Armchair Travel
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
  Lea's New Book

I went to a poetry reading and book signing at Mocha Maya's in Shelburne Falls last week. Lea Banks was signing copies of her new book All of Me, available through Booksmyth Press, Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.


Twenty years ago, Lea and I founded The Writer's Circle in Henniker, New Hampshire, which, we understand, is still meeting at the library every Wednesday night. Our other collaboration, Sarah Banks Hartshorne, turned out pretty well too, and she turned up as well.

Here's a selection from the book's title poem:


It's a spontaneous belief in sadness:
the charred life we live. It's the wolf.
It's the rabbit. It's a dim sparkling of sex
and little earthquakes. It's that heave
of light through small spaces at night.
It's a tightening. It's a loosening.
The clutch, the knot. The ease.


 
Monday, September 22, 2008
  Back From Elko Full of Balloon Juice



I just got back from a quick trip to Elko, Nevada, and I'm full of balloon juice, having been pumped up by Baxter Black, former large-animal veterinarian and legendary cowboy poet.

I stayed at a real-live ranch and rode the range with a real-life cowboy, and you can't beat that. But I and the other reporters on the four-day tour also got a chance to talk with real-live ranchers and their families about the cowboy/buckaroo way of life and why they love it so much despite all its vicissitudes.

We were watching a movie at the Western Folklife Center called 'Why the Cowboy Sings' and it's a matter of fact that a good number of the hard-boiled journalists, myself included, were downright teary-eyed listening to people talk about how much they love the land and their way of life and one another.

But Baxter Black was all about the humorous side of ranching, especially the vicissitudes. He says he has two kinds of audiences, generic and 'cowy,' and with the cowy audiences he doesn't have to explain the jokes about oysters, and there's a lot more blood and snot.

And you don't get more cowy than Elko, so we got the real show complete with prolapsed uteri and exploding methane gas.

Baxter is one of hundreds of cowboy poets and musicians who attend the Cowboy Poetry Gathering, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. And in that time it has been a real focus for western folklore; two to three hundred similar gatherings are now being held all over the West.

So over the next couple of weeks I'll be hammering out a story about it.

Everybody knows that inside every Easten liberal arugula-chomping, NPR-listening elitist there's a little kid who wants to ride and rope and cuss and spit like a real-life cowboy. But what's not so well known is that inside every real-life cowboy there's a poet.

Part of the fun was crossing the Great Salt Desert with Ann Terry Hill of Travel Savvy News, who covers all kinds of destinations around the country, particularly Out West.
 
Monday, September 15, 2008
  The Sad End of Russia's Imperial Family
It has been hard to blog about the second half of Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massey as the young tsarevich Alexis, 14, and his sisters, Olga, 22. Marie, 20, Tatiana 18, and Anastasia, 16, approach their execution, along with their parents, with revolvers in a cellar. How gross is that?


Trotsky wanted a nationally broadcast radio trial of Nicholas, which proved impossible because of military advances by "white" Russian armies, and also because of the Czech Legion, the greatest footnote in the history of the world, guys who fought their way from the Balkans to Vladivostock and back again. Do read up on their amazing accomplishment.


Through no fault of their own, the Czech Legion made the Ural Soviet (soldier/worker council) in Ekaterinberg very nervous. Indeed, the Soviet had to flee later when the Czechs and the "white"Russians took over the town.


The Ural Soviet obtained approval for what they did from Lenin's interior minister, and clearly from Lenin and Trotsky, but, understandably, they didn't want anyone to know what they had done. That's how proud they were.


They bought a lot of lye to decompose the bodies, but they didn't know that the tsarina and the grand duchesses had sewed precious jewels into their corsets. They didn't imagine that the belt buckles of the tsar and his son would not be dissolved. And they left entire the body of Anastasia's spaniel Jimmy.


An investigation by the "white" army that took over Ekaterinberg, together with testimony from the executioners, left no doubt about the details. Thanks to Lord Mountbatten, a cousin of the imperial family, we have 20th-century mitochondrial DNA evidence that confirms the whole disgusting story.


When Woodrow Wilson learned of the death of the imperial family, he changed his mind about Lenin and Bolshevism. I guess you could say the same for me. If they weren't ashamed of what they'd done, why did they buy all that lye?


My impression from this book was that Lenin was a cold-blooded bastard who was no good for the human race. And as everyone knows, Stalin was worse. A murderous bastard, but he crushed Hitler as no one else could have done.


This much seems to be documented: Nicholas and Alexandra lost their thrones because a majority of the people thought Alexandra and Rasputin had betrayed their country to the Germans.

Lenin did betray Russia to the Germans. He rationalized it by saying he expected a revolution in Germany very soon, but that was a lie. He kowtowed to the Kaiser for years after that, and used the Germans wherever he could to help him crush his enemies.

I confess I am no scholar of Russian history, but it seems obvious to me that Lenin was by far the greater traitor than Alexandra or even Rasputin. When I get to heaven, I'm going to spit in his eye.

And I'm going to give Winston Churchill some serious shit for murdering Franklin Roosevelt; but that's another story.
 
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
  My Mom, Who Made Me Bookish
My mom, who made me bookish, is about six years old right now. About a year ago she knew who Shakepeare was. Today she can't remember where she went an hour ago. Alas, she can't read, as she always used to do. Her house is filled with books.

I worked with a woman with dementia several years ago when I worked for a company called Barton's Angels, and the owner, Nancy Barton Whitley, taught me an important lesson. She and I took this client, was completely disoriented, to a gathering at Nancy's house, and she was the life of the party! She had a swell time, and so did everyone else.

She didn't have to remember anyone or anything.

It's a very sad thing that my mom is going back in time, but there's no time right now to think about how sad that is. On the flip side, she's six years old and I can make her happy every day.

I'm going to have some parties. Mom's still great at making friends.

Here's a little ironic twist: I have this old mirror at my house and I kept thinking I would stencil on it those lines from T. S. Eliot: "There will be time/ There will be time/ To prepare a face/ To meet the faces that you meet," and give it to my mom for the upstairs bathroom in the old house.

Wouldn't that be cool, on a mirror? I knew my mom would love it, being a teacher of literature. But I never got around to it.

So I guess the lesson is: don't postpone those home handicraft projects; you never know when they'll become moot.
 
Friday, September 05, 2008
  The Mathematics of Revolution
At the beginning of World War I, Russia had plenty of food, but just about enough railroad transport to make it available throughout the empire, to Petrograd, for example, their capital, renamed from the German form of the name, St. Petersburg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, let's drink to Sergeant Kirpichnikov. It's he who deserves our thanks.
 
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
  More Fun With Nicholas and Alexandra
I'm entirely swept up in Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie. From his perspective as the parent of a child with hemophilia, he is able to fathom the soul of the empress Alexandra.

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

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

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

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

But how could Rasputin effect a cure with a telegram?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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