be again.

In the late 1970s, Goins, a 62-year-old American woman, recently widowed, pursuing a lifelong dream of exploring the island of Borneo and meeting its native people, boards a riverboat and journeys into a fast-disappearing wilderness. What she finds there is an equatorial paradise whose rainforest, and thus its people themselves, are being despoiled by international lumber companies in their quest for profits. Goins succinctly expresses the not-yet-complete wreckage as "[a] graphic reversal of the theme of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.... [T]he virus endemic to 'civilization' had traveled from the coastal cities of Borneo up the river, to the once untouched jungle, and the Dyak tribes living there." Only in the most remote village she visits, Rukun Damai, does Goins meet a man, the patinggi or village headman, who has quietly determined to resist the lumber companies' incursions and their attendant destruction of the old ways and values.

Although this book, in the end, chronicles a tragedy, it is not a tragic book. For as well as devastation Goins finds humor, hope, friendship, beauty, and great courage. She also, unexpectedly, finds love, and a new measure of self-knowledge and fulfillment. She calls the book, in fact, the "coming-of-age" narrative of a woman in her seventh decade.

I recommend The Last Longhouse as strongly as possible. This is a book that reminds us what our world is losing and has lost. It deserves to be widely read.

Here's the link on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Longhouse-Anna-Goins/dp/1413463045?keywords=Anna+Goins%2C+the+last+longhouse&qid=1540245520&s=Books&sr=1-1-spell&ref=sr_1_1

Get this book as a gift and make some reader very happy this Christmas.

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themikithornburg · 6 years

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The comma is not your friend

"The comma and I are not very good friends LOL." So says a fellow fiction writer, commenting on a Facebook post that suggests many writers could benefit from a closer acquaintance with grammar and punctuation. The admission has a tone of embarrassment, almost of self-blame: I've tried to make friends with the comma, but somehow… it just doesn't seem to want… I don't know what's wrong…

Having for years taught, or tried to teach, undergraduate university students how to write in English, I can tell this writer what's wrong, and it's not her fault. The comma looks innocent, innocuous – just a poor little almost-nothing, a harmless spatter of ink – and it pretends to offer itself, humbly, as useful in a small way. I'd like to be your pal, it says. I can't do big things, but I'm good at minor chores. Just try me. So you take it at its word and give it a chance. And it laughs at you. It can mess you up big time, and it knows that. It can make you look pedantic and dull, it can make you look silly, it can make you look illiterate. It can make your readers scratch their heads and wonder what in the world you thought you were trying to say. The comma is a treacherous slippery two-faced little ingrate. It teases you, butting in where it's not wanted and ducking out of sight when you need it. It pretends to play by rules, but it makes up its own rules as it goes along.

In the mechanics-of-writing textbook my students were required to buy, the chapter on commas contained five rules, as follows: 1) use a comma before the coordinating conjunction (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet) that links independent clauses in one sentence; 2) use a comma after the dependent structure that introduces a sentence's main clause; 3) use commas between items listed in a series; 4) use a pair of commas, one on each side, to set off nonrestrictive structures that interrupt the main clause of a sentence; and 5) occasionally, use a comma anywhere else it's needed.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Sort of? Except that you don't know an independent clause from a dependent one, and you're not sure whether a phrase and a clause are the same thing or two different things, and you'll never get it through your head what "nonrestrictive" means, and… structures? What're they when they're at home? It gets worse, too, when you read the small print. You learn that not only are there numerous exceptions to the first four rules, but that there are also places, not too well defined, where you must never use a comma. Then, when you read that fifth rule over again, you realize that it makes all the others pretty much superfluous. What's the point of having rules, after all, when the last one advises you to play it by ear?

Okay, take a deep breath and consider this. The "rules" and the rule books are only an attempt to make you aware of things you already know if you speak and listen to others speaking in English. Spoken and written English are two different things. We don't have commas – or any other punctuation marks – in spoken English; we have pauses of various lengths, we make signals with our voices by giving words and parts of words various kinds of emphasis, and when we talk directly to each other we pay attention to how well we seem to be understood. We learned to do all this when we were little children, when we learned to listen and learned to talk. Written English, words in a string on a page, can't have pauses or inflections, and writers can't be constantly checking to see if their readers understand them. So punctuation is the way writers of English try to imitate speaking voices.

A comma means a pause. It means a shorter pause than a dash or a semicolon and a much shorter pause than a period, which stands for a full stop. If you don't know where to put a comma, read your sentences out loud and pretend you're giving a speech or making a recording; that way you can't check to see if your listener understands you. Put a comma where it makes sense to pause slightly; don't put one where a pause doesn't make sense. Nine times out of ten you'll get the comma in the right place and you'll leave it out of the wrong place. Nine times out of ten isn't bad, and you'll do better than that once you get the hang of it.

Memorize those rules I cited above – the first four, that is; the fifth rule will eventually take care of itself. Learn what an independent clause is, and a coordinating conjunction (and and but are the ones you'll use most often). Learn to recognize which structures – words, clauses, phrases – are "dependent," meaning which ones can't stand by themselves in normal speech and writing. This much learning and memorization isn't difficult if you remember that these things are not ogres, they're just tools, and if you're a real writer you will learn how to use your tools. Those four rules are good, as rules go, and they're like training wheels; once you can stay upright by yourself you can dispense with them, break them when you don't need them, and truly "play it by ear."

Read good, well-written, modern prose out loud to yourself. Pay attention to what the punctuation directs you to do. Pay attention to those commas and the pauses they stand for. Pay attention to the ways good writers follow those four rules and the ways they break them. Notice what works for you and what doesn't, what enhances your understanding of what the writer is saying and what doesn't, what you have to read over twice to get its meaning. After you've done this for a while you'll begin to hear the writer's voice, and to hear your own voice in your head when you read silently.

If you come to a place where you truly can't decide if a comma is necessary or not, leave it out. Chances are you'll be right. Good writers today use fewer commas than good writers did fifty years ago. And writers before the twentieth century, even some good ones, generally used way too many commas. I don't know, maybe they paused in different places than we do; anyway, ignore them.

Finally, stop fearing the comma. It is indeed a slippery, fickle little thing, but it can be useful. It will never be your friend, but you can make it your servant. When you learn to understand it, you can start getting along with it and using it well.

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themikithornburg · 6 years

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How can I share a love of reading with my child?

I have in my mind's eye a memory of one of my stepdaughters at about age eight, kneeling on the basement stairway, lounging on her elbows a few steps up, chin resting in one hand, nose in a book. Her love for reading had overtaken her there; if you wanted to get down to the laundry room, you'd have to go around her. Now that same little girl is (gasp!) the grandmother of an almost-five-year-old, and she's hoping the same thing a lot of readers hope for their children and grandchildren, that a love of reading can be passed down to a new generation. We know that people who read for pleasure are on average more successful academically, and therefore economically. But for us book-lovers, the hope is more personal. We want to share our great joy in reading with the people we love. Sadly, that hope isn't as easily fulfilled as it once was. Distractions seem to multiply by the day. When my stepdaughter was little, "screen time" meant TV time only, and her parents put limits on that. Back when I started to read, we didn't even have a television set. (Yes, I hasten to say, TV had been invented, but the signal from the nearest station didn't reach us.) And it's not only that there are more distractions, or even that our lightning-speed media have shortened attention spans. I don't know if any studies prove this, but talking with students for many years makes me pretty sure that, for a lot of young people, the process of turning words on a page into scenes, pictures, voices, a kind of reality, has never been learned. What for me is the magic of stepping into another world through the pages of a book is, for them, simply not possible. They see words, they know what the words mean, but turning those meanings into vicarious experience, the way a film becomes vicarious experience, is something that just doesn't happen. No one taught us to do that; we learned it somehow on our own. But these kids haven't learned it. This makes reading a chore, sometimes necessary but never pleasurable. They can read, if they must, but it's no fun. It's not something they'd choose to do if they didn't have to. How can we overcome this? How can we share our love of books with our children? An internet search for phrases like "motivating kids to read" brings up millions of suggestions. Some of them seem fairly obvious, others not so much. I've chosen three to list here: 1. Start early to read to your child. This sounds obvious, but it deserves discussion. Early means early. Even very young infants are soothed by the sound of your voice, by the rhythm of phrases and sentences. We know that babies are busy from a few months old, learning to recognize words and speech patterns long before they start to speak. They're fascinated by funny and unusual sounds, like rhyme. Take advantage of that fascination! Babies are natural lovers of words, even before they know what the words mean. And reading out loud to them establishes a tradition, something they look forward to in the relationship between you and them. Children of any age like to be read to. On a very basic level, it means your attention is focused on them, and children – as parents know – are little attention hogs. The reading session is an intimate moment, strengthening the relationship bond. This means that the story you're reading is the medium of the bond. It's part of the intimacy, which is one reason children love to hear the same story over and over. Remember this, when you're bored to tears with Good Night, Moon for the forty-seventh time: repetition takes your child back to a good, comfortable place they'll associate with a book, with reading. But more than that, being read to releases a child to enjoy the story or poem without having to struggle with the printed words. This, believe it or not, is true even for older children and teens. When you read to them, they can get into the story itself, without printed words standing in the way. This is exactly what you're striving for. Even older teens (even middle-aged people, in fact) enjoy being read to. When I was teaching university undergrads, I'd occasionally read a poem or a few paragraphs of prose to my class, and I soon discovered that they loved it. This surprised me, but it shouldn't have; aren't audiobooks a big, profitable business? 2. Take the child's interests into account. If your child is interested in dinosaurs or pirates, give them stories about dinosaurs or pirates. Make the stories age-appropriate – which means, make them a little older than what you think is age-appropriate. As you've probably noticed, kids' minds are stretching, almost always a bit faster than their parents guess. Don't hold them back; pull them forward, a little at a time. Under this heading comes something more than any obvious interests the child has expressed. You know this little person. You know what will appeal to her delight in magic, or to his sense of humor. When I was about ten, my mother gave me a book she'd loved when she was about ten – an adult book, but one a ten-year-old could get into. How did she know I'd love it? Because she recognized things in me that she knew about herself. Share your own reading enthusiasms with your kids, and pay attention to what sets off a spark. 3. No Fighting, No Biting! This is the title of one of my favorite kids' books (by Else Holmelund Minarik, illustrated by Maurice Sendak), and it's also very good advice. Remember, your goal is a child who loves reading. You won't get there by bribes or punishments or rules. Reading should be a reward, not a chore – and certainly not a bone to fight over! If they don't like a book, don't force it on them. If they don't feel like reading, let it go until they do. This can be hard, and there's no law against offering enticements – talking to them about a story they really liked and tempting them to reread it, or putting an interesting book in their line of sight when they're tired or bored or feeling not quite up to snuff. But do not set an hour each day for reading and hold them to it. That makes you a dictator, and kids don't like being dictated to any more than you do. And let kids know that you yourself see reading as a reward, that it's something you do for pleasure. Also, other than observing obvious no-no's (for instance, not giving erotic romance to a nine-year-old), don't worry too much about content or form. What they read doesn't matter so much as the fact they enjoy it. When I was a young teen, I read my way avidly through a whole series of really silly, old-fashioned love stories. I know my mother sighed, thinking they were stupid and "a bad influence" on me. But I loved them, I was evolving as a reader, and if it hadn't been for those books I might never have moved on to Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Comic books and graphic novels are fine, no matter what your own parents' taboos may have been; in fact, the presence of pictures probably helps bring a visual reality to the written word. Give your child access to as many different books and kinds of books as possible. Fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, adventure, mystery, poetry, biographies, great literature and the literary equivalent of junk food – they're all grist for your mill, widening the reader's potential horizons and increasing the chances that a child will hit upon something he or she doesn't want to live without. As a reader, whether you're a parent or sibling, grandmother or grandfather, aunt or uncle, you're doing your best to pass along your joy in reading. If you have a suggestion I haven't mentioned here, leave a comment to share with the rest of us! I wrote this post, in a slightly different form, as a guest post on a friend's blog a couple of years ago. I thought it was important enough for another outing. For many years, my friend Anne Click taught reading at the university level to kids who needed a remedial course in this basic skill in order to succeed in their other classes. Some of you may find this shocking, but I can assure you it's not at all uncommon. These young students, in their late teens or older, are not below average in intelligence; actually, the fact that they've managed to get through twelve years of schooling without being able to read well suggests to me that they're extremely clever and resourceful. Anne tells me that the top reasons they've gotten that far without learning to read well are, "in no particular order: 1) stymied brain development in the first 3 to 6 years of life 2) absence of books and or role modeling of reading in the home 3) failure mindset/lack of confidence 4) lack of curiosity (most essential quality of a successful student)." Surely, these are handicaps that the adults in these kids' lives can and should be aware of, and can and should attempt to correct early, before the child suffers the real and difficult consequences of not being able – or not wanting – to read.

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themikithornburg · 6 years

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Review: Killing Jenna Crane, by Lynette Sofras

KILLING JENNA CRANE opens the way a book should open – in the middle of suspenseful action. Jenna Crane is in trouble. Somebody, a particularly nasty somebody named Andersen, is trying to kill her. I was hooked. Then a gunshot rings out, Andersen falls dead… and Jenna begins to argue with a third character, someone named Ellis, who has suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Who fired the shot? Ellis hasn't decided, and Jenna is irked. She doesn't need to be rescued, she says; she's supposed to take care of herself. Being rescued is not her thing. She does her own rescuing. I was disoriented. But not for long. Having begun the book without reading the blurb and without really registering what the cover image hints at, I'd taken "Jenna Crane" for a real person – that is, for a character on the same level of reality as Ellis. After a moment of wondering what was going on, I realized that Jenna is a character in a book Ellis is writing. She's real, in the sense that any good character is real to that character's author. As a writer myself, I know how real that is. My own characters sometimes argue with me, after all. Often they win the arguments. An author is, by definition, someone with a creative imagination. Now that I've given that much away, I won't tell any more of Ellis's secrets – or any more of Lynette Sofras's. I'll only say this is a very, very good story, very well told, one I couldn't put down once I'd begun it. I recommend it highly!

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themikithornburg · 6 years

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“A Particular Theme in American History”

"I sometimes think of the colonization of North America as the last of the Germanic invasions of the West, the hordes of Huns, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Goths, and Vandals who swept in from the steppes, swarmed over the Rhine and English Channel, shoved the Picts and Celts aside, and sailed across the Atlantic as soon as they had seaworthy ships for the open ocean." – From T. J. Stiles, "How Do We Explain this National Tragedy? This Trump?"

My husband has been saying something like this for years, although the group of Germanic invaders he chooses to name – the Norsemen, called Vikings – isn't included in Stiles' list. Both of us have been fascinated (and I must admit somewhat smitten) with the Vikings, especially since we started binge-watching the History Channel's Vikings series last summer. The thing about these fierce raiders, he maintains, is that although they took as much swag as they could carry from the people they attacked, their chief motivation wasn't plunder but violence. They really, really enjoyed the bloody things they were doing; it was their sport. We wonder if the taste for conquest wasn't genetic, a mutation that took hold in northern Europe, sort of like – maybe even linked to – the one for pale skin and blue eyes.

It's an interesting theory, anyway.

T. J. Stiles' argument in this essay, published today on "Literary Hub" (originally in Zyzzyva 111, Winter 2017), is related to my husband's theory about the Vikings, but that's not what it's about. What Stiles is basically saying is that, to understand why the United States took the turn it seemed to take in 2016, we must first look at our history – our real history, not the mythic version of it that we like to tell ourselves and each other. Stiles traces, through our history from colonial days through the present, a "particular theme," a tension between how white Americans define themselves and what American identity, as our Constitution wishes and courageously attempts to define it, really is.

Those of us who know a little about our history already know this tension. It's what keeps looming up before us, and keeps too many of us closing our eyes to it, pretending we didn't see it, pretending it isn't there.

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themikithornburg · 6 years

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LOSING OLD FRIENDS

When you reach my age, losing old friends becomes a more common occurrence all the time. It never gets easier, but it gets less surprising. Last week I lost two.

One of them I still see, in my mind's eye, as the woman I met when I was twenty-six going on fifteen. No intelligent adult, meeting me then, would have bet much on my ever amounting to a damn. I had a brain, largely unused, and a university degree. But I'd floated rudderless through life up to that point. I was immature and naïve, irresponsible, lonely, almost entirely lacking in a sense of self-worth, in a marriage that was wrong for me and especially wrong for the pre-adolescent children involved, and too stubborn to admit any of that. Kay, a year older, was able to look past all my deficiencies – which were surely obvious to her – and see something worth her time and kindness and friendship. She didn't literally save my life, over the next couple of bad years, but she lifted me out of my darkness many times, and I credit her with helping to push me in a direction that's brought me a lot closer to being a person I can respect.

The other old friend I've lost is Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the best – or maybe the best – of contemporary American writers, and a woman I never met. Yes, I have and cherish a handwritten postcard from her, thanking me for something I'm now embarrassed to recall: feeling proud and giddy just after I'd self-published my first novel, I'd sent her a copy of the book along with a fan letter. She wrote back promptly and warmly, saying she loved the title already. I knew exactly what that meant, and I loved her even more for it. I suppose it's presumptuous to call her a friend on the basis of that slight correspondence. But if a friend is someone you treasure, someone who's given you something of herself that makes a real and positive difference in your life, then as one-sided as that friendship was, it was real. Not only the books and stories she wrote but the woman herself, the person who, in writing them, willingly revealed herself, gave me so much.

I started this by talking about losing friends. But of course that's just one of our euphemisms for death (and Oscar Wilde was right – it does look like carelessness). You don't lose friends, really. Yes, when they die you have lost their physical presence, which in my case here was a minimal loss; I hadn't seen Kay, or spoken with her except by letter, for almost thirty years, and my eleven-year-old postcard from Ms. Le Guin was and remains her only actual presence in my life. But a friend enriches one's life, and that enrichment is an addition, and that addition is a change. I am not the same person I was before I knew them. Part of who I am is a small part, a distillation, of who they were. If I am lucky enough to be another person's friend, now, then the part of me that will live on in that person will also be a part of them. We live in each other. We build upon each other.

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themikithornburg · 6 years

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An opinion, likely to be unpopular

In my opinion, as adults we all OUGHT to be able to tell the difference between instances of sexual assaults/harassment that should be taken seriously and things that are either quite innocently meant or easily corrected by the "victim," whether male or female. It's a spectrum, and of course some people are more easily offended than others. But in the current climate, which is beginning to look more & more like a witch hunt, no one dares suggest that something as harmless as a hand on the shoulder could be ignored or quietly objected to. And anyone who dares suggest (as Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson recently did) that women have some responsibility is quickly castigated and forced to take it back.

One of the sources of the trouble is that no one seems willing to recognize that, from the year one up until (in our culture, anyway) sometime in the 20th century, most women have had to attract a man in order to survive, whereas only a few men, maybe, have had to put out any effort to attract a woman, because they could generally overpower one. It's been an evolutionary imperative. Women want to look "attractive," and they teach their daughters this wisdom. Men, most frequently, do not give a damn if they look attractive to women or not; if they are mighty hunters or have a good-paying job, that's what makes them attractive to women. This is all changing, of course, but it's changing a lot faster than we as a species are in any way really ready for.

Meanwhile, our consumer culture has for nearly a century been teaching women that the way to look "attractive" is to exaggerate their secondary sexual characteristics so as to make men drool; the implication – whether girls and women are conscious of it or not – is that if they can make men drool, one of those men is likely to marry them and make their lives complete. It's not only the women who go around scantily clad (many of whom, including twelve-year-old girls, suppose it's the only way to look "attractive") but pretty close to every woman in our culture, not excepting myself at age 77, who would be ashamed to be seen in public without looking what we've learned is "attractive." And when we succeed, we attract men, who have learned in the same way that if they're attracted, they should let that be known. To the woman who's attracted them. Some let it be known by grabbing the woman, which is a crude way to go about it (but sometimes works) and can get them fired from their jobs or arrested, recently (although not often enough in some cases, sadly). Others let it be known by telling the woman politely that they think she's attractive. Which, recently, can also get them reprimanded or fired, although probably not arrested.

Until our culture catches up with itself, we're going to see a lot of the current problem. I have a feeling that's not going to happen anytime soon.

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themikithornburg · 7 years

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Poetry behind bars

I have never been in prison (yet), but I have been in a prison, where I took part in a poetry reading.

It may strike you as odd that a poetry reading would be held in a prison; you may even think that being required to attend a poetry reading might be a form of punishment used to make prisoners' lives even more miserable than they already are. Let me assure you, though, that the prisoners I read poetry to were at the reading by choice and were both attentive and appreciative. One of the chief miseries of an inmate's life is boredom, or so my friends who have been in prison have told me. Prison life is deadly routine, punctuated by occasional and relatively infrequent violence. You will find yourself doing things it had never before occurred to you to do, just to keep from being bored completely out of your skull. Things like attending poetry readings.

Things, even, like writing poetry.

The facility in which I was, happily, not incarcerated but was in long enough to read a couple of my poems, and listen to a couple of other people read theirs, was a women's prison in the southern United States.* I was visiting a friend who lived nearby, taught English at the local college, and had started a summer poetry workshop at the prison. Most of the women who participated in the workshop had never attempted poetry before, but my friend had inspired them to try, and the results were impressive. Probably this isn't surprising; people who are in prison have generally led interesting lives before they arrived there, lives full of emotional complexity. Poetry presents an opportunity to give expression to that complexity, and imprisonment gives you plenty of time to reflect on it. Anyway, every woman who'd joined the workshop selected one of her poems to include in a collection, which my friend published. The title of the collection was Kites – the word being a slang term for notes passed secretly among prisoners or from prisoners to someone who would deliver them to someone else on the outside. Bits of paper that could fly over cell blocks and walls.

My copy of Kites, I'm sorry to say, has long been lost, probably in one of my many moves since that summer. But I remember a few of the poems and the names of some of the poets. Actually, I remember word for word one line, in a poem entitled "Church Ladies on Visitors' Day" (or something close to that). The poet's first name was Ruby, and the line remains one of my favorite lines of poetry ever: "You giggling batch of pop-eyed bitches."

I remember Ruby for something else, too. At that reading I mentioned above, I'd read what I thought was the best poem I'd written so far, which was also the first one I'd really been serious about writing, the one I felt was somehow the beginning of my enterprise as a writer. And, as I told the audience when I introduced it, I had no idea why I'd chosen the images in the poem, no idea what it was really about. After the reading, we – readers and prisoners – were folding and stacking chairs, and Ruby said she thought she knew what it meant, if I'd like to hear her idea. I told her okay, and she explained my poem to me. My jaw dropped. She was absolutely right, and I'd never have known if she hadn't told me. Well, she said, it was like a quote she'd heard from Winston Churchill: "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?"

I've since read that maybe it wasn't Churchill who said that. But, whatever… there's a lot of truth in it whoever said it. Ruby eventually finished serving her time, was released, and she and my friend stayed in touch for quite a while. I think about her often and wonder what she's up to these days. I wish her well. …………….

Not every poem written by a prisoner comes out of a poetry workshop. Most, in fact, over the years and centuries, probably have not. Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte d'Arthur while he was imprisoned, back in the 16th century. Oscar Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol soon after his release from prison, where he served two years for "homosexual offences," in 1897. And countless poets, some anonymous, have written verse, serious or funny, while behind bars. Some of these poems have survived in writing, no doubt, and others have lived for a while in the oral tradition, memorized and passed along by the poets' fellow prisoners.

In the 1950s or '60s, my husband heard and memorized a poem, author anonymous, that a friend of his had in turn heard and memorized while he was incarcerated in an Indiana prison. I've done Internet searches, hoping to find that someone along the line had written the poem down and someone else had posted it. My searches have been to no avail, and while the poem probably isn't going to challenge Le Morte d'Arthur or The Ballad of Reading Gaol for pride of place among prison poems, we've decided it deserves not to be forgotten. So I've written it down as my husband remembers it, and here it is:

The Ballad of Jimmy LaRue

Some strange, weird tales have come out of jails, And many of them are true, But the strangest I've heard was told by a bird Who called himself Jimmy LaRue.

We shared a cell in a Midwest 'tel. He was doing ten days for vag, And this boy warmed up like a homeless pup When I gave him a tailor-made fag.

You see, he was broke, and there's three in a smoke, And it seemed to suit him all right. It started him back on memory's track. Here's the tale he spun that night.

"I was doing ten in a Midwest pen, And my bunker was slated to fry. He was one of a mob who had pulled a job, And the law said that he must die.

"His buddy had squealed, and then appealed For mercy for helping the state, But they evened the score by giving him four When he thought he'd get the gate.

"They made this squealer a potato-peeler And put him in Cell Block Three, And the other guy, who was slated to fry, They put in a cell with me.

"Well, the time was set, and I'll never forget The night that he said goodbye. He wanted to chat with that lousy rat. He was just that kind of a guy.

"He wanted to shake the hand of the snake Who had sold his life away, But the warden said 'Nix – I'm leery of tricks. The Governor might give you a stay.'

"It was four o'clock in the death-house block, And the guards were strapping him in. A murmured prayer for the man in the chair Asked God to forgive him his sin.

"The lights in our cell, they flickered a spell, And he knew his buddy was dying, That his soul was hurled to an unknown world At the cost of a quitter's lying.

"He let out a yell like a scream from hell. It echoed through Cell Block Three. 'Cut it out!' he cried. 'I lied! I lied! Oh, God, it's killing me!'

"Well, you know the rest – this rat went west. He died as the lights came on. And I, Jimmy LaRue, helped bury the two In the light of the cold, bleak dawn."

(I especially love the first two lines – an example of sly innuendo if ever there was one. I hope that if you like "The Ballad of Jimmy LaRue" you'll pass it on. Maybe even put a tune to it and sing it.) ………………

*I was definitely the amateur in this group of poets. The other two who read were LaVerne Hanners, the friend I was visiting, whose Girl on a Pony is a classic memoir of the American West in the 1930's; and Lorenzo Thomas, poet, critic, and teacher extraordinaire.

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themikithornburg · 7 years

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Magic Portals

If you're a member of Goodreads, you know that the site encourages readers and fans to submit questions for authors. The other day I got a question from someone (probably Goodreads itself; my readers and fans are remarkably mum): "If you could travel to any fictional book world, where would you go and what would you do there?" The more I've thought about this, the more I'm stunned. Goodreads' question, with its "if you could," takes for granted that I can't "travel to any fictional book world." When in fact I can. I do it all the time. And so do you, if you're someone who reads fiction. Goodreads should know this! When you're a good reader and have good books to read, you can open a magic portal into other worlds. People have been saying this for centuries. "There is no frigate like a book," wrote Emily Dickinson, "to take us lands away." Your high school English teacher (after telling the class what a frigate was and scowling at the kid who laughed nastily at the word) explained that these lines were a metaphor, a figure of speech meaning that a book was like a ship. But your teacher was wrong. What Dickinson means is absolutely literal. No ship, or for that matter no plane, train, or automobile, can do what a book can. No vehicle can take you very far over your lunch break and bring you back in an hour. Fuel and tickets are expensive. Until space travel gets cheaper and time travel is invented, there are some places you can't go at all. Books, on the other hand, are quick, always available, and free if you have a library card. They can take you to the past, to the future, across the country or across the universe. And this part of the poem is a metaphor only in the sense that you won't be traveling physically. If you're a good reader, and are reading a good book, emotionally and consciously you will be where the book takes you. And most of the time, emotionally and consciously is what counts. I've read books that took me to their world so completely that when I finished them, or stopped reading for the night, I could hardly get back to my own world. Stephen King's books do that to me, and while his world isn't always a comfortable place, it's a fascinating one. I've read books that rescued me, temporarily, from my own uncomfortable places; once, during a hot muggy summer when I was dead broke and working a job I hated, I read all of Jane Austen's novels back to back and lived, for hours at a time, in cool nineteenth-century England among people whose worries were entirely different from mine. I've lived in fictional worlds that were so real to me, emotionally and consciously, that they entered my dreams. The first time I read Frank Herbert's Dune I actually hesitated to go outdoors without wearing a stillsuit to preserve my body's moisture; in my mind, the world of the book and my everyday world were momentarily confused. I've had discussions, sometimes arguments, with the characters in some good books. I've fallen in love with a few of them. What do I mean by "a good book"? In this regard, it's not a moral, nor a literary, nor even an aesthetic judgment; it's purely a practical one. A good book is enticing enough to persuade me to enter its world and then strong enough to keep me there. Also, and importantly, it has to be well enough written on every level of writing, from spelling to plot, to avoid kicking me out of its world with every grammatical error or non-sequitur or sudden, unintended change in point of view. Some readers can ignore a few of these distractions, but some can't, and no one can willingly stay in the world of a book that keeps reminding them every few paragraphs that it's just a collection of words on a page. Of course, not every good book can help every reader work its magic. When I was eleven I tried to read David Copperfield and simply could not get into Dickens' world – the ironies were lost on me, and the unfamiliar vocabulary was too great a distraction. At eleven I was a good reader for some books, but not good enough for that one. I was easily bored, and boredom zapped me back through that magic portal the wrong way. On the other hand, a couple of years ago when I attempted to reread Gone with the Wind, which I'd loved at thirteen or so, I couldn't stay on the other side of the portal. I'm sure for some young or naïve readers it's still a good book, but I stopped being a good reader for it, probably sometime in the late 1950s when I started to know too much about the real world to believe in Margaret Mitchell's fictional one. Her major characters all thought (as Mitchell apparently did) that slavery was a fine institution, and while I could well believe that of selfish, single-minded Scarlett and cynical Rhett (and while it was obvious that "Mammy's" act had everyone fooled, including the author), Ashley Wilkes was the deal-breaker. He was neither stupid nor a hypocrite, but he had to be either or both; he didn't have the luxury of living in the 1930s and lying to himself. Every time he appeared on the scene, then, he pushed me right out of that book's world. The line is blurry between a good book and a not-so-good one, even when you take "good" in this narrow sense. Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin novels are so good, for me as a reader, that I've read them – all thousands of pages combined – three times, and I have no trouble getting past the sea-going vocabulary that might stop another reader. But they'd be even better books if the complete Norton edition weren't so badly edited (not edited, in fact, but just scanned and printed) that there's a typo or two on almost every page. It's the author's job, with the help of the editor, to make his or her fictional world as real and distraction-free as possible, and since O'Brien was dead when this edition came out, the publisher has a lot to answer for. For some otherwise good readers, the combination of technical vocabulary and stupid errors will make it a world they can't inhabit. Of course there's also a blurred line between good readers and bad ones, and the line moves, depending not only on the book but on other things, including the reader's time of life or even on the reader's mood. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't. There's a novel called Dear Enemy, by Jean Webster, published in 1915, that I've read approximately 200 times (if I lived in the world of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 I could walk around reciting it), and if I need cheering up I'll reread it again. I can't stay long in Thomas Hardy's novelistic world; I get way too depressed there. And I don't even understand the concept of "a great beach read." If I'm on a beach, I want to be on the beach, not in some other fictional place. (I wonder if anyone ever read Nevil Shute's On the Beach while they were on a beach?) The sad thing, though, is that some bad readers are always bad readers. Technically, they can read – they know the words, they can pronounce and define them, and they know what most of them mean. But the words are only words; they open no portals. When I was a teacher, I sometimes had students like this. They'd graduated from high school and were able to advance through required college courses in their major and minor fields without ever reading a fictional book or story willingly. "I don't like fiction," they'd say, and no wonder. From their reactions, in things they said or wrote, I think reading fiction must have been, to them, the way a mathematics text is to me – something I can mostly understand, if I put my mind to it, but something that doesn't touch me or move me in any way. Black marks on a white page, forgotten as soon as the page is turned. I don't know why this is so, for those people; I don't think it's a lack of imagination, because they seem able to watch movies and television with some pleasure, and you have to have at least a little imagination to do that, although the actors and directors and crews do most of that imagining for you. I suspect it's because they never found that first magic portal, the one that took them "lands away," and so they never knew it was possible, never got the knack of it. Maybe it's too late for them, as young adults or old adults, to learn the trick. I hope not. But why do I hope not? It's just a game, isn't it, this trick of opening a magic door into a fictional world? It's not something we need to do in order to live, and it's not like there aren't millions of people in this world who aren't able to read at all and who get along just as well without it. Yes, some believe that reading certain texts – say, the Bible or the Quran – can make one a better person (a questionable belief, I will venture, having met some of the folks who hold it). But fiction? Isn't reading fiction just a frivolous entertainment, no worse but certainly no better than watching a movie or playing solitaire? Am I a better person for having read Dune or David Copperfield? Will you be any wiser or any more virtuous after you've read that new novel you just brought home from the library? Possibly not. But you'll have travelled, and travel is broadening, as they say. You'll have met new people, including the book's author, and had a glimpse into their minds. You'll have seen, if the book is a good one, how strangers live, or how they once lived, and seeing this will suggest that how people live in your own world isn't the only possible way. You'll encounter problems and ways of addressing them that haven't occurred to you – yet – in this world. Also, when you've spent a little time in another world, you'll notice that the other world is a mirror, whether perfect or flawed, of this one. In that mirror you may get a glimpse of yourself. Priceless, always.

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