Armchair Travel
Friday, January 22, 2010
  The Goodrich Foundation

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

 
  The Dearly Departed

My cousin Chris and my mom at cousin Esther's wedding. Photo by Esther Fricke.
 
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
  RIP C.T.



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.
 
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
  So What Did Spartacus Say?

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."
 
Monday, January 11, 2010
  Celebrity Guests


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.
 
Sunday, January 10, 2010
  Getting Smashed in the Head is Not Good For You
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.
 
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
  Carol Burnett on Law and Order

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.
 
Sunday, January 03, 2010
  In the Desert With Charlie Chan
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.
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Location: Sunderland, Massachusetts, United States

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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MOST RECENT POSTS
Cool Houseguests
Kimball Chen -- Small Steps
Let's Hear It For Snail Mail
House of Cards
New Visitors to the Back Porch
Sunshine, My Mom, and the Goodness of Life
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
The Goodrich Foundation
The Lady Cardinal
The Dearly Departed


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