This evening I inadvertently crossed another project off the To Do list. I was looking for an air purifier — we have two — and thought it might be in the coat closet.
Our coat closet is that sort with the horribly dated bifolding doors. (I wonder if I can put a bookcase door in there one day when I win the lottery …) It holds a lot of coats. Critically, it holds a lot of board games, too. And also a shoe caddy, an empty box and a picnic setup. Also space heater, a box fan, and three little containers of things like gloves and scarves. But there was no air purifier.
Oh sure, the new one was in the box in the laundry room, where I’d stored it. The other was … upstairs. So present and accounted for. And that closet got cleaned. And by cleaned I mean straightened up, and removed the empty box and box fan.
So the day was, in fact, productive. One closet to go. Maybe next week.
Also, I added 10 more pairs of cufflinks to the collection this evening.
I’m not sure how long it takes to make these in small batches. But it’s long enough to wonder how many more I should make. As I’ve mentioned here, I’m in a hot dog and bun situation as it pertains to the supplies — parts and material vs storage. Right now, I have a lot more storage than bits. So the solution, clearly, is to get more bits.
And, of course, french cuffs. It always comes down to that.
Mel Brooks wrote a book, and that’s not the name of it. It could have been the name of it. But they went another way for this light and breezy read.
The best title would have been Mel Brooks Needs An Editor. The beloved comedian and filmmaker, who is turning 99 later this month, tells us a few tales of his young life, how he got started with Sid Caesar and then diligently works through his better known move projects, organized by chapter. It wanders around, but you indulge it because there’s a lot of joy there, and it’s a beloved older man and there’s probably something good coming.
A lot of the magic of his work, I’ve decided here, is in the performance. The writing is a little more flat than he would delivery it. But that’s probably how I read.
I was telling a friend about this, who sent me this link, which is a joyful little watch. And I was glad for it. Because it’s basically chronological, this performance winds up near the end. But, just for now, look at the joy on the man’s face. It’s beautiful.
It’s a decent little beach read. (Just try to not think too hard about whether or not Brooks is largely the person to blame for our remix culture.) It moves fast, and you’ll work your way through it wondering if he’s going to mention that specific gag, bit or punchline that always sticks with you. If that’s what you’re after, this book is ready for you.
It’s rained all day. It started last night. A nice, light, mild rain. It was almost polite, this rain. And it’s continued like that. Presumably it fell overnight, politely. And it has done so all day today, a considerate guest, happy to entertain and also to leave the soil damp, and the grass greener.
It has also cooled everything considerably. We didn’t hit the 60s today … that’s company for ya. We’re due more rain the rest of the week, but it starts warming up a bit tomorrow. And, next week, summer arrives.
But, today, I’ve spent some of the time enjoying the view. And drawing up plans for the fall term. (I now have two weeks of one class mapped out in my mind!)
Also, I made a few more cufflinks today. I have all the materials here, but have been holding off for the summer time. I figure I’ll do a few at a time.
Also, I have a lot of cufflinks.
In a few minutes, I’m going to iron some pocket squares. (So, by Friday, I’ll be on to cleaning closets. I really need it to warm up, and/or to get my bike back on the road.) I have even more pocket squares.
But, first, let’s check in on the kitties, since they are the stars of the site’s most popular regular feature. It is pretty easy to see why. Phoebe is just posing it up on the stairs.
Poseidon has no time to pose, he’s too busy using his nose.
Yesterday afternoon, this was on the porch. Ordinarily we buy this at the store, but my lovely bride told me she found a great deal online. Then she told me the details and the prices were so low they must have been ~INSANE!~ Or something. That’s all great, but every one of those things is 42 pounds.
Someone had to carry those around the corner to the porch. I love saving money, and I’m happy when we buy in bulk. But, as I moved those bags in from the porch, and then through the hallway, laundry and into storage in the garage, I was offering silent apologies to the delivery person.
This weekend I finished Molly Manning‘s War of Words. She’s the law school professor and best selling author of three mid-century histories. I bought this one in 2023, and finally opened it on the Kindle on Friday night.
It is a well researched, and very breezy look at the efforts of giving reading materials to the citizen soldiers of World War II.
Perhaps the most important letter to the editor that Yank dared publish came in April 1944, when Corporal Rupert Trimmingham shared a story about a cross-country trip he took with eight other Black soldiers on army business. They traveled from their home base of Fort Huachuca, Arizona, to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana.
In Arizona, Fort Huachuca was a source of pride. As the Arizona Republic reported in 1942, the fort was “home of the splendid 93rd Infantry Division, [the] first all-colored division to be organized in World War II,” and “one learns in a hurry at Arizona’s Fort Huachuca” that “America’s colored citizens . . . make some of the nation’s finest and most efficient fighting troops.” Trimmingham, used to Arizona’s customs and attitude toward Black troops, was amazed by how differently he was treated by the Camp Claiborne community.
According to Trimmingham, after a one-night layover in Louisiana, he and his fellow soldiers discovered that “we could not purchase a cup of coffee at any of the lunchrooms” because, “as you know, Old Man Jim Crow rules.” Trimmingham continued:
The only place where we could be served was at the lunchroom at the railroad station but, of course, we had to go into the kitchen. But that’s not all; 11:30 A.M. about two dozen German prisoners of war, with two American guards, came to the station. They entered the lunchroom, sat at the tables, had their meals served, talked, smoked, in fact had quite a swell time. I stood on the outside looking on, and I could not help but ask myself these questions: Are these men sworn enemies of this country? Are they not taught to hate and destroy … all democratic governments? Are we not American soldiers, sworn to fight for and die if need be for this our country? Then why are they treated better than we are? Why are we pushed around like cattle? If we are fighting for the same thing, if we are going to die for our country, then why does the Government allow such things to go on?
And so Trimmingham closed his letter to Yank by asking a question that “each Negro soldier is asking. What is the Negro soldier fighting for?”
When Yank published Trimmingham’s story, a flood of letters poured into Yank’s mailbox. Nearly every message to Yank spoke to the indefensibility of treating enemy combatants with greater respect and courtesy than a fellow American. “Gentlemen, I am a Southern rebel,” a letter by Corporal Henry S. Wooten Jr., began. “But this incident makes me none the more proud of my Southern heritage!” Wooten continued:
Frankly, I think that this incident is a disgrace to a democratic nation such as ours is supposed to be. Are we fighting for such a thing as this? Certainly not. If this incident is democracy, I don’t want any part of it! … I wonder what the “Aryan supermen” think when they get a first-hand glimpse of our racial discrimination. Are we not waging a war, in part, for this fundamental of democracy? In closing, let me say that a lot of us, especially in the South, should cast the beam out of our own eyes before we try to do so in others, across the sea.
Hundreds of letters agreed with Wooten’s sentiments.
Sergeant Arthur Kaplan complimented Yank for printing Trimmingham’s letter and said, “It seems incredible that German prisoners of war should be afforded the amenities while our own men—in uniform and changing stations—are denied similar attention because of color … What sort of deal is this?”
“I’m not a Negro, but I’ve been around and know what the score is. I want to thank the YANK . . . and congratulate Cpl. Rupert Trimmingham,” wrote Private Gustave Santiago.
One missive, signed by an entire outfit, laid bare the hypocrisy of the army’s policy on racial segregation and the government’s claim that this was a war for freedom. The unit explained, “We are white soldiers in the Burma jungles, and there are many Negro outfits working with us. They are doing more than their part to win this war. We are proud of the colored men here,” they said, and “it is a disgrace that, while we are away from home doing our part to help win the war, some people back home are knocking down everything that we are fighting for.” Ironically, this letter remarked that soldiers from other Allied nations had marveled at the racial diversity of the United States Army and how all troops worked cohesively together. Were they masquerading a lie? It angered them to know that German soldiers were being treated better at home “than the soldier of our country, because of race.” The letter closed by stating, “Cpl. Trimmingham asked: What is the Negro fighting for? If this sort of thing continues, we the white soldiers will begin to wonder: What are we fighting for?”
Trimmingham’s letter provoked such outrage that it commanded the attention of the home front. The New Yorker published a fictionalized account of Trimmingham’s story in June 1944, which was reproduced repeatedly in the New Yorker’s books of “war stories” over the following decades. A dramatic skit about Trimmingham’s story was aired on national radio. And when Yank produced a volume of its best stories, Trimmingham and the letters responding to Trimmingham’s letter were included.
Months after his original letter was published, Trimmingham appeared in the pages of Yank again. “Allow me to thank you for publishing my letter,” he began. Every day brought a fresh batch of letters from fellow soldiers, many from “the Deep South,” who condemned the treatment he had received. “It gives me new hope to realize that there are doubtless thousands of whites who are willing to fight this Frankenstein that so many white people are keeping alive.” If white allies would “stand up, join with us, and help us prove to their white friends that we are worthy, I’m sure that we would bury race hate and unfair treatment,” Trimmingham said.
Here are Trimmingham’s letters, which are often held up as important sequence of events in the eventual integration of the United States military. As a soldier, Trimmingham served as an electrician in the Army Corps of Engineers. Born in Trinidad, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1925. After the war he went to work for Singer Sewing in Indiana and became naturalized citizen in 1950. He lived the last 30 years of his life in Michigan, where he died in 1985.
There’s a part of one chapter covering publications initially aimed at WACs. It seemed that two things were true, a lot of people resented WACs serving in a time of war. And a lot of male soldiers were reading women’s magazines.
Given male troops’ appetites for women’s periodicals, it was a sound conclusion that WACs would not be the only ones reading the magazines and newspapers that were being printed by and for them. And if more men read serious articles about the important war work the WACs were doing, the animosity most male soldiers felt for the WACs might dissipate.
And thus, in lieu of the Stars and Stripes, there was the Service Woman newspaper, which covered stories about women serving in the army, navy, marines, coast guard, army nurse corps, and navy nurse corps. Its coverage was comprehensive and showcased the importance of the work being done by women—from saving lives in combat zones to enduring long periods of captivity as prisoners of war. Those in the European theater replaced Yank with Overseas Woman. This magazine reported on WAC scientists, female doctors, and women who were test pilots for the Army Air Corps. Articles explored what work might be available to women after the war and how the war might change traditional gender stereotypes. Rather than read what men thought women should do, Overseas Woman was an empowering periodical that did not underestimate the intellect or ambition of its readers.
There were also smaller-scale newsletters for individual posts, like Fort Des Moines’ WAC News, which confronted the “malicious and untruthful reports about the Wacs.” One issue included an interview with a civilian correspondent in Algiers, who insisted that “one Wac was doing as much work as two or three men soldiers could do,” and that the correspondent was told by “General Eisenhower and various other officers … that the Wacs were so valuable to the American Army in North Africa that they wished they had ten times as many as were there.” WAC News also had some fun with the army’s double standards, reporting how WACs proudly hung photographs of “pin-up boys” in their bunks. And when the WAC News celebrated its second anniversary in print, Milton Caniff and Sergeant Sansone joined forces to create a congratulatory cartoon featuring their famous characters, Miss Lace and Wolf. Over six thousand copies of the paper were printed, and one thousand were mailed to posts across the world. If anything would lure male readers to this servicewomen’s newsletter, seeing their favorite cartoon characters emblazoned on the front cover was an ingenious ploy.
Here’s a bit more on Miss Lace, which was a big hit with service men, and more on The Wolf.
Another thing you get out of this book is some nice overviews of specific unit newspapers and newsletters. You’re only as good as your source material and in this Manning really proves her work. There were a few thousand publications for the people in uniform, most of them stateside and in Europe (because MacArthur was a thin-skinned egoist). So I looked up the newspaper for the 35th Division, which was where my great-grandfather served, in the 137th Infantry Regiment as a combat medic. I saw a few examples online, and it’s interesting to see how the paper evolves and improves as their circumstance changes. Here’s a rag they put out in December of 1944, just days before the Battle of the Bulge began.
That’s Sgt. Junior Spurrier, who, the next March, would receive the Medal of Honor for what he did in November 1943.
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy at Achain, France, on 13 November 1944. At 2 p.m., Company G attacked the village of Achain from the east. S/Sgt. Spurrier armed with a BAR passed around the village and advanced alone. Attacking from the west, he immediately killed 3 Germans. From this time until dark, S/Sgt. Spurrier, using at different times his BAR and M1 rifle, American and German rocket launchers, a German automatic pistol, and hand grenades, continued his solitary attack against the enemy regardless of all types of small-arms and automatic-weapons fire. As a result of his heroic actions he killed an officer and 24 enlisted men and captured 2 officers and 2 enlisted men. His valor has shed fresh honor on the U.S. Armed Forces.
Spurrier lost a brother in the war, and had his share of struggles when he returned to civilian life. But there’s no getting around what he did when the push was on.
Manning, the book author, has it that there were 4,6000 unique newspapers created, produced and published by soldiers during and around the war. Some of them were made with great skill, and sometimes they were made on the backs of old reports, or with whatever resources they could scrounge together. (It was a war.) She didn’t have them all, of course, but imagine everything we could learn, big and small, if we had copies of all of those little publications. That’s what her book is trying to allude to, and it’s a good read of overlapping interests. And I’ve got another of her books on my Kindle, too. But, first, a funny memoir.
books / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Drear is a word, and you can use it in May 22 May 25
Cold and rainy throughout the day. And yet somehow it was, at times, bright. A bright gray, perhaps. And it wasn’t the coldest day you’ve ever experienced, no. It is May after all. On the other hand, it is May, and it was cold. The kind of cold that you know, right away, if you let it sink into your bones, you’ll have a difficult time shaking it.
So I stayed inside. And shivered.
Tomorrow, we might have some sun and a high of 64. This would be appropriate for the last full week of May.
We’ve not done it, so we must do it. And that thing which we must do is the contractually obligated weekly check-in with the cats. They remain the most popular feature of the site, they know it, and they remind me of it. They are especially adamant when they know they haven’t been featured in a while.
It has been nine days since they’ve graced this spot. So, believe me when I say this, I’m hearing about it.
Now that’s one sleepy kitty!
While Phoebe is trying to hold her head up, Poseidon is holding down his part of the arrangement, guarding the backyard. You can see we’ve upgraded their duty station somewhat, and they’ve started to figure it out.
From there, they can battle the birds, fight off fallen leaves and alert us to any larger critters that come by.
We don’t have a lot of larger critters coming up close to the house. Except in the winter time. Everyone comes around when it snows. I can see the tracks.
Here soon, though, Poe will be watching the deer munching the grass out by the treeline. I wonder if he’ll do that, comfortably from his box, or if he’ll climb on top of it for a more commanding view.
I started a new book last night, which means I should mention the one I just finished. Kate Harris’ debut is a travelogue, an adventure memoir. Published in 2018 to wide acclaim, it was a best seller in Canada, won the prestigious RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and a host of other awards. And if you like the genre, or just get into this, you can see why.
Harris was a Rhodes Scholar, an MIT grad student, but didn’t find that she was suited for the lab. She wanted to go to Mars. Or, really, to be an explorer. Or, more precisely, perhaps, to find herself alone, very much alone, at the top of things. Oh, she’s also a talented writer. She and a childhood friend set out for the old Silk Road and this book is about this 14-month adventure, crossing borders, fighting off thirst, meeting people from drastically different cultures, the sort of thing you’d expect from a travelogue. The kind many people think they would write. But it earns its keep in the little asides she takes throughout.
Besides, the historian William Cronon argues that there is nothing “natural” about wilderness, that it is a deeply human construct, “the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.” Though I might be appalled by Marco Polo’s failure to swoon at mountains and deserts along the Silk Road, wilderness in his day implied all that was dark and devilish beyond the garden walls. The fact that I’m charmed by the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert and the breathtaking expanse of the Tibetan Plateau doesn’t mean I’m more enlightened than Polo, more capable of wonder. It means I hail from a day and age—and a country and culture—so privileged, so assiduously comfortable, that risk and hardship hold rapturous appeal. It probably also means I read too much Thoreau as a teenager. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he wrote, priming me to pine after places as far away from Ballinafad as possible, like Tibet and Mars. Provoking such distant wanderlust was hardly Thoreau’s fault or intention—he himself never travelled beyond North America—but I enthusiastically misread him, conflating wildness with wilderness, substituting a type of place for a state of mind. Cronon finds the whole concept of wilderness troubling for how, among other things, it applies almost exclusively to remote, unpopulated landscapes, fetishizing the exotic at the expense of the everyday, as though nature exists only where humans are not. This language sets up a potentially insidious dualism, for if people see themselves as distinct and separate from the natural world, they believe they risk nothing in destroying it. What Thoreau was really saying was that he’d travelled wildly in Concord, that you can travel wildly just about anywhere. The wildness of a place or experience isn’t in the place or experience, necessarily, but in you—your capacity to see it, feel it. In that sense, biking the Silk Road is an exercise in calibration. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.
Or, after easing their way into Tibet …
It was only late August, but the poplars were already flaring gold. Fallen leaves crunched beneath our wheels, and the paper prayer flags scattered on mountain passes made a similar noise when we biked over them. Tibetans threw the colourful squares into the sky in a bid for good fortune, and if nothing else, this had the immediate effect of collaging a dark road into something brighter. On one pass a bus drove past me just as its passengers threw the papers out the window, so that prayers stormed down all around me. One of them caught on the brim of my helmet without ever hitting the ground. I tucked the gritty, sage-coloured square into my journal for good luck. Depicted on it was a wind horse, or lung ta, a pre-Buddhist symbol for inner wind or positive energy shown as a horse lugging a jewel on its back. When someone’s lung ta decreases, the Tibetans say, they are grounded by negativity, and when lung ta increases they see things more positively and soar. “The very same thought can lead to a state of freedom or to a state of confusion,” wrote a Tibetan monk, “and the direction it takes depends upon lung ta.”
Or this, near the end of the journey …
The edge of winter, the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Mel and I stood shivering in the spot we would’ve landed if we’d kept swimming east that first summer on the Silk Road, a faint slick of sunscreen in our wake. Then again, shortcuts never take you to the same place. Wearing down jackets and pants with the legs rolled up, we shuffled into water so calm and clear it was like wading through air. Ten seconds later we shuffled out again, numb from the shins down. That night we warmed up in the village of Spangmik over a dinner of dal-and-rice with two Indian tourists. All I remember from our conversation was that the men hailed from some massive city, Mumbai or Calcutta, and Pangong Lake was the first place they’d seen stars.
Or this bit, in the epilogue, which is a long way off from where she began, in literary, personal and geographical senses.
With that the woman disappeared into a back room, leaving me stunned at her refusal to take sides. She returned a minute later with some photographs of her own: A family snapshot featuring rows of solemn people wearing dark robes with sleeves so long they hid everyone’s hands. A monastery pearled among gritty mountains. Some kind of Buddhist painting, intricate curves and symbols and patterns rendered in yellow, green, red, white, and blue. “Sand,” the woman clarified. “This is sand.” I’d read about how Buddhist monks painstakingly arrange bits of coloured quartz into a geometric representation of the universe, or mandala, then scatter the art in a gesture of non-attachment. The photograph I held was the sole proof that the sand mandala had ever existed, only the real mandala wasn’t the completed work of art, but its attempt. That act of pure attention, the motion there and away.
And then, every so often, she drops in lines like this, stuff you know that just came to mind somewhere on a dusty mountain pass.
“Every heartbeat is a history of decisions, of certain roads taken and others forsaken until you end up exactly where you are.
It’s hopeful, it’s humble, it’s kind and, in parts, quite funny. For thoughtful wanderlust, pick up Kate Harris‘ Land of Lost Borders.
It’s another day of playing a bit of catch up. Mostly because the day was spent working on stuff sitting at the computer. Dear Diary, today was more grading. That’s not terribly exciting. There’s always something more exciting than that, if you’re willing to look on the bookshelves everywhere around me, or the big stacks of music that are everywhere else.
This weekend I read “The Day The World Came to Town.” I picked it off the Kindle via a random number generator. It was released in 2003, I bought it on a big sale in 2021, and it’s sat there, waiting. And, when I opened it, I didn’t have high expectations.
This is a book about September 11th, and the days that followed, in Gander, Newfoundland.
You’ll recall that one of the things the U.S. did after the planes hit the World Trade Center was to close down American airspace. Every plane had to land at the nearest available, accommodating airport. No mean feat, logistically. This applied to international flights coming over, too. No one knew it at the time, because no one knew much in those first terrible hours, but the military was preparing to shoot down any planes that didn’t comply.
Up there in Newfoundland was a great big airport. They’d had an aeronautical boom during and after World War II. The biggest positive were the very long runways that could allow the biggest planes to takeoff and land. When jets, and their greater range, became the kings of the sky, it became more-or-less obsolete. A small place with no real reason for people to visit.
Then, 38 planes landed there, putting 6,595 people on the ground in a town where fewer than 10,000 people lived. And this book is that story.
And, as I said, I didn’t expect a lot from this book. But this book was good, and really quite charming. It details the people of that community, Gander, and some of the people who couldn’t have found it on a map before September 11th. These people, the Newfies, are really something. For instance:
The biggest problem facing officials was transportation. How do you move almost 7,000 people to shelters, some of which were almost fifty miles outside of town? The logical answer was to use school buses. On September 11, however, Gander was in the midst of a nasty strike by the area’s school-bus drivers.
Amazingly, as soon as the drivers realized was was happening, they laid down their picket signs, setting their own interests aside, and volunteered en masse to work around the clock carrying the passengers wherever they needed to go.
And the whole book is full of this, a parade of regular folks doing the small things that were huge things in such a traumatic moment.
In most cases, the passengers didn’t have their actual prescriptions with them. In each case, O’Brien and the other pharmacists had to call the hometown doctor or pharmacists so they would know the exact medication and dosage, and had a new prescription sent. During one stretch, O’Brien and his wife, Rhonda, worked forty-two hours straight, making calls to a dozen different countries.
Surprisingly, there isn’t one universal standard for identifying drugs. A drug such as Atenol, commonly prescribed to patients with high blood pressure, can go by different names in different countries. A pharmacist for more than twenty years, O’Brien spent hours on the Internet, and worked with the local hospital and Canadian health officials, to sort through the maze of prescriptions and find the right drugs for each passenger. In the first twenty-four hours, pharmacists in Gander filled more than a thousand prescriptions. All at no cost to the passengers.
Canadian Tire was giving products away. The local cable company made sure every place that was housing refugees had a connection for news. The phone people set up banks of phone lines and fax machines. And on and on and on it goes. People welcomed strangers into their homes. They made herculean efforts to get messages back and forth. The locals tried to distract a woman who was worrying over her firefighter son, and finding ways to let teenagers be teenagers.
One of the stories is about Gary Vey, who was the president and CEO of the Gander International Airport Authority. He wasn’t in Gander, but in Montreal at a big airport conference. He couldn’t fly back to work at his airport, so he rented a car, drove more than 600 miles, caught a six-hour boat ride, and then drove eight more hours to his hometown, going straight to the airport, arriving in the afternoon. He worked for about 12 hours, after all of that, and headed home in the predawn hours.
Not wanting to wake his wife, he quietly showered in the hallway bathroom and decided to sleep in their guest bedroom. The room was dark as he dropped his towl and climbed into bed, wearing nothing more than wet hair and a weary expression on his face.
And that’s when he realized he wasn’t alone. He was in bed with a seventy-year-old woman from Fort Worth, Texas, whom Vey’s wife, Patsy, had befriended at one of the shelters and decided to take home. Remarkably, the woman was still asleep. Vey gingerly stood up, covered himself with his towel, and retreated to his own bedroom.
“We’ve got company, I see,” he told his wife when they both awake the next morning.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s a lovely lady from one of the flights.”
She told her husband she couldn’t stand the thought of this old woman spending a night sleeping on the floor of a classroom at Gander Academy. So she’d brought her home and tried to show her a good time. Well, he said with a laugh, he almost showed her more than that.
It was a great weekend read.
Since we had so much fun with the Re-Listening project yesterday, let’s jump back in today. I’m still about 10 or 14 discs behind, after all. And next on the list is a great little 1998 record that no one purchased, but me. Seven Mary Three’s fourth studio record peaked at 121 on the Billboard 200, and it’s easy to forget, but even easier to enjoy.
It’s a rock album, but it’s also introspective, more than you would expect, in a rock album sort of way.
There’s also the visceral, which is perhaps what that band is best remembered for. Just roll down the windows, press a little deeper into the accelerator and sing aloud sorta stuff.
And that’s Seven Mary Three to me. My college roommate and I saw them on their second record’s tour. We played that one a lot in his place, and in his truck. And so this band, to me, is about Chuck — I didn’t see him much when this album came out. I wonder if he ever heard it. — about that whole driving into a song thing, and oddly, a band I listened to a lot while mowing the lawn.
I have four of their albums. Maybe I should buy the other three to round out their catalog.
Also, the rhythm section of this band never gets its due.
The band hasn’t played since 2012, and doesn’t look to anytime soon, apparently. I’d probably go see them again. We caught them at Five Points South, a now defunct club that hosted a lot of great music over the years. That’s also the place where I saw Edwin McCain for the first time. And his second album, “Misguided Roses” is up next in the Re-Listening project.
It is a perfectly acceptable effort. The album peaked at 73 on the US Billboard 200.
The single you remember, of course, is “I’ll Be,” which was on radio everywhere, and at most every wedding since then. It went all the way to the second spot on the US Heatseekers Albums chart, blocked from the top spot there only by the band, Fuel. And then it really took off, which disqualified it from the odd rules of the old Heatseekers chart, but it lodged itself into the top 10 of six other Billboard charts. I wasn’t even aware it could have been eligible for six of them, or why some of them even exist.
The rest of the album is stuck in amber which, for pop music, is probably an OK thing. One of the songs still stands out. (Though, I must say, they all sound better on every format that’s not “YouTube.”)
I probably saw McCain and his band three or four times right around that period, usually opening up for one of his buddies. He took some time away from music, restoring boats, apparently had a TV show about that in the middle of the teens. He’s released two records since then, 12 studio albums in a solid 20-year career. He’s touring this summer.
And that’s enough for now. That’s plenty. We’ve got a beautiful, busy spring weekend ahead of us. How about you? Big plans?
We have plenty to catch up on, and we must do it before I forget all about it. It’s easy to do that when there’s constantly so much to add. Constantly so much. You can’t even imagine how many things have accumulated since I began typing this.
From time-to-time I have to remind myself to read things for fun. And there’s just … so much. The work material, which is interesting. Daily news, when it isn’t doomscrolling. And some of that turns into work stuff, in a variety of ways. Every day, it seems, there’s a new thing that will be an example in one class or another. And then there are the, no kidding, 200+ books sitting here waiting for me. (I just counted. I should be reading.)
So, let us make the smallest of dents. A few days ago, as we traveled to and from Chicago, I read The Great Rescue. It’s about the USS Leviathan, seized from its German master when the U.S. joined World War I, the liner turned into a transport shipping, moving doughboys back and forth from New York to the U.K. The book was released to coincide with the American centennial anniversary of the war. I bought a digital copy of it in 2020, and finally opened the thing.
This vessel was a luxury liner sailing under the Germany flag, christened as SS Vaterland. She was opulent, massive and fast. She first sailed in 1914, a three-funnel beauty built as the largest passenger ship in the world, meant to move 4,050 passengers, and some of them in the grandest style. The Vaterland had only made a few trips before her fate was forever changed. It was docked on the Hudson when the United States declared war. After a time, it was taken over and repurposed. As the Leviathan, the vessel made 10 round trips, carrying over 119,000 people over there, before the armistice in 1918. Nine westward crossings in the year after the war ended brought the survivors home.
Is there video of this legendary boat? Of course! It’s only 100 years old.
It was also crowded as a troop ship. And the passengers needed to eat.
As for the book itself, it’s a popular history read, and it moves well. Reading about World War I from this distance is interesting distance because, on one hand, we have things like those videos, but not a lot of the popular histories always want to go too deep on the human subjects. The Great War was so broad in scope that the best histories are observed at the division level. This one, despite the distance and the large sample size, we get a little bit of time with the captains, men named Joseph W. Oman, Henry F. Bryan, who commanded seven of the voyages, and William W. Phelps, who was in command when the armistice was signed. (She was in Liverpool at the time.) But not Edward H. Durrell. He was the last military captain of the Leviathan. He shows up in the index, but not in the text. John Pershing and his staff went over on an early voyage.
You can’t tell the American story of World War I without mentioning him, so the book veers away from the vessel now and again to talk about him, his war, and meeting the woman who would eventually become his wife. Douglas MacArthur came home on the Leviathan after the war ended, American readers know that name, so some of his combat exploits are included.
We meet Royal Johnson, who was a young congressman and briefly a soldier before he was wounded and knocked out of the war. You meet Freddie Stowers. He gets a nice treatment, but there’s apparently a fair amount we don’t know about his early life. Only in the epilogue do you learn that he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. You meet the writer Irvin Cobb, who covered the war and probably had his exploits downplayed. And you also met Elizabeth Weaver, a nurse that went over to Europe and returned on the Leviathan. She plays a minimal role in the book, but it’s a second woman, one supposes.
Reading about World War I from this distance is also interesting distance because, on the other hand, it is so often short on those individual tales. And this is the case here, too. The book moves swiftly, and it probably does well to have the cutaways from the voyages to the short vignettes of these people’s stories. What’s the alternative? Writing about yet another day at sea? More smelly, cramped holds? A possible periscope sighting, again?
The other big character in the book was the influenza outbreak, and it comes up, but it feels like maybe it was tacked on as an afterthought, or cut down for some reason or another.
“The curtain was coming down on the wartime career of the Leviathan. It happened quietly, with none of the fanfare and news flashes that had accompanied the seizure of the ship in April 1917. The last entries in the log were made on October 29 as the vessel was tied to her moorings at Pier 4. Totally ignoring or missing the quiet end to her naval career, the New York papers devoted their front pages that day to the ongoing Senate fight over the peace treaty, a looming national coal strike, and how the prohibition amendment would be enforced when it went into effect in January. There was no mention of the Leviathan.”
The ship was decommissioned that day, a day the ship’s final log noted was “clear, slightly hazy, light SW airs.” It sat in New Jersey for a few years. By then, there were more ships than anyone needed. It was overhauled and refurbished and in 1923 United States Lines landed a deal to take five trans-Atlantic voyages a year, but it was expensive and it was Prohibition. In a decade as a post-war cruise liner it never turned a profit. And then came the Depression. The Leviathan was retired in 1936, sold, and scrapped in the 1940s.
Since we’re catching up, let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I’m probably 17 albums behind. I’m playing all of my old CDs in more or less the order in which I acquired them all. I say more or less because this book is out of order. I had hit the 21st century, but right now I’m back in the 1990s. It doesn’t matter.
Anyway, I figured that since I was listening to all of these again I could write about them here. “What a great regular feature,” and I’ve only come to regret that it has taken forever, because I have a lot of music, and I don’t do this regularly. The idea was that I could pad this space, pull up an old memory or two, and then play some good music.
So it’s … let’s say 1997, maybe 1998, because I got the CD books out of order. And, today, we’re in a bit of a greatest hits phase. First up, “Words & Music: John Mellencamp’s Greatest Hits,” a two-disc retrospective featuring at least one song from each of his studio albums released between 1978 and 2003, some 17 records.
These aren’t music reviews. They certainly aren’t music reviews of 21-year-old greatest hits, so this will be brief because I don’t have any good recollections attached to this. Besides, everyone has the same John Mellencamp memories, anyway, and that’s not a bad thing.
So, quickly. This is the first track on the first disc. It was an unreleased song, and it immediately tells you your favorite pop artist has entered a comfortable phase. It’s the strings, and the rhythm.
There was another new song on the second disc. And it reinforces the notion you got from the first one.
That’s probably a little cynical. I’m sympathetic to a problem had later in the 1980s Mellencamp. Everyone wanted him to make Jack and Diane over and over. No one wanted to see the guy grow or change as an artist or musician. I’m neither of those things, but I understood his complaint.
So let me share my favorite song from Johnny Cougar, from 1987.
Mellencamp had a bit of a reputation in Bloomington. And I almost met him once, just before we left. He was donating his papers to the university, and they had a big ceremony in our building. It was all very locked down for someone selling a man-of-the-people gimmick. Hilariously, while all the old university people were thrilled, none of the students even knew who he was.
Entertainment is a tough business like that.
Anyway, here’s your new favorite John Mellencamp song. Someone there played it for me, probably one of the family members or handlers was within earshot at the time.
He doesn’t have any tour dates on his site for this year, just now, but Mellencamp did more than two dozen shows last year. He still paints. He does VO work. Not bad for a guy in his early 70s.
If you like Mellencamp, and you can find it, there’s a good documentary-concert that was released about 15 years ago titled “John Mellencamp: Plain Spoken Live from The Chicago Theatre.” It’s worth checking out.
The next disc up was another greatest hits effort, and it’s not even their first compilation, but it was a good one for me. Def Leppard’s “Vault” covers the 1980-1995 range, and somewhere there in the 1980s was when I started finding my own music. MTV, don’t you know. They were there, I was there, it was bound to happen.
“Vault” was eventually certified five-times platinum in the U.S. It went platinum in four other countries and gold in four more. And that’s why you release greatest hits. Sometimes you make easy money on music already produced.
Which is not exactly fair. There was one new track.
It was a post-grunge era power ballad. There was a lot of that in 1995.
To promote the record, the band did shows on three continents in one day in Morocco, London and Vancouver. This put them in the Guinness Book of World Records, under the larger category of Things That Don’t Need To Be Records.
The rest of the tracks are off “Pyromania,” “Hysteria,” or “Adrenalize.” They all figure into the Re-Listening project, and this is already very long.
I’ve never seen Def Leppard live, and I’m surprisingly OK with that. They’re still touring, some 48 years into the band’s life now. I guess they’re the Stones, but with more intricate instrumentation. They’re playing all over North America this year.
Tomorrow, another book (I know!) and probably some more music.
