Almanac of Story Tellers: Wendell Berry

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Aug. 5th

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    It is the 217th day of the year, leaving 148 days remaining in 2022.

 

   On this date in 1934, the writer, activist, and farmer Wendell Berry was born in Port Royal, Ky.

    He tells his stories of his love for the land, joy in the simple tasks of life, and hope for a clean and honest future in his poems, novels, and essays. He practices what he preaches -- spending his life farming in tune with nature on land in sight of his birthplace, teaching students at the University of Kentucky, and speaking out against war, injustice, and the degradation of nature.

    Through his writings and his teachings, Berry honed a simple message -- we must live in harmony with nature. We must accept the rhythms of the land and all of its inhabitants, and reject the idea we can improve, ignore, or destroy our environment without consequences.

    His first collection of poetry, Broken Ground, published in 1964, highlight his concern about the abuse of land, and his desire to restore balance to nature.

                                        We could not help but look
                                        With backward eyes on spring,
                                        When fresh fields lay to sun
                                        Like a clutch of eggs before
                                       The warmth of the hatching hen.

    By reading Berry, one learns about Kentucky, its culture and its ways, its quirks and its mannerisms, its country and its people. His novels, especially, capture the tone and the setting of rural Kentucky and its small towns. Often set in the fictional town of Port William -- similar to his Henry County hometown of Port Royal -- the novels, beginning with The Memory of Old Jack, and continuing with Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter, helped tell the history of Kentucky from its Civil War days, through the 19th Century and into the 21st Century.

    His short stories complemented the larger novels, telling the stories of a revolving cast of characters and how they lived and breathed the land.

    Berry still lives and works in Port Royal, on the banks of the Kentucky River in northeastern Kentucky.

Almanac of Story Tellers: Sapphire

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Aug. 4th

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    It is the 216th day of the year, leaving 149 days remaining in 2022.

   

    On this date in 1950, the poet and novelist Sapphire was born.

    She wrote her stories about Black life and sexuality in the United States in vivid, unsparing language. Rape, assault, poverty and other abuses flooded her writings, and she explored the impact and consequences on both the molester and the victim.

    Her best known works are her two novels, Push and The Kid, which together tell the story of Precious, an obese, barely literate Black girl who is abused, raped, and has two children. When she is sent to an alternative school, she begins to tell the story of her life.

    Push, written as a series of diary entries, shows how Precious grows as she learns to write, using various language -- including African Vernacular English -- as she learns more. It also tells of her trauma, including the fact that her father, who raped her, has died from AIDS.

    It was later adapted as the movie, Precious, Based on the Novel "Push," by Sapphire.

    The Kid follows the life of her son during his teen years.   

    Sapphire grew up the daughter of an Army couple in California. She dropped out of high school and rambled around the coasts, before landing in New York where she eventually attended the City College of New York and obtained a master's degree from Brooklyn College.

    By the late 1970s, she was writing poems published in various journals in New York. Her first book of poetry, Meditation on the Rainbows, was published in 1987.

    But she did not become a household name when her poem The Wild Thing was published in a journal underwritten from the National Endowment for the Arts. It was wildly criticized for its depictions of violence and sexual abuse, and perceived blasphemy. The resulting controversy resulted in the resignation of the NEA director.

    Sapphire lives in New York City.

Book Review: The Apollo Murders

 

•  Author: Chris Hadfield

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: Hadfield played guitar and sang Bowie in space, so I gave the book a chance.

******

    Gunfights in space! Mysterious holes on the moon! Communists literally hanging on to an American spacecraft orbiting Earth! A Russian lunar rover investigating the potential for nuclear power on the moon!

    And this is no far-fetched, Spaceman Spiff adventure in the far future. This is history.

    Well, an alternative history, with an extra Apollo mission landing on the moon with the idea to keep the Soviets in line -- with Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Leonid Brezhnev appearing in the background, and the CIA and KGB pulling and unwinding each other's strings.

    So it's not really history, but it could be. And Chris Hadfield -- retired Canadian astronaut, fighter pilot, former commander of the International Space Shuttle, a guy who has walked in space, and who sang a version of Space Oddity while in orbit around the Earth -- is just the guy who could pull it off.

    He does.

    This is a fun book. When you're able to look back on U.S.-Soviet relations and treat them as satire, you know you're having a good time. When you make plain ole trips to the moon, even spacewalks on the moon, seem tame by comparison, you've done a good job.

    But Hadfield also takes his science seriously, and does nothing that could be considered impossible. Yes, he sometimes gets carried away in the descriptions of flying and space flight, but I cut the guy a break -- he's actually been there, done that.

    In brief, Lieutenant Commander Kazimieras "Kaz" Zemeckis is a fighter pilot and wanna-be astronaut with one eye blown out when a bird got in the way of his plane. (Oops. So he can no longer fly in space.) But he knows everything about Apollo, so he gets to be in mission control, along with Al Shepard and a bunch of other real guys. (Lots of people and stuff is real in this book. It's all laid out in the end.)

    But Apollo 18 is part of the fiction. Hadfield sees it as an added mission to the moon, to do science and other things. But the Russians, who have a landed a rover on the moon and running it via a special satellite, are acting like they are up to something. So the Apollo crew are tasked with finding out what's really going on.

    A lot of other things are happening on Earth with the U.S flight crew, and when they go to space and discover the Soviet satellite actually has real live cosmonauts on it, things get dicey.

    But Hadfield holds it all together. The various real and imagined characters play well. When events threaten to overtake the American mission, Hadfield reels them back in. 

    It's a good balancing act. An exciting thriller, without the thriller problems that induce eye-rolling and a please-get-this-over-with feeling. Hadfield writes tightly and plots nicely.

    It's not Bowie in space, but it's just as cool.  

Almanac of Story Tellers: Ernie Pyle

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Aug. 3rd

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    It is the 215th day of the year, leaving 150 days remaining in 2022.

 

    On this date in 1900, the journalist Ernie Pyle was born.

    He wrote his stories about life and war and death in newspaper columns that were syndicated across the United States. He told the tales of life in these United States through the average men and women he met while traveling throughout the country. 

    He told tales of war during World War II through the voices of the average infantryman who fought the good fight and spoke not for the general or the career officer, but for the private and the enlistee.

    And he told the tales of death through the story of one Capt. Henry T. Waskow, dead on the field of battle, yet memorialized by the men he led in a a report that helped Pyle win the Pulitzer Prize in 1944.

    Pyle was born to be a reporter. After a stint in the Naval reserves, he attended Indiana University and served as an editor at the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. During his time there he began to develop the style that bode him well -- traveling and speaking to regular people to learn about life and culture from those who lived it.

    He soon moved to Washington, and joined the Washington Daily News. He became a roving columnist for the paper and its Scripps-Howard news service, driving around the country in a Model T automobile with his wife, Geraldine. 

     When war raged in Europe, he became a war correspondent, using the same style: living and working and traveling with the troops, telling the stories from their perspective. It  brought him fame and admiration -- his columns were beloved back in the United States, and newspapers often saw sales increased when his columns appeared.

    He often interrupted his duties to return home to recover from combat fatigue. In a September 1944 column, he told readers if he "heard one more shot or saw one more dead man, I would go off my nut."

    But return he did. And Pyle died as he lived. While covering some of the final battles of the war, recording the tales of the Navy and Marines in the Battle of Okinawa, Pyle was shot in the head and killed when a Jeep he was travelling in was ambushed by Japanese soldiers.

    It was April 17, 1945.

Almanac of Story Tellers: James Baldwin

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Aug. 2nd

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    It is the 214th day of the year, leaving 151 days remaining in 2022.

   

    On this date in 1924, the novelist and playwright James Baldwin was born.

    He told his stories about race, class, and sexuality -- many of them dealing with characters struggling with their identity and oppression -- in novels, essays, and plays. He also was a civil-rights activist, and wrote about the impact of living as a Black man in the United States.

    Born in New York City, Baldwin grew up in a large family in Harlem. He graduated from Clinton High School, and showed promise in the stories he wrote for the school's magazine. After high school, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he wrote for local periodicals. He started writing a novel.

    He moved to Paris, where he finished his first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain. Based on Baldwin's early years, it explores the relationship of a young Black man with his family, his sometimes violent father, and his church, where he worked as a teenage preacher. It also discusses his sexuality and his growing sexual interest in other men, and the conflict that poses with his religion.

    It received critical acclaim when it was published in 1953. It remains popular today; and it is considered among Baldwin's best work, along with one of the finest novels of in the 20th Century.

    While living for almost a decade in Paris, Baldwin wrote numerous essays and stories. They included The Negro in Paris, regarding the difference between Black Americans and Africans in the French city. Black Americans, he concluded, had a "depthless alienation" almost unknown among the native Africans. 

    He also wrote a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, and a second novel, Giovanni's Room. That novel explored gay men and bisexuality at a time they were virtually ignored among the general public and rarely written about.

    Upon his return to the United States, Baldwin became involved in speaking and writing about the American civil rights movement. Among his works from this period was the non-fiction work, The Fire Next Time, about the role of race and religion -- both Christian and Muslim -- in U.S. society.

    Baldwin died in 1967 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in France.