The Athenaeum

"The War Game"- FB Ali

Johnny Demeter killed himself last night.  No, he didn’t put a gun to his head or anything like that. His sports car skidded off the road and into a wall.  He always drove too fast; he liked to take risks; he enjoyed the thrill of danger.  He was also lucky, but it seems his luck ran out last night on a rain-slicked curve.

We got the call very early this morning.  Still half-awake, we barely understood what was being said.  When the realization came, Helen and I were devastated.  He had become so much a part of our life in the last few months.  And then there was the ruin of all our plans for the future.

We had met him six or seven months ago at one of these big family weddings.  Someone introduced us; he turned out to be a cousin of a cousin of mine.  He stood out in the gathering: young, handsome, fashionably dressed, and with a striking blonde hanging on to his arm.  We learned that he was rich; an only child, his father had died some years ago and left him a lot of money and property.  People thought he was something of a playboy; he owned several fast cars, and seemed to have a string of girl friends.  Later that evening he sought us out again, and we chatted for quite a while.  The three of us were about the same age, and we seemed to like each other.  Helen is shy, and doesn’t talk much, but with him she was quite animated.  We enjoyed our conversation till the abandoned blonde found him and dragged him away.

A few days later Johnny came to our coffee shop.  Helen and I had started this business a couple of years ago, shortly after we got married.  We were just managing to keep our heads above water; in fact, we would have gone under if some of our loans hadn’t been from our families, which they were prepared to stretch out.  Johnny arrived just as we were closing up.  He helped us to tidy up the place, and then we went upstairs to the small apartment above the shop where Helen and I lived.  He had brought along a bottle of wine, and we sat up late after supper, talking away.

Pretty soon this became a pattern in our lives.  Every few days, Johnny would turn up with a bottle or two of wine, and we would eat Helen’s supper and talk and talk for hours.  He seemed to enjoy it just as much as we did; perhaps he found in us what he missed as an only child.  For us he became a bright light in our rather drab lives.  We worked all day, and seldom had the urge to go out or meet people afterwards; we had hardly any friends.  Johnny was such good company.  Helen, especially, blossomed in the friendship; in the beginning, when he would tease her gently, she would just blush and laugh, but then gradually she opened up, and joined equally in the chatter and kidding around.  We all laughed a great deal.  We were happy together.

And then Johnny offered us a way out of the dead end in which our lives were stuck.  One of the properties he had inherited from his father was a building on the Danforth in which there was a Greek restaurant.  This had been running for a long time, and was very successful, but the owner now wanted to retire, and was putting it up for sale.  Johnny wanted to buy it, and he wanted us to run it as his partners; his contribution would be the capital, ours would be to manage and run it.  At first we thought he was joking, but he was quite serious.  We talked about it, we checked out the place; Johnny had his accountant check the books; we talked to lawyers, and they began to draw up papers.  From a tantalizing hope, it suddenly became a doorway into a new life full of promise.  We were living hand to mouth, and always with the fear that one of the big chains would open an outlet in our neighbourhood and put us out of business.  And now here was a way out.  Helen and I were so excited; we talked about it all the time and made plans for the new restaurant.  We even discussed how, perhaps in a year or two, we might be in a position to have a baby.

Now this terrible early morning call had changed everything.  A dear friend, almost a brother, had been torn out of our lives, and so had our future.  Bereft, we clung to each other and cried out our grief.  Helen could not be consoled; she curled up into a ball on the bed and wept and wept.  I sat beside her with my head in my hands and this awful emptiness inside me.  But, finally, we had to get up and get ready to go downstairs and open up the shop.

"How Santa Claus Came To Simpson's Bar"- Bret Harte

It had been raining in the valley of the Sacramento. The North Fork had overflowed its banks and Rattlesnake Creek was impassable. The few boulders that had marked the summer ford at Simpson's Crossing were obliterated by a vast sheet of water stretching to the foothills. The up stage was stopped at Grangers; the last mail had been abandoned in the tules, the rider swimming for his life. "An area," remarked the "Sierra Avalanche," with pensive local pride, "as large as the State of Massachusetts is now under water."

     Nor was the weather any better in the foothills. The mud lay deep on the mountain road; wagons that neither physical force nor moral objurgation could move from the evil ways into which they had fallen, encumbered the track, and the way to Simpson's Bar was indicated by broken-down teams and hard swearing. And farther on, cut off and inaccessible, rained upon and bedraggled, smitten by high winds and threatened by high water, Simpson's Bar, on the eve of Christmas day, 1862, clung like a swallow's nest to the rocky entablature and splintered capitals of Table Mountain, and shook in the blast.

     As night shut down on the settlement, a few lights gleamed through the mist from the windows of cabins on either side of the highway now crossed and gullied by lawless streams and swept by marauding winds. Happily most of the population were gathered at Thompson's store, clustered around a red-hot stove, at which they silently spat in some accepted sense of social communion that perhaps rendered conversation unnecessary. Indeed, most methods of diversion had long since been exhausted on Simpson's Bar; high water had suspended the regular occupations on gulch and on river, and a consequent lack of money and whiskey had taken the zest from most illegitimate recreation. Even Mr. Hamlin was fain to leave the Bar with fifty dollars in his pocket -- the only amount actually realized of the large sums won by him in the successful exercise of his arduous profession. "Ef I was asked," he remarked somewhat later, --"ef I was asked to pint out a purty little village where a retired sport as didn't care for money could exercise hisself, frequent and lively, I'd say Simpson's Bar; but for a young man with a large family depending on his exertions, it don't pay." As Mr. Hamlin's family consisted mainly of female adults, this remark is quoted rather to show the breadth of his humor than the exact extent of his responsibilities.

     Howbeit, the unconscious objects of this satire sat that evening in the listless apathy begotten of idleness and lack of excitement. Even the sudden splashing of hoofs before the door did not arouse them. Dick Bullen alone paused in the act of scraping out his pipe, and lifted his head, but no other one of the group indicated any interest in, or recognition of, the man who entered.

     It was a figure familiar enough to the company, and known in Simpson's Bar as "The Old Man." A man of perhaps fifty years; grizzled and scant of hair, but still fresh and youthful of complexion. A face full of ready, but not very powerful sympathy, with a chameleon-like aptitude for taking on the shade and color of contiguous moods and feelings. He had evidently just left some hilarious companions, and did not at first notice the gravity of the group, but clapped the shoulder of the nearest man jocularly, and threw himself into a vacant chair.

 "Jest heard the best thing out, boys! Ye know Smiley, over yar -- Jim Smiley -- funniest man in the Bar? Well, Jim was jest telling the richest yarn about --"

     "Smiley's a ---- fool," interrupted a gloomy voice.

     "A particular ---- skunk," added another in sepulchral accents.

     A silence followed these positive statements. The Old Man glanced quickly around the group. Then his face slowly changed. "That's so," he said reflectively, after a pause, "certingly a sort of a skunk and suthin of a fool. In course." He was silent for a moment as in painful contemplation of the unsavoriness and folly of the unpopular Smiley. "Dismal weather, ain't it?" he added, now fully embarked on the current of prevailing sentiment. "Mighty rough papers on the boys, and no show for money this season. And tomorrow's Christmas."

Labor Day 2012

A little send off music for the Labor Day weekend:

Fanfare For The Common Man- Aaron Copland

 

 

 

If you've never read Studs Terkel's Working, maybe this is the weekend to pick it up.  If you have already read it, perhaps a good weekend for some re-reading...

Wishing all TA/SST posters, readers, & commenters a pleasant Labor Day holiday spent with family & friends.

-Maureen Lang

"Strike the Tent," a review by Richard Sale

“In my beginning is my end.”

Pat Lang’s three-volume novel is a vast work that has real genius.  It speaks with what Yeats called, “the living voice.” What makes it remarkable is the astonishing breadth of the canvas on which he paints, the dazzling sweep of the characters and scenes and the variety topics.  The force of his narrative, the delicate mental reactions and subtle emotional calculations of the characters, along with Lang’s thorough mastery of the Civil War, make the book an amazing and praiseworthy performance.

There is a chiseled quality, a hardness and clarity in the way Lang sees things. In the book, you find that there are sexual tensions, personal rivalries, and strategic dilemmas in abundance. Lang’s world is a complicated and dangerous world. There are two supreme loyalties for a man – one is loyalty to his country, and the other is loyalty to family. Since the family loyalty is more personal, it is also the stronger.

Claude Devereux, a Confederate agent, is also man of tortured self-doubt (at one point he observes that ‘the people who doubted him most, are the people he cherished most”)  and he is also a man ambitious of achievement, liking to pit his resources against superior odds, liking to be in places where he is liable to be killed.  His mission forces him to perform exploits to validate his sense of his own worth. He is condemned to a perilous life of constant re-assessments, constant vigilance and wariness, always scanning the ground around him to avoid his own destruction. Claude is one of those who has to know when to be silent, to know just how much to say, to be truthful and yet to mislead, how to drop casual observations as a kind of test of a person’s acuteness, how to sense what others mean or know even if they don’t say it. He has to be able to know that someone is planning a secret meeting even though he says the exact opposite; he has to know that a person who appears to have real influence has in fact lost it; he has to know that another is a wire-puller, and yet a person from whom you can have anything you want if you simply present the right face and hit the right note.

In the end, Claude is destroyed by the very events he has set in motion, destroyed by his own inner demons. In the Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot used the line, “In the beginning, is my end.”  That is Lang’s plot in a nut shell.

Reading Pat Lang’s novel has also changed the way I viewed the Civil War. It is a novel about patriotism, discipline and comradeship, but it is also about honor and the values of civilization. There is too much vindictive animosity about popular depictions of the South in the Civil War. In too many books, the South is pictured as a static, agricultural land directed by men of a refined culture that was marred by the ownership of slaves. Men of the North were men of the cities. By necessity, the liberty of the individual in the North was submerged into the preponderant weight of the mass.  The mixed nature of the population demanded amalgamation.  That was the source of the North’s strength.  It was a gross strength, the strength of massed and limitless numbers.

By contrast, the South was an old civilization, one of luxury and refinement. In Lang’s book, you will discover that the gentlemen of the South were men of social graces and tradition. To the Greeks, nobility was the prime mover in forming the nation’s culture and the Confederate men are very Greek in their ideals. In the South, culture was shown in the whole man -- in his external appearance, conduct, and in his inner nature. The Southern cavaliers lived by ancient commandments—“Honor the gods, Honor your father and mother, Respect the stranger.”

High civilization in history springs from the differentiation of social classes. The upbringing of those classes aims at producing a man the way he ought to be. It unites nobility of action with nobility of mind. In the South, a man measures his own nobility by the regard he enjoys in other’s eyes. Men do what they do in order to ensure their own worth. Heroes treat each other with constant respect and their whole social system depends on such respect.

The culture of the Confederacy prized physical prowess and spiritual harmony as the highest goods attainable by a successful life. A sense of honor prevented men from committing any gross action, and they were driven by an enormous drive to obtain honor by performing some great deed. Men did what they did to ensure their own worth. The man’s job was to forget himself in the service of the honorable duties demanded by his country in the while avoiding doing anything base. This was the foundation of the whole system of southern ethics.  Honor was universally valid. You could not forget your country. Its values were universal and timeless and your service to them never ended. 

Behind the cavaliers of the South stood the Southern women. Respect for honor lurked at the point of every sword. The men were chivalrous and enacted a gallantry that wasn’t false or artificial. Women in the South were worshipped as fit companions for the cavaliers. All this emerges as you read Lang’s narrative.

People like to cite Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a kind of mechanical homage to what they haven’t really read. I recently began W&P for the ninth time, and I can say, without flattery, that Lang’s work echoes in many ways Tolstoy’s masterpiece.

Richard Sale

"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.

"Down the Sky" now available

"Science currently holds that time travel is an impossibility, but readers of Down the Sky, the final volume of Colonel Pat Lang’s Strike the Tent trilogy will question that assertion. Code-named “Hannibal,” Confederate penetration agent Claude Devereux is firmly lodged in the upper echelons of the Federal war machine. Now a Brigadier General of the Union forces with the new Congressional Medal of Honor on his chest, Major Devereux of the Confederate Secret Service knows time is running out. His minders in Richmond may no longer trust him, his personal life is a shambles, and Union spy-catcher Lafayette Baker is determined to bring him down. Only his peculiar, personal friendship with President Lincoln holds his enemies at bay. 

Claude’s missions for the Federal War Department take him to major battles, and the reader will experience Cedar Creek, and Fort Fisher as if in person. The vision of Lincoln standing in full view of the Confederate sharpshooters at Fort Stephens is indelible, as is the vignette of a severely wounded Union officer on the grounds of the Belle Grove Plantation after Cedar Creek. Such a view of battle could only have come from the author’s personal experiences. 

The book stands alone, but it is a worthy successor to its two predecessors, The Butcher’s Cleaver, and Death Piled Hard. The great Shelby Foote said: 

'The Civil War brings everything into a sharper focus with heightened color. Anytime you want to study human behavior, it is well to study the Civil War, because in that you study human behavior under terrific pressure and heat. So that men show what they are for good or bad more readily than in ordinary times.' 

Readers of the trilogy, and of Down the Sky in particular will find this unerringly demonstrated by the historical rigor and deep creativity of Patrick Lang.

James Peak"

 

The third novel in the "Strike The Tent" trilogy is now available for purchase at; iUniverse, Barnes and Noble and Amazon. The cover painting, "Lincoln, 1863" is by Keith Rocco.

The first and second volumes, "The Butcher's Cleaver" and "Death Piled Hard" are available from the same booksellers.

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

Download Rosemont.Butcher's Cleaver-LO

https://fasttransients.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/down-the-sky/

http://ncmuseumofhistory.org/collateral/Podcasts/Confederate%20Secret%20Service.mp3

This podcast is highly recommended. 

pl

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

 

To A Young Reader: By Richard Sale

 
By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars.

The fact that you are reading is an indication that you have intelligence beyond the ordinary.  Books then are going to be absolutely essential to developing your talents, but you have to ask, what kinds of books are going to enrich your intelligence the most?

When I was 11 or 12, my farther and my mother didn’t read. We had shelves crammed full of wonderful books including “War and Peace,” but I never ever saw either of them touch a single one.  I was urged to read “Treasure Island” by Stephenson or “Ivanhoe,” by Scott but the writers of these books wrote in a way that was out of date and the books were boring.  Rather than use simple words effectively, they used big ones and used complicated sentences.  It was like gazing at a stone. The first books I ever read were eyewitness accounts of World War II by war correspondents – books about bloody Pacific battles like Tarawa. I loved them and still do.

So the basic rule for you is, read what interests you, not what someone has told you to read.  A very famous poet named Samuel Johnson used to read a book by paging through it and only started to read when he came across something interesting. That is a good rule to follow. (When a friend asked Johnson about his reading, Johnson replied, “So you really finish books?” He seemed surprised.)

You read a book for a reason. Knowledge from books is like a spot of dye.  It drips into water and it expands and spreads its color. That is what reading does for you – it is that spot of dye. It spreads. It stirs curiosity, helps you discover connections between what you are reading to what you haven’t read, and helps you determine what is true from what is false.

Some people feel reading isn’t practical – why are you outside doing something rather than read? Well, reading is an act, just like chopping wood. Don’t believe anyone who tells you differently.

The events of your own personal life will give you subjects to write about. There is something called “direct experience, and there is “indirect experience.”  Reading is an indirect experience. Most of your valued knowledge will come from indirect experience. A great statesman once said, “Any fool can learn from experience, but the real gift is to learn from others’ experience.” Determine not to be a fool.

Language in Your Life 

All sorts of things are going to happen to you – the unfairness of parents, the bored tyranny of bad teachers, the torments of bullies, death, the joy of friendship and love. But there is greater range of things in your life to which you should try and pay attention if you want to develop your mind. You are a creature of physical perceptions: You see. You hear, you feel. All knowledge comes from these. One of the most important is to train your eyes to see –see, not what other people say you saw or perhaps would have seen, but to learn to express in words what you actually saw. So begin by seeing.

Remember, the first word or expression that comes to your mind is not your own. The first words that occur when you try and describe your own life will come from your friends, neighbors, relatives, from parents, teachers, clergymen. Their words are not your words. You have to avoid their words.

Most ordinary people are mentally lazy. This does not mean they are not good people. It doesn’t mean they are not skilled at their jobs or faithful in attending church or they are not kind or thoughtful parents. It just means they have, over time, been reduced to saying whatever everyone else says. They say what they have been told to say without thinking about whether such words are truly accurate to what they are truly feeling.  Most people don’t ask if such words truly convey and depict the actual sight of the thing. 

 

A Yuletide Omnibus

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long:

And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,

The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,

No fairy takes nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.

-Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1

For your Yuletide enjoyment, here are a few Christmas-themed short stories suitable for those long evenings sitting by the inglenook (courtesy of eastoftheweb.com):

A Kidnapped Santa Claus . . . L. Frank Baum  One might think that Santa Claus would have no enemies on all the earth - and for a long time, he didn't ... then the Daemons came along. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle . . . Arthur Conan Doyle  A Christmas mystery for detective Sherlock Holmes beginning with a lost hat and an abandoned goose. How Santa Claus Came To Simpson's Bar . . . Bret Harte  On Christmas Eve in a remote settlement cut off by heavy flooding, a group of men pay a visit to a deprived boy. The Fir Tree . . . Hans Christian Andersen  Fairy tale about a little fir tree that wants to grow up. The Gift of the Magi . . . O. Henry  A tragic, ironic Christmas for one hard up couple. Markheim . . . Robert Louis Stevenson  Markeim arrives at an antique dealer's on Christmas day, ostensibly to buy a present for a lady. A tale of evil and its nature. Bertie's Christmas Eve . . . Saki  Bertie Steffink takes action against his disapproving relatives. Captain Eli's Best Ear . . . Frank Stockton  Two reclusive, retired ship's Captains decide to celebrate Christmas for the first time in years. And a few favorites of my own: The Burglar's Christmas- Willa Cather At Christmas Time- Anton Chekhov A Child's Christmas In Wales- Dylan Thomas A Christmas Memory- Truman Capote A Miserable Merry Christmas- Lincoln Steffens One Christmas Eve- Langston Hughes Susie’s Letter from Santa- Mark Twain Our Lady's Juggler- Anatole France A Christmas Dream and How It Came True- Louisa May Alcott The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton (from The Pickwick Papers)- Charles Dickens Christmas With Queen Bess (from Master Skylark)- John Bennett Dancing Dan's Christmas- Damon Runyon (added to list via comment thread- thanks, Dave)   Christmas Eve at Sea A wind is rustling "south and soft," Cooing a quiet country tune. The calm sea sighs, and far aloft the sails are ghostly in the moon. Unquiet ripples lisp and purr, A block there pipes and chirps i' the sheave, The wheel-ropes jar, the reef-points stir Faintly --and it is Christmas Eve. The hushed sea seems to hold her breath, and o'er the giddy, swaying spars, Silent and excellent as Death, The dim blue skies are bright with stars. Dear God -- they shone in Palestine Like this, and yon pale moon serene Looked down among the lowing kine On Mary and the Nazarene. The angels called from deep to deep, The burning heavens felt the thrill, startling the flocks of silly sheep And lonely shepherds on the hill. To-night beneath the dripping bows where flashing bubbles burst and throng, The bow-wash murmurs and sighs and soughs A message from the angels' song. The moon goes nodding down the west, The drowsy helmsman strikes the bell; Rex Judaorum natus est, I charge you, brothers, sing Nowell, Nowell, Rex Judaorum natus est. -John Masefield       Christmas! 'Tis the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial fire of charity in the heart. -Washington Irving

Wishing You All A Joyous Holiday Season!

-Maureen Lang

The List

After reading all the messages that I have received as suggestions, I find that picking "winners" is beyond my "pay grade."  Send in your lists again as comments to this post and we will have them all.  pl