More Mary Phylinda - A Country Alarm Clock


Reading "A Doctor in Homespun" by Mary Phylinda Dole gives the reader a glimpse of a world that has disappeared almost completely -- the world of 19th century New England where people made nearly everything for themselves and went to market primarily to sell things.

At the Williams Farm in Ashfield, Massachusetts, where Mary went to live after her mother died (Mrs. Williams was a cousin of Mary's mother), they made their own clothing, soap, yeast, candles, cheese, butter, cider, maple sugar, corn meal and a sweet syrup called raspberry shrub.

"Nothing was ever wasted by the Williams family," Mary writes. "They believed in the old saying, 'Take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.'

"They always had dollars to give to others who needed them. When my brother-in-law's mill burned, Mr. Williams was the largest contributor to a fund to help him rebuild. I have been sent a great many times with a pound of butter, eggs, apples or something to the minister's or where there was sickness."

"The butter and eggs not needed for our own use were taken to the store and traded for various 'notions' such as pins, needles, thread, buttons, tape, spices, calico and cotton cloth. For the bigger things, such as barrels of flour and sugar, Mr. Williams traded wood, potatoes, apples and turnips."

Here's a tip from Mary Phylinda - grow your turnips in a field that has been fallow for a year and don't pick them until they've been sweetened by a good hard frost.

And they ate very well indeed. I'm getting hungry just reading about it. They had apples, berries, cabbage, beets, turnips, potatoes, carrots, lamb, chicken, turkey, goose, squirrel, partridge, coon, and brook tout. When a cow was butchered, they had liver, sweetbreads, heart, tongue, kidney, tripe, roast beef, steak, pot roast and corned beef. From the pig they got ham, bacon, roasts, chops, salt pork, Philadelphia scrapple, head cheese, pickled pig's feet and many pounds of sausage.

"It used to be said that everything about a pig could be used except the squeal," she says.

Mary Phylinda was a true farm girl and liked outdoor chores like harnessing and driving the oxen and horses, raking hay, tending calves, shearing sheep, splitting wood, cracking butternuts, tapping maple trees, collecting sap and generally keeping real busy.

I can just picture her studying her Latin while tending the fire beneath the pans of boiling sap.

What also comes through in the opening chapter of this book is the love that Mr. and Mrs. Williams (we don't learn their first names in the book) and the entire Williams family showed to Mary Phylinda, whose mother died when she was eight years old.

"Mr. Williams was a man of few words," she writes, "but when he did speak, every one listened. He seldom raised his voice and never scolded.

"I would like to recommend his alarm clock. It doesn't need winding and never fails. In haying time he would come into the house, take the tin dipper, get some water, add molasses, vinegar and ginger.

"After drinking this, he sat down in his old Windsor chair to rest, holding the empty tin dipper between his knees. When he got so sleepy that the dipper fell, with a clatter, to the floor, he got up and went back to work."  ¶ 3:01 PM 0 comments

  The Old Badger Game

"You see, officer, it was like this..." Ma Joong and Lan Tao-kuei bust a soldier for the old Badger Game. The illustration is from "The Chinese Nail Murders" by Robert van Gulik.  ¶ 3:06 PM 0 comments

  Ma Joon and Chiao Tai - Two Fun-Loving Guys In "The Chinese Nail Murders" by Robert van Gulik, Judge Dee is assigned as magistrate to the Province of Pei-chow, newly liberated from the Mongols by China's Northern Army, and his two lieutenants, Ma Joong and Chiao Tai, meet and became pals with a national martial arts champion named Lan Tao-kuei, the pride of Pei-chow.

Though they are both experienced fighters, as "brothers of the green woods," i.e. bandits, and later as lieutenants of the tribunal, they ask Lan to teach them some grips and exercises.

Lan explains that he doesn't teach individual techniques, that they would have to follow the entire course.

"Ma Joong scratched his head," van Gulik writes.

"'Do I remember correctly,' he asked, 'that your training rules include leaving the wenches alone?'

"'Women sap a man's strength,' Lan said. He spoke so bitterly that his two friends shot him an astonished look. Lan rarely indulged in vehement statements. The boxer continued with a smile: 'That is to say, it'll not hurt if kept well under control. For you I'll make special conditions. You have to give up drinking altogether, you must follow the diet I prescribe, and sleep with a woman only once a month. That's all!'

"Ma Joong shot a doubtful look at Chiao Tai.

"'Well,' he said, 'there's the rub, brother Lan! I don't suppose that I am fonder of a drink and a wench than the next, but I am nearing forty now, and they have grown to be a sort of habit with me, you know. What about you, Chiao Tai?'

"Fingering his small moustache Chiao Tai replied, 'As to the wench, well, all right -- provided of course she's the pick of the top shelf! But as to going entirely without wine...'

"'There you are!' Master Lan laughed. 'But it doesn't matter. You two are boxers of the ninth grade. There is no need to enter the extra grade. In your profession you'll never have to fight an opponent who has reached that highest level.'

"'Why not?' Ma Joong asked.

"'That's simple,' the champion answered. 'For going through all grades from the first up to the ninth, a strong body and perseverance suffice. But for the extra grade, strength and skill are of secondary importance. Only men of a completely serene mind can reach it, and that naturally precludes becoming a criminal.

"'Now that judge of yours,' Lan observed, 'I think he could make the extra grade if he wanted to.'"  ¶ 2:56 PM 0 comments

  Tolstoy Lite In today's busy world, not too many people have the time to read "War and Peace." It's a great work about the epic struggle of the Russian people against the invading forces of Napoleon. Ironically, many Russian aristocrats had to take Russian lessons because they were so used to speaking French.

The definitive scene is when Marshall Kutuzov, the corpulent Russian commander views Napoleon's "Grand Armée," 400,000 strong, arrayed before Smolensk or Kiev or someplace, and says, "I will make them eat horsemeat."

The Russians retreated all the way to Moscow, but there they made their famous stand at Borodino -- a close-range artillery duel, two enormous armies blasting away at one another. Napoleon was a master at using artillery, and Kutuzov was no slouch either.

Tolstoy describes a Russian artillery officer assigning his men, pointing to a spot and saying, "You die here."

The battle was a stand-off, with the French in possession of the field. Half the Russian army and one fourth of the French army were killed or wounded. Then winter set in and Napoleon had to retreat from the burned-out city of Moscow.

Kutuzov more than made good his pledge. On Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, a bag of gold would not buy a crust of bread. Of the 400,000 men Napoleon led into Russia, and the 100,000 who reinforced them later, fewer than 20,000 would ever return. The Cossacks had a grand old time harassing their dwindling ranks.

So "War and Peace" is a corker of a story. It's just that I would have left out the detailed description of the entire masonic induction ceremony (zzzz), the discussion of the Polish constitution (zzzzzz) and the application of the newly discovered principles of calculus to the study of history (zzzzzzzz).

If you would like a taste of Tolstoy that won't take all summer try his collected short stories. I have one of those great Random House Modern Library editions, a paperback-sized hardcover.

His first story, "A History of Yesterday," is more like a writing exercise -- kind of interesting if you're interested in the minutiae of a Russian aristocrat's life in the nineteenth century.

The pace really picks up in Tolstoy's subsequent stories because he went off to war, first as a volunteer and then as a cadet in an artillery battery fighting in Chechenya in the Caucasus Mountains. The beef between the Russians and the Chechens goes way back, you see.

It was kind of like the US Cavalry and the Indians -- an indigenous population using guerilla tactics against a better armed, more numerous opponent. In one story a Chechen floats by a Russian river outpost unnoticed by breathing through a reed.

Then Tolstoy went to Sevastopol in 1854 when it was beseiged by the Turks, the English and the French in the Crimean War. There's an excellent description of life under constant artillery shelling. Where is there room for courage and valor when everyone is under fire and some people get blown up and some don't?

Tolstoy's stories of Sevastopol got great reviews. In fact Tsar Alexander II had a second edition published (in French, curiously) and told his generals, "Guard well the life of that young man."

Here's a description from Tolstoy's second story, "The Raid," of an old Chechen villager captured by the Russians:

"The old man, whose only clothing consisted of a mottled tunic all in rags and patchwork trousers, was so frail that his arms, tightly bound behind his back, seemed scarcely to hold onto his shoulders, and he could scarcely drag his bare crooked legs along.

"His face and even part of his shaven head were deeply furrowed. His wry toothless mouth kept moving beneath his close-cut moustache and beard, as if he were chewing something; but a gleam still sparkled in his red lashless eyes which clearly expressed an old man's indifference to life.

"Rosenkranz [the idiotic Russian ensign who has captured and bound the old man] asked him, through an interpreter, why he had not gone away with the others.

"'Where should I go?' he answered, looking quietly away.

"'Where the others have gone,' someone remarked.

"'The dzhigits [warriors] have gone to fight the Russians, but I am an old man.'

"'Are you not afraid of the Russians?'

"'What can the Russians do to me? I am old.'"  ¶ 10:56 AM 0 comments

  Bill Mauldin Cartoons



Here are a couple of Bill Mauldin cartoons. Bill was a friend of Ernie Pyle's.  ¶ 2:14 PM 0 comments

  Ike's Big Day In early April, 1945, things were going great for Ike and the allies. The Ruhr industrial area of Germany had been surrounded and taken, along with more than 250,000 prisoners. As Winston Churchil put it gleefully, "My dear General, the German is whipped. We've got him. He is all through."

Ike issued a proclamation urging German soldiers to surrender and urging civilians to plant crops. He described the hopelessness of the situation and told them that "further resistance would only add to their future miseries."

"My purpose was to bring the whole bloody business to an end," he writes. "But the hold of Hitler and his associates was still so strong and was so effectively applied elsewhere, through the medium of the Gestapo and the SS, that the nation continued to fight."

Hitler, Ike says, "was writing an ending to a drama that would far exceed in tragic climax anything that his beloved Wagner ever conceived."

That's when Eisenhower had a truly unforgettable day, April 12. First he viewed what may well have been the largest collection of treasure in the history of the world. Genghis Khan or the Spanish conquistadors may have topped it in value, but I rather doubt it. Then he saw the most shocking and horrible sight he had ever seen in his life -- beyond even the horrors of combat. Here's his account:

"General Patton's army had overrun and discovered Nazi treasure hidden away in the lower levels of a deep salt mine. A group of us descended the shaft, almost a half a mile under the surface of the earth.

"At the bottom were huge piles of German currency, apparently heaped up there in a last frantic effort to evacuate some of it before the arrival of the Americans. In one of the tunnels was an enormous number of paintings and other pieces of art.

"In another tunnel we saw a hoard of gold estimated by our experts to be worth about $250,000,000 [in 1945 dollars - billions today] most of it in gold bars.

"Crammed into suitcases and trunks and other containers was a great amount of gold and silver ornaments obviously looted from private dwellings throughout Europe. All the articles had been flattened by hammer blows, to save storage space, and then merely thrown into the receptacle, apparently pending an opportunity to melt them down into gold or silver bars.

"The same day I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency.

"I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.

"I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that 'the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.'

"Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt."

Ike later brought a contingent of Hollywood filmmakers to Europe to document the Holocaust.

I found a description of that day, April 12, 1945 on the website of the University of San Diego History Department website:

"Generals George Patton, Omar Bradley,and Dwight Eisenhower arrived in Ohrdruf. They saw more than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies that had been flung into shallow graves. Eisenhower insisted on seeing the entire camp: a shed piled to the ceiling with bodies, various torture devices, and a butcher's block used for smashing gold fillings from the mouths of the dead. Patton became physically ill behind the barracks. Eisenhower felt that it was necessary for his troops to see for themselves, and the world to know about the conditions at Ohrdruf."

At the end of this unforgettable day, Eisenhower learned that President Franklin Roosevelt had died.  ¶ 7:16 PM 0 comments

  Kurt Vonnegut When I mentioned that passage in "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut the other day, I realized I have not written any entries about Vonnegut. I guess it never occurred to me that there could be anyone who hasn't read all of Kurt Vonnegut's books. If you haven't, you're lucky, because now you can.

They're all great, but "Slaughterhouse Five" is the best, with "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater" and "Sirens of Titan" and "Breakfast of Champions" all in a dead heat for second.

"Slaughterhouse Five" is, in part, about Vonnegut's experience in World War II. He was sent to the front as a scout and was captured almost immediately in the German offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge.

As a prisoner of war he was taken to Dresden where he survived an Allied firebombing raid in which more than a million people died. Ironically, the Germans had been keeping the American prisoners in these underground slaughterhouses, and of course Vonnegut was in Number Five.

One of the great ironies in the book is when the prisoners are brought up to help clean up the wreckage and Bernard O'Hare, a friend of the main character, Billy Pilgrim, sees a teapot that's identical to one he has back home in New Jersey. Dresden, of course, used to be famous for china. Anyway O'Hare picks up the teapot and winds up getting shot for looting.

These wartime memories are interspersed with other episodes in Billy Pilgrim's later life because Billy is always getting mixed up and traveling back and forth in time. Sometimes he even goes into the future, when he is kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, along with a beautiful movie starlet and the Tralfamadoreans put them in a giant dome and stand around hoping to watch them mate.

Vonnegut wrote a lot of science fiction early in his career which was not too successful, so he creates a spoof of himself, an immortal character named Kilgore Trout, an unsuccessful science fiction writer who appears in many of his books. In one of them, Trout has written a book about aliens who come to Earth to bring greetings from their planet, but the only way they can communicate is by farting and tap dancing.

"Cat's Cradle" may be his most popular work, and it really is hilarious. The plot is too complicated to explain, but it involves a small Caribbean island with a ruthless dictator and a forbidden religion and a secret substance called Ice-9 that causes water to solidify at 45 degrees Farenheit.

The ruthless dictator, of course, is described as "one of Freedom's greatest friends" by representatives of the American government. The penalty for double parking -- or any other offense, however minor -- is "the hook."

In this book Vonnegut also invents a number of wonderful new words including "wampeter" -- an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve, like the Holy Grail; "foma" -- harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls, such as "Prosperity is just around the corner;" and, my favorite, "granfalloon" -- a proud and meaningless association of human beings, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Anyway here's the passage from "Slaughterhouse Five" I mentioned. I should explain that because Billy Pilgrim travels back and forth in time, he sometimes winds up watching movies backwards.

"He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

"The formation then flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks.

"The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again and made everything and everybody as good as new.

"When the bombers got back to their base, the steel containers were taken from their racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mostly women who did this work.

"The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again."  ¶ 5:59 PM 2 comments

  The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion In my first Armchair Travel entry I noted wistfully that the books of the generation that fought World War II are showing up at rummage sales as they pass away. For example, there's an edition of "War and Peace" published in 1942 with a map of Russia inside the front cover showing Napoleon's progress in 1812 and one inside the back cover showing Hitler's progress.

Another book that was popular with the WWII generation that I see quite a bit is "Der Fuehrer" by Conrad Heiden. It's an excellent biography of Hitler that explains the conditions in Germany that enabled him to rise to power.

But Heiden, who fought the Nazis in the streets in the 1920s and had to emigrate from Germany, also explains the origin and development of one of the vilest bits of propaganda ever created: "The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion," which purports to be a plan for world domination hatched by a group of rabbis meeting in a Swiss cemetery in 1897.

"We shall create unrest, struggle and hate in the whole of Europe and thence in other continents... Unremittingly we shall poison the relations between the peoples and states of all countries. We shall stultify, seduce, ruin the youth. We shall not stick at bribery, treachery, treason, as long as they serve the realization of our plans.

"If any state dares to resist us; if its neighbors make common cause with it against us, we shall unleash a world war. etc. etc."

In the summer of 1917 an unknown man walked into the rooms of Alfred Rosenberg, then an architecture student in Moscow, left the book on a table and walked out. Rosenberg was later to become the principal racial theorist of the Nazi Party and after Hitler's invasion of Russia he became Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and supervised atrocities on an enormous scale.

Rosenberg accepted the forged "Protocols" as gospel and they were a cornerstone of Nazi propaganda. The irony, of course, is that they outline the Nazi program to a "T".

Heiden explains that most of the text of this work was originally written in 1864 by a French lawyer named Maurice Joly as a satire of the dictator Napleon III. It was entitled "Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu." Joly was captured by Napoleon's police and spent 15 months in prison.

Later the Ochrana, the secret police in Russia under the tsar, wanted yet another pretext for violent persecution of the Jews. "They wanted to frighten the tsar and drive him to bloodshed," Heiden explains. "To this end they persuaded him that the Jews of the whole world had devised a secret conspiracy to achieve domination, first over Russia, then over the whole world."

The Ochrana took out the parts of Joly's work that were attributed to Montesquieu, the advocate of democracy, and kept the parts attributed to Machiavelli, the conniving totalitarian. They also lifted part of a book written in 1868 by Hermann Godsche, under the name of Sir John Retcliffe the Younger, called "Biarritz" about twelve rabbis "from all corners of the earth" meeting in a cemetery in Prague and chortling (in Chaldean, no less) about how, through its mighty bankers and the power of gold, Judah was going to conquer the world.

The Ochrana also cleverly tied in an actual Jewish congress that met in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 and founded the Jewish Zionist Movement. So in the final draft the graveyard where the rabbis meet is moved to Basel.

I mention this because this document is still showing up in our own time and a surprising number of gullible souls still believe in its authenticity. It is also used by militant Islamists as anti-Israeli propaganda. Heny Ford once published excerpts from "The Protocols" in the Dearborn Independent, but he later admitted the work was a fraud and apologized to the Jewish community.

As recently as the 1980s I saw excerpts from "The Protocols" in some weird full-page advertisements that some daffy lady was paying for in Foster's Daily Democrat in Dover, New Hampshire.

So tell your kids about this in case this particular piece of putrescence should float to the surface in the future.  ¶ 7:02 PM 1 comments

  Best Five Bucks I Ever Spent I think I talked about the best six bucks I ever spent - for Mary Phylinda Dole's autobiography "A Doctor in Homespun." The best five bucks I ever spent was for a set of 24 audio tapes called "The History of Ancient Rome" by Professor Garrett G. Fagan of Pennsylvania State University. It's from The Teaching Company (teachco.com).

One of my problems in college was that when a lecturer brought up an interesting point, or one that recalled something I had seen or heard somewhere else, I would lapse into a contemplative reverie and miss the next few minutes of the lecture.

In the audio tape format, this is no problem. I just rewind Professor Fagan and I don't miss a thing. I listened to all these tapes twice and was fascinated the whole time. Professor Fagan is a true scholar, but he is also very good at presenting his views in a way that is understandable to a general audience.

Describing Roman government, for example, with its many different assemblies and procedures, he likens it to an old man's kitchen. To an outside observer it might seem chaotic, he explains, but to the one who has worked in it for many years everything is in the right place.

To explain the Roman attitude toward divinity, Professor Fagan gives the example of a door. The Romans had a god for the lintel -- the big beam across the top that makes a door possible without the house falling down -- a god of the door frame, a god of the threshold, a goddess of the hinges and a god of the door itself. Every spring, every dell and even every grove of trees had its divinity that had to be consulted before any change was made to the landscape.

My personal favorite among the Roman divinities (except for Venus, of course) is Robigus, the god of rust and mold.

And things had to be done at the right time. If the omens were wrong, if a crow flew the wrong way across the sky, they would cancel all the laws made in the assembly that day. If a priest coughed during an incantation, he had to start all over again.

You can see how the Roman priests (who were also the politicians and generals) could manipulate these kinds of things to suit their own purposes.

I disagreed with the professor on a couple of minor points. He says there was nothing mysterious about the Etruscans and that they were probably indigenous to Italy. Well the Etruscan language has still not been deciphered after all these years, and he ought to decipher it before claiming that the Etruscans are not mysterious.

I also have to ask, if the Etruscans are indigenous to Italy, where they got the ideas for the arch (the "keystone" of Roman architecture), the purple stripe on their robes (from purple dye made in Tyre in ancient Phoenicia) and the idea that you can tell the future by looking at the livers of beasts.

He also seemed to have some sort of animus against the Gracchi, two brothers who, each in their turn, tried to reform Roman society and were both assassinated. Remind you of anyone? The younger of the Gracchi, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, was killed when opponents in the assembly broke apart the benches and beat him to death. I got the feeling that Professor Fagan, had he been there, would have busted up a bench and joined in the fun.

But overall I really loved his descriptions and accounts of Rome and the Romans, and especially his ability to choose really apt illustrations. For example, in describing the way Augustus ruled, he mentions a guy who was running for some office or other and went overboard in describing what a great guy he was. Augustus was annoyed by this, and when someone mentioned the guy, he said, "So-and-so is not my friend."

Well everyone got the message and the guy was barred from business, politics and society, became a pariah and wound up killing himself.

Augustus was always mindful of the fate of his uncle and adopted father Julius Caesar who was murdered because the senators thought he wanted to be king. So Augustus always kept up a show of respect for democratic institutions while reserving all the real power for himself.

To show how powerful Rome was back in the day, Professor Fagan gives two illustrations. First, the great commercial city of Rhodes fails to aid the Romans in some conflict or other and pisses them off. The Roman's give tax-free status to Cyrpus and Rhodes becomes a virtual ghost town overnight.

The other example he gives concerns the Syrian army. The Seleucid Kingdom, based in Syria and extending through all of Peria to Afghanistan, was one of the four kingdoms ruled by the sucessors of the generals who divvied up the empire of Alexander the Great after his death.

One Seleucid prince, Antiochus IV, was waging war against the Egyptians. The Romans didn't want Antiochus messing in Egypt, which was their "breadbasket," so they sent this one old man with a walking stick.

This old guy, Popilius Laena, walks up to the front of Antiochus' army, which has just driven the Egyptian army back to Alexandria, and Antiochus comes forward to talk with him. Popilius Laena doesn't even want to talk, he just draws a circle around Antiochus in the sand with his walking stick.

Popilius tells Antiochus that if he walks out the front of the circle, he should consider himself at war with Rome. The Seleucid prince has to turn around and go home.  ¶ 6:58 PM 0 comments

  Three Cheers For Sir Astley Cooper Here's a sample from a book I found for a dollar called "The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes." I was actually looking for another interesting anecdote, but every time I do that, I find another one. This one is by someone named Captain Gronow -- probably a British soldier.

"After the Battle of Waterloo, all the wounded horses of [the Emperor Naploleon's] Household Brigade of cavalry were sold by auction. Sir Astley Cooper attended the sale and bought twelve which he considered so severely hurt as to require the greatest care and attention in order to effect a cure.

"Having had them conveyed, under the care of six grooms, to his park in the country, the great surgeon followed, and with the assistance of his servants, commenced extracting bullets and grapeshot from the bodies and limbs of the suffering animals.

"In a very short time after the operations had been performed, Sir Astley let them run loose in the park; and one morning, to his great delight, he saw the noble animals form in line, charge and then retreat, and afterwards gallop about, appearing greatly contented with the lot that had befallen them.

"These manoeuvres were repeated generally every morning, to his great satisfaction and amusement."

It kind of reminds me of a passage in Kurt Vonnegut's brilliant book "Slaughterhouse Five," a book which deserves an entry of its own. In the passage I'm thinking of, Vonnegut describes how wonderful it would look if you made a movie of an aerial bombing raid and ran it backwards.

Great buildings would rise from piles of rubble as if by magic. People and animals wounded and maimed would miraculously be made whole. The dead would get up and walk around as if nothing had happened. I'll hunt up the passage and post it for you.

Besides editing stories for GoNOMAD.com, I work at a stable with some truly beautiful horses and when I think of the noble steeds Sir Astley saved from the glue factory forming up and charging just for fun, it makes a delightful picture.  ¶ 12:21 PM 0 comments

  Quite the Young Literary Scholar
The author's daughter Sarah Banks Hartshorne, when she was 13, found a passage in James Aswell's book (published in 1951) that Grace Metalious lifted nearly verbatim in her bestseller -- nay, blockbuster -- "Peyton Place" (published in 1956). Quite the young literary scholar.  ¶ 8:40 PM 0 comments

  James Aswell and Grace Metalious

I have mentioned my great admiration for Grace Metalious as a woman who sat down at her kitchen table, like Harriet Beecher Stowe and J.K. Rowlings, and created not just a popular book, but one that entered the American lexicon and changed the way that Americans, especially small-town Americans felt about themselves, all in an age when it was forbidden to say the word "pregnant" on television.

"Peyton Place" became a major motion picture with Lana Turner and surprise! Lorne Greene as the prosecutor. Then it became a television show with Mia Farrow and Ryan O'Neal. Farrow left the show to get married to Frank Sinatra. Imagine being married to Frank Sinatra and Woody Allen.

Anyway I've been trying to find out how many copies of Metalious' first novel were sold, but all I've learned is that 60,000 were sold in the first ten days, and it was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. There were at least 19 printings in the first two years after it was first published -- 1956 and 1957.

As you have probably read in the papers or on line or wherever you get your news, teenage phenomenon Kaavya Viswanathan received a $500,000 advance from Little Brown for her book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," which Little Brown has had to take off the market because readers of Megan McCafferty noticed more than 40 passages in Viswanathan's book that were nearly identical to scenes in McCaffrey's book. McCafferty declined to seek compensation of any kind, just insisted the book be withdrawn. I haven't been able to learn if Viswanathan had to return the advance.

Well it might interest you to know that Grace Metalious could have ended up in the same position as Kaavya Viswanathan if alert readers of James Aswell's little known book "There's One in Every Town," published in 1951 had noticed certain passages in "Peyton Place."

I have to confess that despite my admiration for Grace Metalious as a writer, and despite the fact that I collect her books, I have not read "Peyton Place." But my daughter Sarah did, when she was about thirteen years old. As the granddaughter of Russell Banks, she felt it was important to become acquainted with other members of the New Hampshire White Trash School of Literature.

Well, then I stumbled onto a copy of "There's One in Every Town" at a rummage sale and noticed the cover art - these weirdly drawn fingers all pointing at this woman. So I picked it up to show to her. I said I thought it was a cheap knock-off of Peyton Place until she said patiently, "Look at the copyright, Dad." I admit I should have thought of that.

Well, then my young literary scholar plowed through the Aswell book and lo and behold she found a passage that is virtually identical to a passage from Peyton Place, or rather, the other way around, since it was written five years earlier. The passage has to do with a widower and his son who seem to have a jolly time "baching it," meaning being bachelors together.

I thought that was a rather clever piece of scholarship for a 13-year-old.

Another pretty rare find is a book by George Metalious (Grace's husband) and June O'Shea called "The Girl From Peyton Place." I haven't read this one either, but I did pick out this quotation to show that when Grace wrote about scandalous behavior, she was writing from firsthand experience. George quotes a paper Grace wrote in 1959:

"I couldn't make my husband happy, in fact, he seemed happier away from me than at home. Everyone told me how wonderful he was at school, how happy he was. I gave up completely. I started drinking like a fish and was soon embroiled in a very stupid love affair.

"The man was a farmhand with no education and I didn't even have to try to measure up to him. He thought I was spectacular. He told me I was beautiful, smart and wonderful. It was nice to hear and stupid to listen to.

"I had finished 'Peyton Place' and it seemed to me that I faced a terrible vacuum. I couldn't have a baby; and I couldn't start another book; George had his school and the kids had him. I had a bottle and a man who told me what I wanted to hear. The greater my feelings of guilt became, the more I drank and the more I ran."  ¶ 8:36 PM 0 comments

  Bill Mauldin I've posted several excerpts from Ernie Pyle's dispatches describing the realities of army life during World War II. Another book that gives a vivid, accurate picture of the life of the infantryman is Bill Mauldin's "Up Front," which Mauldin wrote to accompany a selection of his famous cartoons featuring two "dogfaces" named Joe and Willie.

I'll be putting up some of the cartoons, but in the meantime, here's a passage describing two types of infantrymen:

"Look at an infantryman's eyes and you can tell how much war he has seen. Look at his actions in a bar and listen to his talk and you can also tell how much he has seen. If he is cocky and troublesome and talks about how many battles he's fought and how much blood he has spilled, and if he goes around looking for a fight and depending on his uniform to get him extra special privilieges, then he has not had it.

"If he is looking very weary and resigned to the fact that he is probably going to die before it is over, and if he has a deep, almost hopeless desire to go home and forget it all; if he looks with dull, uncomprehending eyes at the fresh-faced kid who is talking about the joys of battle and killing Germans, then he comes from the same infantry as Joe and Willie.

"I've made it sound as if the only infantry is the kind that spends its time being miserable and scared in foxholes. There are other kinds. There are those who like it and those who have reasons of their own for wanting it. I know two of these notable exceptions: a swamp hunter from Georgia and an exiled baron from Prussia.

"The swamp hunter once killed eight krauts with one clip from his M-1 rifle. He loves to go on patrol, all alone, with a rifle, a luger pistol, a knife, plenty of ammunition, and half a dozen grenades hung to his belt by their safety rings, so he can pluck them and throw them like ripe tomatoes.

"The fact that hanging grenades by their rings is not a good way to live to a respectable old age doesn't bother him at all. In fact, he tells with great relish how one came loose while he was creeping around a German position, and how it exploded under his feet, kicking his legs up in the air, but leaving him miraculously unscratched.

"He once saved his entire company by sheer guts, and he has been decorated several times. He says war is just like swamp hunting.

"The Prussian is a wild character who received a battlefield promotion to lieutenant after saving a patrol and the officer who commanded it from annihilation. He is famed far and wide for leading his own patrols fantastic distances through enemy lines. He admits he gets scared, but his hatred for the Germans is so intense that he keeps it up. He has been wounded several times.

"His favorite weapon is the tommy gun, although he used a carbine once to shoot a German officer through the throat, and then almost wept because he had shattered the officer's fine binoculars. He has saved many lives and has got a lot of valuable information by the simple process of sneaking into a darkened kraut command post at night, demanding to know the plans and situation in his arrogant Prussian voice and then sneaking back to our side again.

"The army couldn't get along without soldiers like that. They provide wonderful stories and they inspire their comrades to greater feats of arms, and they do a lot to make Jerry fear the American army.

"Joe and Willie, however, come from the other infantry -- the great numbers of men who stay and sweat in the foxholes that give their more courageous brethren claustrophobia. They go on patrols when patrols are called for, and they don't shirk hazards, because they don't want to let their buddies down.

"The army couldn't get along without them, either. Although it needs men to do the daring deeds, it also needs men who have the quiet courage to stick in their foxholes and fight and kill even though they hate killing and are scared to death while doing it."  ¶ 3:54 PM 0 comments