For no reason at all?

Ernest Hemingway's favorite novels

How many have you read?  I've read 10 -- well, I haven't read all of the Oxford Book of English Verse, but that's not really a novel.  "Far Away and Long Ago" is one of my favorites.  It's not a novel, either, but a memoir.
Ya know...this basically looks like a high school reading list.  There's really nothing unusual about the choices, especially considering when the list was written: Somerset Maugham, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and ee cummings were all contemporary, well-known authors, and the rest were not that far in the past.

Another one gone

Good-bye August, good-bye summer,

Shorter days are such a bummer.

Stephen kissed me in the spring,

    Robin in the fall,

    But Colin only looked at me

    And never kissed at all.

    Stephen's kiss was lost in jest,

    Robin's lost in play,

    But the kiss in Colin's eyes 

    Haunts me night and day.

    ~ Sara Teasdale

Understatement

My father watched westerns

He couldn’t get enough of them: those dusty
landscapes on the other side of the screen,
men on horses seeking justice or revenge.
All through my life if he was tired I would
find him in a dark room full of gunfire.
His movie titles included words like Lone
and Lonesome though mostly families
stuck together and young men learned
to risk their lives for whatever was noble
or right. I could not sit through them;
women were left behind in saloons
with hair and dresses as soft as pillows,
their possibilities perfumed by estrogen.
But it was the men my father was watching.
They had wide hats and leather boots,
masks made of betrayal. My father
remembered the dangerous people
he faced in courtrooms, his arguments
like bullets. His mind was full of places
that were not yet settled, places where
law was new. A man had a horse, a few
friends, some deep internal compass.
People relied on him; what he needed most
was courage. My father related to this.
He knew, after all, how the west was won.

~ Faith Shearin
from Moving the Piano

American Letter

"Our Banner in the Sky" by Frederic Edwin Church

It is a strange thing — to be an American.
Neither an old house it is with the air
Tasting of hung herbs and the sun returning
Year after year to the same door and the churn
Making the same sound in the cool of the kitchen
Mother to son's wife, and the place to sit
Marked in the dusk by the worn stone at the wellhead —
That — nor the eyes like each other's eyes and the skull
Shaped to the same fault and the hands' sameness.
Neither a place it is nor a blood name.
America is West and the wind blowing.
America is a great word and the snow,
A way, a white bird, the rain falling,
A shining thing in the mind and the gulls' call.
America is neither a land nor a people,
A word's shape it is, a wind's sweep —
America is alone: many together,
Many of one mouth, of one breath,
Dressed as one — and none brothers among them:
Only the taught speech and the aped tongue.
America is alone and the gulls calling.

An excerpt from An American Letter by Archibald MacLeish

Home

Our father owned a star,
and by its light

we lived in father’s house
and slept at night.
The tragedy of life,
like death and war,
were faces looking in
at our front door.
But finally all came in,
from near and far:
you can’t believe in locks
and own a star.

~ William Stafford from Another World Instead

Say Goodnight, Gracie

The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne,

Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright.

What her husband George Burns called her illogical logic

Made a halo around our syntax and ourselves as we laughed.

George Burns most often was her artful inconspicuous straight man.

He could move people about stage, construct skits and scenes, write

And gather jokes. They were married as long as ordinary magic

Would allow, thirty-eight years, until Gracie Allen's death.

In her fifties Gracie Allen developed a heart condition.

She would call George Burns when her heart felt funny and fluttered

He'd give her a pill and they'd hold each other till the palpitation

Stopped—just a few minutes, many times and pills. As magic fills

Then fulfilled must leave a space, one day Gracie Allen's

               heart fluttered

And hurt and stopped. George Burns said unbelievingly to the doctor,

               "But I still have some of the pills."

--Alice Notley

Nice shot!

Kinda...

Wouldn't it?

Mistake!

So I skipped 7th grade.  Looking back, although the intent by those who recommended my doing so was good, that was a mistake.  I was too young when I entered high school, my brain not sufficiently developed, nor my social skills and understanding of the world. 
I also lost my age cohort of friends with whom I  could have faced the new experience together.  That may have been the worst part of it.
I remember on Orientation Day, when we freshman were introduced to the school, met the faculty and staff, and shown the excellent facilities -- library, science labs, study halls, student lounge, gymnasium, outdoor amenities, swimming pool, cafeteria, school museum; oh, it was a great school, no doubt -- I was quite overwhelmed. 
At a pause to let stragglers catch up, our guide, one of the student counselors, just to pass the time, I'm sure, happened to ask me how I found the library.  Those were his exact words:  "How do you find the library?"  Maybe he said "did" but I heard "do."  So I told him.  That is, I gave him directions: walk back down the hall behind us, take the stairs to the left, turn right and it's at the very end.  I was baffled why he would ask me this since we had just been there, but thought it must be some kind of check to see if I had been paying attention or something.
But the look on that man's face.  The emotions that raced across it.  He thought I was being a smart ass.  No!  No!  I, a 12-year-old, just took the words at face value and answered him as accurately as I could.  But I had made an enemy and I had no idea that I had, any more than I had any idea what the ripple of laughter that followed my response meant.
There were a lot of episodes like that to come.  Many could have been avoided if I had just not skipped a grade and been a year more mature when I entered high school.
Oh -- what's the significance of the image I illustrate this post with?  None.  Other than sometimes I wish I could walk away from parts of my life and forget all about them.

Girl flyers

I ran across this comment on a message board discussing East Asian cultural and history matters:
"I just finished reading the book Under The Same Army Flag. It was printed in China in 2005. The book has over 50 short remembrances from Chinese soldiers who fought in Burma and India during World War II.  In the chapter titled "War Time" by Li Derun is the following:
'All Americans seemed to be open-minded with lively personalities, men and women alike. When we were with ground services at the airport, we often ran into American female pilots who flew small aircraft.  The small aircraft with only two seats were used to rescue injured soldiers, flying into the most dangerous and difficult locations where there often was no formal landing strip.
"Unlike Chinese women who tend to be shy and more reserved, American girls were outgoing, forthright, and each had a unique personality, and they were dedicated, hard workers too. When there was an injured soldier, they would spare no effort to rescue him regardless of his rank or nationality, always safely getting him to the hospital. Their job had no regular hours, and sometimes they had to fly back and forth round-the-clock.'
Although the author is a little vague about where and when he was writing about, it appears to have been the airfield in DinJan in either late 1944 or early 1945."

The prisoner's song.

I've had this song stuck in my head for days.  Aren't we all prisoners in one way or another?  Recorded in 1924.

My kind of kid

Mr. Lonely

Such a lovely song.  Thank you Mr.Vinton 

and your experience in the US Army that inspired you!

US Army, Germany, 1960

Sentimental and Sweet

One of my favorite songs from my favorite era.  

I have to refrain from

humming along a la Glenn Gould.

Opened April 11, 1940, London, just before the Battle of Britain.

A bit sad...

This ad is from the late 1930s.  The text is quite evocative:  "The piano is intensely personal, sensitive, responsive...the instrument to which musicians have ever turned for the deepest and most rewarding evocations of the spirit."
The ad also mentions four famous pianists:  Hoffmann, Horowitz, Paderewski, Rachmaninoff.  I wonder how many have even heard of them today.

Kids say the darndest things...

What is it about wearing his shirt that makes a guy go crazy?  Well, whatever makes you happy.  The guy mowing the lawn looks pretty happy, too.

Time flies

My kind of guy

Ditto!

Disagreeable people looking for an argument.  Who needs it?

Strike a pose!

 

When I was an undergraduate, I posed as a figure model for art classes, so I can empathize with this comic strip.  Funny thing is, if a 16-year-old boy had gone into a strip club he would have been thrown out, and the owner might have risked being arrested.  But an art class?  No problem!

Most of the models made it clear as they posed that they were indifferent about or bored by what they were doing, and ignored the...um, I almost said "audience," lol, but "aspiring artists" is the better term.  But I didn't.  I looked them over, gave a few a faint smile (mustn't break the pose!) and otherwise engaged with them in subtle ways.  When the class was over, other models would dash off as if relieved to be done with the odious task, but I would linger a bit and look over the sketches and paintings, express interest and chat a bit.  It was fun.

I guess

Overheard:  "You win some, you lose some, and taxes take the rest."

My solace

When the world is too much, when nothing makes sense, my solace is music.  I lose myself in it, forgetting everything else. There is nothing else.  How could there be anything else?



Stephen Foster's lovely "Beautiful Dreamer," the last song he ever wrote, composed a few days before his death, arranged for solo piano.

Future department head

A child's summer

Don't you remember how it was?

Hey

Hi, Wanda,
It was nice to see you again.  It's hard to believe we haven't seen each other since we were passing through MKAB.  That's a long time ago already.
I know I promised to keep in touch and let you know how things were going with me. I meant to, I really did.  But you know how it is.
I hate to think that we are moving on farther and farther into our own worlds and away from the friendship and shared experiences that we had and that we thought would always be important and tie us together.   But life moves on, doesn't it?  Your boat drifts on that current, mine on this one, and soon enough we can't hear each other, even if we shout, and then, finally, we can't even see each other any more.
But I will always remember you, wonder what you are doing at this moment that I think about you, and hope that you are happy and content.
Your friend,

Do I remember?  Do I?  Every day.  Every day I remember.

Pavane for a dead...civilization

Have we lost the battle?  Did we fight?

Once upon a time...

       

    Well, I think...

War

“We have merely nodded to fear. Now we must shake its filthy hand.”
    ~ Ernest K. Gann, Fate is the Hunter

I've been thinking of something Dickey Chapelle wrote in her autobiography. She was a war correspondent on Iwo Jima in 1945 and had just photographed a wounded marine:

The photograph she took.

“After I took his picture, while the chaplain administered the last rites as the corpsman began transfusing him, he came back to consciousness for a moment. His eyes rested on me. He said, “Hey, who you spyin’ for?”
“The folks back home, Marine.”
“The folks back home, huh? Well, fuck the folks back home!” he rasped. Then he closed his eyes. I didn’t see where his stretcher was carried.
After we had ceased loading for the day, his voice haunted me. What lay behind that raw reflex answer? What dear-John-I-know-you-understand letter? What other betrayal?
I remembered his wound. A piece of a giant mortar shell had sliced across his stomach. So I went down into the abdominal ward with my notebook in my hand. There were no names in it yet because I wasn’t willing to hold up moving stretchers while I spelled out names. But I had copied the dogtag numbers of each man as I made his picture. The nurses’ clipboard listed the serial numbers of the men being treated. The number I wanted wasn’t there. I thought perhaps I had been mistaken about the kind of wound he had, so I tried to find him in the other wards, the other decks, even those of the officers. I couldn’t find his number.
There was only one more set of papers aboard. This showed the dogtag numbers of the men who had died on deck. The number for which I was looking was near the top of the list.
So I think I was the last person to whom he was able to talk. And I had heard him die cursing what I thought he had died to defend.
It was my first and most terrible encounter with the barrier between men who fight, and those for whom the poets and the powers say they fight.”

Dickey Chapelle

Chapelle herself was killed in Viet Nam in 1965 while on patrol with marines during Operation Black Ferret.