This past Thursday was the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn. The army of George Washington lost the battle – and the American Revolution was nearly strangled right at the very beginning. What saved Washington’s army was a group of soldiers known as the Maryland 400.
I own a Kindle, and I have a lot of books on it. I’ve also been paring back my library of physical books; some 400 have already made their way to a school library. But I do love holding a book in my hands while I read. Matthew Adams at Mining the Riches agrees, and he says some things are worth holding on to.
Have you ever wondered how people predicted the weather before we had Accu-Weather? Signs in the sky? Aching bones? Meteorology didn’t begin coming of age until the mid-nineteenth century, but people had been predicting the weather long before that. Becky Little at History takes a look at the various ways people used to figure out what was happening or going to happen with the weather.
I still own four of the textbooks I used in college: Investigative Reporting, The History of Journalism, and a two-volume set of the Norton’s Anthology of English Literature. The fact that I was a journalism major explains the first two. But those two volumes of the Norton have their own story. What those four books have in common is that I took those courses all in my sophomore year. You can do the math: my sophomore year was 1970 to 1971.
The vast majority of my sophomore class took the required English 55 and 56 classes – American literature. There was also another option – English 51 and 52, English literature.
No one took English Lit, except English majors. It was notorious for the rigor of its instructors, focused as they were on educating the next generation of English teachers. That’s who generally took the two courses.
I don’t remember why I decided to go with the English majors. I was in journalism; I was not going to be teaching English literature. I suspect it had something to do with T.S. Eliot, whose poetry I’d discovered in high school. Yet that’s not really an excuse; Eliot was also taught in the standard sophomore courses.
When I began to write my historical novel Brookhaven, my jumping off point was a family story. My father often told me about my great-grandfather, Samuel Young, and his Civil War experience.
The story was this: Samuel was 13 when the war began in April of 1861. He was too young to enlist, so he signed up as a messenger boy. He had been in that position for a good deal of the war. When the war ended with the surrender of General Lee’s Army at Appomattox Courthouse to General Grant and the surrender of General Johnston’s army to General Sherman at Greensboro, Samuel found himself in the East, with no way to get home except by foot.
The story went on,
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Photograph: My paternal great-grandparents, Samuel Franklin Young and Octavia Montgomery Young.
About the time my mother turned 75, she said something to me that she’d been apparently been saving up. “You know,” she said, “I’ve reached an age when I can say what I think, and I don’t have to worry about what happens because of it.” This was something she learned from her own mother, who’d made some kind of similar announcement at about the same age. Except my grandmother had been doing exactly that long before she announced it. So had my mother.
I remembered those statements as I read deeper into You, Too, Were Once on Fire: Poems by Peter Murphy. Ad those thoughts hit me as I read “Stairs to All Levels,” a poem about Frank O’Hara and New York City and the Twin Towers and 9?11, and you don’t even realize it until the end of the poem hits you upside the head with a smack. It was that poem, followed immediately by “Miss Besieged Sarajevo,” about a beauty contestant during the Bosnian War in 1993, that made me realize I needed to make sure my seat belt was buckled and tray tables were locked securely for takeoff.
Agatha Christie wrote a slew of short stories. Many featured her celebrated detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, and a few included her detective duo, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. And many were standalones, mysteries, thrillers, spy stories, and even a ghost story or two.
In “The Case of the Perfect Maid,” the village of St. Mary Mead is buzzing with the news – a maid has been fired by two elderly sisters living together, supposedly on the grounds of theft. Miss Marple’s own maid, a good friend of the fired woman, asks her to “put things right;” there was no way her friend would have stolen anything. And Miss Marple pays a visit, discovering what the rest of the village has learned – a replacement maid has been installed, ad she may be the best maid ever to grace the village. But something is off, and Miss Marple knows it.
Agatha Christie
In “The Herb of Death,” a group of weekend guests (including Miss Marple) are gathered together, telling stories. One woman tells the story of a great tragedy, in which a young woman died of poisoning after eating foxglove mistakenly mixed with sage. The odd thing is that no one else at that fatal dinner got sick. So, what happened? Miss Marple quietly beings to piece together what really happened.
In her lifetime, Christie became an international institution, writing scores of novels and stories and selling millions of books. One interesting fact: She wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first novel, after a bet with her sister Madge. After rejections by six publishers, it was finally published four years later.
These short stories are what we call “cozy mysteries” today. Blood and gore is limited; gn graphic scenes of sex or violence. They are period pieces – and they’re great fun to read and solve along with Miss Marple.
Hadrian’s Wall was built during the reign of the Emperor Hadrain. It stretches across the narrowest part of England – 73 miles from Newcastle on the east to Solway Firth on the west. Its purpose: keep the barbarian Picts in the north, separating them from Roman Britain. Jonathan Thomas at Anglotopia is walking the wall, and he’s providing daily updates. (He’s actually walking 84 miles, starting at the seacoast on the east.)
Therapy culture has been shaping America for decades, and it has not excluded the church. Amy Mantravadi at Mere Orthodoxy reviews a new book on the subject, Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond by Matthew Loftus.
The end of a relationship with a spouse or partner is like a death – a death of familiarity, a death of structure, a death of how we live our lives and who we share that life with. I’ve never experienced that kind of loss, but I’ve seen it happen to close friends and family members.
Gabrielle Myers experienced that kind of loss, a relationship she ended after “five years of verbal abuse.” She did what many poets do – she turned to writing poetry to understand it, assimilate it, and resolve it –if such a thing can ever truly be resolved. But she did it in a rather unique way, by using the natural landscape around her to structure and explain her poems. And her loss.
The result is Go Forth: Lose Yourself into Life, Myers’ fourth collection of poetry. It could also be subtitled with the words she uses to begin her introductory essay: “Begin to Know the World Again from Nothing.”
After reading and writing about the three epic poems, I read Cross of Snow, the 2020 biography of Longfellow by Nicholas Basbanes. Two years later, I saw the movie “I Heard the Bells,” the story behind Longfellow’s poem that eventually became a popular Christmas carol. And all this while, I kept looking for something that will help me unify a theme for this as-yet-unnamed novel.
The movie might have been the clincher. And I thought, what about Longfellow’s poetry? If I had searched more or better than I did, I might have found the 2017 novel What Longfellow Heardby Jon Nappa.
We have mobile phones, but we still have a landline. And according to caller ID, the most common caller we get on that line is someone I’ve grown rather fond of. His name is “Spam Risk.” He’s gotten crafty; he sometimes changes his name to “Medical Clinic,” or that of a local grocery chain, or just a location. But he is, and always will be, “Spam Risk.” He deserves his own short story or novel. But there might be hope for this unwanted intrusion; Gary Saul Morson describes it at The Wall Street Journal (story unlocked): A Modest Proposal to Deal with Spam Calls.
It might be because I’ve lived a long time. But what I do not get, at all, is this fascination for and support of socialism. Perhaps it’s because I’ve read The Gulag Archipelago, and I remember when it was published. Ot the killing fields of the Kymer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. Or the brutal suppression of the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia in 1968. For those who think it could never happen here, well, they never thought it would happen in lots of places. Bradley Birzer, writing at The Imaginative Conservative, looks at the resurgence of socialism here.
Family history is rarely handed down intact, or even handed down at all. I was told a few things about my paternal grandfather, for example, mostly about the crazy songs he liked to sing and the expressions he used. A story about my great-grandfather, however, was handed down, an epic Civil War story. I based my novel Brookhaven on that story. Except the handed-down story turned out to be almost entirely wrong. But the reality told another kind of story – about a father who lost two sons and a son-in-law in the Civil War and was terrified that his youngest would be called up, so he took steps to protect that son as long as he could. At Front Porch Republic, N.P. Curtin writes about the importance of family stories, and keeping the family history alive.
