Armchair Travel

New Visitors to the Back Porch

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:56:00 +0000

The goldfinches love our new thistle seed feeders. They're not as colorful in winter.

And everybody loves sunflower seeds. My flash kept bouncing off the glass, so I had to open the porch door to take this guy's picture. He didn't care; just went right on eating.

Sunshine, My Mom, and the Goodness of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 05:49:00 +0000

We've had a little sunshine here lately, and it has been greatly appreciated. Everybody's lots more cheery.

I lost my mom last fall, so I noticed the direct connection between moms and sunshine. My instinctive reaction, when I see the sunshine, is this internal tape recording of my mom saying, "It's a beautiful day. Go outside and enjoy it."

All evening I've had an image before me, a photo from GoNOMAD of an orphan in Malawi with nothing but a tattered pair of pants, standing by the roadside, smiling a big broad smile.

I think too of the kids in Kent St. John's photos from Papua New Guinea, standing in the sunshine smiling.

There's a message here: GoNOMAD writers are funny-looking so they make children smile. Also, life is good, especially when you're standing in the sunshine, even though it's actually nuclear radiation from a fusion reaction 93 million miles away.

These images remind me of a transcendent experience I had as a substitute teacher in a fourth-grade classroom in the Hawlemont School (serving Hawley and Charlemont) many years ago.

Fourth graders are perhaps the most wonderful people in the world. They can round off to the nearest thousandth, but they don't know how to tell a decent lie.

I looked out at this one particular classroom and I was somehow able to see what would happen if every one of these children realized their full potential -- Mozarts and Martin Luther Kings and Jane Goodalls and Frank Zappas.

It's a staggering thing to see, but somehow, at that moment, I saw it, and it changed forever my ideas about humanity.

I experienced a power that's so far above and beyond everything I've ever known that I couldn't tell you the first thing about it, except that it's very, very good.

That's the only thing that can possibly save this sorry world, the promise of our children.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:32:00 +0000

I'm having enormous fun with The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Not the movie with Barbara Stanwyck; the book by Grace Zaring Stone.

It's set in the treaty ports of China, in 1911, I think.

Here we have troops from all over the European empires guarding the International Settlement -- Senegalese, Annamites, Sikhs and Durhams with machine guns

In the harbor you have gunships from England, France, Holland, Italy, Japan and America.

You have your collapsing Qing Dynasty and then your Nationalists, some of them communists, others not, and Russians, White and Red, supporting one side or the other

Then there are your religious missionaries and your medical missionaries and there's even a mention of Yale in China -- Boola, Boola!

Lots of room for international intrigue.

The story begins with the arrival in China of Megan Davis, who is from a small college town in New England (Amherst or Hanover?) who has come to marry her medical missionary fiance, but gets swept up in the capture of Nanking by Nationalist forces

She ventures out of the International Settlement to help a courageous doctor rescue some orphans, but they are set upon by a mob that doesn't like foreigners and the doctor gets knocked unconscious and she's getting beaten up, and then she gets rescued by the eponymous General Yen, who happens by in his private train and turns out to be a very amusing fellow.

Megan being a prospective missionary's wife, there are a lot of interesting discussions about Western attitudes toward the Chinese and vice versa. At one point she's giving the General a hard time because the mob set upon her and the doctor when they had a safe-conduct with his (General Yen's) signature.

"I see now your safe-conduct was worthless. But I did not know at the time. You see, I have lived all my life in a country where if a situation comparable to this were possible, such a pass would be effective. The whole temper and training of the people would make it so

[Pretty hypothetical and conjectural, if you ask me]

"Do you speak seriously?" General Yen replies. "Where is this country you are talking about that has no mob spirit, no race hatred, but only a perfect respect for law and authority? I had supposed that you were an American."

Score one for the eponymous general.

"Megan realized too late that she had been carried away," Stone continues, "and simultaneously that she must not be carried away again."

The Goodrich Foundation

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:17:00 +0000

I heard a very moving presentation last night at Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Greenfield: Sally and Donald Goodrich, founders of the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation, shown here with scholarship students from Afghanistan.

Sally and Donald lost their son Peter on September 11, 2001. He was on flight 175, the second plane to strike the World Trade Center. Among many other things, Peter was a student of world religion who had a copy of the Qu'ran filled with page markers. To honor his memory, they established the foundation to help the people of Afghanistan.

The foundation raised more than $400,000 to build a school for girls in Logar Province and has also provided funds for a well and a reservoir in Kunar Province, and for scholarships for Afghan students to study abroad.

They also provided help to earthquake victims in Nangahar, and they support an orphanage in Wardak, providing a flock of sheep, arable land, a school and a health clinic to support these young victims of the conflict.

The Foundation's website has a wealth of information about these projects.

"In both Afghanistan and the United States," they write, "our hope is to contribute to a new generation of citizens and leaders capable of devising solutions to complex problems."

Both Sally and Donald described how these efforts, and the bonds they have formed with the Afghan people, have helped them to overcome their grief at the loss of their son.

The talk was part of the Miriam Emerson Peters Speaker Series in Global Awareness.

The Lady Cardinal

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:19:00 +0000

The Dearly Departed

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:05:00 +0000

My cousin Chris and my mom at cousin Esther's wedding. Photo by Esther Fricke.

RIP C.T.

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:40:00 +0000

My cousin Christopher Todd Hartshorne passed away yesterday, suddenly and unexpectedly, much too soon. The news hasn't really sunk in.

It was like that with my mom last Fall. The grief didn't really register until I looked at her watch and her glasses by her bedside and realized she would never need them again.

C.T. Tucker, known to us in his youth as Cousin Crispy, has been an inspiration to me since we were baptized together in 1952.

My grandmother Essie had a favorite story about the occasion in which Chris objected to his handling by the minister and let him have it in the only way he knew how.

Chris' father Kim was a brilliant musician who gave up his musical career for reasons that seem silly today and became a banker.

It was part of the mantra that Kim's brother, my father, the lawyer who wanted to work at the racetrack, recited to me on one or two occasions: 'You can't do what you want to do.'

The lesson was not lost on Chris, and he did what he wanted to do his entire life. He made his living as a musician for years and years, and I do not recall his ever being in a band where anyone else was the leader.

Kicked out of school for refusing to cut his hair, busted speeding in a stolen car with a pound of pot, climbing over the wall of a juvenile detention facility in his pajamas, Chris was always brave and determined -- much more so than I -- and he lived life on his own terms.

People like that become a beacon for everyone around them and C.T. in his day inspired thousands of people with the idea that you can do what you want, and to hell with anybody who stands in your way.

I do not deny that this manner of living is fraught with peril; the examples are all around us; but Chris was fortunate to find a wonderful woman who, by his own account, rescued him and helped steer him in the right direction.

The sad thing is Chris had really just hit his stride and he was a hugely successful animal wrangler for movies and television, and he had equipped his farm with state-of-the-art solar panels and a great outdoor woodstove that could take six-foot logs.

I talked to him just two months ago about his wonderful Dr. Seuss menagerie of llamas, donkeys, pigs, sheep, horses, and whatnot. Lately he'd been having success breeding miniature beagles.

He said he'd been having back problems, but a week or two later they said he had lymphona all over, and they tried a lot of stuff and then yesterday he passed away.

If you didn't know Tucker, or even if you did, check out this video by my friend John Kunhardt, in which Chris plays Joe Kennedy. The part was written by my brother Paul Hartshorne in his musical Love Field.

So What Did Spartacus Say?

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 02:58:00 +0000

I've been wrapped up in The Gladiators by Arthur Koestler about the slave rebellion led by Spartacus. I just googled Koestler and it turns out he's a disillusioned communist

And like Ignazio Silone (Bread and Wine) and George Orwell (Animal Farm), he wrote an anti-communist novel called Darkness at Noon, which I'm going to have to go out and read.

Koestler had a truly amazing life, flying as a journalist over the North Pole aboard the Graf Zeppelin, being captured in the Spanish Civil War and exchanged for the wife of Franco's favorite fighter pilot.

In Jerusalem in 1944 he tried to persuade Menachem Begin (who then had a 500-pound price on his head for the bombing of the King David Hotel) to abandon terrorism and accept a two-state solution. Give the guy points for trying.

The Gladiators was actually written before Darkness at Noon, and it clearly shows his disillusionment with Communism.

Spartacus' (or is it Spartacus's?) big problem, you see, was his own soldiers and followers. They were so into burning and raping and pillaging that it made it hard for cities to open up to them, and they didn't have siege engines like the Romans.

But if they could only have given up the burning and raping and pillaging, every city in Italy would have welcomed them because everybody, especially veteran/farmers, were getting utterly screwed by a corrupt and venal system of large-scale plantation farming using slave labor.

Veterans would come home to see their childrens sold as slaves. Unchecked plutocracy.

Spartacus almost effects an alliance with the Cilician pirates and the Roman exiles in Spain under Sertorius, but that gets bolloxed up by a Roman naval victory, and after knocking off six or eight Roman armies, he finally gets stranded in Bruttium on the toe of the boot of Italy and his pirate buddies let him down and won't take his army off to Thrace, where he's from and whither he would like to retire.

Spartacus comes to the graveyard in Rhegium and sees a tombstone that reads "Titus Lollius lies here by the road so that the passing wanderer may say: Greetings, Lollius!"

"Greetings, Lollius!" says Spartacus, and, Kostler writes, "he smiled the good-natured smile of the old days."

Celebrity Guests

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:19:00 +0000

We've had a great response to the black oil seeds we've been putting on the porch rail, with lots of celebrity guests. I think that's a red-bellied woodpecker on top, and our flashy friend the cardinal.

I'm trying to get a good shot of my favorite celebrity, the lady cardinal, because she's even more beautiful than the male, though not as flashy.

Once I saw the male cardinal feed the lady cardinal. It looks like they're kissing.

All that color on our porch has attracted another celebrity visitor, too, a horned owl. He was too far away to photograph.

Getting Smashed in the Head is Not Good For You

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:29:00 +0000

I have always loved watching football. I pull over to the side of the road and watch high school teams scrimmaging. But I'm not sure I will continue to enjoy watching football much longer, knowing the damage that is being done to the players.

After reading "Offensive Play" by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, October 19, 2009, I wouldn't let my kid play football. The serious lifetime damage of this game is equivalent to the damage inflicted by boxing, and for some it's even worse.

We know that boxers suffer at least a 20% rate of dementia, added on to the normal risk of Alzheimer's.

The National Football League is studying hard hits to the head, as well they should, but it turns out every day-to-day hit does serious damage. Soccer players suffer serious damage when they head the ball.

In a typical drive down the field, NFL linemen suffer dozens of blows to the head, and they all add up. It's not just the severe ones.

"I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I'd hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn't come uncrossed for a full series of plays," said a former NFL lineman. "You are out there trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them."

Gladwell interviews Ann McKee from the VA hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, who has studied brains that have been donated by boxers and football players, who has identified a type of dementia completely unrelated to Alzheimer's that can be found in boxers, of course, but also in football players.

Not just NFL linemen either. It shows up in people who played a little football in college. Turns out it's really bad for your brain to be bashed about, even in a routine football practice.

Remember the asbestos threat? Was that discovered by the government? No it was not. It was discovered by The New Yorker. The asbestos companies didn't seem to notice that they weren't paying any pensions because every single worker was dying of asbestosis. It took a literary magazine to bring out the truth.

But here's the good news for football fans: Dr. McKee's research relies on brain donations, so the data is accumulating very slowly. It will probably be years before we understand how deadly this game is. So, in the meantime, enjoy the playoffs!

Don't read this article in the NY Times: Dementia Risk Seen in Players in N.F.L. Study.

Carol Burnett on Law and Order

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:55:00 +0000

I currently have a household situation that causes me to look heavenward and say thanks: three congenial housemates. In 12 years here at Harmony House, it has often been otherwise. In fact we have been visited here by a number of evil spirits including evil spirit number one, whose name is Legion.

We have heard the cries of souls in torment and we have endured the condescension of... never mind. We've had scads of wonderful people, too. Then sometimes we have a mix.

Anyway, two housemates are fans of Law and Order, which I never watched much before, but it turns out you can actually watch it 24 hours a day. It wasn't long before I was hooked.

I'd stand there watching and then when the commercials came on I'd go out with my wheelbarrow and get a load of cordwood.

When I got back the commercials would be almost over and I would listen to the show while I loaded the wood box.

The writing is solid and responsible, and there's that guy who went to Groton School, like Franklin D. Roosevelt and the judge in My Cousin Vinny and me. He shills for some investment company, too -- good actor.

I read where the show has been very beneficial for actors in New York because they always need new victims and judges and witnesses.

Then I saw the one with Jason Jones as a right-wing radio guy, and I realized that these guys are shaping public opinion in a very good way.

Then tonight I came home and there was Carol Burnett playing the wife of a guy who had murdered a prostitute and her boyfriend. She had a great role and she nailed it. I stood there in wonderment.

I was so glad to see an actress and comedienne that I have known and loved since childhood give such a great performance on a 21st Century show. It wasn't surprising that Carol Burnett nailed the role. The surprise for me was that there's still someone around who can write a role for Carol Burnett to nail.

I know that sounds crotchety, but gol durnit, it's true. Look at all the other crap on TV these days. Good writing like that, I have to doff my bowler.

There's something about Carol Burnett that audiences have always loved, and it warms the cockles of my heart to see that this is still true.

In the Desert With Charlie Chan

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:09:00 +0000

Looking for diversion, I picked up The Chinese Parrot, by Earl Derr Biggers (1926) and I found it. The plot of the book, the second in the Charlie Chan series, is diverting in its own right, but in addition to that, it was written at a time when people had telephone numbers like Pasadena 76, so it transports the reader back in time.

There's a glimpse behind the scenes at a Hollywood movie studio in the Twenties, and a cast of characters that immediately put me in mind of the movies of that era -- the young son of a jewelry store owner, looking to find himself, the young cowgirl full of gumption (already engaged) who scouts out locations for a film company, the former New York reporter living out his days as a desert-town editor...

There's the ruthless tycoon, of course, and an opera singer, and a host of other very three-dimensional grifters, prospectors, society types and movie people, not to mention the inimitable Honolulu police detective himself.

I think the greatest authors are the ones who can create good minor characters like the crooked innkeepers and debauched friars of Alexander Dumas, or the Fat Man and the Pansy in The Maltese Falcon.

I have a few quibbles with the plot, but I have to say, every character in this book is a living, breathing human being, especially the parrot, who dies far too early, in my estimation. If only he could have been resurrected.

The upshot is a book that reads like an old movie where you can really picture the people and the action. Not surprisingly, the Charlie Chan series, eventually, became a big hit on the silver screen, spawning fifteen movies, even though Derr Biggers only wrote five books.

The first few film adaptations were flops because they had Chinese actors playing Charlie Chan. (What an idea! Like an Indian actor playing Gandhi!)

Once they cast a Westerner in the role (Swedish actor Warner Oland). it was a huge success. That tells you something, but I'm not sure what. In the books, Charlie Chan is little, which Warner Oland, surely, is not.

Charlie Chan has been described as a demeaning stereotype because he is deferential, even in the face of racism, and because he speaks broken English.

Actor Keye Luke, who played Chan's Number One Son, was asked if he thought that the character was demeaning to the Chinese. "Demeaning to the race?" he replied, "My God! You've got a Chinese hero!"

Famed mystery writer Ellery Queen agreed that Derr Biggers' character was "a service to humanity and to inter-racial relations." Up until that time, US movie audiences knew only sinister Chinese characters like Fu Manchu.

If you read the book carefully, you see that he actually speaks English as he feels it ought to be spoken, and if he is deferential to loutish Americans, it is always with a wink to the audience, indicating that he is going to make saps out of them, and he does, with very satifying results.

Chess and Matinis at Six Below

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 04:41:00 +0000

I dug out my martini shaker tonight, in spite of solemn vows made on a number of occasions, to toast my buddy Casey, who lived here at Harmony House for nearly ten years while he was a student and later a computer guy at Hampshire College.

I recall sitting on the front porch sipping martinis with Casey when it was six below. With our lap rugs and longjohns we were proof against the elements. We would play chess and indulge our nicotine addiction and share our observations of the world -- a lot like James Spader and William Shatner on Boston Legal.

We played games from the wonderful chess books by Irving Chernev, as well as games of our own, of course, many of which we attempted to record. When I try to play them out, though, I find there's almost always a move missing which makes them hard to reconstruct -- must have been the martinis.

Casey was new to chess, so I had a few decades of experience in my favor, but it didn't take long for him to hold his own, and eventually he beat me more often than not. We generally played the King's Gambit because the games tend to be brief, one way or the other. If Black jumps on his offensive possibilities right off the bat, he can often gain a quick win, but White has lots of chances, too.

I remember we were both spellbound playing out the games of Petrosian, the master who won by retreating. Of course we could never have reached that level of understanding without Chernev's brilliant commentaries.

Then Casey set up a monitor on the porch and we watched all the Bob Hope Bing Crosby movies and three or four seasons of Sex and the City, and a season of Down Under. It was very interesting to compare perspectives, the twenty-something and the forty-something.

I learned a lot about the unique universe of Hampshire College and shared bits of my world as a stockhandler at Yankee Candle.

In the end a confluence of psychoses among the housemates obliged Casey to decamp, but those psychos are all gone now, and it seems right and fitting to sip a few matinis and recollect a rare friendship.

A Little Taste of Heaven

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:24:00 +0000

This Xmas season I stopped listening to the radio and plugged in my tape of Carlene Carter and some of her aunts and cousins and sisters, known variously as the Carter Family or the Carter Sisters.

I reckon it's the closest I'm likely to come to listening to the Heavenly Choir. Not only do they have great voices, they each have a lifetime of learning to sing together, and on top of that they sing songs that really capture the spirit of America in times past.

Grandpa A.P. Carter roamed across the country gathering folk songs and his children and their children have grown up singing them. I suppose their children's children will too. It's a wonderful gift that's been passed along over the generations.

Carlene gives us a glimpse of what it was like to grow up in the consummate musical family in her tribute to Mother Maybelle:

"We'd be way down the road by the break of dawn,
Biscuits and gravy and a truckstop song.
In a world of my own, I saw what I saw.
In the rearview mirror
I got a wink from my grandma.

"And if I could change one thing in this world
I'd go back to the days of Grandma and her girls
Singing sweet and low..."

I can't find this record in Carlene's discography, so I don't know who exactly is on it. My friend Dave Pinkerton made it for me.

It has some of Carlene's great songs like Quarter Moon, Ten Cent Town and I Fell in Love, (check it out, complete with chicken guitar) but it has lots of beautiful old tunes, too, like Fifty Miles of Elbow Room and The Little Brown Church in the Dale and The Banks of the Ohio.

I've listened to this tape hundreds and hundreds of times and I still get teary every time. There's one song by Dave Loggins called Natural Life that gives me shivers up and down my spine. The last verse goes like this:

"When I die, I hope my soul will go to heaven
'Cause I know that I'm just passing through this world,
But I believe that God gave everyone an angel
Just to have a little taste of Heaven
While living here on this Earth."

I've sure had my taste, and I reckon she knows who she is. Merry Christmas, cupcake.

Tunisia's Luckiest Puppy

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:19:00 +0000

One of the funner aspects of working at a travel website is traveling vicariously around the globe with lots of great writers and great people. Like Sony Stark, for instance. I get tired just reading her blog! Here she is in Tunisia with that nation's luckiest puppy.

Voting Decency Off the Island

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 04:07:00 +0000

I remember when I first heard the word "lifestyle" thirty or forty years ago, and it gave me the creeps. It suggested that you could live in a way that might be different from your immediate neighbors, but would be identical to millions and millions of other people, nothing unique or personal about it, like the houses they build these days.

I have never watched the television program Survivor, either, but I've seen snatches of it and heard about it, and it has always given me the creeps, too. While channel surfing, I saw one part where a woman was talking about a musician and a guy who made people laugh.

She said he was a nice enough guy, but, she said, "You wouldn't want to feed him."

At the time I thought, "This is laying the groundwork for the time when the young people of America, once Social Security becomes an unbearable burden, decide to convert an enormous liability -- Social Security recipients -- into a valuable energy resource." All you would need, after all, is a high-tech after-burner.

Well it turns out reality television gives someone else the creeps, too, Francine Prose, who wrote "Voting Democracy Off the Island: Reality TV and the Republican Ethos" in the March 2004 edition of Harper's, which someone left in the sauna at my health club.

I gather that, on Survivor and other reality shows, they have teams, but ultimately you can't win without betraying or at least outlasting your teammates. And millions and millions of children are watching and learning.

Prose enumerates the values implicit in the universe of reality television: "the vision of a zero-sum society in which no one can win unless someone else loses, the conviction that altruism and compassion are signs of folly and weakness, the exultation of solitary striving above the illusory benefits of cooperative mutual aid, the belief that certain circumstances justify secrecy and deception, the invocation of a reviled public enemy to solidify group loyalty."

And she point out that these are "the exact same themes that underlie the rhetoric we have been hearing [in 2004] and continue to hear from the Republican Congress and our current administration."

It's no coincidence that Dick Cheney is heavily invested in prisons. The Republican vision of the world is like the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" when the angel Clarence takes Jimmy Stewart on a tour of the world as it would have been if he had not spent his life working at the Savings and Loan helping people buy homes and build decent neighborhoods.

They go to a town called Potterville, named for the Scrooge-like, Cheeny-like, banker in the movie, which is all bars and pawn shops and strip joints and liquor stores, and, of course, prisons.

To illustrate what I'm trying to say, let me pose this question: How would Jimmy Stewart, one of the most decent people who ever lived, who served his country as a bomber pilot in World War II, have fared on Survivor?

Nice enough guy, but you wouldn't want to feed him.

We can't let children watch this crap without telling them how sick it is. What kind of world do you want to live in?

The Voices of Children

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:18:00 +0000

Very few things can brighten a cold winter night like the voices of children, especially if the songs are well chosen and they practice a lot. Last night I heard a lovely concert by the Mark's Meadow School Chorus under the direction of Mary May. Below is a photo of my favorite member of the chorus, Star Shine Ehrbuk-Stryker.

Mortality as Inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:10:00 +0000

It's a kind of stiff upper lip holiday season for my family since three of our number are battling cancer. We are very close-knit, so we're all anxiously waiting for news and trying to help out the best we can.

As always with this disease there is so much uncertainty, which might be a blessing because it leaves room for hope that the degree of scariness will be reduced. We lost a beloved cousin to a very fast-moving form of cancer years ago, so we know what the worst outcome is like.

It reminds me of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It is when her sister dies that Jo March (Louisa) sees that the life she has known will one day pass away and no one will ever know anything about it unless...

That's when she stops writing silly (but fun!) adventures and starts writing the novels that made her famous.

When you think about it, this idea can be generalized for writers everywhere: Your entire world, all of life as you know it, will, much sooner than you think, pass away forever. Is there anything that you love, that brings you joy, that you would like to pass along to the poor souls who come after us?

Millions of people all over the world know all about the March family and draw inspiration from their story because one person took the time to set it all down in a way that people would enjoy reading.

Admittedly, all those millions of people and all their books will be dust, too, one day, but it's a way of passing along something worthwhile to the next few generations and setting them on the right path so they can do the same.

I think there's another lesson for writers here, too: You don't have to be inspired. You just have to put down what you see.

I want to be like Mommy

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:46:00 +0000

This lady is not an ecdysiast as the drawing might suggest. She actually works at Home Depot.

They were out of snow shovels during a recent snowstorm, and the lady found one in a store room.

When she brought it out, everyone wanted to buy it.

She told her daughter about it and her daughter immortalized the scene in this drawing, which I saw on lamebook.com, via a Facebook post by my friend Angie.

Improve Your Writing Skills

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:48:00 +0000

I mentioned in my last entry that reading Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail will improve your writing skills. Give it a try! Here's a selection. I don't think anyone, even Lincoln, even Churchill, ever used the English language so well. Maybe because it appeals to me so directly as a father:

"We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

"Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, 'Wait.' But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;

"When you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people;

"When you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: 'Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?'"

That's just a taste. Read the whole thing and you'll be the next Kurt Vonnegut.

Writing for the Web

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:10:00 +0000

Our family is praying for my Uncle Nat [Max's father and my godfather] who will be having surgery tomorrow. Not many of us are church-goers or perhaps even religious, but at certain times, religious or not, we pray.

Max has gone down to New Jersey, and I'm holding down the fort. I'm very thankful for the competence of the staff at the GoNOMAD Cafe. They know how to make decisions and that means I can focus on the website, where I have to say, we are publishing some of the best stories I have ever seen. And we have always put up great stuff.

Wednesday I'll fill in for Max in a class on writing for the web, and I've been batting around ideas. I've hosted writing groups for many years, worked with freshmen writing their first college papers, and, in my present post, edited travel stories from writers all over the world.

The advice you give has to be appropriate for the students' level of development, so I think I'll ask for a show of hands to see how many have written something they're proud of, then a show of hands to see how many have written something that really surprised them.

Then I think I'll touch on three points about writing in general. The first is: if you want to be a writer, write. Sounds simple, and it is. My senior year in college, two housemates and I took a course called Daily Themes. You could get a B by writing 300 words a day, and it could even be the same word over and over. We wrote a stupendous amount of crap, but all three of us produced something that really surprised us.

My own offering, Aboard the Mothership, was published in the Yale Literary Magazine, which, I'll have you know, is not for blockheads.

Anyway, the second point is: if you want to be a better writer, read great writers. What you read has a tremendous impact on what you write. My advice to all writers has always been to read Lincoln. The Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural are quintessential Lincoln, but I try to read everything he ever wrote, even his terrible poetry.

And don't forget to read Martin Luther King. Everyone knows the I Have a Dream Speech. Have you read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail? You can't read it without becoming a better writer.

Thirdly, and this is obvious, too: write to the point. Don't take off on tangents, however interesting they might seem. You have to focus. Prune your writing of excess, pretense or falsity. You might not have much left, but that's the real stuff.

I'll try to skip over these points fast if I get the sense that they get it and speak more specifically about writing for the web. Certain bits of information fit in a tweet. Others fit in a Facebook entry. Others fit in a blog entry. Others fit in a GoNOMAD story or an essay in the New York Times.

In all of these media, I believe you will find that it's best to rely on the simple declarative sentence. Sentences are like donkeys -- best not to overload them.

Then there's the line that travel writers walk between telling us only about the destination, so we end up with a Wikipedia entry, or telling us too much about themselves, what we call oversharing. That's usually people who fancy themselves the next Hunter Thompson and want to tell us all about what their Uncle Ernie always said.

Readers want to hear about your journey, but they don't want to wait sixteen paragraphs to find out where you went.

Then we can talk about Search Engine Optimization, key word use in body text, and esoteric stuff like that. Gee, blogs are a great place to bat around ideas.

The Shadows of History

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:43:00 +0000

I saw a documentary about a guy who carved totem poles somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He said he loved working with sharp tools. I think that's a lot like editing a really good story. It's more fun than work.

My editorial cup is running over at GoNOMAD with stories from Max Hartshorne and Cindy Bigras, New Zealand, Sarah Banks Hartshorne, Oaxaca, Kent St. John, Papua/New Guinea, Sony Stark, Switzerland, and Kelly Westhoff, How to Travel Together Without Killing Each Other.

On top of that we have a really first-rate new (to us) author, Sophie Ibbotson, who sent us a great story about Dead Goat Polo in Kyrgyzstan.

Still I have to say the greatest pleasure this week was putting up Roman Skaskiw's story about Visiting Free Ukraine. It reminds me of James Michener's Iberia, not a work of fiction like Michener's other works, but a travelogue that combines a personal journey with an exploration of the history and culture of a country.

One part of Roman's story that I find particularly moving is when he talks to his relatives about the Soviet era.

"I heard of people who were taken away for fighting the Soviets, for criticizing the Soviets, for supporting Ukrainian nationalism, for being wealthy, for being university professors, for being writers, for singing Ukrainian folk songs in a pasture, for being related to someone who was deported, for nothing..."

"Peasants are a silent people," Solzhenitsyn wrote, "without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs."

I felt I was helping to tell a story that might otherwise remain forever untold, not so much in the interests of justice -- it's a bit late for that -- but in the interests of truth.

I think it's important for us to hear how children betrayed their schoolmates and their families and how people tyrannized one another to serve a totalitarian state. It's a lesson that applies to all humanity. And we all know what happens to people who don't study history.

Things Left Undone

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 05:02:00 +0000

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When I was a choirboy at St. Paul's Church in Dedham, Massachusetts, after we had marched out of the church, we stood there by the door while the Reverend Rudy Rowell pronounced what I guess they call the benediction.

I can still hear his stentorian tones: "For we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us, etc. etc."

Without doubt I have done numerous things which I ought not to have done and I hope I have learned all I could from these mistakes. But after you've learnt what you can, you have to move along.

"Done's done," said my friend Roger Patt one day, and it was as if he had snapped his fingers and cleared up a lot of stuff for me. "Done's done."

Undone -- now that's something else again.

This weekend I had a wonderful dinner with some friends from college, but they were so... successful, and so... happily married. They were retiring from distinguished careers and I am still trying to ascend the first few rungs of Maslow's hierarchy.

It prompted a few reflections about my life, which has been wonderful, but which may not have been all that it could have been in terms of accomplishments.

And for all you young people out there, let me offer this insight: While I regret doing those things which I ought not to have done, that's over and done with.

The greater, open-ended regret is having left undone those things which I ought to have done. Those undone things stick with you. I'm not exactly sure what they are, and it is a bit late, but I think I just might get started on them now.
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Roman Skaskiw - A Faceful of Truth

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:28:00 +0000

Back in ought seven, as associate editor at GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, I received a story called 'A Brief Tour of the Holy Land' from a US Army officer named Roman Skaskiw.

I figured since he had served his country in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had a right to be heard. He has since served a second tour in Afghanistan.

The problem was, it was about seven times as long as all our other stories. So I made a deal with the boss to put it up off the clock, as it were. I mean, it added a whole new dimension to the website, but then, I really couldn't justify the time I wanted to spend fussing over it.

We have hundreds of great stories from all over the world, and most of them take about a half a second to put up.

But Roman's story was positively worth it for me as an editor. I could tell right away that this was the real stuff, the next Ernest Hemingway, in this respect -- the guy can't lie.

So just after posting Roman's Holy Land story, we find his Email From Afghanistan has been published by the Atlantic Monthly, probably the most prestigious literary magazine in America. I emailed him that he is exactly what America needs: a faceful of truth.

Our country is hearing a lot of patriotic palaver from scoundrels and chicken hawks, and when the day comes when the American public can hear from honest soldiers like Roman Skaskiw and Andrew Bacevich, I believe our country will be better off.

Dr. Bacevich, who served in Vietnam, lost a son in Iraq. He has some very insightful ideas about American Exceptionalism which you probably haven't heard.

Anyway, after GoNOMAD published his story about the Holy Land, Roman sent me an email saying he had story about hiking in Afghanistan.

"I'm in the army," he said. "Does that count as travel?"

"Travel's travel," I replied, and GoNOMAD became the only travel website with an article about hiking in Afghanistan. It's not much like your typical hikes because you have to wear body armour and you have to crop out all the local residents, even the tea guy, because they might be killed.

Then Roman sent us two great travel articles, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and canoeing in Iowa.

Now he has a superb article in the New York Times which I think every American citizen ought to read, and here's the really good part -- I have his best work yet, a story about his trip to his family's farm in the Ukraine, and I'll have it up on GoNOMAD next week.

I don't want to give away anything, because this will be a blockbuster of sorts for us, coming, as it does, in the wake of the Times article. But it's exactly what I have come to expect from Roman, and it's a privilege to present it to the public.

Roman's grandfather got tipped off that the Soviets were about to arrest him and he swept up his family, including Roman's mother, then two years old, and escaped to Poland and then the United States.

Some of the questions he raises relate to the Soviet genocide in the Ukraine. Nazi war ciminals were brought to justice. but not Soviet war ciminals.

Large historical questions like this are interwoven with a deeply personal journey to Roman's family homeland and his meetings with those who stayed behind. And there are lots of great photos.

For an editor, it's a real pleasure to work with great material.

A Field Hospital in North Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Hartshorne) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:29:00 +0000

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I recently experienced a book collector's delight when I found a second copy of Ernie Pyle's book This is Your War. I was able to pass it on to another historian of my acquaintance who I hope will enjoy it.

Reading Cornelia Hancock's account of tending the wounded at Gettysburg, and her remark that she never felt better in her life, I was reminded of a field hospital Ernie visited many times in Algeria.

A hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina, had been transported lock, stock and barrel to Africa and set up in an oat field. Everything was in tents that could be struck and set up again in three days.

"They were like a giant medical Ringling Brothers," Ernie writes. "Everybody worked like a slave. Doctors helped dig ditches. Nurses helped unload trucks."

"One amateur electrician among the enlisted men started wiring the office tents for lights. A couple of carpenters-by-trade made themselves known, and went to work. A professional sign painter turned up among the first patients , and painted the street signs that helped to give the hospital a civilized touch."

Reading Ernie Pyle is a lot like being there, and what strikes Ernie, and the reader, is how great these people feel because they're making such a big difference for so many people.

The chief surgeon tells him, "I never go into town. I feel better out here than I've ever felt in my life. We were all prima donnas back home. We had every comfort that money could buy. We would have been shocked at the idea of living like this. But we love it. We all do. I suppose we'll be making our families live in tents when we get home."

The chief medical officer tells him, "We have only a quart of water a day to wash, shave and wash clothes in, so we don't take many baths. Maybe we don't smell so good, but when we're all in the same boat we don't notice it. And it sure feels good living out like this."

"At the far end of the hospital, behind an evil-looking barricade of barbed wire, was what Colonel [Rollin] Bauchspies called 'Cassanova Park.' Back there were a hundred and fifty soldiers with venereal disease."

"What's the barbed wire for?" Ernie asked. "They wouldn't try to get out anyhow."

"It's just to make them feel like heels," the colonel said. "There's no damned excuse for a soldier getting caught nowadays unless he just doesn't care. When he gets a venereal he's no good to his country and somebody else has to do his work. So I want him to feel ashamed, even though at the same time he does get the finest medical treatment."

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