Pete Lit

"In Flanders Fields"

Despite being a pacifist, I still find myself moved by this verse...

In Flanders Fields
by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD, Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Today is Veterans Day, so please give some remembrance to all of the soldiers who have fought for our country. But also recall that this day was originally called Armistice Day ("a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace"), which marked the peaceful end of World War I, and remember that striving for peace means more soldiers come home safely or never go to war in the first place.

Albums start to finish

When I'm downloading from my record collection to my iPod, I rarely download albums in their entirety. Even though I've only tapped one-fifth of my iPod's storage capacity so far, I'm hesitant to download entire albums because, quite frankly, few of them are start-to-finish essential. Most of them have at most four or five tunes that I want to listen to regularly. The exceptions -those that are indeed start-to-finish essential and warrant a full download - are what I've come to realize are among my most cherished albums. And here they are:

Dumptruck, Positively
The Feelies, The Good Earth
Glenn Mercer, Wheels in Motion
The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday
Joel R.L. Phelps & the Downer Trio, 3
Joel R.L. Phelps & the Downer Trio, Warm Springs Night
Morphine, Cure For Pain
Morphine, The Night
Mark Sandman, Sandbox (disc one)
Sebadoh, Bakesale
Tom Waits, Orphans (disc two)
Yo La Tengo, Painful

Two anomolies in this list: Glenn Mercer and the Hold Steady, both of which I like but don't absolutely love. I have several other albums that will be downloaded in the entirety once I get around to it, including Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted, Lou Reed's New York, Silkworm's Libertine and R.E.M's Murmur. Also, this list doesn't include albums downloaded from iTunes, in which having the full album is inevitable - of the latter, there are two (the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime and Tommy Stinson's Village Gorilla Head) that I would have downloaded in full from CD had I not gotten them from iTunes instead.

Quote

"Why shouldn't the American people take half my money from me? I took it all from them."
- Edward Filene, as quoted in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940, by William Leuchtenberg

I didn't know anything about Filene (other than his department store chain) before reading this quote, but he seems to have been an interesting individual. He was a highly successful merchant, of course, but also was instrumental in the creation of both credit unions and workers compensation insurance.

On the Waterfront, reissued

The estimable Chicago publisher Ivan R. Dee is reissuing Budd Schulberg's On The Waterfront, which he wrote after writing the screenplay for the great film of the same name.

“The film’s concentration on a single dominating character, brought close to the camera eye, made it esthetically inconvenient, if not impossible, to set Terry’s story in its social and historical perspective,” Schulberg wrote. “In the novel Terry is a single strand in a rope of intertwining fibers, suggesting the knotted complexities of the world of the waterfront that loops around New York.”

I've already read the book, and it does indeed have much more of an epic sweep than the Terry Malloy-focused film (which is no knock whatsoever on the film - when you have an actor of such magnetism and power as the young Marlon Brando, you'd be crazy not to focus on him). In particular, the novel develops the character of Father Barry much further than the film. And while I don't want to be a spoiler, I will say that the book ends much differently (and realistically) than the thrilling finale of the film. Read it and you'll see what I mean.

What happened in Hastings?

Nick Hornby passes along an intriguing anecdote:

I am on a train from the south coast back to London. Across the aisle, three elderly passengers, two women and a man, buy coffee from the trolley.

“What you do,” says the elderly man to his friends, “Is, you sip through the hole in the top of the lid.”

The two elderly women give it a go, tentatively at first, and pronounce themselves amazed and delighted at this technological breakthrough.

“I only found that out myself when I went to Hastings,” said the man.

What happened in Hastings? I wish I knew.

"What Happened in Hastings" - sounds like short story gold to me! Writers, hop to it!

Quote

"These are dead men. They are ghosts that walk the streets by day. They are ghosts sleeping with yesterday's newspapers thrown around them for covers at night."
- Tom Kromer, Waiting for Nothing

Quote

"Here is the difference between Dante, Milton and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years."
- Carl Sandburg

Beautiful...and that reminds me that I really need to delve back into Sandburg's Chicago Poems one of these days.

Great Depression reading

My literary tour of the Great Depression continues. Over the weekend (thanks in part to Internet-connection problems that kept me off my laptop, blissfully as I now realize) I finished Edmund Wilson's The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump, a collection of magazine essays from 1930-31, when the "Great Depression" moniker hadn't been coined yet and the turnaround engineered by FDR (who took office in 1933) was still a few years off. Wilson surveys the national landscape, with particularly memorable pieces on labor strife in the West Virginia coal mines and the construction site of the Hoover Dam, making no effort to hide his Communist sympathies (which were admittedly more socially acceptable in those capitalist-backlash days) and his loyalties to the common laborer. As the book concludes, I was struck by how convinced the otherwise astute Wilson was then that the Communist revolution in America was imminent. Which makes me wonder why, despite conditions being so ripe, that revolution never happened - was it the success of FDR's New Deal? the preoccupation with the rise of Hitler and immersion in WWII? the emerging horrors of the totalitarian Soviet state that revealed that maybe Communism wasn't paradise after all? Interesting question, I think.

Next up is William Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940, which I'm seventy pages in to. Fresh from his resounding 1932 defeat of Hoover (electoral college margin: 472-59!) FDR has just completed his whirlwind first 100 days in office, during which time he managed to enact a truly mind-boggling mass of legislation designed to stauch the Depression bleeding and prod the country toward recovery. Good reading so far, though a bit heavy on detail.

Ben Tanzer, I Am Richard Simmons

We recently read I Am Richard Simmons, the new chapbook from Ben Tanzer (our colleague, kindred spirit and bestest lunch companion) and swooned all over again, as the story's eponymous narrator projects the energy and mania and exuberance and positivity and, yes, also the veiled desperation and sadness and heartbreak that seems to underlie all of that celebrity's public appearances. The chapbook is part of Mud Luscious Press' ongoing series, and while reading both the book and series are very much worth your time, they may not necessarily change your life. But maybe, just maybe, it will, and at any rate it will definitely change Ben's.

Dorothy & John

I submitted this photo to the wonderful My Parents Were Awesome several weeks ago, but since I've gotten impatient waiting for the site to post it, I thought I'd just go ahead and post it here. That's my parents, Dorothy and John Anderson, during their college years in the late forties. And for the record, though my awesome but late dad is no longer with us, my mom is still thriving and remains quite awesome.