Girl at the End of the World

For I don’t know how long I have been seeing this picture on Patheos when reading the several blogs I follow there. It looked interesting, but I wasn’t particularly moved to read the book. 

Then one of the bloggers I follow on twitter retweeted something that sounded interesting from someone called Elizabeth Esther, and I began following Elizabeth Esther, too. I shortly discovered that Elizabeth Esther is the author of Girl at the End of the World, so I decided that if I could find it at the library, I’d read it. A trip to our library’s website revealed that yes, they had the book (2 copies), I could put a hold on one and have it sent to the library closest to me, and a few days later, there it was. Forty some odd years ago when I got my first (barcodeless, cardboard) EBR Parish Library card, I did not envision such efficiency. Now I’m looking forward to the day when a drone drops the book off at my door.

The book is a memoir of the author’s upbringing in an Apocalyptic church, one started and run by her own family. 

I was raised in a homegrown, fundamentalist Christian group—which is just a shorthand way of saying I’m classically trained in apocalyptic stockpiling, street preaching, and the King James Version of the Bible. I know hundreds of obscure nineteenth-century hymns by heart and have such razor sharp “modesty vision” that I can spot a miniskirt a mile away.Verily, verily I say unto thee, none of these highly specialized skills ever got me a job, but at least I’m all set for the end of the world. Selah.

This excerpt from the back cover sums up both the book’s content and the author’s breezy style, a style that covers a world of heartbreak. In one sense the book is an easy read: it’s written simply, there are no mind boggling statistics or difficult academic concepts to absorb, and it’s broken into short chapters. In another sense, the book is a difficult read, as books about abuse and suffering always are, especially if any of it happens to resonate with some of the reader’s own experiences. Rachel Held Evans described the book as, “the sort of book you plan to read in a week but finish in a day.” My experience was the opposite: I planned to read it in a day but had to keep putting it down because it got to be too much, so it took me closer to three.

Part of what made the book so difficult for me was that the author does not belabor her experiences. Her matter of fact style in describing what she went through (multiple daily spankings, being made to quit an after school activity she loved and needed to get into a private college because it interfered with her numerous chores at home, having a teacher question her science project because when she measured her resting heart rate it was over 100) more than anything she actually says conveys how the bizarre can seem normal when you are raised with it.

In the end, Elizabeth Esther was able to make her way out of the cult she was brought up in, find a new way of living with her husband and children, and even make peace of a sort with her parents. I find it interesting that for her, finding her way to the Catholic Church was part of her healing path. My relationship with my stepmother was a stormy one, but the one thing I am immensely grateful for is that she sent me to a Methodist church and not the Catholic one I had been baptized into. Well, that, and the whole saving my life thing, but it’s pretty much a toss-up in my eyes.

Fortunately, neither Elizabeth Esther nor I are tasked with selecting each other’s spiritual path, and her reasons for becoming attracted to Catholicism make perfect sense to me, even if it’s a path I wouldn’t have chosen. In the end, that’s what makes the book so heartening, the message that we can overcome childhood brainwashing (the author’s own term, from the Prologue) and look at the world through our own eyes. I do recommend reading the book, whether in a day or three or even a week. 

Insulted

In my reading recently I came across this post, Patriarchy in Homeschool Culture by Samantha Fields, in which I found a quote from the book Beautiful Girlhood. Beautiful Girlhood was originally written by Mabel Hale and published in 1922, and has been more recently revised by Karen Andreola and republished.

The section that Samantha quoted went as follows:

One day a handsome young gentleman alighted from a train … As he paced the platform, he soon attracted the attention of a young girl. She watched him flirtatiously out of the corner of her eye, coughed a little, and laughed merrily and a bit loudly with a group of her acquaintances; but at first he paid no attention …
At last he noticed, turned, and came directly to her, while her foolish little heart was all in a flutter at her success …
“My dear girl, he said, tipping his hat, “have you a mother at home?”
“Why, yes,” the girl stammered.
“Then go to her and tell you to keep you with her until you learn how you ought to behave in a public place,” and saying this he turned and left her in confusion and shame. It was a hard rebuke; but this man had told her only what every pure-minded man and woman was thinking. Girls can hardly afford to call down upon themselves such severe criticism. (130-31)

This is where a wide reading of true mid-nineteenth century literature comes in handy for a girl. Let me tell you the rest of the story, without the flowery prose (okay, maybe a little flowery prose).

The young girl immediately got the attention of the conductor and pointed to the offender saying, “Excuse me, sir, but that person, while unacquainted with me, presumed to come up to me and address me with words that insulted both my mother and myself. I trust I can rely on your protection from any further advances on his part.”

I mean, seriously? Let's look at the sequence of events as presented, shorn of any editorial content designed to influence our views of who is at fault here. A young man alights from the train, sees a bevy of attractive young ladies, and begins to pace around the platform. Why is he pacing? Whether he is waiting for another train, or a cab, or his valet to come and get him, the wait won't be made any shorter by him walking up and down. He sees a group of acquaintances, including one particular young lady, and attracts her attention.  Is this the purpose of his pacing? It would seem so to an observer not inclined to blame the woman in any interaction between a woman and a man.

But then, what does the young lady do? She laughs merrily at something that one of her acquaintances says. Obviously she's a strumpet, or wait, here's another thought. Maybe the group has noticed the young man's efforts to get her attention and one of them has said something amusing about him. And now she's laughing at him! So he does what he can to preserve his pride: make it seem like she's the one trying to attract his attention, and insult her for it.

I mean, otherwise we'd have to believe that this paragon of male virtue presumed to approach and address a young lady without a proper introduction just to correct her manners. He’d be lucky not to be horsewhipped. Young Victorian ladies suffered from a lot of disadvantages, true, but a lack of ways to deal with insults from young popinjays was not one of them.

As the authors would have known if they had bothered to read good literature instead of writing the bad kind.

Cutting Loose

As I wrote last week, I heard readings from her latest novel, The Cutting Season, by award winning author Attica Locke, and immediately bought the book and had it autographed. 

The book more than lived up to the promise of the excerpts the author read. The genre is that of a murder mystery, and I love murder mysteries, but the book reads more like a novel in which the mystery, while well written and satisfactorily solved, serves as a plot device to develop the characters and themes. 

The main character is a Louisiana woman, Caren Gray, the descendant of slaves who has come to work as the manager of a plantation where her ancestors worked both as slaves and as free paid workers. The plantation, Belle Vie, passed into the hands of the Clancy family after the Civil War and at the time the book opens, has been run as a historical site and venue for weddings and parties for two generations.

Caren herself grew up on the plantation because her mother worked there as a cook. We learn as the book develops why Caren left the plantation, why she argued with her mother and was estranged from her at her death, and why she came back to live and work as the plantations’s manager. Caren’s fractured relationship with her mother is one, in my eyes the main one, of several relationships at the heart of the book. 

First and most important are the personal relationships. In addition to Caren’s relationship with her late mother, revealed in flashbacks, there is Caren’s relationship with her own daughter, which, as we learn in the first scene with the two of them together, is beginning to experience some strain. Morgan wants to attend her father’s upcoming wedding, and Caren has put off buying her a plane ticket. Eventually this leads to us learning about both Caren’s and Morgan’s relationship with Morgan’s father. Finally, there is Caren’s childhood relationship with the younger son of the Clancy family, Bobby, which ends when they both reach puberty.

There are also the wider relationships: Caren’s relationship with her employer and with the employees she manages. Her employees, as it turns out, view her as something of an outsider and protect her from information about what is going on at the plantation, even when that information involves her own daughter. Her employer, the older Clancy son Raymond, hints from time to time that he views her as a charity case who owes something to his family. 

Both Caren’s friendship with Bobby and professional relationship with Raymond are part of the book's treatment of the relationship between the white members of society and the black ones.  But there is a new racial conflict brewing between the black workers and the new migrant workers coming in from Mexico and Central America to work the jobs in the fields for lower wages.

Finally there are the geographical relationships. Both Caren and the Clancy brothers view Belle Vie as home, but the differences in the way they do so further develops the treatment of the relationship between races as well as explaining more about Caren’s relationship with both her mother and daughter. Additionally, there is the relationship between the plantation and the cane fields beyond.

When Caren finds the body of a dead migrant worker on the plantation grounds, all these relationships come into play. Caren has reason to believe her daughter knows something about the murder, and calls the child’s father, who takes it on himself to come down to Louisiana from Washington, DC to see for himself what is going on.  An even older mystery, about the disappearance of one of Caren’s ancestor’s known as Jason, becomes significant in looking at the recent one. An unsatisfactory employee whom Caren had been about to fire becomes a suspect in the murder investigation. The secrets the plantation workers are keeping finally come to light and with information obtained by a journalist who is writing a story on the labor practices of the company that owns the cane fields, eventually lead to the killer.

The real resolution to the story, however, in my mind at least, takes place in Caren’s evolving relationships with her daughter, her daughter’s father, and the Clancy family. The book has not so much a happy ending as a hopeful one, as Caren is able to let go of some of the guilt over her estrangement from her mother and some of the control she keeps over her daughter, and to cut loose from Belle Vie and consider moving away from Louisiana. Yet for those who are fans of pure whodunits, this book works well, too, with the solution being enough of a surprise to keep the reader puzzled but not so much of one as to seem like something that would only happen in a book.

So thank you, Attica Locke, for such a wonderful addition to my library and I hope to the libraries of my readers as well.

Real

My husband and I went to the Shaw Center last night to see the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence given out. The award was given to a woman named Attica Locke, for her book The Cutting Season.  The book is about an African American woman who becomes the manager of a plantation that is used for wedding and parties, after growing up on that plantation when her mom worked there as a cook, and leaving it the first chance she got.

The author said* she got the idea for the book when she went to the wedding of a black woman and white man at Oak Alley. She herself is married to a white man. At any rate, she didn't realize that Oak Alley was a real plantation until she got there, and then she became extremely angry at the juxtaposition of the pretty setting with the history of slavery there.  She also found it bizarre that no one at the wedding acknowledged the history. The bride's father is a preacher, Ms. Locke said, and “I’ve never met a black preacher who couldn't find a microphone at a wedding", but he didn't say anything. 

"They didn't even jump a broom, nothing". She and her husband said a prayer (quietly, not out loud, I think.) 

Locke later went back and stayed at Oak Alley overnight and gathered ideas for her novel. She noticed that these days, the gardeners on the plantation are all Mexicans and the workers in the cane fields behind it are migrant workers, "and I don't know how anyone stays there without getting a headache". I really liked her, and bought a copy of the book and had it autographed.

I have heard many authors speak, between the Gaines Award events and the Historical Foundation monthly meetings, and usually don’t find myself thinking that I like the author. I don’t generally think I dislike the author, either, I just focus on the work and whether I want to buy the book and read it. 

Ms. Locke had begun by saying, “I’m going to be real”, and in my mind, that’s a signal that no, I’m not. I say that not because I think the people who use that phrase are lying, but because simply using the phrase reflects an awareness that we present ourselves in different ways in different situations. That being the case, the speaker has to pull up “real” from the pool of potential personas, and how real is that, when you think about it?

Yet when she began to speak, about the wedding and her husband, and black preachers and her subsequent trip to Oak Alley, I did believe I was hearing the real woman sharing her reactions and confusions with the audience because she trusted that we, too, would either see what she saw, or else at least have our own minds boggled by her description of what she called “plantation Disneyland”.  

I should add at this point that Saint Anonymous’ UMW is planning a trip to Oak Alley in April, and that my best friend D, the one I walk with every week and share birthday outings with, is coming with me. What I probably haven’t mentioned before is that my friend D is African American. I shared with her by email earlier today Ms. Locke’s take on the wedding experience, and got the response, “Gee, how interesting.   Yes, a good read before visiting Oak Alley.”

We should say a prayer.

*all quotations are as best as I can remember.

Award Night

Since my husband and I are members of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, we get invited to the annual Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence ceremony. 

There are two ways to give to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. The first is that you can endow a fund of some sort for them to manage. Although it is probably obvious to a regular reader of my blog that my husband and I are not hurting for money, we are not at the “endow a fund” level of wealth. The other way to support BRAF is by donating an annual amount of $100 and up, to be used toward their operating expenses, and that’s what we do. People who donate in this way are considered members.

The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence was conceived at another sort of BRAF event several years ago, when Mr. Gaines gave a reading from his work Mozart and Leadbelly. The award is intended to honor Ernest Gaines by selecting a promising African-American author as recipient. This year’s recipient is Stephanie Powell Watts for her book of short stories, We Are Taking Only What We Need. Watts, we are told, “worked as a Jehovah’s Witness minister, a shoe-string factory worker, and a food service and office worker” before receiving her PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. “She now teaches at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania”. In addition to the honor of the award and a trophy, she was given $10,000. Honor is nice, but money pays the bills.

As part of the ceremony, recipients read from their work. Ms. Watts read a short selection from the first short story in her book, shorter than the amount that recipients usually read, but she stopped at just the point to leave you wondering what happened next. I’m not sure whether it was purely her decision to read a shorter than average bit, or whether it was to leave time for the Master of Ceremonies, Irvin Mayfield, to lead an improvised sestet in several jazz compositions, including selections from Mayfield’s recent composition: Dirt, Dust and Trees: A Jazz Tribute to Ernest Gaines. The sestet finished their set with a second-line style medley of gospel tunes, including I’ll Fly Away and When the Saints Go Marching In. 

After the ceremony, there is always a buffet, compliments of  a locally owned and quite elegant restaurant. I would hate to say that the buffet is my husband’s only reason for attending this cultural event so regularly, but he has memorized the exact location of the shrimp-filled pirogue, and heads to it with the determination of a spawning salmon.

The tiny bread plates that accompany the spread are no doubt meant to be a reminder that this isn’t supposed to be dinner, but we’re good at carrying multiple plates. We are also good at snagging a table in the room with the shrimp boat (less congested than the one with the dessert table and martini bar), which means we have seats to give away. Usually we literally give them away; while we hope to attract other folks to talk with, our spare chairs usually get carried off to other tables where people in large groups need extras. This year other people asked if they could sit with us and of course we agreed. They then preceded to carry on their own conversation as if we weren’t there. I eavesdropped shamelessly as one woman, originally from New York by her account before moving to Washington and then here to Baton Rouge, raved about the musicians. By her account, the only place to hear jazz like that in Washington any more is at the Kennedy Center, which she thinks has driven the smaller jazz clubs out of business. Tickets for events at the Kennedy are expensive, so they could only go to one event a year. Culture in Baton Rouge, she continues, is so accessible. 

I haven’t really thought of it that way, but there are numerous events at the Shaw Center (where the Gaines award is given) throughout the year. There are small jazz clubs in town with reasonable cover charges, and of course, the Little Theater events we go to, as well as a symphony orchestra. There are three outdoor music festivals each summer. LSU has begun hosting a multi-act country music concert each year, and there are concerts that come through at the River Center. One of our local charitable agencies (about which there was a big scandal several years later) even hosted a concert by Luciano Pavarotti back in the 1990’s. People came from surrounding states for that (and Pavarotti, not the charity, got most of the money.) I still have the program.

Not to mention, that my husband and I take for granted being able to see and hear Ernest Gaines himself each year at this time, as well as guest MC’s that have included, in addition to Mr. Mayfield, actors Courtney Vance and last year, Cicely Tyson.

So yes, say what you will about our small city (and lord knows I say a lot of it), but it has at its heart a group of leaders determined to see that the needs of its citizens are met, and it has ready access to the arts.

Thank you, Miss-Snob-Pretending-the-Original-Occupant-of-the-Table-Wasn’t-There, for reminding me of it.  

On the Hunt

Since my retirement I have made more use of the local library, checking out mostly murder mysteries but also the occasional non-fiction book from the New Releases shelf. No matter how interesting the non-fiction books appear at first, though, I’ve had a hard time making my way through them, not because the books themselves are bad, but because they tax my aging attention span. As I have mentioned before, there are books I want to have read, more than I want to actually read them.

Nonetheless, I checked out Peter L. Bergen’s Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11/ to Abbottabad. This book I actually finished.

This is not a book rushed into print to take advantage of public interest in a news topic. Bergen is the author of a previous books on Bin Laden,  including Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden, the manuscript of which he had turned in to his publisher the week before 9/11. The book has a ten page bibliography and 80 some odd pages of notes. Bergen has interviewed sources named and unnamed in the intelligence community and was able to see Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound before it was razed. There is a lot of detail in this book.

Some of the things I learned were, first, how invested President Bush was in trying to find Bin Laden himself. His seeming indifference in public Bergen’s sources attribute to Bush’s reluctance to remind the world that Bin Laden had attacked the US and evaded capture. 

Also, I was not aware of how unsure the intelligence community was that the tall figure they saw walking in the garden of the compound truly was Osama Bin Laden. It made sense given all they knew, but there was a good deal of uncertainty still when the mission to go after him was approved. In the end it was decided that there was unlikely to be any better information forthcoming if the mission was postponed, and more chances of leaks.

There was planning during the final Clinton years to try to extract Bin Laden from Tora Bora using a similar scheme, but concern for losing any members of the mission led to proposed plans that involved over a hundred military personnel, which did not seem practical.

Bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks was to get the US out of the Middle East. Instead, of course, they brought our military there in force.

What stays in my mind, however, is not the detail so much as the ethical and philosophical implications that the book raises. 

First of all, Bergen describes many of the “interrogation techniques” used on captives. It is sobering to think that these are the actions of my government, my country. Then there are the drone strikes, not all of which hit their intended targets.  Bergen relates how the US used a faked vaccination project to try to obtain DNA from the children in the compound to confirm that the Bin Laden family lived there. Awareness of the faked vaccination program has led to distrust of real ones going on today.  It is hard to read the book and not feel complicit.

The philosophical implications have been in my mind a long time, since the 9/11 attacks. I remember President Clinton’s ordering an attack on Bin Laden’s stronghold in Tora Bora while impeachment hearings were going on. There was a lot of criticism of the attack as being staged purely to divert attention from the impeachment hearings, and comparisons to the movie Wag the Dog. 

What if the attack had succeeded? It is possible that the 9/11 attacks would still have occurred, in which case, no doubt a lot of blame would have fallen on Clinton for provoking them by assassinating Bin Laden. No one would have been aware that the attacks were in the works anyway.

On the other hand, perhaps with Bin Laden dead the plan would not have been implemented, 3,000 people would not have died, and the two towers would be standing today. There again, no one would have been aware that the plans would have been in the works, or that the nation owed President Clinton a huge debt of gratitude. Even if captured Al Qaeda operatives had confessed to plans to blow up the world trade center by flying planes into it, would anyone have believed such a plan could work?

So now my mind goes back to those “interrogation techniques” that make me think, not my country! Even if they did not produce any usable information, maybe there is way they could have somehow interrupted the chain of events that would have led to another horrifying event in some alternate universe.

There is a reason that “hypothesis contrary to fact” is considered a logical fallacy. It is just too easy to prove what you want to prove with hypotheticals. We have no way of knowing what would have happened in the alternate universes our minds can devise. We have only the task of living a just life in the world we do have.

Now and Always

Every month the Foundation for Historical Louisiana meets at the Old Governor’s Mansion and hosts a speaker. Last night’s speaker was Christian Garcia, who has just edited and published a book of letters written between his maternal grandparents between 1901 and 1916. His grandfather had been a state legislator and attorney and thus was often away from home working.

His family saved all the letters and Garcia was given them twenty years ago by a family member who hoped he would do something with them. The something he did is a book called Now and Always: A Louisiana Love Story. Garcia’s talk consisted of a short movie followed by readings of some of the letters, and then a summary of things he learned while researching the history of that period and compiling the letters. 

I went home wondering how it would be to have access to extensive correspondence between family members. My grandfather wrote to my grandmother once while he was visiting other family in South America. I know this because I sat next to my grandmother while my aunt translated the letter from Italian for me and my brothers. My grandmother greeted each term of endearment from my grandfather with some Italian words of her own which I didn’t exactly know, but the tenor of which were obvious from her facial expressions and gestures. I’m not sure what she was mad at him about, but it did make a nice change from the times I sat between the two of them while they competed for my attention. I would love to have that letter today.

My dad did save some of the letters my mother wrote to him while he was overseas during WWII. I remember they began with “my dearest darling”, which I thought was funny because who thinks of their parents being in love when they are little. I don’t know what happened to those letters.

I do, however, have a letter my mother wrote to my paternal grandparents in 1943. The letter was written from here in Louisiana, because my father was stationed at Camp Beauregard near Pineville, Louisiana (a few hours north of here) and my mother had rented a room in town to be near him. They had just been married the previous month and her coming to Louisiana to be with him was the only honeymoon they got before he shipped out. My dad had sent me the letter for me to read with the idea I was supposed to send it back but I sort of forgot, for that version of “sort of forgot” that means “didn’t want to”.

The letter begins with my mother explaining why my dad did not write himself.

 . . . [H]e is kept so busy that he can’t even write. Last week they sent him out on the firing range at another camp. He was there for six days. He was supposed to get Wednesday night off and also Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday. But he was out on the range and had no time off. When he came back he had a six day beard. He couldn’t even write to anyone.They gave him yesterday off and we went out. We came back too late last night. He wanted to write, but he asked me to. He will write the next time he gets off. You see, the reason he has very little time is because he has to go to school for an hour or sometimes two each night.

My dad was actually a good correspondent for most of his life. He was the one who wrote to me once I left home, and sent all the news of my brothers, sister, and eventually nieces and nephews. He kept up a long correspondence with a boyhood friend in California. I have only one letter from my mom (my stepmother) announcing my sister’s third pregnancy. So I imagine he actually did feel bad about not being able to write to his parents himself.

I went out to camp on Monday. I was watching him work. He’s good! [that was actually double underlined.] He’s the best officer there. I was allowed to go in his hut. Mrs. Adler (her husband shares a hut with Frank) was with me, so we went in and sewed the patches on their jackets and overcoats. That’s the first work I’ve done for Frank since we were married.

That’s my favorite part of the letter. My poor mama, a new bride living in a rented room while her husband lives in a hut, not even able to cook or clean for him. She must have felt as if her life had been interupted. And I don’t know whether my dad was the best officer there or not, but I had my own experience of her fierce loyalty to anyone she loved a few months before she died. My cousin and I had come home from the candy store with a box each of some kind of taffy. Terry could not find a chocolate in her box and I had two. She accused me of stealing hers, I denied it. My Aunt Nellie ordered me to give Terry one of the chocolate candies and my mother roared, “If my daughter says she didn’t take it, then she didn’t take it.” (Picture double underlines here.)

I moved into another room here. It’s nice and roomy. I have a three piece bedroom set, a nice easy chair, and a small vanity bench that I use as a table. I also have a sink in my room and space for my wardrobe trunk. It’s very pretty. It’s bigger than the other room I had and right off the living room. We can use the living room as often as we want. The people are all very friendly, so I don’t feel lonesome on the five nights Frank isn’t off.

She goes on to ask about other family members, then adds

Tell them we wish they could see the beautiful countryside down here. Oh, yes, down here you don’t need a license to drive and you can get enough gas to go pleasure driving if you know the right folks. Too bad we don’t have a car.

Same old Louisiana (although now you do need a license to drive).

She signs it “Love and kisses, Julia”. I’m pretty sure the name on her birth certificate was “Giulia” because that is how it was spelled on her wedding invitations, but naturally she would have Americanized it as soon as she could spell. 

Ten years later she was dead, of a rare blood disease that turned into blood cancer. My maternal relatives would frequently say, “I guess you don’t remember your mother”, but I do. I remember the time she defended me to my aunt (although looking back , I suspect I did take my cousin’s candy, not out of larceny but out of sheer inattention.) I remember one afternoon I sat with her in the living room while she read a book. Every time she looked up, I smiled at her and she would smile back. I began to worry that she would get tired of smiling back, but she didn’t. She smiled back every time. I remember the time I had an abscessed tooth and Dad let me sleep in their bed the night before my dentist appointment. I couldn’t sleep and kept pinching her back so she would know I was there. The next morning I asked if she knew I had slept in her bed and she said, “Sweetheart, I knew you were there.”

So I kept the letter, because it is her, just the way I remember her, now and always.

My mother and I when I was 3 or 4.

Even More Fame

Ah, fame and fortune. Okay, scratch the fortune part. The book that I wrote about last August is finally out, and I have my copy. The book is called Lost in Translation: The English Language Taken Hostage at Home and Abroad, edited by Chris Stone. It’s a picture book showing humorous mistranslations, misspellings, and abuses of grammar in English signs, menus, and other documents seen around the world, and two of the pictures are mine.

I had almost forgotten giving the author permission to use the pictures in his work. Yesterday we were checking the mailbox and John found a large envelope addressed to me. “Are you expecting something?” I am, actually, a T-shirt from LL Bean to replace one that wore out in a few months time, but not this soon.

“It looks like a book. Are you expecting a book?” As I said, I had forgotten all about it, so until I opened it, I had no idea what it was.

My pictures are numbers 16 and 89.  You have to count them to figure out which is which because there are no page numbers, just a picture on each page and captions. I haven’t looked through the entire book yet, but my husband has, and I heard laughter. 

Anyway, here are my two contributions:

Taken in Hungary, April 2010

Taken at Barton Springs, Austin, Texas

To see the rest, buy the book.

Not There

I first heard of Tania Head through the promos for the film The Woman Who Wasn’t There on the Investigation Discovery channel. After watching the program I found the book of the same name at the library and read it, trying to make sense of Tania’s story. Lord knows, I’m not the only one. She has left a number of bewildered victims who once were her friends in her wake, who have far more need to make sense of the tangled tale than I have.

Filmmaker Angelo Guglielmo’s story begins at the beginning as Tania herself tells it, with her relationship with a man named Dave and their romantic if possibly not entirely legal wedding on the beach in Hawaii. It follows Tania on the day of September 11, 2001, going to her high-powered financial job in the south tower of the Twin Towers as her husband/fiance goes to his job in the north tower. Tania turns down an offer to meet Dave downstairs for coffee, and thus they are each in their offices when the first plane hits. Tania begins to leave the building but is still in the south tower when the second plane hits. Her story from there is gruesome: her body on fire, her arm almost torn off, she is saved by a stranger in a red bandana who escorts her to the stairs and later by a fire fighter who protects her from debris and finds her an ambulance.

In 2004 Tania gets up the nerve to join an online support group for survivors of the Twin Towers and to tell her story. Something I did not realize until I read the book was that the office workers who escaped the towers on 9/11 were forgotten victims. The families of people who died and the first responders got a lot of attention, but the people who had managed to flee the buildings alive were not invited to memorial events, given special escorted tours of ground zero or asked for their input in the plans for the new building the way the families of those who died were. At least, they weren’t until Tania came along. Using connections made as the wife of Dave, who had died in the north tower, she was able to arrange for a private tour for her survivor’s group. She made friends with survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing and solicited their advice in dealing with survivors. She helped organize a drive to save the Survivors’ Staircase. She befriended and helped a number of survivors and gave them hope.

She was never actually there.

Tania’s story was a fiction from beginning to end. On September 11, 2001, as best as anyone can tell, Tania, whose real name is Alicia Esteve Head, was in her native Barcelona attending a business college. She never knew Dave (who was a real person), she never worked for the agency she claimed to work for, she never attended Stanford or Harvard as she had also claimed. When an investigative reporter for the New York Times began to press Alicia for her story, she disappeared.

I say her story was a fiction from beginning to end, but oddly enough, the most gruesome and hard to believe detail was true. According to friends, Alicia Head was in a car accident some time before 9/11 and her arm was severed and she was burned. Her arm was reattached successfully, but the resulting scars made her story plausible to friends who heard her tell her story of surviving the September 11 attacks. 

Friends in Spain offered Guglielmo more information. Alicia was prone to making up stories, especially about romances, from her childhood. Alicia had always been fascinated with the U.S.A. and kept a large flag in her room. She was also shocked and embarrassed when her father and brother were arrested for financial improprieties and sent to prison. Her mother divorced her father and she and Alicia came to the U.S.

So I can make a certain amount of sense out of Tania’s actions, or think I can. She suffers a traumatic, life threatening accident and then her family, who might otherwise have supported her, breaks up and she is embarrassed to face her friends. She finds a support group for people who, like her, have survived a traumatic event and are still having trouble making sense of it and moving on. If she just fudges the details of her accident a little bit (okay, a whole hell of a lot), she can belong, too. She can get the support she needs, and even more importantly, she can offer support to others.

I would almost feel sorry for her if she hadn’t left so much pain and destruction in her wake. The friends who thought they knew her feel bereaved, as if the Tania they knew had died, and betrayed. Reading their accounts of finding out that Tania was a fraud is saddening. These are people who did not need additional pain. It’s not as though Tania/Alicia was completely lost in her fantasy world, either. When a Times reporter tried to do an interview with her she knew her story wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. It was her frantic attempts to avoid him that finally tipped off her friends, one of whom was film maker Angelo Guglielmo, to the glaring discrepancies in her story.

I “meet” so many people online, and many of them, like Tania Head, have stories of trauma to tell. It occasionally occurs to me that I don’t know if these stories are true, any more than they know if my stories are true, but even if I found someone’s tale of woe questionable, I wouldn’t start grilling them. For one thing, truth is stranger than fiction; for another, someone who has finally summoned the courage to reach out for support does not need to hear, “Yeah, right”. In most circumstances I would rather risk being duped than being cruel, at least if it’s only emotional support being asked for. I think most people feel the same way, and that’s what allows people like Tania/Alicia to get away with emotional fraud.

But I wonder, if months after her accident, when the immediate pain and trauma had been dealt with, what if someone had said to Alicia, “Alicia, you have been through a horrible time and probably were scared you wouldn’t even live. Do you need a friend to talk to about it?” If that had happened, would Tania ever have hijacked a support group and hurt so many friends?

You Lost Me

One of the side effects of my two weeks spent hanging out online with Methodists is that I heard frequently about the book You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving the Church . . . and Rethinking Faith, by David Kinnaman. It is not the kind of book that I would normally read, if not for the fact that it was available for free on Kindle. I’ve been reading a lot of free books since I re-injured my left foot.

The title of  You Lost Me is self-explanatory. The book reviews data collected by the Barna Group, showing that over half of 18 to 29 year-olds who attended church as teens are leaving the church, and discusses what to do about it. He divides his research subjects into three groups: Nomads, who drop out of church but still identify as Christian, Prodigals, who are skeptics and consider themselves ex-Christians, and Exiles, who don’t attend church but still “pursue God-honoring lives”.

Given the emphasis on research in the descriptions of this book, I was expecting a different kind of book. Kinnaman’s book is written from the point of view that young people leaving the church is a bad thing. That’s a perfectly valid point of view. Kinnaman, after all, is president of the Barna Group, an evangelical polling firm whose business is providing churches with information they need to grow those churches. It doesn’t mean (I hope) that they slant their statistics, but it does mean they are going to have an opinion about what their statistics show. I would have been more interested in reading about the results presented from a more neutral viewpoint, not “Whoops, we’re doing something wrong” or even “Yay, we’re doing something right” from an atheist perspective. But that’s a personal preference, and doesn’t say anything about the value of the book to the average reader.

The more important problem I see is what is missing from the book. In each chapter, Kinnaman cites the pertinent statistics about young people who gave negative answers, but he doesn’t cite the numbers or percentages of young people who gave positive (toward church)  or neutral answers. For example, in a section titled Nomads Describe Their Faith Journeys, Kinnaman lists 6 statements that reflect negative views of church such as “Church meant a lot to me when I was younger, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense in my life now” and “I may return to church when I am older but I have no interest now”. Next to each statement, he gives the percentage of respondents who described each statement as “completely true of me” or “completely or mostly true of me”. I presume that choices such as “slightly true of me”, “mostly not true of me” or “not true at all of me” were also available to respondents, but we don’t ever see those numbers. So for the statement “Church meant a lot to me when I was younger, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense in my life now”, we are told that 6% of respondents selected “completely true of me” and 20% selected “completely or mostly true of me”, but we don’t know how the rest of the answers were distributed. Did most of the missing 74% think the statement was sort of true of  them or not at all true of them? There is a huge difference between a problem of a church that barely meets the needs of young people and meets the needs of a significant chunk of them so badly that they are leaving, and a church that meets the needs of most young people quite well but is failing to meet the needs of a significant chunk of them so badly that they are leaving. Unless I missed something, nowhere in the book is that distinction addressed. 

There is an old saying that you can prove anything with statistics, but that is true only to the extent that no one is paying attention. If you understand the underlying logic behind the gathering of statistics, you will know whether the numbers someone offers proves their case or not, unless they are flat out making the numbers up. You will know why it’s important to have a control group to contrast with a study group. You’ll know which numbers answer which questions.

Kinnaman wants us to believe that the generation he calls “Mosaics” are “discontinuously different” from previous generations in terms of Access (to information and technology), Alienation, and their response to Authority. Even if this is true, without comparing how (or even if)  18 to 29-year-olds who have left church differ from those who still attend church with respect to access, alienation, and authority, he has no grounds for saying that these are the factors that influence their having left church, let alone serve as predictors they won’t return.

Not only does Kinnaman not present data that differentiated his Nomads, Prodigals, and Exiles from their church-going peers, he doesn’t have a comparison group of data from older generations obtained at the time they were 18-29. Granted, that data might not even exist, but you can’t demonstrate that Mosaics are truly “discontinuously different” from prior generations by comparing how Mosaics describe themselves now to how the previous generations also describe themselves now, which is what Kinnaman attempts to do. He cites Bob Buford as claiming, “Boomers describe their generation with terms like ‘work ethic’, ‘respectful’, ‘values and morals’, and ‘smarter’”. I am a Boomer, and here’s how I remember it: our “work ethic” was “tune in, turn on, drop out”; “respectful” meant “don’t trust anyone over thirty” and calling law enforcement officers “pigs”;  our “values and morals” led to the sexual revolution and a book called Steal This Book. If we’ve persuaded Buford to believe we truly saw ourselves as embodying a work ethic, respect and values and morals, we were definitely smart, I’ll give him that.

Obviously this book is useful to the pastors and youth workers who have been talking it up. I wouldn’t tell anyone not to buy it. It’s just that I see it as one more in a long line of popular books that cite research inappropriately, and in the process miseducate their readers about what questions statistics can answers and how powerful they can be when used properly. For that reason, David Kinnaman, you lost me.

Viral

I don’t remember where online I heard of the book, The Viral Storm: The Dawn of A New Pandemic Age, by Nathan Wolfe, but wherever I did, I saw it and thought, “I want to read that.”

It belongs to a whole subset of books that I want to have read, more than that I want to read, because while the information in them is interesting to know, I have the attention span of a flea. And while The Viral Storm is written for a popular audience, it’s not an easy read. It took me over a month to slog through it.

It was a worthwhile read. I was amused to see that one of the reviews on Amazon contained this line: “While reading the first 100 pages or so I was pretty sure I picked up a book about primate behavior instead of viruses.” The book is about pandemics, what they are and how they spread. Primate behavior, according to the author, has a lot to do with how humans acquire viruses from the animal world and how we spread them. When the first apes decided to add meat to their diet, they exposed themselves to microbes in the blood of their prey. Chimpanzees and bonobos hunt meat, particularly monkeys. It is likely our last common ancestor did,  too.

Why is that relevant to pandemics?

Hunting, with all of its messy, bloody activity provides everything infectious agents require to move from one species to another. The minor skirmishes our early ancestors had with other species probably resulted in minor cuts, scratches and bites - insignificant compared to the intense exposure of one species to another that is a direct result of hunting and butchering.
The chimpanzees who were devouring their feast of red colobus monkey in the Kibale forest that day were an instant, visual example of blurring the lines between species. The manner in which they were ingesting and spreading fresh blood and organs was creating the ideal environment for any infectious agent present in the monkeys to spread to the chimpanzees. (Kindle edition, location 558-571)

Wolfe spends the bulk of his book on the human behaviors that make pandemics possible: advances in domestication of animals, in travel, and in medicine. Living in proximity to livestock exposes us to their diseases. The rapidity of airplane travel means a traveler can pick up a disease in one place and spread it in another, sometimes before even showing symptoms. The medical advances that save lives, like blood transfusions and organ transplants, also open up a direct route for microbes to get from one body to another.

Wolfe also discusses new ways of tracking pandemics. Borrowing from a term used by intelligence communities, he talks about listening to “viral chatter”, reports of low level incidences of viral infection that need watching. One of his projects is getting hunters of bushmeat to use baseball-card-sized sampling papers to take samples of blood from the meat they hunt and drop it off in easily located collection spots. This allows researchers to check for microbes that may be making their way from the meat into human populations.

Wolfe also cites a 2009 Google study that shows that search patterns of individuals “provide a sense of what individuals are becoming infected with”. 

With the vast stores of search data kept by Google and the US influenza surveillance data collected by the CDC, the team was able to calibrate their system to determine the key search words that sick people or their caregivers used to indicate the presence of illness. The team used searches on words related to influenza and its symptoms and remedies to establish a system that accurately tracked the influenza statistics generated by the CDC. In fact, they did better. Since Google search data is available immediately . . . Google was able to beat the CDC in providing accurate influenza trends before the traditional surveillance system. (Kindle edition locations 2768-2764)

Okay that’s scary, and not just in the “I could get sick and die” sense of scary, but it is also impressive.

So read the book. It’s well worth the time.

Extremely Annoying and Incredibly Sad

Usually when I go to see a movie, it doesn’t occur to me that it may have been based on a book. I had heard of  The Help and Eat, Pray, Love before I saw the movies, The Help because it was recommended by a friend and Eat, Pray, Love because it was the basis for a sales campaign by World Market. I did not know that The American was based on A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth until after I had seen it.

I don’t like reading books after I have seen the resulting movie because then I can’t get the actors’ voices out of my head. If you’ve ever read The Julie/Julia Project, you know that Julie Powell is not Amy Adams. So when it did occur to me that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close might be based on a book, I decided to search my Kindle before searching movietickets.com, and that’s how I found Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel.

The main narrator in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is nine-year old Oskar Schell. I say “main narrator” because there are three different narrators in the book. In addition to Oskar, we get to read letters written by each of his grandparents, his grandfather’s letters having been written around forty years before the action in the book takes place, and his grandmother’s letters being written contemporaneously with the events in the book, although that is not clear until the end. What is also not clear is how the reader ever gets access to the letters.

Oskar is also an unreliable narrator. He is an unreliable narrator for reasons inherent in being nine years old: he has a limited understanding of other people’s behavior, limited access to facts that are relevant to his situation, and limited interest in understanding any point of view other than his own. 

Oskar is variously described in reviews as “precocious”, “unusually intelligent”, and “not a typical nine year old”. Of course he isn’t. He’s the author’s conception of a precocious nine year old as shaped by the author’s need to have a coherent first person narrator, and possibly as shaped by the author’s recollections of himself and his friends at the age of nine.

Nine year olds are funny. They are still children, but in many ways you can see the emerging adult they will be, not just in temperament (which  is apparent in infancy), but in the way they speak, the gestures they make, the sense of humor they show, the facial expressions they use. They can go back and forth between babyishness and a seeming adult sophistication so fast it gives you whiplash. So the author’s choice of a nine year old as not just the main character, but as the main narrator, makes a lot of sense. 

The problem is, nine year olds, even very smart nine year olds, just aren’t that coherent. Ask a nine year old to tell you about a favorite book, movie, or TV show and three sentences into the narrative you will find yourself asking questions to keep oriented. Children that age are still in the process of developing a sense of what the listener needs to know. They are much better at it than their three or six year old selves, but not good enough to sustain a book.

So the Oskar who narrates the book is not believable. The Oskar who is a character in the book, however, is. Oskar’s father died in one of the Twin Towers on September 11, and Oskar is trying to come to grips with his father’s death. Oskar’s mother also has a male friend, Rob, and Oskar not only resents and dislikes Rob, but also the fact (as he states it) that his mother is moving on with her life.

Oskar also has a therapist that he sees on a regular basis, with whom he has no rapport. The therapist is a stock character: child psychologist who has no rapport with children. This therapist is necessary because Oscar’s interactions with him give us another view of Oskar, but a therapist who could actually make Oscar feel safe to share his hurt about his mother moving on with her life would give us an entirely different story, one the author doesn’t want to tell. For a reader who isn’t, like me, standing outside the story thinking, “This just doesn’t work”, that would not be a problem, but I kept wondering why Oskar’s mother didn’t just find him another therapist, especially when it becomes clear she has her own disagreements with the man.

It’s not as though she is without financial resources. She and Oskar continue living in the family apartment in Manhattan, one that is large enough that Oskar’s father has his own closet. This is an important plot point. Oskar goes into the closet one day, notices that his father had his tuxedo laid out on a chair in the closet, and in the course of other explorations, finds a key. Oskar sees the key as a message from his father and embarks on a search to find the lock it goes to, and the message it holds.

And when I say “embarks on a search”, I mean literally wanders around Manhattan on his own for hours at a time. It turns out that Oskar’s mother is not nearly as clueless as she seems all along (remember, Oskar is an unreliable narrator), but even so, Oskar is allowed a lot more latitude than one would think is prudent for a nine year old in a big city.

This is true despite the fact that Oskar has an overprotective grandmother who lives across the street. Oskar has only been able to get her to allow him to bathe alone by holding a piece of her knitting yarn as she sits outside the door, occasionally giving it a tug. Grandma has reasons for her issues, as the reader finds out in the course of reading letters she writes to Oskar. The letters are another example of the author choosing a narrator for convenience, not realism. In the first letter she writes, Grandma goes into detail about her sex life with Grandpa, in a way that one would not expect her to do with a nineteen year old grandson, let alone a nine year old. It is not clear from the book that Oskar, as opposed to the reader, ever reads the letter, but still. It seemed like every three pages I found myself saying, “What are these people thinking!”

And yet, despite the book’s flaws, I found Oskar’s story compelling and true to the incredible sadness and confusion that comes with losing a parent at an early age. Even if Oskar’s mother, grandmother, and therapist had been far more adept in dealing with his pain, they still would have been helpless in the face of his grief. When a child loses a parent, there is no good thing the other adults in the child’s life can do. Oskar tells us this, in the way perhaps only an overly precocious, unrealistically articulate, badly supervised and unreliable nine year old narrator could.

Answers

Okay, time to match the famous first lines listed in It Was A Dark and Stormy Night with their respective works, although I am sure anyone who was interested has Googled the ones they did not know. It turns out the line “It was a dark and stormy night” made famous by the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, was also used as the opening line of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle.


Thank you Amaryllis, Dr. Ngo, and Nenya for your contributions.

• Call me Ishmael.  Moby Dick
• Marley was dead, to begin with. A Christmas Carol
• In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis
• There’s my last duchess, painted on the wall . . . My Last Duchess, poem
• I sing of arms and the man.  The Aeneid
• Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph.   Exodus
• Happy families are all alike . . . Anna Karenina
• In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. The Hobbit
• "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents.”* Little Women
• To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman. A Scandal in Bohemia
• In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. Job
• The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville Nine that day. Casey at the Bat, poem
• The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. The Wind in the Willows
• All children, except one, grow up. Peter Pan
• My mind now turns to stories of bodies changed into new forms. Metamorphoses, Ovid

Poems contributed by Amaryllis:

• Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary... The Raven
• Two roads diverged in a yellow wood... The Road Not Taken
• Because I could not stop for death... Death
• In Xanadu did Kubla Khan...  Kubla Khan
• Let us go then, you and I... The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
• The went to sea in a sieve, they did... The Jumblies
• I met a traveler from an antique land... Ozymandias
• Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert... To A Skylark
• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways... Sonnet 43 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms... La Belle Dame Sans Merci
• Let me not to the marriage of true minds... Sonnet 116, Shakespeare
• When I was one-and-twenty... When I Was One-and-Twenty
• Listen, my children, and you shall hear... Paul Revere’s Ride
• So. The Spear-Danes, in days gone by... Beowolf

I must admit, I thought the line for The Jumblies belonged to Winken, Blinken, and Nod.

This one from dr ngo, which I had to Google:

• He was born with the gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad. Scaramouche (I was way off with my guess of Pudd'nhead Wilson.)

And finally, from Nenya:

• It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. A Tale of Two Cities
• It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Pride and Prejudice
• In the beginning was the Word... The Gospel of John
• It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. 1984

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

“Marley was dead, to begin with.” I am rereading A Christmas Carol. The beloved tale that encourages generosity, celebration, family feeling and empathy at Christmas and all other times begins with the words “Marley was dead”.

Having reread the words, “Marley was dead, to begin with” and inspired by Kit Whitfield’s recent deconstructions of first sentences of novels, I begin to think of other first lines, the ones that when you hear them, you can automatically place in their respective works. This is the list I came up with:

• Call me Ishmael.
• Marley was dead, to begin with.
• In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
• There’s my last duchess, painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive.
• I sing of arms and the man*.
• Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph.**
• Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
• In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
• "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents.”*
• To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman.
• In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job.
• The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville Nine that day.
• The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.
• All children, except one, grow up.
• My mind now turns to stories of bodies changed into new forms.

Six of those lines have been translated from other languages, but I think at least four of those should be recognizable anyway. I’ll post sources another time. Feel free to add any of your own in comments.

* That’s not the whole first sentence, but if you are going to recognize it, that’s the part you’ll recognize.

** I know, that’s not the first line of the book, but I would argue that it is the first line of the story.

Book It

Last week I got an email from an editor at a small publishing house asking to use some photographs of mine in a book. In exchange I get a credit and a free copy of the book. It's not like people are clamoring to pay me for my photographs, so I agreed and sent him a few suitable shots.  Getting credit and a copy of the medium in which my pictures are used is more than I got the last time someone used my photographs, which was when my then employer used some pictures I had taken of  our young clients in a video for a fundraiser.*

I had a strange reaction when I received the email. I was sure I had already received an email about the project and replied to it. When I searched for the previous email, I couldn't find it, nor could I find a reply that I sent, a message on Flickr, or even a comment on the relevant photographs on Flickr. I have developed either psychic powers or a badly distorted sense of time.

I did look up the publishing house in question to make sure that it existed, and that they weren't some kind of vanity press. They seem legitimate. They largely publish niche books about "wine, naval history, craft, cookery and textile art". If I ever get the urge to write a cookbook about foods that can be prepared easily in a ship's galley, with recommendations for wine pairings, illustrated with photographs of quilted potholders and embroidered dish towels, I have a contact.


*The photos on the left and in the center under the title "Mask" and the two that show from the 24 to the 26 second mark are mine.