The Athenaeum

"The Butcher's Cleaver" Now for Sale

 
 Please visit the web site for my novel "The Butcher's Cleaver."  It is now for sale on-line at Barnes & Noble, Amazon and iUniverse.com p 

Download Rosemont.Butcher's Cleaver-LO

www.rosemontbooks.com

http://ncmuseumofhistory.org/wgo/podcasts.html

For sale at these links:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/104-0278800-4247125?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=The+Butcher%27s+cleaver&x=11&y=11

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=The+Butcher%27s+Cleaver&z=y

http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0-595-47476-4

A review of the book has recently been published in the Defense Intelligence Agency newspaper:

Download DIAReview.pdf

"This a remarkable and a very unusual book, with those qualities being inseparable. In particular, there is its pervasive, perambulating, almost dreamlike air -- both in narration and description. That is, everything that its central character, Confederate agent Claude Devereux, takes note of (but not only Claude) is presented to us as though it were preserved in amber -- estimates of men and situations but also the then-existing "look" of things, natural and man-made. Of course, to capture or evoke the "then-existing" as it was then felt is the great yet elusive goal of historical fiction. In addition, a feel for, or a need to evoke, the "then-existing" implies a no less powerful sense that much of what existed then is lost. It is here, without ever becoming too explicit, that "The Butcher's Cleaver" is so poetic. Again, this is present in the most seemingly ordinary descriptive passages (as time seems to slow down a bit to allow Claude to notice the look of a street, a piece of architecture, etc.). After a while one begins to feel that that all this verbal and visual "touching" amounts to a continuous farewell on Claude's part, and not only because he almost certainly knows that his cause and way of life are doomed but also because we know (as he anticipates) what acts Claude himself will bring to pass after the span of the novel itself is completed. The perambulating, near dreamlike quality of the book comes to a climax in the scene where Claude and his brother Patrick observe Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. Again, one would think that in the face of such a famous scene of "action" that the tempo of the writing would have to accelerate, but instead, if anything, it slows down a bit more, to convey what probably does occur in the minds of trained men who are observing combat but also to convey, in this case, their awed, horrified reluctance to take in what they cannot avoid seeing. Patrick, BTW, is a beautifully modeled character; his role in the double game the Devereux brothers are playing is at times almost heartbreaking."  Lawrence Kart

The second volume of this trilogy is entitled "Death Piled Hard."  It is available from the same booksellers.

These books are available in electronic formats to include "Kindle" from major vendors.

Archaeology News- January 2012

Starting in 2012, at the end of each month, I will be posting world archaeology news here at The Athenaeum.  Also plan to participate in digs on the West Coast of CA & will periodically post journal entries from that as well.

-Maureen Lang

 

CALIFORNIA: Over 7,500 years, the skulls of the Chumash people and those of their ancestors gradually shrank. Scientists think that these people, who inhabited coastal California for over 10,000 years, might have suffered a long-term health decline and growth impairment from exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), common pollutants found in oil and coal. The Chumash had extensive and increasing exposure to PAHs through tar, which they used to seal baskets and canoes, applied to the body as medicine, and even chewed like gum.  (Courtesy Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History) NEW YORK:During demolition at what was once Bellevue Hospital Medical College, a 15-pound metal box, sealed on November 14, 1897, was discovered. Among student registries and notebooks found in the time capsule was a vial containing spores of Clostridium perfringens, bacteria that live in the intestine. Bacteriologist Edward Dunham included them so future generations could check if they were still viable. They weren't, but doctors today might be able to observe how bacteria have changed since the introduction of antibiotics in the late 1920s.  (Courtesy New York University Langone Medical Center) LOUISIANA: In the time before bridges made the bayou more accessible, small rafts and cable ferries were the only path into the swamps and between plantations. Now, in a few tarred wooden platforms and some rusted gearwork, a river guide might have located the remains of Vester's Crossing, one of the last cable ferries—a boat pulled back and forth via cable—in the area. The site may become part of a heritage paddle trail.  (Courtesy Web Helbling, Bastrop Daily Enterprise) NORWAY: As glaciers recede, hundreds of artifacts are discovered each year. One of the latest finds was a men's tunic or coat that emerged from a glacier in Breheimen National Park. Dating to the 4th century A.D., the wool garment—made with an advanced technique called diamond twill—is one of very few known from this period in Europe. Without close attention, many of the artifacts that emerge from melting ice will be lost—decomposed or washed away—before they can be studied.  (Vivian Wangen, Museum of Cultural History, UiO) SPACE: One of the next frontiers for archaeology is out of this world. Scientists in England are attempting to contact Prospero, a satellite launched in 1971, to see how its circuits have held up. First, they have had to rummage for the satellite's communications codes and build custom equipment, and now they are attempting to make contact by sending a simple signal. NASA has also begun drafting guidelines to protect three dozen lunar sites, including the Apollo 11 and 17 landing sites. The guidelines could include ground-level boundaries and no-fly zones—for when private spaceships (and even tourists) start arriving.  (NASA/Wikimedia Commons)

AUSTRALIA: Hanged for the murder of three policemen 131 years ago, Ned Kelly—the country's most notorious bushranger and outlaw—is considered both folk hero and killer. He robbed banks, wore homemade armor to his final confrontation with police, and reflected the tension between poor Irish settlers and the wealthy Anglo elite. Following his execution, Kelly was buried in a mass grave. Forensic scientists, ending decades of speculation, have identified his bones by comparing DNA with a descendant's. But his skull, perhaps separated as a souvenir, remains at large.  (Damien Plemming, The Age, Courtesy Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine) TURKEY: On the Gallipoli battlefield of World War I, where Allied armies, including soldiers from Australia and New Zealand called Anzacs, were defeated by Ottoman forces, archaeological surveys have revealed some of the battlefield conditions, which historical sources state were quite dreadful. In particular, it appears the Anzacs were eating canned or stale food, while the Turkish forces had frontline kitchens, suggesting they had access to hot meals. Other artifacts found include water bottles with bullet holes in them, fragments of barbed wire, and expended ammunition.  (Courtesy Antonio Sagona, University of Melbourne) KENYA: From the banks of Lake Turkana archaeologists have excavated what they believe are the oldest "advanced" stone tools yet discovered. At 1.78 million years old, the handaxes are the oldest known examples of Acheulean tools, probably made by Homo erectus, and predate other examples by 300,000 years. Compared with older, cruder stone tools, the handaxes are heavier and have sharp edges for butchering, scraping, and smashing. The find raises interesting questions about which early humans first left Africa and what tool technologies they took with them.  (Courtesy Pierre-Jean Texier, National Center of Scientific Research, France) EGYPT: An analysis of 15 mummy hair samples shows just how important styling was more than 2,000 years ago. To understand how the complex hairdos were achieved and maintained after death, scientists studied coatings on the hair with electron microscopy and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. They found that the ancient Egyptians used a kind of fatty hair gel to keep their hair coiffed in both life and the afterlife. The absence of embalming materials in the hair suggests that it was covered during mummification.  (A. Aufderheide, Courtesy Natalie McCreesh, University of Manchester) EL SALVADOR:Under 17 feet of volcanic ash at the ancient Maya city of Ceren, archaeologists have discovered a raised road called a sacbe. Usually these roads, connecting temples, plazas, or towns, were lined with stone, but this one, which probably led to two ceremonial buildings nearby, was not. In the absence of the stones, the rapid burial by the eruption of the Loma Caldera volcano helped keep it intact for identification.  (Courtesy Payson Sheets, University of Colorado)

www.archaeology.org/1201/world/clostridium_gallipoli_acheulean_tools_nasa_prospero.html

Etta James 1938-2012

"At Last" from Etta James' album At Last! recorded at Chess Recording Studio in 1960

At last, my love has come along
My lonely days are over
And life is like a song.
Oh, yeah, at last
The skies above are blue
My heart was wrapped up in clover
The night I looked at you.
I found a dream that I could speak to
A dream that I can call my own
I found a thrill to rest my cheek to
A thrill that I have never known.
Oh, yeah when you smiled, you smiled
Oh, and then the spell was cast.
And here we are in heaven
For you are mine, at last.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1uunRdQ61M

 

Etta James discography (courtesy of discogs.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Maureen Lang

SOPA & PIPA Blackout

SOPA and PIPA Blackout

SST and TA will be "down" today in sympathy.  pl

 

A Virtual Feast

Someone suggested a compilation of favorite recipes.  Let's do it!  pl

"Bertie's Christmas Eve"- Saki

It was Christmas Eve, and the family circle of Luke Steffink, Esq., was aglow with the amiability and random mirth which the occasion demanded. A long and lavish dinner had been partaken of, waifs had been round and sung carols; the house-party had regaled itself with more caroling on its own account, and there had been romping which, even in a pulpit reference, could not have been condemned as ragging. In the midst of the general glow, however, there was one black unkindled cinder.

     Bertie Steffink, nephew of the aforementioned Luke, had early in life adopted the profession of ne'er-do-well; his father had been something of the kind before him. At the age of eighteen Bertie had commenced that round of visits to our Colonial possessions, so seemly and desirable in the case of a Prince of the Blood, so suggestive of insincerity in a young man of the middle-class. He had gone to grow tea in Ceylon and fruit in British Columbia, and to help sheep to grow wool in Australia. At the age of twenty he had just returned from some similar errand in Canada, from which it may be gathered that the trial he gave to these various experiments was of the summary drum-head nature. Luke Steffink, who fulfilled the troubled role of guardian and deputy-parent to Bertie, deplored the persistent manifestation of the homing instinct on his nephew's part, and his solemn thanks earlier in the day for the blessing of reporting a united family had no reference to Bertie's return.

     Arrangements had been promptly made for packing the youth off to a distant corner of Rhodesia, whence return would be a difficult matter; the journey to this uninviting destination was imminent, in fact a more careful and willing traveller would have already begun to think about his packing. Hence Bertie was in no mood to share in the festive spirit which displayed itself around him, and resentment smouldered within him at the eager, self-absorbed discussion of social plans for the coming months which he heard on all sides. Beyond depressing his uncle and the family circle generally by singing "Say au revoir, and not good-bye," he had taken no part in the evening's conviviality.

-2-

     Eleven o'clock had struck some half-hour ago, and the elder Steffinks began to throw out suggestions leading up to that process which they called retiring for the night.

     "Come, Teddie, it's time you were in your little bed, you know," said Luke Steffink to his thirteen-year-old son.

     "That's where we all ought to be," said Mrs. Steffink.

     "There wouldn't be room," said Bertie.

     The remark was considered to border on the scandalous; everybody ate raisins and almonds with the nervous industry of sheep feeding during threatening weather.

     "In Russia," said Horace Bordenby, who was staying in the house as a Christmas guest, "I've read that the peasants believe that if you go into a cow-house or stable at midnight on Christmas Eve you will hear the animals talk. They're supposed to have the gift of speech at that one moment of the year."

     "Oh, DO let's ALL go down to the cow-house and listen to what they've got to say!" exclaimed Beryl, to whom anything was thrilling and amusing if you did it in a troop.

     Mrs. Steffink made a laughing protest, but gave a virtual consent by saying, "We must all wrap up well, then." The idea seemed a scatterbrained one to her, and almost heathenish, but if afforded an opportunity for "throwing the young people together," and as such she welcomed it. Mr. Horace Bordenby was a young man with quite substantial prospects, and he had danced with Beryl at a local subscription ball a sufficient number of times to warrant the authorised inquiry on the part of the neighbours whether "there was anything in it." Though Mrs. Steffink would not have put it in so many words, she shared the idea of the Russian peasantry that on this night the beast might speak.

     The cow-house stood at the junction of the garden with a small paddock, an isolated survival, in a suburban neighbourhood; of what had once been a small farm. Luke Steffink was complacently proud of his cow-house and his two cows; he felt that they gave him a stamp of solidity which no number of Wyandottes or Orpingtons could impart. They even seemed to link him in a sort of inconsequent way with those patriarchs who derived importance from their floating capital of flocks and herbs, he-asses and she-asses. It had been an anxious and momentous occasion when he had had to decide definitely between "the Byre" and "the Ranch" for the naming of his villa residence. A December midnight was hardly the moment he would have chosen for showing his farm-building to visitors, but since it was a fine night, and the young people were anxious for an excuse for a mild frolic, Luke consented to chaperon the expedition. The servants had long since gone to bed, so the house was left in charge of Bertie, who scornfully declined to stir out on the pretext of listening to bovine conversation.

-3-

     "We must go quietly," said Luke, as he headed the procession of giggling young folk, brought up in the rear by the shawled and hooded figure of Mrs. Steffink; "I've always laid stress on keeping this a quiet and orderly neighbourhood."

     It was a few minutes to midnight when the party reached the cow-house and made its way in by the light of Luke's stable lantern. For a moment every one stood in silence, almost with a feeling of being in church.

     "Daisy -- the one lying down -- is by a shorthorn bull out of a Guernsey cow," announced Luke in a hushed voice, which was in keeping with the foregoing impression.

     "Is she?" said Bordenby, rather as if he had expected her to be by Rembrandt.

     "Myrtle is --"

     Myrtle's family history was cut short by a little scream from the women of the party.

     The cow-house door had closed noiselessly behind them and the key had turned gratingly in the lock; then they heard Bertie's voice pleasantly wishing them good-night and his footsteps retreating along the garden path.

     Luke Steffink strode to the window; it was a small square opening of the old-fashioned sort, with iron bars set into the stonework.

     "Unlock the door this instant," he shouted, with as much air of menacing authority as a hen might assume when screaming through the bars of a coop at a marauding hawk. In reply to his summons the hall-door closed with a defiant bang.

     A neighbouring clock struck the hour of midnight. If the cows had received the gift of human speech at that moment they would not have been able to make themselves heard. Seven or eight other voices were engaged in describing Bertie's present conduct and his general character at a high pressure of excitement and indignation.

-4-

     In the course of half an hour or so everything that it was permissible to say about Bertie had been said some dozens of times, and other topics began to come to the front -- the extreme mustiness of the cow-house, the possibility of it catching fire, and the probability of it being a Rowton House for the vagrant rats of the neighbourhood. And still no sign of deliverance came to the unwilling vigil-keepers.

     Towards one o'clock the sound of rather boisterous and undisciplined carol-singing approached rapidly, and came to a sudden anchorage, apparently just outside the garden-gate. A motor-load of youthful "bloods," in a high state of conviviality, had made a temporary halt for repairs; the stoppage, however, did not extend to the vocal efforts of the party, and the watchers in the cow-shed were treated to a highly unauthorised rendering of "Good King Wenceslas," in which the adjective "good" appeared to be very carelessly applied.

     The noise had the effect of bringing Bertie out into the garden, but he utterly ignored the pale, angry faces peering out at the cow-house window, and concentrated his attention on the revellers outside the gate.

     "Wassail, you chaps!" he shouted.

     "Wassail, old sport!" they shouted back; "we'd jolly well drink y'r health, only we've nothing to drink it in."

     "Come and wassail inside," said Bertie hospitably; "I'm all alone, and there's heap's of 'wet'."

     They were total strangers, but his touch of kindness made them instantly his kin. In another moment the unauthorised version of King Wenceslas, which, like many other scandals, grew worse on repetition, went echoing up the garden path; two of the revellers gave an impromptu performance on the way by executing the staircase waltz up the terraces of what Luke Steffink, hitherto with some justification, called his rock-garden. The rock part of it was still there when the waltz had been accorded its third encore. Luke, more than ever like a cooped hen behind the cow-house bars, was in a position to realise the feelings of concert-goers unable to countermand the call for an encore which they neither desire or deserve.

-5-

     The hall door closed with a bang on Bertie's guests, and the sounds of merriment became faint and muffled to the weary watchers at the other end of the garden. Presently two ominous pops, in quick succession, made themselves distinctly heard.

     "They've got at the champagne!" exclaimed Mrs. Steffink.

     "Perhaps it's the sparkling Moselle," said Luke hopefully.

     Three or four more pops were heard.

     "The champagne and the sparkling Moselle," said Mrs. Steffink.

     Luke uncorked an expletive which, like brandy in a temperance household, was only used on rare emergencies. Mr. Horace Bordenby had been making use of similar expressions under his breath for a considerable time past. The experiment of "throwing the young people together" had been prolonged beyond a point when it was likely to produce any romantic result.

     Some forty minutes later the hall door opened and disgorged a crowd that had thrown off any restraint of shyness that might have influenced its earlier actions. Its vocal efforts in the direction of carol singing were now supplemented by instrumental music; a Christmas-tree that had been prepared for the children of the gardener and other household retainers had yielded a rich spoil of tin trumpets, rattles, and drums. The life-story of King Wenceslas had been dropped, Luke was thankful to notice, but it was intensely irritating for the chilled prisoners in the cow-house to be told that it was a hot time in the old town tonight, together with some accurate but entirely superfluous information as to the imminence of Christmas morning. Judging by the protests which began to be shouted from the upper windows of neighbouring houses the sentiments prevailing in the cow-house were heartily echoed in other quarters.

     The revellers found their car, and, what was more remarkable, managed to drive off in it, with a parting fanfare of tin trumpets. The lively beat of a drum disclosed the fact that the master of the revels remained on the scene.

-6-

     "Bertie!" came in an angry, imploring chorus of shouts and screams from the cow-house window.

     "Hullo," cried the owner of the name, turning his rather errant steps in the direction of the summons; "are you people still there? Must have heard everything cows got to say by this time. If you haven't, no use waiting. After all, it's a Russian legend, and Russian Chrismush Eve not due for 'nother fortnight. Better come out."

     After one or two ineffectual attempts he managed to pitch the key of the cow-house door in through the window. Then, lifting his voice in the strains of "I'm afraid to go home in the dark," with a lusty drum accompaniment, he led the way back to the house. The hurried procession of the released that followed in his steps came in for a good deal of the adverse comment that his exuberant display had evoked.

     It was the happiest Christmas Eve he had ever spent. To quote his own words, he had a rotten Christmas.

                                                      (from Saki's short story collection The Toys of Peace, 1919)

 

Posts of Christmas Past:

2010- "Dancing Dan's Christmas"

2009- A Yuletide Omnibus

2008- Have A Swingin' Christmas & A Cool Yule

 

Wishing a Happy Christmas & Prosperous New Year to All!

 

 

-Maureen Lang

 

Thanksgiving- 2011

 

A Thanksgiving To God, For His House

Lord, Thou hast given me a cell

         Wherein to dwell,

A little house, whose humble roof

         Is weather-proof:

Under the spars of which I lie

         Both soft, and dry;

Where Thou my chamber for to ward

         Hast set a guard

Of harmless thoughts, to watch and keep

         Me, while I sleep.

Low is my porch, as is my fate,

         Both void of state;

And yet the threshold of my door

         Is worn by th' poor,

Who thither come and freely get

         Good words, or meat.

Like as my parlour, so my hall

         And kitchen's small;

A little buttery, and therein

         A little bin,

Which keeps my little loaf of bread

         Unchipp'd, unflead;

Some brittle sticks of thorn or briar

         Make me a fire,

Close by whose living coal I sit,

         And glow like it.

Lord, I confess too, when I dine,

         The pulse is Thine,

And all those other bits, that be

         There plac'd by Thee;

The worts, the purslain, and the mess

         Of water-cress,

Which of Thy kindness Thou hast sent;

         And my content

Makes those, and my beloved beet,

         To be more sweet.

'Tis Thou that crown'st my glittering hearth

         With guiltless mirth;

And giv'st me wassail-bowls to drink,

         Spic'd to the brink.

Lord, 'tis Thy plenty-dropping hand

         That soils my land;

And giv'st me, for my bushel sown,

         Twice ten for one;

Thou mak'st my teeming hen to lay

         Her egg each day;

Besides my healthful ewes to bear

         Me twins each year;

The while the conduits of my kine

         Run cream, for wine.

All these, and better, Thou dost send

         Me, to this end,

That I should render, for my part,

         A thankful heart,

Which, fir'd with incense, I resign,

         As wholly Thine;

But the acceptance, that must be,

         My Christ, by Thee.

-Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

  www.poets.org

Wishing all Athenaeum/Sic Semper readers, commenters, & posters

a lovely Thanksgiving holiday spent with family & friends.

-Maureen Lang

 

Veterans Day- 2011

During the First World War, Ernest Hemingway volunteered to serve in Italy as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross. In June 1918, while running a mobile canteen dispensing chocolate and cigarettes for soldiers, he was wounded by Austrian mortar fire. "Then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red," he recalled in a letter home.

Despite his injuries, Hemingway carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety and was injured again by machine-gun fire. For his bravery, he received the Silver Medal of Valor from the Italian government—one of the first Americans so honored.

Hemingway in Italy, 1918.

Commenting on this experience years later in Men at War, Hemingway wrote: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it."

Recuperating for six months in a Milan hospital, Hemingway fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American Red Cross nurse. At war's end, he returned to his home in Oak Park, Illinois, a different man. His experience of travel, combat, and love had broadened his outlook. Yet while his war experience had changed him dramatically, the town he returned to remained very much the same.

Two short stories (written years later) offer insights into his homecoming and his understanding of the dilemmas of the returned war veteran. In "Soldier's Home" Howard Krebs returns home from Europe later than many of his peers. Having missed the victory parades, he is unable to reconnect with those he left behind—especially his mother, who cannot understand how her son has been changed by the war.

"Hemingway's great war work deals with aftermath," stated author Tobias Wolff at the Hemingway centennial celebration. "It deals with what happens to the soul in war and how people deal with that afterward. The problem that Hemingway set for himself in stories like 'Soldier's Home' is the difficulty of telling the truth about what one has been through. He knew about his own difficulty in doing that."

After living for months with his parents, during which time he learned from Agnes that she had fallen in love with another man, he decamped with two friends to his family's Michigan summer cottage, where he had learned to hunt and fish as a young boy. The trip would be the genesis of Big Two-Hearted River—a story that follows one of Hemingway's best known fictional characters, Nick Adams, recently returned from war, on a fishing trip in northern Michigan.

Hemingway in Oak Park IL, 1919.

In the story, Hemingway never actually mentions the war and the injuries Nick has sustained in it—they simply loom below the surface. In this and other stories in his first major collection, In Our Time, Hemingway does more than advance a narrative; he also debuts a new style of writing fiction.

"The way we write about war or even think about war was affected fundamentally by Hemingway," stated Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., another speaker at the Hemingway centennial. In the early 1920s, in reaction to their experience of world war, Hemingway and other modernists lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization. One of those institutions was literature itself. Nineteenth-century novelists were prone to a florid and elaborate style of writing. Hemingway, using a distinctly American vernacular, created a new style of fiction "in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly."

"Hemingway was at the crest of a wave of modernists," noted fellow centennial panelist and book critic Gail Caldwell, "that were rebelling against the excesses and hypocrisy of Victorian prose. The First World War is the watershed event that changes world literature as well as how Hemingway responded to it."

(Courtesy of the National Archives)

 

 

-Maureen Lang

 

"The Banshee"- Alice Guerin Crist

As we came down the old boreen,
Rose and I – Rose and I,
At vesper time on Sunday e’en,
We heard a banshee cry!
Beyond the churchyard dim and dark,
‘Neath whispering elms, and yew-trees stark,
Where our star shone-a corpse-like spark-
Against the wintry sky.

We heard and shuddered sick with dread,
Rose and I- Rose and I,
As the shrill keening rang o’erhead
Where cloud-wrack floated high.
Our two young hearts long, sorely tried,
By poverty and love denied
Still waiting for some favouring tide,
And now! Death come so nigh.

‘Which of us two is called away
You or I-You or I?”
I heard my patient poor love say,
With bitter plaintive sigh.
‘Neither, dear girl,” I bravely said,
‘To Mary Mother bow your head,
And cry for help to Her instead,
Nor heed the Banshee’s cry’.

We raised our hearts in fervent prayer,
Rose and I-Rose and I,
Nor knew our troubles ended there,
Our happiness came nigh.
For ‘twas the grim old farmer, he-
My only kin, rich, miserly,
Who, dying left his wealth to me-
For whom the banshee cried.

-Alice Guerin Crist (1876-1941)

http://www.usq.edu.au/pmrc/literaryhistory/writers/crist

 

Happy Halloween, Everyone!

Links to 2010 & 2009 Athenaeum Halloween posts:

"Hallowe'en in a Suburb"/Classics from the Crypt-

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2010/10/halloween-in-a-suburbclassics-from-the-crypt.html

A Bit of Halloween History, Poetry, Music, & Ephemera-

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2009/10/a-bit-of-halloween-history-poetry-music-ephemera.html

 

-Maureen Lang

 

A Farewell to Dowd

"I have always been a Fitzgerald girl. What could be more gorgeous than “The Great Gatsby”?  If you perused Hemingway in college in the first flush of feminism, he seemed like a relic. As F. Scott Fitzgerald noted, Hemingway needed a new wife for every big book. And even when he was cheating on a wife with her friend, he painted himself as a victim of predatory and trusting women." Maureen Dowd

-------------------------------------------

How boring, yet another feminist single woman sniping at "Papa."  I first heard this line of bilge from a college girl long ago when I was more interested in her than in her opinion on literature.  She said that Ernest wrote "divinely" but that his message of masculine inner (and outer) life was unacceptable.  That was it for me.  There were other fish in the sea.  (She married a friend of mine)

I love Hemingway's work.  He, Conrad and Kipling are the most imortant influences on my writing.  His style, described somewhere as the "iceberg theory" is something that I aspire to but have never been able to fulfill in fact because of the constant pressure from readers to be told more.  More!  More!  Nevertheless, an Israeli officer who did me the honor of reading "The Butcher's Cleaver" said that "in some books you have to read between the lines.  In this one you have to read between the words."  I hope so.  Everyone says that Hemingway could write dialogue.  That he could do, but anyone who has read "The Big Two Hearted River" and thinks he has no talent except for dialog is mistaken.

Hemingway can be rough on women.  The message in  "...Francis Macomber" is clearly that of male liberation from a psychologically  "castrating" woman, but, are there no castrating women?

On the other hand, the account of Cantwell's feelings for Renata in "Across the River and Into the Trees" is a symphony dedicated to the essentially hopeless love of a dying older man for a girl so young tht he calls her "daughter."  I think this novel is one of his most underrated works.  He thought so too.  Perhaps that was because he had revealed so much of himself in it.

I am surprised that Dowd would write such a column.  pl

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-farewell-to-macho.html?ref=maureendowd

The Bravest Man in the Air Force by Basilisk

 
“Alconbury Tower, Sting two-two, holding for the active.”

The gray fighter vibrated with the power of two mighty jet engines. Even at idle power the aircraft wanted to lope along, and on this cold day, with the brakes set, it chattered and slithered across patches of ice until its tires found purchase,

“Sting, Alconbury, hold for traffic, U-2 in the pattern.”

At the height of the Cold War, RAF Alconbury in the moors of East Anglia was a hodge-podge of spy planes, Electronics Countermeasures Aircraft, and a squadron of garishly painted Northrop F-5’s meant to represent a hophead’s dream of Soviet MiGs. The “MiGs” were flown by a collection of misanthropes who were short on military discipline and appearance and long on combat skills. Their job was to humiliate NATO’s air forces in close combat and hone the tactics that might be used when the big war came.

We had come with a half-dozen F-15 Eagles to take on the gaggle of Aggressors in simulated combat and try out our newest technological goodies.

 “Hold on, damnit,” the jet slipped again, writhing sideways slightly. “I don’t mind the flying, but this stuff on the ground is dangerous.” The front seater was a green lieutenant, known to all his mates as “Skunk,” and I was riding in the back of a two-seater to catalog his skill with the hush hush new gear recently installed in the jet. He was on a training hop to fight four Aggressors singlehanded, and he was expected to win.

With my visor down against the glare from the white sky, I craned upward and saw the U-2, a black crucifix against the sky. Turning base; its long wings were tilted steeply. I watched its leisurely progress and reached for a switch near my right knee to test my G-suit. I felt its reassuring pressure against my abdomen and legs as it squeezed me with a giant’s grip. I switched to one hundred percent oxygen for a second and felt the dryness whistle in my nose, flavored with the mask’s indefinable rubbery essence. I closed the zipper of my flight jacket against the chill and surveyed the bleak landscape of the airfield still encased in the mantle of an uncharacteristic snowfall.

“Alconbury, Dragon six six on final, gear and flaps, full stop.” The U-2 pilot’s voice was slow and calm, I glanced back at it now, descending steeply toward the runway, its slender wings disfigured by flaps, slats, and spoilers, its bicycle-style landing gear looking hopelessly inadequate.

“Here comes the bravest man in the Air Force.” Skunk’s voice held a kind of reverence unusual for one fighter pilot to express for another, let alone for the pilot of a slow, straight wing reconnaissance aircraft without even an afterburner to its name. I wondered what provoked the statement.

Just at that second a Chevy El Camino pickup in Air Force blue livery roared past our nose, accelerating hard down the runway, the roar of its exhaust audible briefly over even the sullen roar of our two GE F-101’s. Crouched in the bed was an airman in a hooded parka. He wore large day-glo orange gloves and he clutched the “pogo” wheels on a long strut that would be inserted in a socket in the U-2’s wing as it touched down.

“Holy Shit!” I craned to see what had provoked Skunk’s reaction.

“Dragon six six, Alconbury, go around.” The U-2 emitted a sudden stream of blue-grey smoke from a firewalled engine, cleaned up the spoilers and ascended as if by an elevator, retracting the gear and milking up the flaps as it disappeared into the low overcast.

“Look at that truck,” Skunk breathed through the intercom.

I glanced to the left to see the pickup completely out of control, using all two hundred feet of the runway’s width as it described perhaps the third big looping three-sixty. The wheel man in the bed was rigid, unmoving riding the wild steed to the end of its performance.

The driver regained control, made a highspeed U-turn and accelerated past us to line up for another run. As it crossed our nose, the wheelman snapped a smart salute.

“Bravest man in the Air Force,” breathed Skunk, “bar none.”