Armchair Travel

The Mathematics of Revolution

2008-09-05T20:29:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of World War I, Russia had plenty of food, but just about enough railroad transport to make it available throughout the empire, to Petrograd, for example, their capital, renamed from the German form of the name, St. Petersburg.

At the beginning of World War I, according to Robert K. Massie, Russia had 20,071 locomotives and 539.549 freight cars and this barely provided for the basic needs of the population. By early 1917, they had 9,021 locomotives and 174,346 freight cars. Then, thanks to 35-below weather, the boilers burst on 1,200 locomotives burst and 57,000 freight cars became inacessible.

And then there were the six million men at the front, who had to be supplied and the coal that had to be brought from central Russia that the Russians used to get from Cardiff.

Rasputin had clearly foreseen this and warned the emperor and the empress about it. But if you're the rulers of an empire, should you really need a holy man to remind you to take care of the food supply?

When the revolution took place, the lefty groups were entirely unprepared. Lenin, in Zurich, was giving up. He wrote that he didn't expect to see the coming revolution in his lifetime.

But when there was no bread, the women began to march through the streets, and bakeries were broken into,

Then the soldiers were ordered into the streets to shoot down the populace, but they refused. I think the world ought to give credit to a sergeant name Kirpichnikov of the Volinsky Regiment who shot a captain who had struck and insulted him the day before when the trooops had refused to fire on the crowd.

Soon after, the Volinsky Regiment took to the street, with their marching band at the head of the procession, and red flags attached to their bayonets. All the soldiers in Petrograd follwed them.

If you're an absolute monarch and you can't get soldiers to shoot down their fellow citizens in the street, you're in a darn embarassing situation. The tsar sent regiments from the front to restore order, but their trains were surrounded before they even stopped and they all joined the revolution.

Then the tsar agreed to do all the things he refused to do before, and it was way too late. A week before he could have kept his crown, but now the Palace of Justice, and all the police stations, were in flames.

Right up to the end, his minister of the interior, Protopopov, kept him thinking that everything was just fine. He tried to rescind the legislative immunity of Fedor Kerensky so he could arrest and kill Kerensky.

One day later he was begging Kerensky for his life -- and Kerensky spared him!

Here's what a feeb Protopopov was -- after Rasputin's murder, he claimed to have seen visions of Rasputin in the night, hoping to hoodwink the empress, as Rasputin had done.

Although she has to go down in history as the most gullible person who ever lived, she wasn't buying any of Protopopov's nonsense, even when he fell on his knees and cried, "Excellency! I see Christ behind you!"

I guess somewhere, somehow, there's a limit to anyone's credibility. It's never anything I want to count on, though.

You have to give Nicholas and Alexandra credit for uniting public opinion in Russia. Everyone agreed they had to go, including every political party and all their relatives, including Nicholas' mother, and especially the cousins who were next in line.

And the people hated the empress as well, so when the food supply was cut off, things all fell into place. It certainly wasn't something planned by revolutionaries. It was simply a breakdown of government. The certain outcome of a mathematical equation.

Still, let's drink to Sergeant Kirpichnikov. It's he who deserves our thanks.

More Fun With Nicholas and Alexandra

2008-09-02T20:09:00.000-07:00

I'm entirely swept up in Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie. From his perspective as the parent of a child with hemophilia, he is able to fathom the soul of the empress Alexandra.

I didn't know beans about hemophilia before, and I didn't think I wanted to. I thought that if you got a little cut you might bleed to death. That's not it at all. Surface cuts are easily bandaged. It's the inernal bleeding, causing massive swelling, expecially in the joints, that causes excruciating pain for the child for days and even weeks.

Alexandra had sat with her child for eleven days while he cried out in agony and begged her to make the pain stop. Think about that. Eleven days. Then a telegram from Rasputin arrives saying "The little one will not die," and the tsarevich goes into a deep sleep and awakes the next morning without pain.

Rasputin had stopped the bleeding before by speaking to the tsarevich, because he had told him bedtime stories for years, and he clearly had very strong hypnotic powers.

Massie points out that there is a dentist in Phildelphia who performs tooth extractions for hemophiliacs without excessive bleeding using hypnosis, and the guy figured this out by reading about Rasputin.

But how could Rasputin effect a cure with a telegram?

Well, Massey points out, if Alexandra, the mother, gained hope through the telegram, the child might easily gain some psychological reassurance from the change in her manner. We'll never know. Some ascribe Rasputin's successes to dumb luck, but they are too many to dismiss.

He also showed up at a hospital and appeared to save the life of the empress' only friend, Anna Vyrubova, after a catastrophic train wreck.

It's no wonder Alexandra believed him to be a man of God. But he was actually an utter and complete degenerate with voracious appetites for sex and booze. So people, one by one, approached the tsar or the tsarina to tell them about Rasputin. That he had orgies, that he tried to rape a nun, and countless other true accusations.

The Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, something like the Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, talks to the tsar and tsarina about, not rumors, but reports confirmed many times over. He gets sacked and sent to a monastery in the Crimea.

The police keep detailed reports of Rasputin's doings, which are read, for a fee, by the public, so everybody knows he meets every Wednesday with the chief German agent in Russia during WWI.

Finally the chief of police tells the tsar that Rasputin has exposed himself in a downtown restaurant and bragged that he was doing the empress. Everyone thinks Rasputin has gone too far, but no. The police chief is sacked.

Alexandra, who knows for certain that Rasputin is a man of God, knows these reports are lies and makes Nicholas reject every cabinet minister who doesn't please Rasputin. This means anyone decent or competent minister gets sacked -- a lot like the Bush administration.

Rasputin actually wangles the appointment of a Minister of the Interior who gives him four cars that are faster than all the cop cars, so he can avoid surveillance in his midnight romps.

And the secretary of this same Minister of the Interior gets caught blackmailing a bank, all this when Russia is suffering catastrophic losses at the front and people are starving, not from lack of food, but from lack of transport.

Soldiers are deserting from the army for the simple reason that they are running out of ammunition. Others are sent to the front without weapons and told to wait and grab a rifle from someone killed or wounded.

If a minister didn't like "Our Friend," as Alexandra called him, he was sacked and a tsarist hack was put in his place. And Nicholas, though he cuts a sad, heroic figure, was a nitwit who sometimes showed a tiny amount of independent spirit but ultimately complied with Alexandra's demands, all of which came from Rasputin.

His own mother, the dowager empress Marie, tells him he has to get rid of Rasputin, but he's too dense.

Nicholas even cancels a Russian offensive that might have been decisive purely on the orders of Rasputin, transmitted in the horribly boring letters of Alexandra.

Then Rasputin writes a letter to the imperial couple saying that he knows he is going to be killed and if he's killed by a regular anarchist assassin, fine, they'll be ok. If, however, he is killed by relatives of the tsar, as in fact he was, then they and all their family will be dead within two years, which they were. Makes ya wonder, don't it? What is God up to?

Having met, through Massey's scholarship, the grand duchesses Olga, Marie, Tatiana and Anastasia, and the tsarevich Alexis, I am greatly saddened by their slaughter. They were charming, happy children. They never did anything to deserve it.

But as for Nicholas and Alexandra, I think it's a lot like the Archduke Maximillian who was executed in Mexico. You have to remember the Prime Directive and let evolution take its course.

A funny footnote: The revolutionaries always thought that both the empress Alexandra and Anna Vyrubova were Rasputin's mistresses and fully aware of his well publicized debaucheries. Anna had a little house near the Alexander Palace and was often the go-between between the empress and the "Holy Man."

During her trial Anna Vyrubova asked for a medical examination to exonerate her from this charge, and she got it. She was proved to be a virgin. A medieval exoneration in an age of secular revolution.

Thomas Jefferson's Mixed-Race Children

2008-08-31T19:21:00.000-07:00

You may be aware of the historical controversy over Thomas Jefferson' seven children with Sally Hemmings. Many historians, for many years, insisted he did not sire them, and even after DNA evidence was introduced, insisted they were sired by Jefferson's nephews.

We have evidence the nephews were not where they would have had to have been at key times -- they were off managing their own plantations -- and Jefferson was, but even so, imagine Jefferson sitting night after night at the dinner table with the mother of his nephews' children.

Besides that, everyone at the time knew they were Jefferson's children, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, everybody, and he never denied it. The historians who have defended his chastity over the years have pretty much made themselves look ridiculous.

I always held it against Jefferson that he did not free his own children, even in his will, but in making that judgment, I may have been losing sight of my grandmother's admonition, "Was ya there, Charlie?'

There's a brilliant article in American Heritage, June 1972, (before the definitive DNA evidence came in) by Fawn M. Bodie, which does a lot to set forth the facts in the case. And her scholarship has certainly led me to reassess my negative judgment of Jefferson.

When Sally Hemmings, at the age of 15, got pregnant by Thomas Jefferson, she was in France. She did not have to return to the United States if she didn't want to, and she knew it. Thomas Jefferson wanted her to, and he made a deal with her that her children would be freed when they were 21.

The reason the children weren't legally freed was that as free blacks they would no longer be allowed to live in Virginia. Bodie's research shows that all of Sally Hemming's children were allowed to run away and were not pursued.

Remember, Sally Hemmings was the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife. Jefferson's father-in-law had made no secret of it. Her children were three-fourths Caucasian.

That meant they were able to 'pass' as white and could stay in Virginia. For the full story, we have the wholly truthful narrative of Sally Hemmings' son.

I was wrong to judge Jefferson as I did; he was carrying out his end of a deal cemented in Paris in 1788. So always remember: If you're making a moral judgment about any family that's not your own, ask yourself, "Was ya there, Charlie?"

And while we're at it, why can people be half Italian and half Irish but never half black or even one fourth black? Just asking.

Will Rogers

2008-08-24T19:54:00.001-07:00

I watched a movie with my folks last night called The Will Rogers Story, and I learned a lot about this most amazing American.

A Cherokee (with lots of other nationalities mixed in) born in Oklahoma when it was still the Indian Territory, he was a cowhand in Texas, Argentina and South Africa before getting a job with a Wild West Show.

With his talent for doing tricks with a lariat, he got a job on Broadway, of all places, with the Ziegfield Follies. He later became a movie star in silent films, and was even more successful in the talkies.

Then he started writing a newspaper column that was immensely successful and allowed him to travel all over the world. US presidents from Hoover to Roosevelt used to call him up to explain their policies because he had so much influence with the American people. He had the most popular newspaper column and the most popular radio show in the country.

Among his famous sayings are: "I only know what I read in the papers," "I never yet met a man I didn't like," and "Whenever Congress makes a joke, it's a law and whenever they make a law, it's a joke."

He used his success to help those in need. Whenever there was a disaster, he immediately flew there and reported on it. During the Depression he worked tirelessly to help the unemployed.

When he died in a plane crash in 1935, they say, it prompted the greatest outpouring of national grief since the death of Abraham Lincoln.

The movie ended with this tribute from Ogden Nash:

"I worked with grin and gum and lariat
To entertain the proletariat.
And with my Oklahomely wit
I brightened up the world a bit."

Two Old Foes

2008-08-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

When King George III of England made his choice for prime minister, he turned to someone very like himself - "round-shouldered, fat, with a puffy pig-like face" - Frederick, Lord North.

According to Richard M. Ketcham (American Heritage, June 1972), Lord North also had "an oversized tongue that thickened his speech." Together with "large, bulgling eyes, wide mouth and thick lips," this gave him what Horace Walpole called "the air of a blind trumpeter."

North's unsuccessful efforts to subjugate the rebellious American colonies are well known to history. But in his defence he was at all times doing the bidding of his august and similarly pig-like majesty, King George.

During the American Revolution, North was often opposed in Parliament by Colonel Isaac Barre, who made the famous remark that North could neither wage war nor establish peace.

North resigned as prime minister after the war, but remained a member of Parliament until his eyesight failed completely. Just before his death he met Colonel Barre, who was also blind.

"Well, Colonel," North declared, "whatever may have been our former animosities, I am persuaded there are no two men who would now be more glad to see each other than you and I."

Blueberries for Sal

2008-08-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

If you're looking for great books to read to kids, you can't do better than Robert McCloskey. Make Way for Ducklings is legendary in Boston and Blueberries for Sal has always been legendary in my family since the title character looks exactly like my mom, Sally Hartshorne, who made me bookish.

Make Way for Ducklings is about a family of ducks in Boston for whom a Boston policeman stops traffic. Blueberries for Sal is about two moms and two youngsters who go blueberry picking and the youngsters wind up following the wrong moms.

Since one mom is a bear, this might lead to a problematic situation, but things work themselves out, as they so often do.

And for kids who are learning to read, you can't do better than McCloskey's Homer Price and the sequel Centerburg Tales. Kids love Homer and his pet skunk Aroma and the doughnut making machine that goes haywire and the 42 pounds of edible fungus that kept the settlers from starving. Adults love all this, too. It's a true slice of Americana, brilliantly written and illustrated.

My mom and I went for a walk the other day and I mentioned Blueberries for Sal. No recollection. Robert McCloskey is gone. So are Lord Byron and Keats and Shakepeare. So is Harriet Beecher Stowe, about whom my mom wrote her PhD thesis.

I worked for a time as a companion to people with Alzheimer's, but I have never seen the disease act so quickly. At one time I was looking after a guy who had written books about the chemistry of the brain and was experiencing symptoms of dementia.

He said his trouble was forming new memory. "It doesn't stick," he explained. "By the time I reach the end of a paragraph, I've forgotten the beginning." Yet he was able to tell me all about his experiences at college and his career.

With my mom the progression has been much more rapid and invasive, wiping out old memory as well as new.

So that leaves us pretty much in the present tense. We talk about the pictures we see in the clouds.

Tomorrow we're going tag sailing.

Nicholas and Alexandra

2008-08-11T20:11:00.000-07:00

For years I've been seeing Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie at flea markets and tag sales. It sold a bajillion copies and got made into a movie, which I haven't seen but plan to. I finally decided to read it.

You've probably already read it, but if you haven't, it's a real treat. A big fat book and you're sorry when it's over. And you shouldn't have any trouble finding a copy.

It tells the tale of the last of the Romanovs, which, in the words of the Saturday Review blurb, "no novelist would dare invent."

Massie is my kind of historian. He presents a wealth of detail that helps you get to know the characters as people. Queen Victoria, Rasputin, Kaiser Wilhelm, Witte, Kerensky, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin -- they're all here and I'm learning a lot about them that I never learned in history books because it's, well, personal.

In this way he reminds me of Barbara Tuchman, and that's the highest compliment I can bestow on any historian. Like JFK, I'm a big fan of Tuchman, especially The Guns of August and The First Salute.

The wealth of detail allows one to play the part of Chief Inspector Maigret, the inductive detective, who mulls over waves of seemingly irrelevant details, finds something that just doesn't fit, and figures the whole thing out.

"Aha!" you say. "On his world tour as a young man Nicholas was attacked in Japan by a fanatic with a sword and barely survived a glancing blow to the head which left a lifelong scar. This must have led to Russia's disastrous war with Japan..."

But then the young tsarevich Alexis is born and turns out to have hemophilia (like Massie's son) and the holy profligate Rasputin is able to control the little lad's bleeding (all seem to agree on this point) and gets a grip on the royal family, and it all gets so wild that any generalization of any kind just seems so simplistic and irresponsible. It happened the way it happened and like the Saturday Review says, no novelist would dare invent it.

At the climax Rasputin ingests enough arsenic to kill a team of oxen, gets shot fifteen times, and finally dies of drowning when he is wrapped in a carpet and thrown in the Neva River. And the largest empire in the world is convulsed by war and revolution. You couldn't make this stuff up, and Massie does a great job of presenting it in all its complexity.

What Makes a Great Vacation?

2008-08-04T20:41:00.000-07:00

Everybody has their own idea of a great vacation, I guess. For my daughter Sarah and me, this year at least, it had to include a lot of theater. She's an actress and I'm an aspiring playwright.

But we also wanted to include kayaking and tennis and fresh air and splendid scenery, and we didn't want to include toll booths, subways or taxicabs.

So we headed up to New Hampshire, where kids can see great theater in their flip-flops and jelly shoes. And I do mean great theater. The actors, directors, choreographers, musical directors, costumers, everybody, they're the same folks who work on productions on Broadway, off-Broadway, and all the great regional theaters around the country.

I guess I was most impressed by the choreography. These companies have to perform on comparatively small stages, but in the productions we saw, far from scaling back the dancing, the choreographers seemed to take the small stage as a challenge, and also they seemed to want to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that every member of the company could do some serious hoofing.

I saw 18 to 20 dancers high-kicking on a 20-foot stage, gracefully and effortlessly -- don't tell OSHA. And they have to sing and act perfectly, too, and they do. I fell in love with every leading lady and was literally dazzled by the singing and dancing talent of every member of the company.

It's hard to believe that while they're performing a play for two weeks, they're also rehearsing the next one.

The first two nights we stayed at the Rosewood Country Inn in Bradford with Dick & Lesley Marquis. If you're looking for tranquility, serenity and beauty, this is where you'll find it. People get married there every weekend; that's how beautiful it is. We enjoyed it as a great place to veg out between interviews, rehearsals and performances.

Then we went to Purity Springs in East Madison, a wonderful resort where many families have been going for thirty or forty years. It's been owned and run by the Hoyt family for six generations, and since they also run a summer camp and a ski area, they know a lot about having fun.

They have swimming and kayaking and volleyball and tennis and stuff like that on site, and they're located in the Mt. Washington Valley which has every recreational opportunity anyone could ever want from hiking up Mt. Chocorua to fishing the Swift River to riding the alpine slide at Mt. Attitash.

They take a canoe trip on the Saco River every Thursday and hold a lobster bake on Purity Island. They usually send a van to the theater, but the week I was there it was a non-family presentation of Cabaret, which I loved, but I could see why they didn't send the van.

Friday morning, when I told the waitress at the dining hall that I was checking out early, she packed me a box lunch with a sandwich and cookies and grapes. How cool is that?

One Swell Vacation

2008-08-04T13:47:00.000-07:00

My daughter Sarah and I had one swell vacation in New Hampshire -- three plays in three days. Grueling work, but somebody has to do it. Sarah had to take off Thursday, but I got an extra day and an extra play -- Cabaret. You can read all about it on GoNOMAD once we write it all up.

On my way home through Wolfeboro, I stopped to get an iced tea, and it turns out the girls soccer team from Kingswood Regional High School was having a car wash to raise money for new uniforms.

So I got to chat with these enterprising young women and drove home with a nice clean car. If you'd like to make a contribution call Andrea L. Ogden, Director of Athletics, 603-569-8100 or go to their website.

Books I Can't Not Buy

2008-07-22T21:25:00.001-07:00

I know I have a problem. I admit it. The last time I moved I had five truckloads worth of books, and that was 12 years ago. Now who knows.

I don't buy anything I can get at the library, and I don't buy anything because someone else might want it. But then there are these books I can't not buy.

This Sunday it was World Enough and Time by Robert Penn Warren and The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot.

Robert Penn Warren used to eat lunch at Silliman College when I was there. I always had this vague idea that I should go and sit with him, but I never did. Maybe I missed a life-changing moment, but I don't think so. Let the guy eat his lunch in peace is what I thought.

I read All the King's Men about Huey Long, and it could just be the Great American Novel, but no one will ever know whether it is or not, so let's just say it's a good book. And I had never heard of World Enough and Time. That usually means it didn't sell many copies, but that also means it's obscure, so I had to have it.

The title is from Andrew Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress."

"Had we but world enough and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime..." Like many adolescent males, I memorized it just in case I might find it useful in some romantic situation. Never happened. Good poem, though.

"And your quaint honor turned to dust and into ashes all my lust." The argument, I think, is that the coy mistress should have sex with the poet because we're all going to die. Can't argue with that.

As for The Cocktail Party, by T.S. Eliot, it's a play. Why hasn't it been performed on Broadway? People devote their lives to a single poem by Eliot.

"The Wasteland," which he probably knocked off in an afternoon, has been the subject of 529,097,321 or so postgraduate theses in the World of Academia because he makes all these obscure references that academics have such tremendous fun tracking down.

In Academia, there is no distinction between obscurity and profundity; to an academic, they're exactly the same.

Isn't it odd that a few pages, scribbled in a few hours, should generate, literally, enough verbiage to fill twenty freight cars? I think it has to do with the ratio of creators to analyzers.

So why hasn't The Cocktail Party been produced on Broadway and made into a movie? I'll let you know.

I was in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral as a young nitwit -- I played the third priest -- and believe me, it was a corker!

"In the still, small circle of pain within the skull
You still shall tramp and tread your endless round of thought
To justify your actions to yourselves,
Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave,
Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe, which never is belief..."

I know why Murder in the Cathedral never made it to Broadway. No women!

A Grave Illness, A Simple Remedy

2008-07-21T19:40:00.000-07:00

"Paddy Corcoran's wife was for several years afflicted with a kind of complaint which nobody could properly understand," writes William Carleton in his story, aptly titled "Paddy Corcoran's Wife," in W.B. Yeats Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland.

"She was sick and she was not sick; she was well and she was not well; she was as ladies wish to be when they love their lords, and she was not as such ladies wish to be. [I have no idea what this means.] In fact nobody could tell what the matter with her was."

But clearly it's no joke. The poor woman is bedridden for seven years, and clearly it's no pleasure or comfort to her being sick and bedridden.

At last a "little weeshy (fairy) woman, dressed in a neat red cloak" comes in and sits down and says, "Well, Kitty Corcoran, you've had a long lair of it there on the broad o' yer back for seven years, and you're jist as far from bein' cured as ever."

"Do you think it's a comfort or a pleasure to me to be sick and bedridden?" Kitty asks in reply.

"No, I do not," says the weeshy woman, "but I'll tell you the truth: for the last seven years you have been annoying us. I am one o' the good people; an as I have a regard for you, I'm come to let you know the raison why you've been sick so long as you are.

"For all the time you've been ill, your childhre threwn out yer dirty wather after dusk an' before sunrise at the very time we're passin' yer door, which we pass twice a day. Now if you avoid this, if you throw it out in a different place, an' at a different time, the complaint you have will lave you an' you'll be as well as ever you wor.

"If you don't follow this advice, why, remain as you are, an' all the art o' man won't cure you." Then she disappears.

Kitty Corcoran and her kids take a little more care with the dishwater and she is restored to perfect health.

Jimmy Breslin - Old Time Reporting

2008-07-18T20:01:00.000-07:00

Just in time to be too late, I have a good question to ask at reunions, which are pretty much over for the year. Anyway, the question is -- instead of the stupid-sounding "What are you doing?" meaning, "Where do you get your money?" -- I suggest, "What are you reading?"

Ask me that question at any one time, and I'm likely to say Livy's History of Rome, Louise Dickinson Rich, We Took to the Woods (a best-seller in 1942), old copies of American Heritage, and, my current favorite The World According to Breslin.

While big-city daily reporters are transcribing police reports, Breslin is talking to the people who saw the guy get killed.

It's a weird old-timey thing you see in the old movies. They used to call it "reporting."

Breslin is one of the last practitioners of this ancient art.

Imagine going out in search of news when you can get the whole story over the phone or just publish press releases that get delivered right to your door!

Where is the Knowing?

2008-07-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

I can't tell you what a great time I'm having reading We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich about life on the shores of Lake Umbagog in northern Maine in 1942. Well I could, but it would take too long. Just to give you an idea, here's a bit about her stepdaughter Sally:

"The first twelve years of her life she lived in Southern Illinois and attended school regularly. Then she came with us for a while. Just as she was getting used to our peculiar mode of life, her mother sent for her to come to Lichtenstein -- a small country betweeen Switzerland and Austria, in case you didn't know -- and she spent two years there and in the West Indies.

"She didn't go to school at all, but she was being educated, nonetheless. She learned, among other things, not to giggle when a Count kissed her hand, no matter how much it tickled, how to get through the customs with the least trouble, how to wear clothes, and how to order a meal in German. Then came the war, and Sally came back to us."

[Sally boards with family friends, the Allens, and goes to school in Upton, Maine.]

"When she was fifteen, her birthday party was held in the bar of a hotel in Haiti, closed to the public for the occasion. When she was sixteen, her birthday party was held in the Allens' kitchen, open to the public for the occasion. Apparently everyone in town attended. As far as I can tell, she enjoyed both parties equally.

"She belongs to the 4H Club, and teaches a Sunday School class, and has a boyfriend. In fact she has a different one every time we see her, which makes it nice. If she stuck to one I'd probably think I had to worry about its being too serious..."

Louise takes very seriously her responsibilities toward Sally and Rufus, her son with Sally's dad, Ralph Rich. The first picture ever taken of Rufus shows him in the arms of Jonesy, the cook in the local logging camp.

"Most of them [the loggers] were homeless and familyless, and a baby was a treat," she writes.

I particularly love her advice on parenting: "All any parent can do is to stagger along as best he is able, and trust to luck."

Reminds me of Robert Coles, the esteemed child psychologist, who said, "I learn a lot from my neighbors."

And it reminds me of the time my daughter Sarah was three and we were watching Slim Goodbody on television and he was explaining the heart and the lungs and the liver and the brain, and she turned to me and asked, "Where is the knowing?"

"What?" I asked.

"The knowing. Where is the knowing?"

That's when I realized that I was gong to be holding on to my hat for this entire journey. "Some say it's in the head," I said, "and some say it's in the heart." But I was winging it, and I have been ever since.

I do have one tip, believe it or not, despite my predeliction against pontification of any kind. I have always focused on learning from my kid.

I figured if she wanted to know where the Atlantic Ocean was, she would ask, and I would tell her, but my main focus was on learning from her. Kids are closer to the other side, like old people. They know tons of stuff we don't know.

Did I learn a lot? You betcha. I didn't even know what a toe sock was! Now I can sing all the tunes from Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid. I've seen My Girl and My Girl 2, and I cry at the opening credits of Anne of Green Gables. I'm a deeper, more nuanced person.

Did she learn a lot? Who cares? That's her look-out.

Changelings

2008-07-15T21:17:00.000-07:00

Here's W.B. Yeats' introduction to the section on changelings in his collection Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland:

"Sometimes the fairies fancy mortals and carry them away into their own country, leaving instead some sickly fairy child, or a log of wood so bewitched that it seems to be a mortal pining away, and dying, and being buried.

"Most commonly they steal children. If you 'look over' a child,' that is, look on it with envy, the fairies have it in their power."

[But how can you tell? I mean maybe my kid just kind of shriveled up 'cause he was sick. And babies look an awful lot alike.]

"Many things can be done to find out if a child's a changeling, but there is one infallible thing -- lay it on the fire with this formula, 'Burn, burn, burn -- if of the devil, burn; but if of God and the saints, be safe from harm.'"

[Don't forget that last part! I know what you're thinking. But we have to be more open-minded about faith-based medical procedures. And Yeats notes that this incantation is from Lady Wilde, who tended to be a lot gloomier than all the other Irish writers on the subject.]

Then Yeats tells a beautiful little story in just one paragraph, really a thing of beauty:

"It is on record that once, when a mother was leaning over a wizened changeling, the latch lifted and a fairy came in, carrying home the wholesome stolen baby. 'It was the others who stole him,' she said. As for her, she wanted her own child."

The Other Winston Churchill

2008-07-13T18:12:00.000-07:00

At last I found it. There's a New Hampshire novelist named Winston Churchill who wrote in the 1800s and is always confused with the British prime minister of the same name.

You see his books often, bound in red with gold trimming, so they must have been popular in their day, but I have never in all my experience ever met anyone who has read a novel by the other Winston Churchill.

I never would have, except that I stumbled upon Mr Crewe's Career, which is about New Hampshire politics in the 1800s, and I happened to be a member of the Senate staff in New Hampshire for six years.

Though I have seen many copies of Mr. Crewe's Career -- I own three and have given one away -- it is the sequel to a book called Coniston, of which I have only found one copy in thirty years of collecting.

I found another copy yesterday for a buck. I would have paid fifty, but the seller wouldn't get more than a quarter from a used-book seller. No one buys or reads them.

I found it in a box of contemporary books, completely out of context. The young woman said she had not read it. I should have asked her where she got it, because now I'm really curious. Maybe her grandmother gve it to her and told her it was a really good book and she never got around to it.

Here's a thumbnail sketch of the plot: A young New Hampshire bumpkin adores a young woman who marries another man, a wastrel. She dies and the bumpkin travels to Roxbury, a neighborhood in Boston, and takes the young woman's daughter from the wastrel, who then dies as well.

So this old curmudgeon who becomes rich as a tanner and then as the immovable force in New Hampshire politics, who eats nothing but crackers and milk, has an adopted daughter, the child of his long-lost love.

Winston Churchill himself also makes a cameo appearance in this book.

Whenever I find someone who has read Coniston by the other Winston Churchill, I know I will have found a kindred spirit.

The Shores of Lake Umbagog

2008-07-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

I went down to the flea market in Hadley Sunday and picked up a book called We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich. It was in a bunch of books that once belonged to a religious person named Ethel Holmes, who bought it the year it came out, 1942.

It was the only secular book among them. It was so out of place I can only conclude that Ethel and Louise must have known one another.

I found a book about the prophecies of Daniel that looked good and then I saw Louise's. There was a map on the inside cover and I saw Lake Umbagog, where I once went canoeing as a callow youth. We used to call it Lake UMbagog, but I gather it's UmBAYgog. Whatever.

The booth was empty and I had to ask around to find the guy who was selling Ethel's books. The neighboring sellers pointed him out to me.

You don't grab a book you really want and then ask what it costs. You leave the books in the box and gesture vaguely toward them and ask, "How much for books?"

This guy sized me up and said, "A buck."

I hate it when people size you up. You wonder if somebody else might get a better price, but the guy has your number. Well, after all, I did ask around.

But for a buck, I've already gotten two or three good movies worth of enjoyment, and I've only read the first hundred pages.

What's it like living on the shores of Lake Umbagog in 1942? Well it takes a whole chapter to explain what Louise and her husband Ralph do for a living. They live on a five-mile stretch of road and own four cars. It's extemely interesting, if you're interested.

I'll be posting some samples of Louise Rich's writing. It's really superb, but you have to get a decent size sample to appreciate it.

Reading this book reminded me of the tag sale in Northfield that I almost didn't stop at where I got a signed copy of Mary Phylinda Dole's authobiography or the times I first stumbled on Dame Shirley and Isabella Bird and Harry Golden.

It may be that I'm the only person in the world who could possibly enjoy this book, but that just makes it all the more enjoyable.

In Which I Actually Dicker

2008-07-13T17:36:00.000-07:00

I saw a box of books at the flea market today and asked the lady, "How much for books?" She said, "They're all different prices. Some are marked."

I hate that. Books are a buck for hardbound, fifty for paperback.

I looked at the book I wanted, the only old one there (1921, poor condition), and it said five bucks. "That's a lot," I said, and put it back.

"Three," she said. I was ready to pay it. It was a book by E. Phillips Oppenheim.

"Two," I said, not because I'm cheap, but because this blog is about great reads for a quarter, or a buck, or maybe two, but not three, except of course for signed copies of Mary Phylinda Dole's autobiography.

The book, Nobody's Man, now that I've had a look at it, is worth ten bucks (to me), even in a banged-up edition. But to almost anyone else in the universe, it has no value whatsoever. To enjoy it you have to know all kinds of code belonging to the last century that no one knows today.

The main character, we can't really call him a hero yet, is quite clearly guilty of second degree murder and he's equally clearly trying to cover it up. He punched a guy who hit a rotten bit of railing and fell off a predipice. He has sent away his social-climbing wife and all the servants from his country estate and refuses to answer questions posed by Scotland Yard.

Usually we would read a few hundred pages and see him get his comeuppance. But this is different. This is 1921, three years after the end of WWI, and the guy is a war hero. Not only that, he has been driven out of Parliament because he refused to compromise his ideals.

For those of you unfamiliar with the code, this means he's not going to be convicted of murder. Not only that, he's probably going to become Prime Minister, but I'm hooked. I have to see how Oppenheim makes this happen.

I've read several other books by Oppenheim -- one was about a million dollar note that three people had pieces of -- and they're all really good if you're willing to get bored in drawing rooms, gentleman's clubs and country estates all over England. You do meet some rather droll characters.

But if you don't know the discourse of the last century, it's all pretty unintelligible. I guess it comes under the heading really interesting, if you're interested.

Summer Stock Theater:The Hobbit Packs a Bag

2008-07-08T21:04:00.000-07:00

The joke around the office is I help edit a travel website, but I hate to leave New England. It's true I did turn down trips to Paris and Madrid and drive ten hours to a B&B in Maine.

No disrespect to those ancient capitals, far from it. I suggested writers who could (and did!) do a much better job than I could -- Sony Stark and Chance St. John.

I have a theory, based, I admit, solely on my personal preferences, that you can have as much fun in Maine as you could have anywhere in the world. Just take a look at a map of Maine and you'll see what I mean, the way the land embraces the sea.

I think one of the silver linings in the air travel crisis is more and more people, expecially New Englanders, are going to discover the breathtaking beauty of Maine, which has for generations captivated the attentions of so many great painters.

If only there were a train from Boston. People wouldn't have to drive.

This month I am again bestirring myself, this time even less far, to New Hampshire, where I want to write an article about summer stock theater. I think that's something people don't usually think about when they plan their vacation, but it can be really memorable, especially for kids.

I've been talking about this lately with friends, and I've found so many people who fondly remember plays they saw when they were kids. I remember vividly seeing 'Toad of Toad Hall' at the Barnstormers Theater in Tamworth when I was six, half a century ago.

This play, based on The Wind in the Willows, is a swamp-based metaphor for America in the 21st century: the manor has been taken over by rats and weasels and the dimwitted owner, obsessed with motoring, is unable to restore decency and morality.

Summer stock allows children to enjoy theater without riding in subways and taxicabs or wearing uncomfortable clothes, and anything that awakens a kid's sense of wonder can't be all bad.

Summer stock theater also allows greenery-deprived actors from New York to take a breath of fresh air and get a little closer to nature, and I'll bet they enjoy that. But I don't know, so I'm going to ask them.

Then there are the members of the community, many of them kids, who work on the plays. Every stage hand winds up knowing the play by heart, and being a part of a dramatic production gives you a depth of understanding of drama and stagecraft that you never forget because it entwines your own imagination with the playwright's and everybody else's all at once -- the director, the actors, the musicians, the prop manager, the lighting guys, everybody.

Long after it's all over, you feel an attachment to everyone else in the production that it's hard to describe. It's like when Dorothy wakes up in Kansas and everything is black and white again and she says, "But you were there! and you! and you! and you!"

So if a few more parents decide to include a summer stock performance in their vacation planning, and a few more kids discover the power of imagination, that's alright with me.

Jimmy Breslin versus France

2008-07-02T20:27:00.000-07:00

I've been digressing from the main purpose of this blog lately to indulge my latest hobby, bringing peace to the Middle East. I apologize. Back to great reads for a quarter, and you can't miss if you buy a book by Jimmy Breslin.

I consider Table Money the best American novel I have ever read, just beating out All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren and Continental Drift by Russell Banks. And all Breslin's books are great reads. It's a point of honor with him. He will not waste your time.

So last Saturday I was on my way to tag sales in Montague and Leverett when I saw some tables of books set out with nobody there, just a jar. A bunch of beautiful picture books of the Kennedys. I should have bought them all. The price was right. But I have a few books as it is and I often have to make painful choices. I picked out four.

There was also a collection of Breslin's columns, The World According to Breslin, which I had to have, but I didn't have the right change. I tried to find somebody at the house, but no luck, just a couple of dogs inside barking ferociously. I had to drive a half a mile and get the right change and go back, but it was all worth it. Here's a sample:

Breslin is speaking up for the people in Howard Beach who don't want the Concorde to land at Kennedy Airport because it makes too much noise. The French say that it makes no more noise than an American-made plane, and these objections are a ruse to exclude European-made aircraft.

Breslin takes umbrage with a comment by the French president about the residents of Howard Beach and books passage on the QE2 to take up the matter in person. In Cherbourg he tells reporters that he is challenging President d'Estaing to a duel.

"How do you dare such a thing as to challenge our president?" an announcer shrieked.

"He insulted me. I shall avenge these insults."

"You would duel our president?"

"And win." I said.

President d'Estaing declines to meet with him or speak with him or duel with him, but Breslin goes to the National Assembly where there's a marble bar with a brass rail and six bartenders "to serve the the politicians who came off the Assemblee floor to wash the harangue from their throats."

Breslin is in his element, and one might expect more of him here. As it happens he engages in a puerile exchange with a French deputy, a guy who represents the district where the Concorde is manufactured. Still it's funny:

The interpreter said, "He says that a friendship binds France and the United States. It is of vital importance to both of us. It is not in the interest of the United States to tarnish the image of Franco-American cooperation."

I said to the interpreter, "Tell him that a study at Queens College shows that the noise of the Concorde makes people impotent."

M. Raymond's eyes widened as he listened to this. His voice barked. "He says he is most certainly not impotent," the interpreter said.

"Tell him to prove it," I said.

As the interpreter spoke to him again, M. Raymond's mouth opened. The interpreter said to me, "Not with you." Then M. Raymond calls out something and raises two fingers.

The interpreter said, "He said he will show you that he is not impotent from the Concorde going over his head, that you are to get him two Blue Bell Girls from the Lido and he will show you."

Who Is The True Friend?

2008-06-27T20:48:00.000-07:00

I had the great good fortune, just last night, of bringing together two indomitable forces of nature, and golly was it ever fun to watch.

Susanne Hoder gave a moving and insightful presentation about her visit to the Holy Land and ace videographer Sonya Starr got it all on film.

Soon you won't have to take my word for it; it will be posted on the internet and aired on public access stations across the country and presented to churches, synagogues, mosques and community groups, and you can judge for yourself whether I am talking through my hat.

It's even remotely possible that one or two reporters from the mainstream media might discover the importance of this message to the future of the human race. Not likely, but possible.

I hesitate to characterize the presentation, because you really have to see the whole thing. Susanne, who grew up in Georgia farm country, forms a real bond with her hosts in Palestine and Israel through their love of the land.

It's not a diatribe against the Israelis. She shows an understanding of their need for security and compassion for the victims of violence on both sides.

But when she gets to the bulldozing of orchards and vineyards and olive groves, the landfills and the sewage literally dumped on the tiny bits of farmland left to the Palestinians, the Israeli-only highways, the hijacking of the water supply, the students denied permission to further their education abroad, the emergency patients dying at checkpoints...

Gradually it starts to sink in. We're paying for this, and we can stop it.

I learned last night about the strength of the movement in Israel for Palestinian rights. A lot of very wise and compassionate Israeli citizens, and Jews around the world, are working hard to put an end to this systematic strangulation of economic and social life in the occupied territories, which is just as bad for Israel as a nation as it is for the Palestinians.

And they're thinking what I'm thinking: a little dose of the D-word. Divestment. It worked quickly and expeditiously in South Africa. We don't have to wait for the US government to do this. We can get it going right away.

Investors tend to be skittish, and they have lots of safe options to switch their money to. And more and more investment services are shying away from socially objectionable companies doing business in countries that delineate more than one class of citizens.

Because it was so effective against apartheid in South Africa, the D-word gives a lot of powerful people the willies. That's why Susanne has been targeted by person or persons unknown. Recently someone posted an entry on Wikipedia that accused her of denying the Holocaust.

This is a coldly calculated smear; but don't ask me. Ask the United Methodist Church, the YMCA, the Boy Scouts of America or the PTA.

In fact a friend of Susanne's, a Holocaust survivor, is active in promoting divestment from the companies who are profiting from the occupation. I'm going to see if I can bring him to this area to speak. And we'll get that on video, too.

Jimmy Carter says that Americans don't want to know and many Israelis don't want to know what is happening in Palestine.

Americans don't want to know about radon, either, as many newspaper editors have told me when I submitted stories about it, even though, if you have it in your water and you take a shower, it's equivalent to smoking three packs of cigarettes a day.

Socrates posed the question: Is the true friend one who praises you all the time, no matter what, or the person who tells you the truth even when you don't want to hear it?

It's time for America to be a true friend to the Israeli people.

The Big Day

2008-06-25T20:41:00.000-07:00

I'm getting ready for the big day, and my advice to myself is, "Keep your mouth shut."

I've invited my friend Susanne Hoder to give a presentation here in the Pioneer Valley, at the Jones Library in Amherst, at 7 pm today, Thursday, June 26, about her experience in Palestine. We're making a video of the presentation.

And the fact is, no one cares what Stephen Hartshorne has to say about the conflict in the Holy Land, not even me. What do I know?

My solution would be to evacuate all the holy sites and destroy them with a tactical nuclear device and buy everybody a condo in Palm Beach. That would save a lot of money and bring about world peace, but it's never going to happen.

I contend that every American citizen should hear what Susanne Hoder has to say about what's going on in Palestine.

King Hussein of Jordan, in an interview with the Washington Post earlier this week, talked about the importance of reaching a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before the window closes, which may be soon. And we can!

We just have to reach out to our brothers and sisters in Israel and, with respect and consideration for their safety, remind them of the ideals on which their country was founded, just as Harry Golden, one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, told American southerners in the 40s, 50s and 60s that segregation was morally wrong.

It's a big issue that America doesn't want to know about, but we have to.

Jimmy Carter, is he a liar? Is he a fool? I don't think so. Here's what he has to say:

"Americans don't want to know, and many Israelis don't want to know, what is going on inside Palestine. It's a terrible human rights persecution that far transcends what any outsider would imagine.

"And there are powerful political forces in America that prevent any objective analysis of the problem in the Holy Land. I think it's accurate to say that not a single member of Congress with whom I'm familiar would possibly speak out and call for Israel to withdraw to to their legal boundaries or to publicize the plight of the Palestinians or even to call publicly and repeatedly for good faith peace talks. There hasn't been a day of peace talks now in more than seven years.

"So this is a taboo subject. And I would say that if any member of Congress did speak out, as I've just described, they would probably not be back in Congress the next term."

Do we want to live in a republic where the penalty is political death for telling us what we do not wish to know?

In 1972 in Munich, some demented idiots from Palestine killed eleven Israeli Olympic athletes. This was a terrible, stupid crime. Thirty-six years later, we cannot keep on punishing innocent people in Palestine for a crime they had nothing to do with.

Abraham Lincoln was informed, during the Civil War, that Confederate forces were murdering Union troops who were African Americans. He was asked to authorize the execution of Conferederate officers. He authorized the execution of any Confederate officers who could be proved to have murdered Union troops.

We need to apply the same principle in Palestine. You can't punish innocent people. Not with our money. Not in our name. Because America is not just standing idly by. We're paying for the wall with billions of our tax dollars. We have the power to change this, just by learning what we do not want to know.

And, intractable as the conflict may seem, it is really a petty territorial conflict, in global terms, and its resolution could eliminate enormous barriers that now exist between the West and the Islamic world. Don't ask me. Ask King Abdullah of Jordan, a proven friend of America.

Our goal with this video is just to begin to pull aside the curtain that has shielded us from what we do not want to know. Just to begin to tug at the curtain. Like Toto in The Wizard of Oz.

For those of you who can't make it to the Jones Library, we'll be posting the video on YouTube.

Two Humps for Jack Madden

2008-06-25T09:47:00.000-07:00

I'm having tremendous fun with Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, edited by William Butler Yeats. As I mentioned, these stories about "the good people" or "the gentry," as they are known, are very unlike the popular notion of a fairy tale.

Take "The Legend of Knockgrafton" by T. Crofton Croker. It tells the tale of the likeable hunchback Lusmore. Lusmore is really good at weaving straw hats and baskets, and although he's harmless, "some ill-minded persons had set strange stories about him afloat."

One night he's on his way home from a neighboring town, and he realizes he can't make it home, and he lies down by the old castle of Knockgrafton.

"Presently there rose a wild strain of unearthly melody upon the ear of little Lusmore; he listened, and he thought that he had never heard such ravishing music before... The words of the song were these: Da Luan, Da Mort, Da Luan, Da Mort, Da Luan, Da Mort when there would be a moment's pause, and then the round of melody went on again..."

Lusmore loves the song, and begins to sing along, but he adds a little lick during the pause: "When Da Luan Da Mort had been sung three times, he took up the tune and raised it with the words angus Da Dardeen."

"The fairies, when they heard this addition to the tune, were so much delighted that, with instant resolve, it was determined to bring the mortal among them, and little Lusmore was conveyed into their company with the eddying speed of a whirlwind."

They say, "Lusmore! Lusmore!/ Doubt not, nor deplore/ For the hump which you bore/ On your back is no more;/ Look down on the floor/ And view it, Lusmore!"

To make a long story somewhat shorter, they get rid of his hump and give him a new suit of clothes and he turns into a handsome young man that no one in the village even recognizes.

Okay, that part is a lot like a conventional fairy story. Now the second part.

A woman on the other side of Ireland who has a son with a hump on his back hears about Lusmore's miraculous cure and sends a friend to ask him about it. Lusmore tells his story, and the woman takes her son, whose name is Jack Madden, to Knockgrafton to try to get rid of his hump in the same way.

But Jack Madden is not very musical and he flunks the fairy test big time.

"Jack Madden, who was in a great hurry to get quit of his hump, never thought of waiting until the fairies had done, or watching for a fit opportunity to raise the tune higher again than Lusmore, so out he bawls, never minding the time or the humour of the tune, or how he could bring his words in properly, angus Da Dardeen angus Da Hena."

The fairies get mad and bring him in and say, "Jack Madden! Jack Madden!/Your words came so bad in/The tune we felt glad in,/ That your life we may sadden;/ Here's two humps for Jack Madden."

So they take Lusmore's hump and stick it on his back.

"...And what through the weight of his other hump, and the long journey, he died soon after, leaving, they say, his heavy curse to any one who would go listen to fairy tunes again."

Not exactly a happily-ever-after kind of ending; but I can tell, people who regularly hold open jam sessions are going, "Right on!"

Herschel, Give Me a Hand Here

2008-06-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

In 1904, Herschel Goldhirsch, then two years old, arrived in Winnipeg, Manitoba, from a shetl in what is now Ukraine and was then Austria. The next year his family moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and you can read all about his childhood in his delightful, educational books Only in America, For 2 Cents Plain, Enjoy, Enjoy and several others, published under his American name, Harry Golden.

In 1942, Golden moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where, for 26 years, he published The Carolina Israelite, which you might call a blog in the age of print. Sometimes it was about the foods of the Lower East Side, sometimes it was about Augustus and Sextus Pompeius, and sometimes it was about Governeur Morris and the wife of LaFayette. My kind of stuff.

Golden took an active role in community affairs and community organizations like the Rotary, but he consistently pointed out to his friends and neighbors that segregation was morally wrong.
He did it politely, and with respect, and even humor, but he never, in any way, diminished the wrongness of it.

Harry Golden was honored by Martin Luther King in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, in which he scorched white moderates, saying he'd rather deal with the Ku Klux Klan, but listed five writers who understood the urgency of his cause. Harry Golden was on that list.

My friend and hero Susanne Hoder was a little girl in Georgia during the Civil Rights Movement, and she remembers representatives of the local synagogue coming to her church and speaking out for the rights of all Americans, just like Harry Golden.

Now it's time for all Americans to say to our allies, the Israelis, that what they are doing to the Palestinians is morally wrong.

The problem is that most Americans know next to nothing of the wall and the sewage and the toxic waste being dumped in the West Bank, or the Israeli-only highways (no Christians or Muslims allowed) or the deprivation of water and building permits of all kinds.

They probably have never had a child die because of delays at a checkpoint. They probably haven't had a year's harvest of grapes spoil because of a closure in the wall.

They probably haven't seen their grandmother shot dead for a curfew violation that turns out not to be a violation. They have not seen the bomb fragments on the pavement that read "Made in USA". I'm not making this up.

Because of the realities of electoral politics, no candidate, not even Barack Obama, can criticize the government of Israel and expect to be elected. That's why it would be a great time for American Jews to step up. They're the only ones who can do so effectively without being accused of supporting terrorists.

The solution of this problem is vital not only for world peace and for the economic and social survival of the Palestinian people. It's vital for the survival of Israel as well. Ariel Sharon, the deliberate instigator of the second intifada, saw this in his old age, and other enllightened Israelis see it too, writ plainly on the wall.

If Israel is to remain a democracy, it will have to end the occupation, or it will go the way of South Africa, its erstwhile ally. If you don't believe me, hold a seance and talk to Harry Golden.

The Good People

2008-06-11T20:19:00.000-07:00

Talk about your great reads for a quarter. I found a copy of Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, edited by William Butler Yeats. A big fat book full of great stories. And one of the great things about it is that these are not anything like most people's idea of fairy tales.

They're not neat. There's no inspirational formula, no consistent triumph of good over evil, no guarantee of a happy ending, far from it, and the lessons learned, though powerful, are not neat either. They are like the lessons of life, and a hard life at that.

For one thing the trooping fairies are not always benevolent with regard to human beings. Why should they be? And some stories suggest they aren't always on good terms with one another, either. They are said to steal children and paralyze people and livestock. Not that they don't have their reasons.

A lot of people refer to the good people as Lepracauns [Yeats' spelling], but that's actually a more specialized term meaning shoemaker. The Lepracauns are rich because they make a lot of shoes (and presumably sell them). Then there's the Cluricaun who gets drunk in wine cellars, the House spirit, the Water-sheerie, the Banshee, the Dallahan (headless phantom) and the Pooka.

The Pooka in the play and the Jimmy Stewart movie 'Harvey' is a six-foot-plus rabbit, but Pookas can be a lot of different animal spirits.

One thing I've noticed about all these spirits is that they all seem to be very up to date on everything that goes on among the human population. Whenever a human meets a fairy or a group of fairies, they all know him by name and they know his family and they seem to have read some kind of dossier detaiing everything he ever said or did.

Teig O'Kane, for example, a young rich hell raiser, is walking home very late one night and meets twenty tiny guys lugging a dead body and one of them says, "Isn't it lucky we met you Teig O'Kane."

"Teig, Teig," the little man says, "you're living a bad life, and we can make a slave of you now, and you cannot withstand us..." They give him some grief, make him carry the body around and bury it, but they let him off easy and he changes his ways.

Pat Driver, the tinker, sees four fairies carrying a body and gets scared and hides in a pile of straw. The fairies start arguing over whose turn it is to carry the body and one of them says, "There's Pat Driver in under the straw. Why wouldn't he tak' his turn?"

Then there's Jack Dogherty, who meets a Merrow (merman) on the beach. "Your servant, sir," says Jack.

"Your servant, kindly, Jack Dogherty," answered the Merrow.

"To be sure, then, how well your honor knows my name!" said Jack.

"Why, man, I knew your grandfather..."

Then there's Daniel O'Rourke who gets "the same thing as tipsy, almost" and falls into a river and gets swept to an island and then gets stuck in a swamp.

"All of a sudden the moon grew black, and I looked up... and down it came with a pounce and looked me full in the face; and what was it but an eagle? as fine a one as ever flew from the kingdom of Kerry. So he looked at me in the face and says he to me, 'Daniel O'Rourke,' says he, 'how do you do?'"

It's like Cheers -- everybody knows your name.

High Gas Prices -- Where's the Downside?

2008-06-05T21:40:00.000-07:00

Have you heard all the disastrous news? First of all, Detroit is cancelling orders for low-mileage vehicles like trucks and SUVs. People are crowding into underground and above-ground moving modules which the socialistic Europeans call public transportation.

The value of energy innovations like solar panels or wind turbines is always calculated by the money they can save or generate, and this is always based on the price of the fuel oil or gasoline they would save. All these innovations have become more valuable, so the 'invisible hand' of the free market will now favor them.

So higher fuel prices have reduced the production of obscene fuel-wasting vehicles, increased the use of buses and trains, and increased the economic viability of effective alternative solutions.

I'm still looking for the downside. Okay, the farmers and the salesmen get screwed. But no one worries about the salesmen and the farmers always get screwed, except, maybe, the ones who use draft horses or oxen... Would it be too terrible if we had more of them?

Let's also consider the terrible consequences for the Indy 500, NASACAR and monster truck exhibitions. Often these public displays of wastefulness have had to be cut back or cancelled altogether. How sad does that make me?

I personally feel they should run the Indy 500 with Freddy Flintsone cars. Just try it once. That's all I ask.

But don't ask me about high gas prices. Ask Click and Clack of Car Talk. They -- if anyone does -- understand America's love affair with the automobile, but they, like me, deplore the tax subsidies SUV owners have enjoyed and they have proposed a sizeable gas tax, several dollars per gallon.

Their argument is impeccably presented, and in my opinion, cannot be disputed. Without going into details, I will just say that at the end of the six- or seven-year period they project, the price of gasoline will have escalated to the same level it would have achieved without the tax, but during that time we, the American people, will have put aside a sizeable amount of money to throw around irresponsibly or put toward viable new solutions.

In the interests of full disclosure, I commute five miles to work and I drive a 1996/1997 Honda that paid for itself two years ago. The last two months I've been biking to work, but not for economic reasons.