I started a new memoir today. It isn’t really a memoir, or an autobiography. The blurbs may be right, it is a first-person account. But pretty quickly, this one suggested it would stand apart:
That’s Robert Leckie in his first book, Helmet For My Pillow. I generally find memoirs interesting, though often the writing isn’t of a high quality. Leckie is writing about his time in the Pacific in World War II — so far he’s just made it out of boot camp — but he’s not just a Marine, he started out as a sports writer and became a reporter, a family man and the author of more than 20 books. The guy has chops.
Makes me wonder why I waited this long to read it. As a Marine of the First Division he fought in two of the bloodiest island campaigns of the war, and he kept those stories alive here. This book, his first, was published in 1957 and again in 2010. If you remember the HBO miniseries, The Pacific, you met Leckie. This was one of the pieces of source material for the production. Leckie died in 2001.
Here’s the news show the students shot last night:
And here’s the entertainment show, where you can learn all about what to wear in this season’s fashions and various other goings on:
I liked the sunglasses myself.
A talk show tonight, and then a late night dinner and early to rise to do it all again tomorrow!
The new video on the front page of the site looks something like this:
I just happened to be walking by the “river” outside of our building and saw that bright green glow of the moss. That caught my eye. Not Spring!, as a season, but the season of Almost Spring!. It gets your attention. I stood there admiring it for a moment and I realized I was in the right spot, and the sun was at the proper angle, to carry out a little light show.
Standard Monday. A lot of email, and then wondering around and the doing of a few things to be useful in some other capacity.
I finished a book at lunch today, The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins, the former U.S. attorney who would go on to write some 30 books. It is a crime novel, and probably some 70 percent or more of the text are quotes and it zips along. I think I read it over three or four lunches. Everyone says it has the best dialog around. In it, you get an idea of what people think, even a U.S. attorney, who had the job of prosecuting bad guys, thinks it sounds like to live in that world.
It was Higgins’ first novel and Dennis Lehane, another wildly successful novelist of the genre, says in the foreword that everyone is just trying to be Higgins now, even Higgins, was, he says, in his much-too-short career.
I probably won’t go read more of him, because I don’t read a lot of fiction in general. (Today I checked out a memoir, a biography and two history books.) I picked Eddie Coyle up sometime back at the library because the author Elmore Leonard said it was his favorite book, and I like Leonard’s work. I would watch the movie, however.
The best part was it didn’t really have a natural beginning. You were just thrust into things as the reader. And the end, well, the end had its own circular swirl that suggests, perhaps, why Higgins had decided to leave the law and go to the typewriter.
Good book, though. I’m going to read a war story, next, I suppose.
This evening in honor of 12 years of being together, The Yankee and I went out for dinner. We went to the local ichiban steakhouse, which is the preferred style of meal for select ritual occasions. I think this is the fifth or sixth different actual restaurant we’ve enjoyed over the years. And this one is the least crowded of them all.
We had our own private table. No, by the time the chef arrived the neighboring table was standing up to leave. We had our own private room. I do this romantic dinner setting stuff right.
And the chef said maybe three sentences the entire meal. Oh, sure, he warmed up by doing all of the latest spins and twists and twirls, but it reminded me of the clown character that is playing happy, but really is sad. Since there were no other children for him to show off for, I paid close attention. Soon after expressing his sorrow through the twirling of his spatula, though, he just cooked. Which was fine. I’ve seen most of the tricks and the jokes aren’t really all of that great.
I did find myself missing the choo-choo onion volcano, though.
Boy, that’s not a sentence you heard and thought I have to steal that!
Anyway, 12 years. It was a dinner party and we played a board game and then the next day we were hanging out again and we later decided that was the proper date to observe, for observational purposes. And on the night in which we observed 12 years of being together I got another version of one of the truly great moments in our relationship. I told a story, recounting my side of a text conversation we’d had a while back, taking on this pretend frustration for theatrical effect, and she laughed for approximately six straight minutes. The seriously involved kind of laugh, the face scrunched up, doubled over hands on knees, you don’t let up sort of laugh.
I’d trade a lot for those moments. It’d be foolish not to.
You go through your young life in Illinois and enlist the Army right out of high school at 17. By the time you are 20 you have fought in Guadalcanal, been wounded and learned both your parents died while you were away. You go AWOL three times before, finally, your bouts of drinking and fighting become too much to overcome, you get discharged. And then you write classics like “From Here to Eternity” and “The Thin Red Line.” That was Jim Jones. Later still, he was also a journalist covering Vietnam. And I bring him up to you because he was a friend of Willie Morris, that Mississippi scoundrel who was editing Harper’s Magazine by the time he was 33. They become such good friends that Jones asked Morris to finish his last book for him after he died. And he did, “Whistle” became the last of Jones’ war trilogy, and Morris wrote the last three chapters in 1977-78.
Two decades later Willie died. He’d been teaching at Ole Miss after he moved back from New York and had compiled and released a book of his essays that I’d find in a bookstore. I wish I could remember which one. It doesn’t matter, but it probably does. Either way, Terrains of the Heart he wrote at Oxford and I bought it in Alabama, quite literally because of the cover.
And this was a great choice. Willie, like all gregarious storytellers, was pleased to hold court in the warm embrace of a room of people that loved his stories. Willie, like the best storytellers, could make a place come alive and — no, that’s not quite accurate. Willie Morris, who was concerned about entropy and stillness and mortality and life could make the South hum. He could bring the sweet smell of the South to your mind, through your nose, and the dew in the fields to your heart through your toes. And Willie taught me the second thing I learned about writing. The first was that if you can figure out how to bring a smell into the story you’ve done some serious writing. And the second was I wanted to teach myself how to write like Willie Morris.
I tell you this because on this day, every four years, I think of a conversation Willie Morris recounts of his friendship with James Jones:
Who knows what all we’ll think four years from now, or at any time in between, but that’s an important observation to keep in mind.
It was published in 1958 and seems to be aimed at giving a reasonable historical re-telling and description to teens. The chapters have great line art:
That’s a paratrooper, which was pretty much the moment I decided to take pictures to send to our friend Adam, who is a modern paratrooper, because I thought he’d appreciate the biplane:
But it was this one he really liked, and how could you not? Look at his left hand:
Just another day at the office, oh, and do remember your briefcase. Here’s an almost contemporaneous accounting of Captain Sergei Mienov:
He spent almost a year in the United States. On his way back to Russia he passed a few days in Paris. He was full of enthusiasm for what he had seen in the development of air technique. Although Russia was not yet officially recognized, Mienov had been courteously received. He had visited airplane factories, airdromes and training schools. He praised highly the quality of American parachutes and the instruction American pilots received in their use. He had made his first parachute jump here.
[…]
When Mienov submitted the report of his US observations to Air Chief Alksnis, he mentioned the wide interest which parachute jumping could arouse. He suggested that the interest of the Soviet population, and particularly the young, could be turned toward the development of air power by this type of propaganda. Alksnis passed the comment on to the Politburo. Stalin agreed that it was a good idea.
And so parachuting became wildly popular in the Soviet Union.
Until the purges. And then the Germans did it better and then the Americans did it more. And that’s the story of how one of the more crazy ideas a person could do as a spectator sport became one of the craziest things people would do in military service. How the book wound up where I found it remains a mystery.
Here’s Adam now, this is his jump into Ste. Mere-Eglise, Normandy, France, commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day:
He took a miniature American flag on the jump with him and sent it to me as a keepsake, which super cool. That’s in my office now.
So is this stuff:
We are about to surplus a bunch of old equipment. The university has a surplus process for its eight campuses and some things of a certain value must be processed in a certain way and that’s where I am. More specifically, that picture is opposite of where I am, in my office, which is now filled.
Because it made more sense to bring this stuff out of storage, start (and hopefully complete) the paperwork process and then wait on the nice fellows from the Surplus store to come over and pick it up. So I have huge bundles of television cabling, a half dozen old cameras, a switcher, various accesorries and a chest-high stack of old engineering components in my office. If anyone wants to come push buttons, now is the time.
Woke up to snow. Watched it, off and on, fall all day. Little flakes, big flakes, sticky flakes. Here’s some shots from the office:
Classes start back next Monday. People are starting to trickle back into the building, the ones that aren’t sick with something anyway. There’s a lot of that going around, which has been the case since before Thanksgiving. This is a new old building, one side of which you see at the beginning of the video, but it might be out to get us, in a biological sense.
But the snow! Isn’t it lovely! Tonight it will actually get cold. Tomorrow we’ll be between 0 and 5 degrees and wearing heavy jackets. But, today, the snow is full of that magic that wipes away doubt and impossibility and dirt and the decay of autumn. Tomorrow, or the next day, the snow will be its own doubt and dirt.
I canceled my XM subscription today. Two representatives tried very hard to upgrade me or reduce my bill or extend me this or offer me that. But I just don’t spend that much time in the car right now and the reception to their transponders is blocked on about 20 percent of my route. The quality has been in decline ever since the Sirius-XM merger, while the price has almost doubled.
I really only listened to the 40s station anyway.
We’re watching West Wing, about 15 years too late.
I feel like, after tonight’s episodes, that we might have already watched the best part of the show. But last night we were here:
Tonight we got here:
And I think I see what everyone likes about the Charlie character. He’s not a bad character, but I think this is about first impressions — and binge watching. When you met him he was that young kid, who thought he was there to be a messenger. And then you learned his backstory, which was heartbreaking and then he was frozen in amber. He’s a humble sort, but never in over his head. And so he became the precocious child of the show, even as a young adult.
It probably hurt him, then, that he’s in a room surrounded by talented, accomplished people and has a paternalistic lead. Now, it is supposed to be four years later. But, really, for us, it has been just a few months. He’s still that boy, still precocious, which isn’t fair to the character. He’s not a boy, we haven’t allowed for that evolution with time.
Some things about binge watching are antithetical to character evolution.
Would you rather we discussed books?
If you like sports, or baseball, or books about sports, or just good research and writing, I’d suggest Bottom of the 33rd. It is about the longest game in the history of organized baseball, a Triple-A struggle in Massachusetts in 1981.
It featured Easter, 40-degree temperatures, Wade Boggs, Cal Ripken Jr., Bruce Hurst and maybe the best hitter you’ve never heard of. The book covers two clubs, owners, communities, broadcasters, managers … it is difficult to imagine how did not get included, so complete is the research.
The writing is incredibly crisp. I don’t read a lot of sports books, but this was written by a New York Times columnist and it shows in his love of the craft.
I’m also about halfway through The Adventure of English. This is the companion book to a BBC series on the language, told as a biography, almost of a living person.
It’s a slog, but its a good read. You have to really want it, I think, really appreciate the power of language to find this book interesting. It’s poetic in places, and it is as dense as a technical manual in others. Halfway through, though, and Shakespeare just retired and the study of the language has moved to the Pilgrims, landing months late and at the wrong spot, and the meeting, either by “chance or through God’s providence,” with Squanto.
Tisquantum, you might recall, helped the pillaging Pilgrims survive that first harsh winter. He was perhaps the only English-speaking native for hundreds of miles around, and arguably the most fluent English speaker on the continent. How fortunate for them that he was in the next village from where they came ashore. Now, the book is moving into the American Colonial period. I just learned that of the 13 colonies only two were derived from native terms. Connecticut, for example, stems from Quinnehtukqut, which the Internet tells me means “beside the long tidal river.”
I think the best part of the book is that, while it is talking about the power of the language to evolve, it stops in 2011. So some of these words from the 2011 additions to the OED may be in there, but surely not all of them, surely not the word “posilutely.”
