Barbara Kingsolver's Paradox

“What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us. We seem to succumb so easily to the prevailing human tendency to pave such places over, build subdivisions upon them, and name them The Willows, or Peregrine’s Roost, or Elk Meadows, after whatever it was that got killed there. Apparently it’s hard for us humans to doubt, even for a minute, that this program of plunking down our edifices at regular intervals over the entire landmass of the planet is a good idea.”

--Barbara Kingsolver, “Knowing Our Place,” from Small Wonder (New York: HarperCollins, 2002)

It’s hard to disagree with Kingsolver’s sentiment. My problem with her essay is that she characterizes such subdivisions as urban, and that she laments the fact that since 1996, “more than half of all humans live in cities.”

Kingsolver takes the very American position of blaming the city for our loss of wild places. In fact, the people buying those beige McMansions which destroy our wilderness and deplete our farmland are not fleeing the countryside but escaping the city or the older suburbs. They are often looking for something like what Kingsolver already has--a place close to nature. It’s a more sanitized nature than Kingsolver’s but it certainly isn’t urban.

We Americans have distrusted cities for most of our history. We have taken to heart Jefferson’s ideal of the yeoman farmer and Jackson’s battle with that most urban gentleman, Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia. H. G. “Buzz” Bissinger, in A Prayer for the City (New York: Random House, 1997), states it eloquently:

“[C]ities were not simply condemned because they were big or ill tuned for the industrial expansion that had seized them. What was wonderful and exciting about them--the spontaneity, the togetherness of the community, the creativity that comes from getting along and not getting along, the endless characters populating the streets, the chaos--never found a natural place in the American soul. The frontier spirit was so intrinsic to the psyche of the country, the creed of individualism and privacy, of staking out your own piece of land and building your own house, hardly lent itself to the culture and spirit of the city… In Europe, it was cities that were valued and the suburbs that were devalued… It was the city that was the source of life, and the idea of being close to one another was not rejected but assumed. In the United States, the opposite prevailed.” (pp 210-211)

During the 1970s and ‘80s, some well-to-do young people moved back to the cities, rehabilitated older houses, and made a name for themselves. We ridiculed them, calling them yuppies, for Young Urban Professionals. And while we said we scorned them for their extravagances, we did not heap the same scorn on the extravagances of the exurbanites. Our problem with the yuppies was that they were urban. To my knowledge there is no disparaging term for the exurbanite.

Which brings us back to Barbara Kingsolver. While she and her family are not typical exurbanites, they are exurbanites nonetheless. They love and cherish the land and its wildness. They make every effort not to harm it. But even though they are careful stewards of the land, I suspect they contribute more to global warming than the average Philadelphian.

When I lived in Philadelphia, I had no need for a car. I could get to work by bus, and a trip to Center City was easily made by combining the bus and the Market-Frankford El. I walked to the local Shop ‘n Bag with a two-wheeled grocery cart. Many people see the automobile as a symbol of freedom, but I found that there was great freedom in not having to depend upon a car.

Granted, many Philadelphians do have cars. But most live in row houses or apartments, and still rely on public transport. Kingsover, at the time of Small Wonder, was living outside Tucson except in the summer, when she lived in a cabin in the Appalachians. In her most recent book, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, (which I have not read) she and her family spent an entire year in the the Appalachians, eating locally-grown foods in season. I suspect they've now gone back to the Arizona/Virginia pattern.

Here in Bloomington I do need a car (I have a 1990 Toyota Corolla), but because I live close to downtown, I use it mainly to and from work (the local bus service here starts too late and ends too early for me to use it on my swing shift) and to make my weekly trip to and from Elkhart. And while I no longer live in a large city, both my residences are in older neighborhoods of small cities.

Barbara Kingsolver’s paradox is this: for her to live her exurban lifestyle, many more of us will have to embrace the city, and to experience nature in parks. The luxury of living in the country--and it is a luxury--can only be possible if more of us assume a more European attitude toward cities. Like Kingsolver, I am deeply troubled by the encroachment of development on our wild places. But for most of us, the way to preserve our wild places is not to live in wilderness but to return to the city.

The Conan Doyle Syndrome

LONDON, June 16--(U.P.)--Sherlock Holmes, famous story book detective who confounded criminals with test tube and magnifying glass, scorning the while the stupid blunderers of Scotland Yard, died today.
Holmes’ death was announced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose stories of Sherlock have been read by persons of all ages.
Sir Arthur, who latterly has been won from the school of scientific criminology to the occult practices of spiritualism, explained Holmes’ death in the preface to his own “Case Book of Sherlock Holmes.”
“I fear,” wrote Sir Arthur, “that Mr. Sherlock Holmes may become like one of those popular tenors who having outlived their time, still are tempted to make repeated farewell bows before their indulgent audiences. This must cease. He must go the way of all flesh, material or imaginary.”

--Elkhart Daily Truth, 16 June 1927

Eighty years ago today, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried for the second time to kill off his most famous creation. While few people clamored for him to resurrect Holmes a second time, he certainly failed to kill the world’s first consulting detective. Every year, countless new Holmes adventures are published. Most of them are not up to Conan Doyle’s standards, though the adventures penned by Nicholas Meyer and Laurie R. King are, at least to me, worthy of the master.

His first attempt to kill Holmes is better-known than the 1927 death by press release:

“[I]n November 1891 he wrote to his mother: ‘I think of slaying Holmes... and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.’ His mother responded saying ‘You may do what you deem fit, but the crowds will not take this lightheartedly.’ In December 1893, he did so in order to dedicate more of his time to more ‘important’ works (namely his historical novels). -Wikipedia article, “Arthur Conan Doyle.”

Of course, his mother was right. Public pressure forced Conan Doyle to bring back Holmes; he did so brilliantly in “The Empty House,” in which we find out how Holmes escaped death at Reichenbach Falls. Which brings me to what I’ll call the Conan Doyle Syndrome: to neglect one’s own best work in favor of “more important” works. Today, few people read Conan Doyle’s historical novels, such as The White Company and Micah Clarke. But as you read this, someone will be discovering the world of 221B Baker Street for the first time. (I had the magical experience of reading some of the stories in the original Strand Magazine--the university library had bound volumes.)

And perhaps I’ve caught a minor case of his syndrome. My best writing so far has been in the form of short historical articles and autobiographical pieces. But I’m still plugging away at the fiction that in my heart of hearts, I consider “more important.” Of course, Conan Doyle was able to write the Holmes canon, the Professor Challenger stories, and a number of historical novels. If only…

The strange saga of The Vernacular Body

Tho years ago, when I was first discovering the blogosphere, I came upon a blog called The Vernacular Body, written by someone signing himself "elck." It quickly became the first blog I turned to when I went on the Internet. The author, who lived in New York, but was originally from Nigeria (he sometimes included greetings in Yoruba), was wise, enlightening, and entertaining (though he didn't appreciate being called entertaining). On April 1, 2005, he changed the name of his blog from The Vernacular Body to Abdul-Walid of Acerbia, and had a hilarious post introducing himself, with a tag line of something like, "My name is Abdul-Walid of Acerbia. Perhaps you have heard of it."


There was a beautiful post about his trip to India with his fiancee, who came (I believe) from Goa. But then, in July, he stopped blogging. I couldn't blame him; he was not only newly married, but working on a dissertation.

I've thought about "Abdul-Walid" many times since he shut down his blog. Recently I did a Google search under both Abdul-Walid of Acerbia and the Vernacular Body. Check out the appreciation on Via Negativa. But the most bizarre thing is that his blog address is still around:
http://vernacularbody.typepad.com/. I've read that blog addreeses can be bought and sold. But why someone selling science kits for children would want to have the address of a literary blog is beyond my comprehension. It would be wonderful if this site is just being held until Abdul-Walid returns to Acerbia. I'm not holding my breath.

"I Love Galesburg in the Springtime:" Off to Sarah's Graduation

Jack Finney is best known for such such science fiction/fantasy classics as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Time and Again. But my favorite Finney work is "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime," a short story in a collection of the same name. Finney was an alumnus of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, which has produced a number of notable writers. (Carl Sandburg, Galesburg's most famous writer, went to Lombard College, which later was absorbed into Knox). And I'm convinced that a new Knox alumna will join the ranks of those notable writers.

I'll be going to Galesburg with my family this weekend to attend my daughter Sarah's graduation. Bill Clinton will give the commencement address, so I don't expect to be bored. The ceremony will take place outside Old Main, where Lincoln and Douglas debated in 1858.

Sarah plans to combine poetry and fiction with environmental activism. Many of her poems are about endangered species. Here's an example:


Sumatran Rabbit

Perhaps, to be seen, you never wanted.
World’s rarest rabbit,
Remote mountain mammal,
News of you came only from dry fossils
And fragments of bone extracted
From owl pellets. Proof you were out there
And being eaten.

Only twice in eighty-two years
Have we seen you.
Your striped black fur the right disguise to blend in
With cool wet roots
By night only you forage the forest floor
By day you are invisible.

The local people say
They do not know you.
Perhaps your secret is theirs too,
And they pass you a knowing glance
As the scientists walk away.

-Sarah Jane Wylder
May 2005

Sarah will be going to the University of Maryland later this summer to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.

The Dark Side of Naked City

In a recent post about the Sun Aura Nudist Resort of Roselawn, Indiana, I mentioned that it had once been known as Naked City, and that it had hosted the annual Miss Nude Universe Contest. I had thought the club's earlier moniker a clever one, and was curious about the time when it was Naked City. My research revealed some interesting, as well as disturbing facts.

The resort itself began as Club Zoro in 1933, when it was founded by Chicago lawyer Alois Knapp, "the father of nudism in America." Dale and Mary Drost acquired the site later--probablly sometime after the Second World War. Their son, Dick Drost, took over the resort in 1968, renamed it Naked City, and began holding the Miss Nude Universe contest. The club was popular with truckers because it included a truckstop where the waitresses were nude. Along with the Miss Nude Universe contest, there was the "Erin Go Bra-less" dance on St. Patrick's Day, the Un-Fashion Show, and the Miss Nude Teeny-Bopper contest.

That last contest should have set off a red flag, but it didn't. It turns out that Drost was charged in 1985 with molesting a 13-year-old girl and with showing obscene materials to minors. Eventually he pled guilty to 10 sex-related misdemeanors and agreed to stay out of Indiana for 10 years. As a result, Naked City closed in 1986.

Its successor is strictly adults-only. And even though its name isn't as clever as Naked City, we don't have to worry about children being exploited at the Sun Aura Resort.

"Back in the 1960s"

Once upon a time, in what was later dubbed the Magic Summer, I discovered the Incredible String Band. I was visiting my father, who was teaching English at Colorado State University at Fort Collins. I had gone with my stepbrother Paul to visit his far-out friend Josh. He seemed a pretty normal 15-year-old, but he had (or claimed to have) dropped acid so many thimes that he once had to take a second dose to get out of what he called Cartoonland. Nobody did any drugs that day, but Josh mentioned he had an album by the Incredible String Band. It was "The 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion," and it had one of the most psychedelic album covers I have ever seen. (The group itself did not seem to be into the drug culture, though.)

The ISB (named for the Incredible Folk Club in Glasgow) was an eclectic group. It had various members, but Robin Williamson and Mike Heron were the mainstays. They sang blues, folk, calypso, gospel, Chinese-inspired music, and even a piece reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan ("The Minotaur's Song") . From the first track, "Chinese White," with its refrain, "Oh, will your magic Christmas tree be shining/Gently, all around, " to the final "Back in the 1960s," I had fallen in love with the band. My favorite was "Painting Box, with its chorus:

For somewhere in my mind there is a painting box,
I have every colour there it's true.
Just lately when I look inside my painting box,
I seem to pick the colours of you.

Thanks to the marvels of YouTube, we can hear the ISB singing "Painting Box," along with "The Half Remarkable Question." The clip was recorded from the Julie Felix TV show in 1968 . Felix, a British folksinger, joins Mike Heron and Robin Williamson in singing " Painting Box." The film isn't in sync with the sound, but it's still wonderful. Felix is simply delightful as a host (all-right, I've got a thing for dark-haired, brown-eyed women, but she'd be delightful even if she were a blonde). YouTube also has snippets of the documentary about the band, "Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending."

One caution: the ISB is a group most people either love or loathe. The dark-haired, brown-eyed woman I married can't stand them. We've agreed to disagree.

The Sun Aura Resort: Legacy of the Huckleberry Queen?

On my weekly drive between Bloomington, Illinois and Elkhart, Indiana, I often pass through Roselawn, Indiana. It's a small town just west of Interstate 65 along Indiana State Road 10. And like most of northwest Indiana, the area was once part of the Grand Kankakee Marsh.

In the late nineteenth century, the marshes east of there (near Walkerton) were known as Huckleberry Hell, the Stomping Grounds, and South Chicago. During the summer huckleberry picking season, hundreds of people flocked to the region, and a carnival atmosphere held sway. There were saloons, dance halls, and gambling dens (probably not mutually exclusive), and a South Bend writer wrote that there were 500 prostitutes at the huckleberry camps. (This was reported as false by someone who said there were only about two dozen). In an earlier post I wrote about the Huckleberry Queen, the most well-known resident of "South Chicago."

An any case, the huckleberry camp was a pretty wild place by Victorian standards. And perhaps some of that spirit is still there, though a few dozen miles to the west.

Roselawn, Indiana is the home of at least two nudist camps--the Ponderosa Sun Club, and the Sun Aura Resort. The latter is not technically a nudist camp, but a "clothing optional resort." For one thing, it's open all year, and not even the most dedicated nudist would brave a Midwestern winter in the alotgether.

In the 1960s and '70s, the resort was known as Naked City and hosted the Miss Nude Universe Pageant. It still boasts the "Lady's Leg Sundial" from the Naked City era. In the tradition of its predecessor, Sun Aura does not seem to have the puritanical atmosphere associated with traditional nudist camps (at least based on the website). And there's one other difference between Sun Aura and the popular image of a nudist camp. Forget the tanned, fit men and women playing volleyball. There are some, but the visitors to Sun Aura, at least from my tour of the website, have about the same obesity rate as the state of Indiana. And we've got one of the highest rates of obesity in the nation, much to Governor Mitch Daniels' chagrin.

The Huckleberry Queen had been a circus performer, whose specialty was the "iron jaw" act, in whch she swung through ther air while holding onto a strap with her teeth. She sometimes rode bareback on her pony, wearing her circus tights, and evoking images of Lady Godiva. If her ghost still haunts the Grand Kankakee Marsh, I'm sure she's amused by the goings on at Sun Aura Resort.

David Halberstam, R.I.P.

"The Man Who Ran Against Lyndon Johnson." The article appeared in the December 1968 issue of Harper's. I was a senior in high school. Earlier in 1968 I had sold "McCarthy's Million" buttons to my high school classmates. And here was an article about the McCarthy campaign. But it wasn't about McCarthy. It was about Allard Lowenstein, the man who had persuaded McCarthy to run (after failing to get Robert Kennedy into the race) and brought thousands of idealistic young men and women to take a break from college to slog through the snows of New Hampshire and Wisconsin.

It was the first time I had read anything by David Halberstam. And it was a good education in politics. While other writers focused on the candidates, or the campaign managers, Halberstam found the person whose energy and charisma had made the McCarthy campaign.

I later had the privilege of meeting Lowenstein when he spoke at the University of Iowa campus. Sadly, he was murdered in 1980 by one of his former followers--a man with paranoid schizophrenia who believed Lowenstein was controlling him.

But I never had the chance to meet David Halberstam, who was killed in an auto accident April 23. He's best known for his wrtings on the Vietnam War, and his many books. The Best and The Brightest is simply a brilliant work, focusing not on President Kennedy, but his Ivy League-educated apointees, such as McGeorge and William Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamara. It is still, in my opinion, the best explanation of how we got into that quagmire. I quoted the book in a recent post. Rereading the quote reminds me that in spite of all its nuances and complexity, The Best and the Brightest was a page-turner.

While I've read a number of Halberstam's books, my favorite is The Fifties. He shows us that within this supposedly dull and conformist decade are the seeds of the postmodern world. In episodic chapters, he tells the stories of McDonald's and Holiday Inn, the first shopping malls, the development of oral contraceptives, the civil rights movement, the Beat Generation, among other things. Read it and your view of the Fifties will change.

We have one more Halberstam book to look forward to: his story of the Korean War. I've read a number of books about that conflict. But I suspect that after reading Halberstam's book, Ill be surprised at all the things I didn't know.

"Whan that Aprill..."

In recent years, April has too often been a month of sadness. This year we have the dreadful murders at Virginia Tech and record numbers of civilians killed in Iraq. But before this year--before Ruby Ridge and Columbine, even before T. S. Eliot declared it the cruellest month--April was the month to begin pilgrimages. Of course, I'm referring to the time of Chaucer, and his book of tales.

And Chaucer is alive and well in the blogosphere. While I've been told that the author of "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog" is really a Harvard professor emeritus, it is simply wonderful to read his commentaries on twenty-first century life in the language of the fourteeenth, and to believe, in some way that the great poet is with us still.

The blog not only has posts from Chaucer, but from Sir John Mandeville, who gives travel tips (and complains about Scottish food: "I was y-given some thyng called 'the haggis of honour' that semed to me to be the verray spare partis of a sheepe, but whych James swore was 'spices and lovely thynges.'" Katherine de Swineforrd is a contributor, as is the autobiographer Margerye Kempe (who comments on the Modern Language Association).

As Chaucer states in his post of 31 March, after complaining about his exercise regimen ("So ich haue ben yiven up to sondry peynes and tormentes far more grevous than thos recorded in the helle of Dant -- many grim machines that doon twisten myn limbes this wey and that, and bicycles the which travel no wher..."), he reminds us that:

'Bifor Aprille was the cruellest moneth (whatever that meneth!), it was a moneth of coloures and cries, and pilgrymages. Yt was, I sholde saye, myn favourite moneth. "

May it be so once again. But until then, a visit to Geoffrey Chaucer's blog is a welcome relief from the April news of 2007.

Two Years on the Slow Train

In the late winter and spring of 2005 I was living in Northeast Philadelphia, but making the trip back to Elkhart, Indiana at least every month. I usually took a regional train down to Washington, D.C., and then rode the Capitol Limited west through the Allegheny Mountains. The old Baltimore and Ohio line followed the river valleys--the Potomac, then the Casselman, the Youghiogheny, and the Monongahela. Once west of Pittsburgh, the Capitol could do 79 miles per hour. But through the mountains, the top speed was rarely more than 50.

At the same time, I had serendipitously discovered the world of blogging. I had learned from my son Jim, an avid gamer, that White Wolf, the Atlanta-based publisher of role-playing games, was holding a novel writing contest for its revamped (pun not originally intended) World of Darkness series. The World of Darkness was one of vampires, werewolves, and mages. The new mage series had yet to be released, so the contest was limited to the world of vampires, set in Chicago, and the world of werewolves, set in Denver. I had lived in the Chicago area for some eight years, and I decided to enter the contest.

One of my characters was a seemingly young woman who called herself Cassandra, because she told truths about the vampire world that none of her fellow vampires would believe (except those in the power structure who were trying to eliminate her). But I needed the details of the Cassandra story. A Google search led me to The Cassandra Pages, Beth Adams’s fascinating blog. From there I linked to blogs all written by intelligent, caring people who shared many of my views and interests. Some of them are on my blogroll. I also learned that Jana Oliver, a high school classmate, not only had a blog, but was also a freelance writer. Since then she’s published a book, Sojourn, a time travel adventure (and a great read). I was hooked.

While I didn’t make it into the second round of the White Wolf contest (the story has since morphed into a time-travel adventure set in 2005 Philadelphia and 1968 Chicago), I’ve been bogging now for two years. I took the name from the liner notes of Bob Dylan’s album, “Highway 61 Revisited,” which begins, “On the slow train time does not interfere.” The song, “On the Slow Train,” by Flanders and Swann, a lament for the days of local passenger trains in Britain, was a secondary source. And of course, I was thinking of my many hours on the Capitol Limited, rolling through the Alleghenies.

In the two years I’ve been blogging on the slow train, I’ve found new friends and have learned much from my fellow bloggers.

So what’s next on the slow train? I plan to begin a feature called “Discarded Wisdom,” which will review books discarded from local libraries. And a story on Rudy Bladel, a man who was furloughed by the New York Central and responded by becoming a serial killer.

Many thanks to my friends in the blogging world for their support.

Going Greyhound

It had been a long time since I took Greyhound. Then the Chicago terminal was in the Loop, on Randolph Street, and the buses entered and exited the Loop by way of that nightmarish subterranean world that was Lower Wacker Drive. In those days, Greyhound allowed smoking in the rear seats. Even if I sat up front, I'd emerge smelling like a three-pack-a-day man. And the person in the adjacent seat always wanted to convert me to some wacky brand of Christianity.

Normally I drive the weekly round trip from Bloomington to Elkhart. But I had driven down in my Subaru, which someone in Bloomington wants to buy, the previous week. So I rode the early train to Chicago, and took the 11:45 a.m. bus from there to Elkhart.

Chicago's main bus station is west of the Loop, at Harrison and Desplaines--just a few blocks west of Union Station, and not too far from the site of Mrs' O'Leary's barn, where a cow supposedly knocked over a lantern back in 1871. It's one of those postmodern steel buildings, where the structural steel is there for all to see. I got in line to buy a ticket and was upset but not terribly surprised that there was only on ticket agent working. There was a woman with two young children right behind me in line--they looked desperately poor--who were trying to get on a bus leaving in a few minutes. I let them go ahead of me in line, as I had another half-hour before my bus left. I think she made it. She was a very personable young woman, and her children were clean and well-behaved.

As soon as that young woman had made it to the ticket counter, Greyhound brought in a second agent, who was much more experienced than the lone agent had been. I had my ticket to Elkhart in less than a minute.

I walked into the waiting room section and sat down on one of the rather uncomfortable wire-mesh benches. A middle-aged woman in a Greyhound uniform was greeting all the passengers, asking them where they were going, and informing them of the proper gate. She was fluent in English and Spanish, and she was clearly an asset to the company. A lot of people seemed confused, and the public address system wasn't always easy to understand.

My bus was about 15 minutes late departing. It was only about half full, so I had a pair of seats to myself. The passengers were young, old, and middle-aged; black, white, Asian, and Hispanic. We rolled through the West Loop area, then headed south to Chinatown, where we got on the Dan Ryan Expressway. We took the Chicago Skyway through the South Side and into Indiana. The first stop was Hammond, at a nondescript building a few blocks south of the Indiana Toll Road. No one got on or off.

Gary was the next stop. Signs proclaimed the city's centennial, which actually occurred last year. In "The Music Man," the fact that Gary wasn't founded until "nineteen ought-six" was what tipped off Marian the Librarian that "Professor" Harold Hill was lying about his academic credentials. But Hill knew that the city was named for "Elbert Gary, of judiciary fame." The statue of Gary is still there, in front of City Hall. Gary had been a judge in DuPage County, Illinois before he became president and chairman of U.S. Steel, and was always known as "Judge" Gary.

Although more than 80 percent of Gary residents are African-American, a young Hispanic couple were the only people to get on. Back on the Indiana Toll Road, we passed by the massive U.S. Steel plant.

The bus seats were surprisingly comfortable. There was more legroom than on chartered buses I had ridden in the past few years. It was pleasant to see the Indiana countryside roll by. We stopped at the South Bend airport for about five minutes, which gave the smokers a chance to feed their habit. I was disappointed to see that all the smokers were younger people.

As we passed north of South Bend, I could see the golden dome of Notre Dame University. It was another half hour to Elkhart. The station there is in a strip mall just off the Toll Road. There's a small convenience store, a sports bar, a mortgage company, and a real estate office there. The latter two offices had signs proclaiming "No Loitering. No Public Restrooms." The bus station itself was open, although no one was manning the ticket office.

All in all, it was a pretty good trip. I arrived on time. There was no smoking on the bus. And nobody tried to convert me.

Couchette to Sofia: Reservations in the Cold War Era

Alexandra S. recently published a delightful post in her blog, MaRveLouS MadNeSs, entitled "I SpY a VaCaTioN". Here's the last paragraph of her post:

"I want to go back to Luxembourg Gardens and have a twilight picnic, play UNO on the Orient Express (which used to pass right through my town in Bulgaria), and I'd love to do more trips that combine travel with volunteering. Maybe not another two year Peace Corps stint, at least not for awhile, but something that allowed me to discover a new part of the earth while also making a difference there, if even in some small way."

Her mention of the Orient Express and Bulgaria brought back memories, not of Eastern Europe, but of Bensenville, Illinois, and my stint as Rail Coordinator for CIT Tours. It was the fall of 1981, and I had abandoned my graduate studies in history to work in the travel business. After going through a 6-week travel training class, I landed a temporary job with French National Railroads in Chicago. I was really just a mailroom clerk, but because I knew how to read the Thomas Cook timetables, I was soon taking reservations for European travel. When the summer season ended, I was without a job. But my experience with European rail reservations stood me in good stead, and I was soon working for CIT (Compagnia Italiana Turismo) Tours, which was the official agency for the Italian State Railways, which then had its Midwestern office in Bensenville, Illinois.

Booking trains in Italy was tricky, to say the least. There were several classes of trains: TEE (Trans Europ Express), Rapido, Espresso, Diretto, and Locale. TEE and Rapido trains were all-reserved. But Espresso and Diretto trains could only be reserved from the origin station. Italian sleepers were handled by Wagons-Lits in Rome, which was still using paper diagrams instead of computers. Booking trains originating in other countries was problematic. No problem with France, West Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Ditto for the Benelux countries. Spain and Scandinavia were hit-and-miss. But there was simply no way to get a reservation originating in a Soviet-bloc country. And in at least one case, it was impossible to reserve into the Eastern bloc.

There was, and still is, a regular train called the Orient Express, which runs from Paris to Bucharest. (The Venice-Simplon Orient Express and the Nostalgic Orient Express are essentially cruise trains.) But the Direct Orient Express made its last run from Paris to Istanbul in 1977. There was, however, a rather sad remnant of the storied train, called the Venezia Express, which operated from Venice to Istanbul. It had none of the amenities of its predecessor. You could reserve regular first-and second-class seats, but if you wanted to sleep lying down, your only choice was a second-class couchette. There were actually two couchette cars on the train--one from Venice through to Istanbul, and a second which only went as far as Belgrade.

Couchettes don't exist in America. A lot of us wouldn't be comfortable with men and women sharing a six-person sleeping compartment. But the system works well in Europe. And one American, probably familiar with the train, wanted a couchette on the Venezia Express from Venice to Sofia.

This was either in late 1981 or 1982, not long after a man with a Bulgarian connection tried to kill the Pope. Italian-Bulgarian relations were at an all-time low. But that shouldn't have made any difference in the matter of booking a second-class couchette. I sent the request over the telex, a device that seemed obsolete even at the time. A few days later I got the reply. My client had a reservation from Venice to Belgrade only. I telexed back, requesting the couchette to Sofia. I don't know wheter I tried a third time, but eventually my boss made a phone call to Rome, and found out that the Bulgarian railways weren't cooperating. My client had to sit up from Belgrade to Sofia, unless he was able to purchase a couchette from the train crew. A petty incident in the Cold War, but then a lot of the Cold War was comprised of petty incidents.

The Iowa Caucuses--A View from the Seventies

The Iowa caucuses aren't until January of next year, but the candidates are already making the rounds. John Edwards is virtually living there. But in spite of all the hype, only one candidate has ever parlayed a win in the Iowa caucuses into a win in November. And he didn't really win the caucuses, but came in second to Uncommitted. (I'm excluding incumbents here).

Until 1972 Iowa had virtually no influence on presidential nominations, especally on the Democratic side. But that year two things happened: Harold Hughes, the popular ex-governor and senator, was considering a run for the presidency, and the complicated McGovern Commission rules for selecting delegates went into effect. Iowa Democrats decided to hold their caucuses early that year to allow more time to work through the McGovern Commission rules, and to give Hughes a boost in his run for the White House.

Alas, Hughes bowed out of the race, saying he knew he could never push the button to fire our nuclear missles, even if the Soviets launched first. He endorsed Edmund Muskie, who won the caususes. George McGovern managed a strong showing.

It was not until four years later that the Iowa caucuses became the media spectacle they are today. I was living in Iowa City that year, and was working the precincts for Representative Morris K. (Mo) Udall of Arizona. He was one of about a dozen Democratic candidates in the Bicentennial Year. A bumper sticker that year, taking off on a McDonald's Big Mac commercial, read something like: "bayhbentsenbrowncarterchurchharrisjacksonsanfordshappshriverudallwallace...on a sesame seed bun!"

Birch Bayh of Indiana got into the race too late. Udall had the problem of telling too many jokes. He was a serious candidate, and his message of conservation was right for the time, but people didn't take him seriously because he couln't stop telling jokes. Instead, Iowans--even very liberal Iowans who had campaigned for Gene McCarthy in '68 and George McGovern in '72--seemed to be backing a one-term Georgia governor who had been a supporter of the Vietnam War.

I saw Jimmy Carter at a forum at the Iowa Memorial Union. I had a work-study job driving the campus bus (Cambus), and we drivers were in an adjacent room, signing up for shifts. While waiting for our names to be called, some of us looked in on the candidate. I thought he was boring. Of course, after seeing the trailer for the movie "Rocky," I said that the last thing this country needed or wanted was another fight film. My finger was not exactly on the national pulse that decade.

But I also remember walking around campus that winter, and seeing the chartered Greyhound buses parked by the Fieldhouse. The "H" in CHARTER had been taped over. Scores, perhaps hundreds of Georgians had left their subtropical world for the snows of Iowa. They did what the students for McCarthy had done in 1968: knock on doors and make personal contact with the voters. Even then, Carter was unable to win the caucuses. He came in second, to "Uncommitted." In the Iowa caucuses, you can beat somebody with nobody. And Carter's spin doctors (I'm not sure they used that term then, but there were people who did the same thing) persuaded the news media that coming in second to nobody was indeed a great victory. He went on to win the New Hampshire primary. In spite of the "Anybody but Carter" movement, in the West, where Frank Church and Jerry Brown beat the Georgian in several primaries, Carter's people held onto their lead and swept the 1976 convention.

Carter beat Gerald Ford in a very close election that year. Ford might very well have won, had it not been for Ronald Reagan, whose attacks on Ford during the Republican primaries weakened the president.

It was a bizarre campaign, with dozens of candidates, from Ronald Reagan and George Wallace on the right to Mo Udall and Fred Harris on the left. I had friends who wouldn't vote for Udall because he was a Mormon, and supported Harris, a populist from Oklahoma. Since then, the Iowa caucuses have been more important in winnowing out the weaker candidates or persuading the eventual winners to shake up their campaigns. But in 1976 the Iowa caucuses really did make a president.

Anne, Scott Simon, and Poke and Pour Cake.

I grew up in Iowa. Well, there was a seven-year interlude where I lived in Albuquerque. But culturally, I'm an Iowan. Or at least I thought so. I lived in Iowa City, a university town. So I had never heard of Poke and Pour Cake. Apparently it's an Iowa staple. You bake a basic yellow cake, poke holes in it with the handle of a wooden spoon, and pour gelatin, caramel, or cake frosting down the holes.

I mention this because my daughter Anne goes to school at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Last week she went to a talk by Scott Simon of NPR fame. In his lecture, Simon said he had read up about Iowa, but thought Poke and Pour Cake couldn't be real.

Anne didn't stay for the question and answer session, but went to a nearby coffee shop. And they were selling Poke and Pour Cake. She quickly bought a piece for takeout and ran back to the lecture hall. Simon was still there. The master of ceremonies recognized her and said to Simon: "I think Anne has something for you."

Simon put his arm around Anne's shoulders and admitted there was such a thing. It made me feel better about Simon. (I suspect he's changed his tune on Bush's war--see archives.) And Anne has a wonderful story to tell.

Lost in America. The music of Pete Teo

I discovered Pete Teo in 2003, while listening to "The World," a radio program produced jointly by the BBC and Public Radio International. Driving down U.S. 20, just outsde of Michigan City, I was hearing a voice from the other side of the world. "Would you fall in love in Jesselton tonight?" went the refrain of the lively song. Jesselton, I learned later, is the old colonial name for Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, East Malaysia (Malaysian Borneo).

Shortly after hearing the program, I ordered Teo's first
CD, "Rustic Living for Urbanites," from CD Baby of Portland, Oregon--Pete's only outlet here in the States. My favorite track from the album is "Budapest," with he notation, "Inspired by Krudy, 1896." Gyula Krudy was a Hungarian journalist. Here are the last few lines:

The women are all well read in their theatre magazines
And the porter greets you humbly on the street.
The innkeeper inquires of you appetite
With his hat in his hands.
The tramcars, they'll take you to places in your heart,
by the castle they won't fortify.
And the undertaker will show you all his gold teeth
When it's time to forever take your leave.
Take your leave.

Pete Teo has been compared to Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen, but his style--a mix of American, British, Chinese, and Malaysian sounds, is unique. But like Cohen, there's a melancholy to his music. Even the happy, bouncy "Jesselton Tonight" has nostalgia for another era: "Would you fall in love in Jesselton ere days of 'burn baby burn?'" The last phrase doesn't refer to H. Rap Brown and the American Sixties, but to the burning of rainforests for cropland. I don't often listen to two of the three songs about Marianne because they're just too full of pain. Even the first, "Arms of Marianne," ends with, "Can't you see my love--and here's the funniest of them all--thet the rain it raineth everyday," a reference to Feste's song, "When That I Was," from Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night."

Pete's second CD, "Television," has just come out. "Lost in America" and "Carnival Hall" are my favorite tracks from this one. It lacks a song with the ethereal beauty of "Budapest" or the nostalgic but happy "Jesselton Tonight." "Lost in America" is Pete's odyssey through this strange land I call home. It's worth the modest price. Three of Pete's songs have videos and may be seen on YouTube: "Lost in America," "Arms of Marianne," and "Rhapsody in Blue." The last is not an authorized video, but made independently. It's interesting, and a little bizarre, but it isn't of the quality of the other two. Pete's MySpace page includes "Jesselton Tonight." Since I originally published this post, Pete has a new video of "Carnival Hall," made by Kamal Sabran with a Nokia cellphone camera. (It won a contest for videos shot with Nokia cellphones.)

"Lost in America" probably would have been a better title for his second CD. This extremely talented Malaysian singer-songwriter seems to be "lost" here in America just because he's Malaysian. He deserves to be better known worldwide.

Molly Ivins, R.I.P.

I just learned that columnist Molly Ivins died after a long struggle with breast cancer. I'll miss her. In the darkest days of the Bush ascendancy, Ivins told us the truth and made us laugh at the same time. She reminded us in her folksy Texas humor that not every Texan accords divine status to George W. Bush. I never met Ivins, except on the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune and the alternet.org website. When I commuted on the South Shore line between Michigan City and Chicago, I made sure I brought home a Tribune on the day her column appeared. I'm glad she lived long enough to see GWB repudiated at the polls.

"A Christmas Church?"

I've just started reading Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard D. Schmidt (Grand Rapids: Wm. D. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002). It's a collection of short biographies of 29 Anglicans from Thomas Cranmer to Desmond Tutu, and the sort of book I've been wanting to read for some time. Along with the biographies are brief selections of the Subject's writing, such as the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, and Thomas Traherne, and gems from the likes of C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Madeleine L'Engle.

And while I recommend the book, I'm troubled by a passage in the introduction, in which the author attempts to answer, "What is Anglicanism?" Schmidt rejects the idea of Anglicanism as a "middle way" (via media in Latin) between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism because Catholics and Protestants have "found each other and begun discussing all sorts of things--without benefit of our bridge. The whole idea of via media also omits Orthodox and Pentecostal Christians, so perhaps it's time to drop it."

Schmidt also dismisses William J. Wolf's definition of Anglicanism as a "pragmatic church," as opposed a "confessional" or "experiential" church. "Anglicans, Wolf says, are a pragmatic church. Individuals may hold various doctrinal positions and may or may not have had a conversion experience. What makes us part of the church is simply that we do what the church does." But Schmidt writes that "the usefulness of Wolf's comparison is limited, because most churches, including Anglicanism, contain elements of all three 'manifestations,' and no such categorization can be absolute."

Instead, Schmidt proposes the following:

"If we are going to compare ourselves with other Christians, I prefer a comparison based on the major holy days stemming from the life and ministry of Christ. For many Christians, the central event was Christ's death on the cross for the sins of the world. The Roman Catholic Church and most Protestant churches are Good Friday churches. Other Christians see the resurrection of Christ, signifying his victory over Satan and sin, as the central event. The Eastern Orthodox are Easter churches. A third group focuses on Christ's gift of the Holy Spirit as the chief event. These are the Pentecostal churches. Anglicans--and this will become clear to anyone reading the essays in this book--focus on the incarnation of the Son of God, the Word made flesh. Anglican churches are Christmas churches. ...these distinctions are not absolute; all four groups recognize the importance of all four events. But there are unmistakable emphases, and there can be no doubt about what theological doctrine vibrates most strongly within the Anglican soul--it is the Incarnation."

I asked my wife, a Roman Catholic, whether this passage made sense to her. She said no. And I agree. In my experience, both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglo-Catholic branch of the Anglican Church focus on the Triduum--the three days beginning with the evening of Holy Thursday (Anglicans usually call it Maundy Thursday) and ending with the evening of Easter Day .

Anglo-Catholics, when reciting the Nicene creed, bow at the words, "by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man." But so do Roman Catholics. And these words refer more to the Annunciation than to Christmas. But the Annunciation, a major celebration during the Middle Ages, is a decidedly minor one today. If the Incarnation were the central focus of Anglican worship, one would think the Annunciation would be a major holy day.

Christians did not begin celebrating Christmas until the fourth century, though it had become a major celebration by the time the Church of England broke with Rome.

In the seventeenth century, Puritans opposed the trappings of Christmas as popery, and Parliament under Cromwell banned its public celebration. Even after the restoration of the crown, Christmas was not a major feast day among Anglicans. It took Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" and the marriage of of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert, to turn Christmas into the British holiday it has become. (Albert was German and the German celebration of Christmas, including the Christmas tree, came with him.)

The Incarnation and Christmas are important to Anglicans. It's just that I don't see Schmidt's distinction as helpful to Anglicans or anyone else. I still see the Great Anglican Compromise, the middle way, which allowed most Protestants and Catholics to worship together, as the communion's unique strength. I believe that spirit of compromise and inclusiveness will get us through the current controversy over the ordination of gays and lesbians.

And the major celebrations of Jesus's birth, death, and resurrection do not define the way a Christian is to live his or her life, for Anglicans or any Christians. Perhaps the best short description of the Christian way can be found in Rite I of the Holy Eucharist service in the Book of Common Prayer. (Rite II, in contemporary English, does not include it--which I believe to be a mistake.) Here it is:

"Hear what the Lord Jesus Christ saith:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."

I can't say I come close to living up to the Two Commandments, but it's my goal.

A Whisper Returns

My Spanish dictionary defines "susurro" as a whisper, murmur, or rustle, and susurrar as its verb form. So "susurra de luz" literally means "She whispers of (or about) light." I use the feminine, because sururradeluz is the blog name for Susan of "a line cast, a hope followed."

In the spring of 2005, when I had just started this blog, Susan put me on her blogroll and encouraged me to keep posting. Virtually all those who have found this blog have done so, directly or indirectly, because Susan was gracious enough to list me on her blogroll.

She describes herself as " a 46 year old female residing in Portland Oregon
Single mother of two kids, 3 cats, Joey the hyperactive border collie, 2 anoles, and Thistle the pygmy hedgehog
I love to travel, in person, through others' stories, in my imagination
Sometimes poet and oftentimes bird watcher
I put chiles in everything and vote strictly liberal
Collector of used Sting tshirts and trashy religious art."

When I began reading her blog, she was in the aftermath of a messy divorce. She gave us a "warts and all" picture of herself and her family. And we regular readers loved her for it.

Last year her posts became fewer. The sad news was that her beloved father died. Profound grief and the business of having to deal with the estate made blogging virtually impossible. The happy news was that she finally found a man who would give her the love and support she deserves.

Just recently, Susan has started blogging again. She and her boyfriend have bought a property near Portland, and are in the process of tearing down the old ramshackle house there and building a new one. There are some bizarre twists to the move, which make for a very intersting story. Check her blog out, if you haven't already. It's on my blogroll.

Risk: Why I gave up games

I just learned that George W. Bush and I have something in common: in our college days, we both were avid Risk players. I finally gave up the game for my own mental health, but the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue appears to be playing it on a much grander scale.

For those of you not familiar with the board game Risk, it's an American version of a French game called "The Conquest of the World." The board is a map of the world, with continents divided into regions. Each players have markers, which represent armies, and cards, which represent the various regions. Without getting into detail, the objective is to conquer the world.

I often used a defensive strategy, building up my armies in Australia, which could only be attacked from one country, and then going on the attack after the other players had exhausted their armies against each other. I started taking the game seriously. Much too seriously. In a game in which your friends are your enemies, the line between the game and the personal is too easy to cross--at least, it was for me. I stopped playing Risk and have tried to avoid games. I'll play Scrabble, but I don't play to win. I just play to get some unusual word, like syzygy, even though I'd have to use blank spaces. (I've never gotten to spell syzygy in Scrabble, but perhaps someday I will.)

George W. Bush was apparently very good at Risk. But playing the game, even too seriously, risks only a friendship. He's now playing Risk with real armies, and risking real lives. And he's not even particularly good at it.

Was Santayana Wrong?

The philosopher George Santayana wrote many books, but he is best remembered for one sentence: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. " It's been quoted and misquoted, and used to promote the study of history, an altogether worthwhile goal. Yet the application, or misapplication of the lessons of history has been responsible for two of Amerca's most disastrous wars.

I'm listening to the audio book version ofThomas E. Ricks's Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Ricks gives this account of Paul Wolfowitz at Gettysburg:

"One day in 1996, Paul Wolfowitz toured Gettysburg with a group of specialists in military strategy from Johns Hopkins University's school of international studies, where he became dean, after his service under Cheney at the Pentagon.

"Later in the afternoon, as the sun dipped toward Seminary Ridge, Wolfowitz stood at the center of the battlefield, near the spot where the soldiers of Pickett's charge had hit the Federal line and were thrown back by point-blank cannon blasts. Pointedly, Eliot Cohen, the Johns Hopkins professor running the tour, had Wolfowitz read aloud to the group the angry telegram that President Lincoln had drafted but never sent to the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, Gen. George Meade. Why, Lincoln wanted to ask his general, did you stop, and not pursue your enemy when you have him on the run?"

Wolfowitz thought the first George Bush made the same mistake in Iraq. He should have pursued the Revolutionary Guard into Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein. And when Wolfowitz became Deputy Secretary of Defense under Bush II, his was the leading voice for war against Iraq.

And here is David Halberstam writing about McGeorge Bundy at Harvard in The Best and the Brightest:

"His Munich lecture was legendary at Harvard, and when word got out that it was on the day's schedule, he played to standing room only. It was done with great verve, Bundy imitating the various participants, his voice cracking with emotion as Czechoslovakia fell, the German tanks rolling in just as the bells from Memorial Hall sounded. The lesson was of course interventionism, and the wise use of force."

Here are two "lessons of history" which were certainly important factors in bringing us into two wars. When Bundy joined the Kennedy administration, he applied the Munich lesson to Vietnam. Never mind that Ho Chi Minh was essentally a nationalist leader, fighting first against the French and then the American-backed South Vietnamese government. To Bundy, he was a potential Hitler, and had to be met with force.

The Munich analogy was applied to Saddam Hussein as well. Wolfowitz, who lost relatives in the Holocaust, muses about "What if Europe had intervened earlier against Hitler?" But it is his Gettysburg analogy which is the most telling. Again, the circumstances were different: Lincoln had to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia in order to reunite the nation, while Gerorge H.W. Bush's objective was to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein may have admired Hitler, but he was not Hitler. Nor was he Jefferson Davis.

America's two biggest military mistakes in the last 50 years were made not by people who could not remember the past, but by those who remembered it too well, and applied the lessons of one era to the different circumstances of another. Santayana's adage may still be true. But the indiscriminate use of historical "lessons" can surely be as dangerous as ignorance.