Armchair Travel
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
  The Genius of Langston Hughes
I've been reading The Ways of White Folks, a collection of short stories by Langston Hughes. They're all great, but I think the one entitled "Home" may just be the best short story in the English language. I think every high school student in America should be obliged to read it.

Set in the 1930s, it starts with a description of Roy Williams, a black violinist who has been living in Europe for many years but has become ill and has come home to Missouri.

"Roy had been away seven or eight years, wandering the world. He came back very well dressed, but awfully thin. He wasn't well.

"It was this illness that had made Roy come home, really. He had a feeling that he was going to die and he wanted to see his mother again.

"This feeling about death had been coming over him gradually for two or three years now. It seemed to him that it must have started in Vienna, that gay but dying city where so many people were hungry, and yet some still had money to buy champagne and caviar and women in the night-clubs where Roy's orchestra played.

"But the glittering curtains of Roy's jazz were lined with death. It made him sick to see people fainting in the streets of Vienna from hunger, while others stuffed themselves with wine and food. And it made him sad to refuse the young white women trailing behind him when he came home from work late at night, offering their bodies for a little money to buy something to eat...

"'Folks catch hell in Europe,' Roy thought. 'I never saw people as hungry as this, not even Negroes at home.'

"But it was even worse when the orchestra moved back to Berlin. Behind the aparent solidity of that great city behind doors where tourists never passed, hunger and pain were beyond understanding. And the police were beating people who protested, or stole, or begged.

"Yet in the cabaret where Roy played, crowds of folks still spent good gold. They laughed and danced every night and didn't give a damn about the children sleeping in doorways outside, or the men who built houses of packing boxes, or the women who walked the streets to pick up trade."

Tomorrow, if you're good, I'll tell you what happened to Roy when he got home to the "Land of the Free."
 
Sunday, November 26, 2006
  A Deaf and Dumb Giant
You really have to hand it to the news organizations of America. They are dedicated to protecting the American people from the consequences of their actions.

While their stated mission is to tell people what is actually going on, they have decided that the American people are actually too sensitive to see the truth, so they have put on blinders to shield Americans from images that would be too disturbing.

I remember when Bush and his fellow criminals first began talking about their plans for a campaign of "shock and awe" in Iraq. I shuddered to think of the children in that country, let alone the adults.

And yet the media were happily beating the drums for war. The reporters who should have been asking, "What in God's name are we doing?" had only one question, every one of them. They were all wondering, "What am I going to wear?"

Europeans, and other countries that are older and more mature, can see images of children crying over the bodies of their parents and parents holding the broken bodies of their children.

Americans, the media have decided, are too sensitive to see such things. We aren't even allowed to see flag-draped coffins.

This is part of what makes America, in the words of John Rassias, "a deaf and dumb giant in the council of nations."

The news organizations of America have done such a swell job protecting the American people from the consequences of their actions that I think they deserve their own circle in hell. I'm going to speak to Dante about it the next time I channel the spirits.
 
Monday, November 20, 2006
  Two Fine, Humble Men
After the Allied campaign in Sicily, Ernie Pyle flew to Algiers to await transportation back to the US. He dropped in on General Eisenhower, who congratulated him on the columns that had appeared in Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper.

"John Steinbeck, whom Ernie had long admired but had never met, was at Aletti," writes friend and biographer Lee Miller, "and Ernie decided to pay a call.

"As often happened with him, on the way to the hotel he began getting nervous. Perhaps Steinbeck would be busy. Probably he had never heard of Pyle. But he went on. Quentin Reynolds was there with Steinbeck, which made the introductions easy, and for Ernie and John it turned into a historic session of the mutual admiration society."

Reynolds writes, "We sat there on the stone terrace of the villa, talking, almost until dawn... I dropped off to sleep about six a.m. and Ernie and John were still talking, exchanging ideas and finding out that they agreed with each other on everything from bourbon to ranch life in the Southwest. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between two fine, humble men."

Steinbeck later wrote: "There are really two wars and they haven't much to do with each other. There is the war of maps and logistics, of campaigns, of ballistics, armies, divisions, and regiments -- and that is General [George] Marshall's war.

"Then there is the war of homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men, who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, and lug themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage -- and that is Ernie Pyle's war. He knows it as well as anyone and writes about it better than anyone."
 
Friday, November 10, 2006
  The Power of the Kitchen Table
Back in 1850, a preacher's wife in Maine, Harriet Beecher Stowe, received some advice from her sister-in-law, Isabella Beecher:

"Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is."

Hattie had written several textbooks and articles for magazines, mostly to supplement the family's meagre income. But this was something else again. The great Charles Dickens -- who was no slouch as a scribbler -- had done his damedest to wake the country up to the accursedness of slavery, but Americans just called him "a fool and a liar."

Then one day Hattie Stowe had a vision while she was sitting in church. Her son tells us it was "blown into her mind like a mighty wind." She went and sat down at her kitchen table and began to write. Fifteen years later slavery was brought to an end (at least in law), and no less a figure than Abraham Lincoln himself said this was due in large measure to Hattie's book, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

When the two meet in Washington in 1862, the six-foot-four Lincoln shook hands with the five-foot-zero Stowe and said, "So you're the little woman that started this great big war."

Uncle Tom's Cabin, although it is not widely admired as a literary work in our time, was probably one of the most powerful works of literature in the history of the world. It sold more than two million copies worldwide.

Besides galvanizing the antislavery movement in the US, it also had a profound effect on public opinion in Britain, and certainly helped to prevent the British from coming into the war on the side of the Confederates when it might have been in their interest to do so to ensure a continued supply of cotton for their mills.

Unfortunately Uncle Tom, who was beaten to death because he refused to reveal where two fugitive slaves were hiding, is now considered a demeaning stereotype. I think that's too bad. I think he was a hero. Hattie Stowe certainly was.

To me the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin reveals the power of the kitchen table. One hundred years later another housewife sat down at her kitchen table and tackled another ancient evil -- child sexual abuse.

The rape of Selena Cross in Peyton Place by Grace Metalious lifted the curtain on this "accursed thing" for the first time in the history of literature, and America could never again pretend it didn't exist.

When I worked in the NH Senate I served as the staff to the Senate Select Committee on Child Abuse and I accompanied the chairman, Senator Eleanor Podles of Manchester, on numerous speaking engagements.

Every single time she spoke, one or more women would come up at the end and wait quietly for a chance to speak to the senator privately. While I was not privy to these conversations, I was amazed at how many there were. I have never been so moved or felt a part of something so important. And there is no doubt that Grace Metalious encouraged countless child victims to bring this problem into the light of day.
 
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
  "Those that want to be safe must hoist flags."
This is the second entry in our thrilling two-part series on lunatics whom Charles Dickens met in an asylum in Hartford, Connecticut in 1842.

Yesterday Dickens met a woman who styled herself "an antediluvian." Today we meet an aspiring diplomat:

"There was a male patient in bed;" Dickens writes in his American Notes, "very much flushed and heated.

'Well,' said he, starting up, and pulling off his night-cap: 'It’s all settled at last. I have arranged it with Queen Victoria.'

'Arranged what?' asked the Doctor.

'Why, that business about the siege of New York,' he passed his hand wearily across his forehead.

'Oh!' said I, like a man suddenly enlightened. For he looked at me for an answer.

'Yes. Every house without a signal will be fired upon by the British troops. No harm will be done to the others. No harm at all. Those that want to be safe must hoist flags. That’s all they’ll have to do. They must hoist flags.'

Even while he was speaking he seemed, I thought, to have some faint idea that his talk was incoherent. Directly he had said these words, he lay down again; gave a kind of a groan; and covered his hot head with the blankets."
 
Saturday, November 04, 2006
  A Proud and Pleasant Thing
I think this excerpt from Charles Dickens' American Notes shows the lighter side of this sometimes ponderous writer.

Because of his reputation as a social reformer, he was given tours of all the prisons, workhouses and insane asylums. This anecdote comes from a visit to an insane asylum in Hartford, Connecticut. I don't get the reference to Pontefract, a castle in England, but it's funny anyway:

"I very much questioned within myself, as I walked through the Insane Asylum, whether I should have known the attendants from the patients, but for the few words which passed between the former, and the Doctor, in reference to the persons under their charge.

Of course I limit this remark merely to their looks; for the conversation of the mad people was mad enough.

There was one little, prim old lady, of very smiling and good-humoured appearance, who came sidling up to me from the end of a long passage, and with a curtsey of inexpressible condescension, propounded this unaccountable inquiry:

'Does Pontefract still flourish, sir, upon the soil of England?'

'He does, ma'am,' I rejoined.

'When you last saw him, sir, he was - '

'Well, ma'am,' said I, 'extremely well. He begged me to present his compliments. I never saw him looking better.'

At this, the old lady was very much delighted. After glancing at me for a moment, as if to be quite sure that I was serious in my respectful air, she sidled back some paces; sidled forward again; made a sudden skip (at which I precipitately retreated a step or two); and said:

'I am an antediluvian, sir.'

I thought the best thing to say was, that I had suspected as much from the first. Therefore I said so.

'It is an extremely proud and pleasant thing, sir, to be an antediluvian,' said the old lady.

'I should think it was, ma'am,' I rejoined.

The old lady kissed her hand, gave another skip, smirked and sidled down the gallery in a most extraordinary manner, and ambled gracefully into her own bed-chamber. "
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

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