You read a book likeA Place on Earth by Wendell Berry, and you’re reminded of your own family and where you came from. Characters like Burley Coulter and Uncle Jack seem to be almost lifted wholesale from what I remember of many of the “characters” I knew as a child.
My father’s family lived mostly in the Shreveport, Louisiana, area, with a much larger group in Brookhaven, Mississippi (it was my grandfather who would wander away from Brookhaven and settle first in central Louisiana, in a town called Jena. He was working as a surveyor for a railroad company, and he lived in a boarding house operated by my great-grandmother and his eventual mother-in-law.
My father and his three sisters were all born in Jena but had moved to Shreveport by the late 1920s. Rubye was the oldest, followed by my Aunt Myrtle, my father, and my Aunt Ruth. There would have been an Aunt Elouise, born two years before my father, but she died the same year my father as born.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Photograph: My father and my Aunt Ruth about 1923.
It’s early 1945 in Port William, Kentucky. The war has been dragging on, but U.S. forces have survived the Battle of the Bulge. With a number of men involved in the fight in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, residents keep a close ear on the news.
Mat and Margaret Feltner receive a telegram. Their son Virgil is missing in action. That’s all that’s known. Virgil’s pregnant wife Hannah, who lives with the Feltners, gets the news at the same time. The not knowing is a kind of limbo state, and the family somehow has to come to terms with it. It will become even harder for Mat than it does for Hannah or Margaret.
The Feltner family is at the heart of A Place on Earth, the fifth of the Port William novels by Wendell Berry. First published in 1967 (with a new, edited version issued in 1983), the novel is in turn funny, tragic, moving, and exhilarating. It contains laugh-out-loud moments, and it has moments when you’re reaching for the tissues. It’s about family, fathers and sons, the land, community, and the people who are the community.
Wendell Berry as a young man
Berry has created some memorable characters. Uncle Jack Beechum had me laughing with his stories about funerals at the church. Burley Coulter is the steadfast friend. Ernest Finley, wounded in World War I, is the carpenter who gives his heart. Mat is a man of nobility and steadfastness who begins to crack. Ida and Gideon Crop experience and struggle to overcome great tragedy. As individual as they are, they’re recognizable. They are people you know; some are you own kinfolk.
The author also shows himself capable of throwing a curve ball when you least expect it. And once it’s thrown, you realize just how right it is and how well it fits into the story.
Berry is a poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist, and social critic. His fiction, both novels and stories, are centered in the area he calls Port William, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. He’s won a rather astounding number of awards, prizes, fellowships, and recognitions. He lives on a farm in Kentucky.
A Place on Earth is a profound story, one that changes you when you read it. It’s also one worth reading over and over again.
Last Saturday, July 13, a man attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at the Butler County, Pennsylvania, county fair. Many – too many – newspapers didn’t report it the next day, not because they hate Trump but because they print Sunday newspapers early, and production was well underway. It’s a function of what’s happening in the newspaper business – early printing deadlines, pared down editorial and production staff, advertisers preferring other sources, declining newspaper readership, and more. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently announced it would no longer publish a print edition on holidays, supposedly to give its carriers the day off but really because it’s in retreat toward publishing online only for cost reasons. Rick Edmonds at the Poynter Institute has the story on the July 13 news, or lack thereof.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the darling of the Western news media in the early 1970s, because he was resisting the Soviet regime and embarrassing to Richard Nixon as he pursued détente with Brezhnev and friends. And then the writer gave a speech at Harvard in 1978, and suddenly he’d become, in the news media’s eyes at least, a right-wing fundamentalist wacko. But as Gary Saul Morson writes in Commentary, Solzhenitsyn clearly saw what was coming with Western culture.
If I had to pick a favorite gospel, it would likely be the Gospel of John. It was the first book of the Bible I read after becoming a Christian. It’s also different from those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; for one thing, John skips the entire birth narrative of Jesus. (And my ESV Study Bible reminds me that not one of the gospels has a stated author; their associated names come from tradition and early church history.) Theologian Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder has a favorite gospel, too, and he explains why.
DI Hillary Greene, who’s been working cold cases as a civilian advisor to the Thames Valley Police in Kidlington / Oxford, is on the brink of major life changes. Her boss and love interest, soon to be promoted Stephen Krayle, has proposed. She’s leaning toward living together. Whatever she decides, it will mean leaving the Mollern, her canal boat home, or perhaps just tying it up on the canal by Stephen’s house.
Things are also coming to a head with her team member Jake, the police department’s fair-haired boy who’s also a tech millionaire. He’s been snooping around Hillary’s computer and meeting with local crime figures. What he wants is to find his missing stepsister, whose life spiraled downward into drugs and prostitution.
As Krayle’s new job involves going after organized crime, a plan emerges: use Jake and his missing stepsister to go after one of the bigger crime figures in the area. And the cover will be a public announcement that Hillary’s team is reinvestigating a number of missing women cold cases.
Faith Martin
Hillary’s Final Case by British author Faith Martin isn’t, as it turns out, Hillary Greene’s final case. Four novels remain. And there’s nothing in the story to suggest it’s the last case she’ll work on. All we know is that she’s changing home addresses, but she’s still in the same Kidlington / Oxford area.
But it is a classic Hillary Greene story. Martin comes up with more twists that only Greene can see coming. And it’s a cracking good story, filled with a number of tension-filled scenes.
In addition to the DI Hillary Greene novels, Martin (a pen name for Jacquie Walton) has also published the Ryder and Loveday novels as well as the Jenny Sterling mysteries. Under the name Joyce Cato, she has published several non-series detective stories. Both Cato and Martin are also pen names for Walton. (Walton has another pen name as well – Maxine Barry, under which she wrote 14 romance novels.) A native of Oxford, she lives in a village in Oxfordshire.
Today is Take Your Poet to Work Day at Tweetspeak Poetry, and the site has a raft of resources to help you do that. The celebration of poetry and work has been going strong, and I’ve been an enthusiastic participant from the get-go. I even wrote a small book, Poetry at Work, on finding poetry in all aspects of work.
When I still had an office (or a cubicle), I’d pick a poet and bring him or her to work on the designated day in July. Typically, I’d bring my longstanding favorite poet, T.S. Eliot.
Ten years ago, I was preparing to give notice of my intended retirement from work, which I did in September of 2014. I officially retired in May of 2015. It was early, but it was time. Enough said.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Photograph: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in old age.
I had the benefit of having a non-stop string of excellent English teachers in middle and high school. In 8th grade, Mrs. Leavell introduced us to Ernest Hemingway. Miss Roark in 9th grade help a class of 35 boys discover Great Expectations, which turned out to be a great book for 14-year-old boys. Miss Campbell in 10th grade helped us understand Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In 11th grade, when Mrs. Prince wasn’t celebrating Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls (which she did not have us read), she’d rhapsodize about Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. And in 12th grade, Miss Shorey guided 30 boys through the late 16th century Spain of Don Quixote.
As individual as they were, all my English teachers held one writer or poet in common esteem, the one considered the “American poet,” even when we studied world or English literature. This was the poet who, along with T.S. Eliot, all my teachers had studied when they were in middle and high school as well as college.
One of the first presidents of my alma mater LSU was none other that William Tecumseh Sherman, he of “March Through Georgia” fame during the Civil War. He was only president for a short time, resigning to accept a command in the U.S. Army. After the Civil War, no name was more notorious in the defeated South than Sherman’s. I’ve wondered if he ever visited LSU (then at Pineville, La.). As it turns out, he did, at least twice.
Brett McCracken at Family Movie Night has a list of 10 “non-cringe” faith-based movies. I see a list like that, and I have to see which ones I’ve seen. The answer is: seven. (And the list doesn’t include Chariots of Fire or The Sound of Freedom.)
Adman Khan at The Walrus has a fascinating story about the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Well, it’s less about Vermeer and more about the scientist who’s been on a quest to unlock the true colors Vermeer painted with.
