Dan Barry – The NY Times

Taking Books Far and Wide, on the Road Less Traveled By  (Lovely!) Keep truckin’ Dan….

February 4, 2007

This Land

Taking Books Far and Wide, on the Road Less Traveled By

By DAN BARRY

CIMARRON, N.M.

It takes its time in rousing, in shaking the winter morning chill from its streamlined hull. Soon, though, mechanical hums and harrumphs are disturbing the off-season silence in this Old West town, as the rural bookmobile announces its readiness to roll.

Loaded down with a kind of lightness, a cargo of imagery and simile, the bus of books grunts forward and turns west onto Highway 68. It passes the turnoff for the St. James Hotel, where the gunfighter Clay Allison was known for never killing a man unless he needed killing, and eases into the serene remoteness of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Tucked amid the pinyon trees, close to the Rio Grande, live people in out-of-the-way places who want to read what new intrigue John le Carré has conjured. They want to read why Ann Coulter seems to reside in a state of perpetual pique, or how best to care for their African gray parrots, or what life’s lesson Oliver Pig is learning this time.

These are the goods that Betty Palmer, librarian and grandmother, trucks through the mountains, with a dedication as firm as her grip on the oversize wheel. Gone are the nightmares she used to have about driving a 13-ton bus through challenging terrain. She guns the motor with a foot ensconced in a Skechers sneaker and says, “Books just energize me.”

In ascent, the bus pants a trail of diesel exhaust. In descent, its pencil drawer slams against the back of the driver’s seat. Up or down, the fly swatter dangling from a hook swings like a metronome. But the 3,500 books, arranged on slanted shelves, never shift.

Ms. Palmer operates the bookmobile with two colleagues. Three Tuesdays a month, one minds the Cimarron library while the other two set out for parts of northeastern New Mexico far enough to require overnight bags. On this trip, as is their custom, Ms. Palmer and another librarian, Leroy Chavez, have rooms booked for two nights at a Super 8 motel in Taos.

She is 58, with blondish hair, eyeglasses and a compulsion to wipe the book jackets with Windex. He is 54, with a wiry frame, a teaching career ended by heart attack, and a fondness for eating M&M’s on the road. No, they both say, they never tire of the job, the travel or the scenery.

Today’s first of five stops is in a blink of a place called Rinconada. Ms. Palmer steers the bookmobile into the parking lot of a health clinic. A white-haired woman sits in a Honda Accord, waiting. “That’s Charlotte,” the librarian says.

Ms. Palmer flicks three switches to start the generator, activate the overhead lights and unfold steps to the ground. Then she opens the door.

Instantly, rumbling bus becomes quiet library. People cock their heads in that unnatural way seen only around book stacks, and Mr. Chavez seals the contract between state and reader with stamps on the checkout cards of books: MAR 06 2007.

Charlotte Champerlin, the patron who had been waiting patiently, returns four novels that she has carried in a canvas bag. She is a retired midwife who delivered a lot of babies and has had, she says, “a good life.” She chats with Ms. Palmer about an ailing mutual friend, checks out several books and pauses a moment to explain the importance of the bookmobile.

“I read a lot and I’m alone,” Ms. Champerlin says, her bag filled with fresh books. “When you’re alone, you read a lot.”

The bookmobile lumbers back onto Highway 68, its engine’s roar so loud that Ms. Palmer must breach librarian etiquette and raise her voice to be heard. A 1998 Blue Bird, one of four the New Mexico State Library has on the road, this bus has traveled nearly 165,000 miles but is now on its final voyage in the name of literature.

The next week Ms. Palmer will receive a new, much quieter bus, one with a bathroom and space for a microwave oven. She cannot wait, of course, but with maternal affection she looks down at the wheel of this old workhorse to share the assurance that “it’s been a very good vehicle.”

The bookmobile makes its rounds — a Head Start school in Velarde, a post office in Alcalde, another one in Dixon — all the while rolling past a landscape almost beyond any book’s words. Mesas that resemble massive, futuristic tables. Bare apple trees with branches extended in hallelujah praise. The Rio Grande, now calm, now churning.

Late on this day, a day on which 30 patrons will have entered and 173 books will have left, the bus comes to its last stop: the desolate parking lot of St. Anthony Catholic Church in Peñasco, where an American flag flaps not far from a compact cemetery. Soon cars pull up to the large vehicle, looking like curious fish beside a whale.

In comes Sean Kelly, a United States Forest Service employee, who needs a book about puppy care because his dog is about to have a litter. In comes Helen Graves, who always brings a snack for the librarians; this time it’s two bananas and two cans of Dr Pepper. In comes Theresa Velarde, who rejoices in the mobile library because its contents “keep us busy on those long winter nights.”

Suddenly, things are crowded in the bookmobile, now aglow in the descending dusk. The patrons tilt heads and the librarians stamp cards, all inside this bus humming like a living, breathing thing.

Online: Additional photographs and audio from a mobile library in New Mexico: nytimes.com/danbarry.

 

NY Times 2-4-07

 One of my favorite writers - I particularly loved her letters,”The Habit of Being.” Here is a link to her complete stories.

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February 4, 2007 

In Search of Flannery O’Connor

By LAWRENCE DOWNES

THE sun was white above the trees, and sinking fast. I was a few miles past Milledgeville, Ga., somewhere outside of Toomsboro, on a two-lane highway that rose and plunged and twisted through red clay hills and pine woods. I had no fixed destination, just a plan to follow a back road to some weedy field in time to watch the sun go down on Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia.

Somewhere outside Toomsboro is where, in O’Connor’s best-known short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a family has a car accident and a tiresome old grandmother has an epiphany. The fog of petty selfishness that has shrouded her life clears when she feels a sudden spasm of kindness for a stranger, a brooding prison escapee who calls himself the Misfit.

Of course, that’s also the moment that he shoots her in the chest, but in O’Connor’s world, where good and evil are as real as a spreading puddle of blood, it amounts to a happy ending. The grandmother is touched by grace at the last possible moment, and she dies smiling.

“She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

O’Connor’s short stories and novels are set in a rural South where people know their places, mind their manners and do horrible things to one another. It’s a place that somehow hovers outside of time, where both the New Deal and the New Testament feel like recent history. It’s soaked in violence and humor, in sin and in God. He may have fled the modern world, but in O’Connor’s he sticks around, in the sun hanging over the tree line, in the trees and farm beasts, and in the characters who roost in the memory like gargoyles. It’s a land haunted by Christ — not your friendly hug-me Jesus, but a ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of the mind, pursuing the unwilling.

Many people — me for instance — are in turn haunted by O’Connor. Her doctrinally strict, mordantly funny stories and novels are as close to perfect as writing gets. Her language is so spare and efficient, her images and character’s speech so vivid, they burn into the mind. Her strange Southern landscape was one I knew viscerally but, until this trip, had never set foot in. I had wondered how her fictional terrain and characters, so bizarre yet so blindingly real, might compare with the real places and people she lived among and wrote about.

Hence my pilgrimage to Milledgeville this fall, and my race against the setting sun.

O’Connor’s characters shimmer between heaven and hell, acting out allegorical dramas of sin and redemption. There’s Hazel Motes, the sunken-eyed Army veteran who tries to reject God by preaching “the Church of Christ Without Christ, where the blind don’t see, the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” Hulga Hopewell, the deluded intellectual who loses her wooden leg to a thieving Bible salesman she had assumed was as dumb as a stump. The pious Mrs. Turpin, whose heart pours out thank-yous to Jesus for not having made her black or white trash or ugly. Mrs. Freeman, the universal busybody: “Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings.”

People like these can’t be real, and yet they breathe on the page. And there is nothing allegorical about the earthly stage they strut on: It’s the red clay of central Georgia, in and around Milledgeville, where O’Connor spent most of her short life. She lived with her widowed mother on the family farm, called Andalusia, just outside Milledgeville, writing and raising peacocks and chickens from 1951 until her death in 1964 at age 39, of lupus.

O’Connor was a misfit herself, as a Roman Catholic in the Bible Belt, a religiously devout ironist writing for nonbelievers. She liked to gently mock the redneckedness of her surroundings. “When in Rome,” she once wrote, “do as you done in Milledgeville.”

But Milledgeville is not the backwoods. It’s a city of 19,000, on the Oconee River in Baldwin County, 30 miles from Macon. It is the former capital of Georgia, trashed by General Sherman on his March to the Sea. It has a huge state psychiatric hospital and a prominent liberal-arts college, Georgia College and State University. The old Capitol building is now home to a military school. There is a district of big antebellum homes with columns and fussy flowerbeds. Oliver Hardy lived here when he was young and fat but not yet famous.

Milledgeville now looms huge beyond these modest attributes because of O’Connor, or Mary Flannery, as she was known in town. Her output was slender: two novels, a couple dozen short stories, a pile of letters, essays and criticism. But her reputation has grown steadily since she died. Her “Complete Stories” won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1971. Her collected letters, “The Habit of Being,” banished the misperception that she was some sort of crippled hillbilly Emily Dickinson. They revealed instead a gregarious, engaged thinker who corresponded widely and eagerly, and who might have ranged far had illness not forced her to stay home and write.

O’Connor’s own trail begins about 200 miles southeast of Milledgeville, in Savannah, where she was born and spent her childhood among a community of Irish Roman Catholics, of whom her parents, Edward and Regina Cline O’Connor, were prominent members. The O’Connor home, on a mossy historic square downtown, is landmarked and has been closed for renovations, but is reopening for public tours in April. The Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Baptist is across the square, although nothing in it informs a visitor that one of the country’s most prominent apologists for the Catholic faith worshiped and went to parochial school there.

O’Connor learned her craft at the University of Iowa and at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. She lived for a while in Connecticut with the poet Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally, and thought she was leaving the South behind.

But she got sick, and went home to Andalusia, four miles north of Milledgeville.

Andalusia was a working dairy farm run by Flannery’s mother, Regina, who as a prominent widow businesswoman was something of a novelty in town. No one has lived there since O’Connor died in 1964 and Regina moved back into downtown Milledgeville.

Strip malls have long since filled the gap between town and farm, and you now find Andalusia by driving past a Wal-Mart, a Chik-fil-A and a Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, where a man shot his wife and killed himself a few days before I arrived. You pass a billboard for Sister Nina, a fortune teller who reads palms in a home office cluttered with votive candles and pictures of Catholic saints. (To judge from one consultation, she is capable of divining that a visitor is a bearer of dark sorrows, but not exactly skilled at pinpointing what those sorrows might be.)

Across the highway from an America’s Best Value Inn, a tiny sign marks the dirt road to Andalusia. I turned left, went through an open gate and there it was, a two-story white frame house with a columns and brick steps leading up to a wide screened porch. Through the screens I could see a long, tidy row of white rocking chairs.

I drove around back, between the magnolia and pecan trees, parked on the grass and walked back to the house past a wooden water tower and an ancient garage, splintered and falling in on itself.

I was met at the door by Craig R. Amason, the executive director of the Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation, the nonprofit organization set up to sustain her memory and preserve her home. When the affable Mr. Amason, the foundation’s sole employee, is not showing pilgrims around, he is raising money to fix up the place, a project that is a few million dollars short of its goal. The foundation urgently wants to restore the house and outbuildings to postcard-perfection, to insure its survival. Last year the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation placed Andalusia on its list of most endangered places in the state.

For now, the 21-acre property is in a captivating state of decay.

There is no slow buildup on this tour; the final destination is the first doorway on your left: O’Connor’s bedroom and study, converted from a sitting room because she couldn’t climb the stairs. Mr. Amason stood back, politely granting me silence as I gathered my thoughts and drank in every detail.

This is where O’Connor wrote, for three hours every day. Her bed had a faded blue-and-white coverlet. The blue drapes, in a 1950’s pattern, were dingy, and the paint was flaking off the walls. There was a portable typewriter, a hi-fi with classical LPs, a few bookcases. Leaning against an armoire were the aluminum crutches that O’Connor used, with her rashy swollen legs and crumbling bones, to get from bedroom to kitchen to porch.

There are few opportunities for so intimate and unguarded a glimpse into the private life of a great American writer. Mr. Amason told me that visitors sometimes wept on the bedroom threshold.

The center hall’s cracked plaster walls held a few family photographs: an adorable Flannery, age 3, scowling at a picture book, and her smiling older self on an adjacent wall. There was a picture of Edward O’Connor, but none of Regina, who died in 1995 at 99. In the kitchen, an old electric range with fat heating elements sat near a chunky refrigerator, the very one Flannery bought for her mother after selling the rights to “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” for a TV movie in which Gene Kelly butchered the role of the con man Tom T. Shiftlet. In the center of the room, a small wooden table was set for two.

A walk around the grounds summoned all manner of O’Connor images. In a field of goldenrod, a lone hinny, a horse-donkey hybrid named Flossie, with grotesque clumps of fat on her rump, kept a reserved distance. I followed a path below the house down to a pond buzzing with dragonflies. Mr. Amason had told me to keep to the mowed areas to avoid snakes, so I wasn’t too surprised to encounter a black rat snake, stretched out like a five-foot length of industrial cable, by a footbridge at the far edge of the pond. I tickled it with a turkey feather and it curled to strike faster than I could blink.

Back in Milledgeville’s tidy downtown, I went to Georgia College and State University, which was Georgia State College for Women when O’Connor went there. The library displays her desk, paintings and other artifacts, and a librarian took me in the back to see her papers and books — a daunting array of fiction, classics and Catholic theology. The book of Updike’s poetry looked well read, but not as much as the Kierkegaard (“Fear and Trembling” and “The Sickness Unto Death”), whose binding was falling off.

I found Sacred Heart Church, where Flannery and Regina worshiped, and was amazed when the pastor, the Rev. Michael McWhorter, suggested that I come back the next morning for the funeral service of O’Connor’s first cousin Catherine Florencourt Firth, whose ashes were coming home from Arizona. I sat quietly in a back row, then shrank into my jacket when Father McWhorter announced my presence from the pulpit. But the mourners, clearly accustomed to Flannery admirers, nodded graciously at me. The pastor had a shiny round head and tidy beard, and applied incense with medieval vigor, sending curls of sweet smoke around Mrs. Firth’s urn until the tiny sanctuary was entirely fogged in.

I am not accustomed to crashing funerals, so I did not linger afterward. I was grateful for the kind offers from Mrs. Firth’s relations to come back and visit longer next time.

My last stop was also O’Connor’s: Memory Hill Cemetery, in the middle of town, where mother, father and daughter lie side by side by side under identical flat marble slabs. A state prison detail was prowling the grounds, trimming hedges. They had sloppily strewn oleander branches on Flannery’s grave, which I brushed clean. I found a plastic bouquet to place at its head. I looked at the dates:

“March 25, 1925 — August 3, 1964″

She died young, but not without saying what she wanted to say. I thought back to my journey the night before, when I captured the O’Connor sunset I had been looking for. I found a road that led down to the edge of a kaolin mine. Standing beside huge mounds of white chalky dirt, surrounded by deep treads left in the red clay by earth-moving machinery, I watched as a sentence from one of my favorite stories, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” slowly unfolded, as if for me alone:

“The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.”

By the road’s edge I spied an unusual-looking vine. It was passion flower, with purple blossoms that look like a crown of thorns, and the nails for Christ’s hands and feet. I picked a bunch of strands, with their immature fruit, like little green boiled eggs, and got back onto the road to Milledgeville, under a blackening sky, to put them in some water.

VISITOR INFORMATION

WHERE TO STAY

Milledgeville has a lot of chain motels, but only one Antebellum Inn (200 North Columbia Street; 478-454-5400; www.antebelluminn.com), a stately bed-and-breakfast with big white columns, dark woodwork and four-poster beds with flowery linens. A co-owner, Jane Lorenz, is from Hawaii, a Southern state legendary for its hospitality, and when I stayed there the house echoed with sweet Hawaiian slack-key guitar music. Doubles from $99.

In Savannah, the Hamilton-Turner Inn (330 Abercorn Street; 912-233-1833; www.hamilton-turnerinn.com) occupies a corner of Lafayette Square, near O’Connor’s childhood home. Rooms are named for famous Savannah personalities. The Flannery O’Connor room (with whirlpool spa) was taken during my visit, so I settled for the Casimir Pulaski. Doubles from $179.

WHERE TO EAT

Sylvia’s Grille (2600 North Columbia Street; 478-452-4444; www.sylviasgrille.com) is steps from Andalusia’s driveway, in a Wal-Mart shopping plaza, but it’s no chain restaurant. It has wine tastings, live music and dishes like duck confit and cioppino. Lunch every day and dinner every day but Sunday. Dinner for two with wine is about $50.

Little Tokyo Steak House and Sushi Bar (2601 North Columbia Street; 478-452-8886) serves grilled steak and seafood and impressive sushi, which says as much about the worldliness of little Milledgeville as you need to know. Open for lunch every day but Saturday; dinner every day, for about $60, with sake or wine.

Firefly Cafe (321 Habersham Street; 912-234-1971), in Savannah, serves breakfast, lunch and dinner and weekend brunch. An unassuming place with delicious food, especially the corn chowder with crab and the cranberry-pecan-spinach salad. Dinner for two with wine is about $60.

WHAT TO DO

Andalusia (2628 North Columbia Street; 478-454-4029; www.andalusiafarm.org) is open for tours on Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and by appointment seven days a week. The 21-acre farm complex includes buildings in varying states of authentic decay, a pond, wild turkeys and snakes. The gift shop sells O’Connor’s works, bumper stickers (“I’d Rather Be Reading Flannery O’Connor”) and cards bearing O’Connor epigrams, intricately lettered by her first cousin Frances Florencourt. My favorite: “Total nonretention has kept my education from being a burden to me.”

Sacred Heart Catholic Church (110 North Jefferson Street NE; 478-452-2421), where O’Connor and her mother worshiped. Sunday Masses are at 9 and 11:15 a.m. and 5 p.m.

O’Connor’s grave at Memory Hill Cemetery (300 West Franklin Street; www.friendsofcems.org/memoryhill) is on the east side in Section A, Lot 39. The cemetery is also the final resting place of Congressman Carl Vinson and of Edwin F. Jemison, the scrawny Confederate soldier whose doleful portrait is one of the best-known Civil War photographs.

Sister Nina (3054 North Columbia Street; 478-453-8288) offers crystals, palm and tarot readings by appointment.

The Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home (207 East Charlton Street, Savannah; 912-233-6014; www.flanneryoconnorhome.org), now closed for renovation, is to reopen in April.

WHAT TO READ

O’Connor’s short stories and two novels, “Wise Blood” and “The Violent Bear It Away,” appear in numerous paperback editions and the Library of America has published her collected works. “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose” includes essays and lectures in which O’Connor gives a reader invaluable insight into what she’s doing. An essential companion is “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor,” which is literate, self-deprecating and deadly funny.

In Milledgeville, you might want to prowl garage sales for signed first editions of “Wise Blood,” her first novel, which scandalized the society ladies of Milledgeville in 1952. They never expected young Mary Flannery to write such a strange book full of grotesque violence and occasional s-e-x. Craig R. Amason, a local expert on O’Connor, suspects that after the book signings and teas, quite a few copies ended up in attics, unread.

LAWRENCE DOWNES is an editorial writer at The Times.

 

What a wonderful woman…

The NY Times:

Molly Ivins, Columnist, Dies at 62:

Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died yesterday in Austin. She was 62…..

 

NY Times – Opinion Page

I thought this was worth passing along – One sports icon without all the super star baggage…
February 1, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

Why We Mourn Barbaro – By JEFF NEUMAN

HE never talked about himself in the third person.

He didn’t trash-talk, taunt or hang on the rim. Down the stretch of the Kentucky Derby, he didn’t turn and point at Bluegrass Cat, and he didn’t somersault over the finish line. After crossing the line, he didn’t pull out a Sharpie and autograph his saddle for his business manager.

He never referred to his handlers as “my supporting cast.”

He never tried to renegotiate his contract. He never turned down an eight-figure offer by saying, “I’ve got a family to feed, man.”

His only tattoo was discreetly hidden.

He did no commercials for cellphone plans, credit cards, fast food chains or time shares.

He never had his agent issue a statement in which he apologized “if anybody took my actions the wrong way.”

He never appeared before a Congressional committee and lied about his steroid use.

He never dated Paris Hilton.

He was never involved in an altercation with a belligerent fan outside a club at 4 in the morning. He was never arrested for drunken driving. He did not own an unregistered handgun.

He never claimed he’d been disrespected. He never left his competitors in the dust and then said, ”I didn’t have my A game.” He did not attribute his victories to the glory of his personal Savior.

Isiah Thomas never tried to trade for him.

He was never a presenter at the ESPYs.

He never claimed he was misquoted in his autobiography. He never confessed to a double murder in the subjunctive tense.

He trained, ate and slept. He ran his races, gave his best effort, accepted plaudits graciously, went back to his stall and prepared to do it again the next time out.

He never fathered multiple offspring out of wedlock. Alas.

Jeff Neuman is the co-author of “A Disorderly Compendium of Golf.”

 

As I see it – 2

 In the comments section for this post, tell us what bird you would be…

A friend asked what kind of bird I would be after reading my poem on death in the post “As I see it.” I’ve thought about that, and would probably be an eagle (they fly the highest) or a wild goose:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver (A link to a lovely page with the poem)

…Or maybe just a sparrow. They are the hardiest.

 

Some poets I like

A favorite poet – Gerard Manley Hopkins

Some others:

Mary Oliver

Rudyard Kipling

T.S. Eliot

Billy Collins

 

As I see it…

So maybe the next stage after walking on the earth is the gift of flight. Ah, it’s all bullshit. But it’s something to think about, isn’t it? – Russell Crowe (source – A 2000 press conference)

When I die
My soul will perch on the windowsill
And then take
off,
Light as a bird’s feather,
Laughing and full of joy,
Through the
trees,
Above the houses,
Past the stars,
Wheeling and twirling
To
eternity.

Murph

 

Corinthians

“Love is patient; love is kind
and envies no one.
Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude;
never selfish, not quick to take offense.
There is nothing love cannot face;
there is no limit to its faith,
its hope, and endurance.
In a word, there are three things
that last forever: faith, hope, and love;
but the greatest of them all is love.”

 

This is funny – and appropriate (Thanks to an EZ Board):

 

The Herman Melville Eagle

From The wonderful Heron Dance Company – Their Poetry Diary for 2007