August 2007 Archives

Before I resume my travelogue, I have to lament the fires in Greece.  My 1969 European trip was the highest, happiest point in my life, and much of that was spent in Greece among the sites I'd taught in Humanities and World Literature.  It is one thing to teach Greek tragedies, quite another to walk into Agamemnon's palace at Mycenae, crouch through Herakles' (Hercules') fortress at Tiryns, climb the steep winding path up sacred Delphi.  I delighted in the various little documentaries during the Athens Olympics, especially the views of Olympia, where the great games began.  A forest fire threatened the museum there.  I remember the odd little hill above the curving river and the unprepossessing ruins, the small stadium.  Better still I remember the museum, for it contains Praxiteles' Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, illustrating at once the sculptor's famous curve named after him, a stance you can duplicate by putting all your weight on one foot and throwing that hip out; also illustrating the phenomenal sensuality of cold marble by the most famous sculptor of his period.  With the astonishing three-dimensional lilies at Epidaurus from the temple to Asclepius, the first physician-god of medicine, whose wand with entwined serpents, the caduceus, is still the symbol of medicine, I kept wondering how Italy could ever match the sculptural skills of the classical Greeks.  Until I saw Michelangelo and Bernini, of course.

The Apollo there, from the west pediment of the temple of Zeus, is also my favorite version of that supreme god of the arts (4 Delos should always give me away), whose oracle at spectacular Delphi was the most famous in the world of that time.  He is halfway between the stiff archaic kouros (nude young men) and the classical idealism we are most familiar with, and stands with his right arm pointing straight out from his shoulder, gazing serenely across the centuries. 

Anyone lucky enough to be watching the U.S. Open last night would've seen what I consider to be celebrities with class--also, down-to-earth sincerity, poised modesty, honesty, generosity with their talents, and, best of all, good humor.  In his last set ever on the professional circuit, despite a bit of grandstanding, personable Justin Gimelstob gave Andy Roddick an excellent match and then said goodbye in winning high good humor until he moves into the sportscasting area.  As his interviewer handed him the mike, he then interviewed Roddick and was wonderfully funny, easy about it, the whole crowd enjoying the moment; and Roddick in turn was everything I said in the first sentence.  Especially when he said it was the most awkward thing he'd ever done and finally took the microphone away from Gimelstob to end the fun.  This was in high contrast to the brattiness of Frank Dancivic this morning in his loss to Safin, repeatedly hurling his racket on the ground in little temper tantrums betraying his unsportsmanlike conduct, more like a three-year-old than a 23-year-old and reminding me of the low point in Buford's Heat when Mario Batali brags juvenilely, "Katherine Turner gave me tongue!" 

We have a vested interest in Roddick, who was born here in Omaha in 1982, the family moving away when he was five to Florida for tennis reasons.  Omaha insists upon claiming him, though, despite the contradiction then in Nebraska's claiming Willa Cather, born in Virginia, who moved here when she was nine or ten (depending upon which source one reads).  We're accustomed to our famous people moving away, of course, Fred Astaire, Dorothy Maguire, Marlon Brando, Malcolm X (Malcolm Little), Gerald Ford, Nick Nolte, Alexander Paine. 

A few more final words about Buford's Heat.  He's astutely entertaining, as when he identifies the major distinction between English hunting and ours:  theirs is for the royal and wealthy, the property owners, which is why poaching was always a serious crime and led to such tales as Robin Hood and his Merry Men.  Ours is for the common people, and I can attest to that from Dad, an avid hunter and fisherman and the source of much of our meat seasonally, whether I liked eating it or not.  Mostly not, disliking any gamy taste.

And Buford irritated me with his frequent martyrdom shtick over cuts and burns, when he often said he'd been an amateur cook for friends.  No amateur cook I know drops meat into sizzling deep grease for scalding splashes, and most have been warned on TV and elsewhere to curl fingers under to avoid cutting fingertips off.  But similarly, of course, he is actually writing an autobragography and finally gaining butchering knowledge (from the Italian sources!)  Batali lacks as well as having Batali ask him when Buford's opening his own restaurant.  Aw, shucks, no, he's happy as a mere cook.

Enough.  James Lee Burke pleased me in Pegasus Descending with this passage about Stephen Crane:  "Crane said few of us are nouns.  Most of us are adverbs.  No tragedy is orchestrated by one individual.  An event we blame ourselves for may have been years in the making, and may have much more to do with others than ourselves.  Without recognition of that fact, we never acquire any wisdom about anything."  He also refers to Homer, Dante, and ". . . as Faulkner said . . . the past is not only still with us, the past is not even the past."  (And I'm only to page 123.)  The three authors I did most of my term papers on in college were Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, and W. H. Auden.

If they recognize his name, readers, mainly English majors, know Stephen Crane is best known for The Red Badge of Courage, a Civil War novel written by a noncombatant who had interviewed veterans and read their stories, or some of his much-anthologized short stories, "The Open Boat," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," or the one I favor, being about wintery Nebraska, "The Blue Hotel."  His first grimly realistic novel was about a prostitute, Maggie:  Girl of the Streets, and he wrote heavily ironic poetry; in fact, irony is his middle name.  He died of tuberculosis at 28.   

Mount Rushmore was apparently next on our itinerary, because it's the second and third photos, almost out of the bottom of the third.  I certainly cannot recapture any impression because sister Sue worked up there for a summer, not very happily, and because I keep seeing Cary Grant fleeing the villains across the giant mockup of the Shrine of Democracy in Hitchcock's North by Northwest.  I do know that I liked the corkscrew/pigtail bridge in the Wind Cave section, and we were disappointed by Sylvan Lake, pretty but smaller than we'd expected after all the picture postcards of it, the first time, I suppose, I collided with inflated advertising claims and the shrunken reality.  The same deflation occurred with the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs, really a very small area. but I had a Viewmaster reel of its sights and thought it would be grander.

 We did like the narrow Needles highway (one photo), Mom's first mountain driving, the most scenic section besides the later Spearfish Canyon.  I assume the waterfall picture, next, was taken there because of the surrounding rock formations.

The only other waterfall we visited was Bridal Veil in Spearfish Canyon, a beautiful forested area, not rocky spires.  (I have ever since made a special point of seeking out every waterfall I could find on my trips.)

Then comes a photo of a huge sawdust pile, and I know we were fascinated with the various sawmills because we got Black Hills-stamped lumber back home.  Somewhere in here we went to Lead and Deadwood, the former with its Homestake Gold Mine, "the oldest, largest and deepest in the Western Hemisphere," which the adults refused to take the time to tour; Deadwood with its Mount Moriah Cemetery with the graves of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickock, the latter killed with his Dead Man's Hand we saw in the local museum.  He actually started his gun-slinging career and killed his first man at Rock Creek Station near Fairbury, Nebraska.  (I have been to the re-created Rock Creek Station, a state park site with Oregon Trail ruts, a small museum, and yoked oxen pulling Conestoga wagons in summers.)  I don't know who was more freaked out by the steep street up to the cemetery when it seemed the car would go over backwards, Mom driving or we passengers.

We loved the winding Spearfish Canyon, the kind I found all over Montana, Idaho, elsewhere, winding, steep, forested ravines along a noisily rushing mountain stream of cold, clear water over boulder beds.  Scenes from Dances with Wolves were filmed there decades later.  

I'm sure next we went on to Belle Fourche, where Aunt Ella ran a motel with her second husband, Jack.  Aunt Ella was five years younger than Grampa and definitely looked like him.  Her first marriage left her the name Adel, that of her three children, Raymond and the twins Lorraine and Lloyd.  Her two sons were there with Aunt Ella, so I'm guessing Lorraine was already married.  The last I knew, the boys were in the Twin Cities, and Harold and Lorraine Meyer had a ranch near Isabel, South Dakota.  Mom and Lorraine corresponded, especially at Christmas.   We did not have an auspicious meeting with Ella's second husband, Jack, whose last name I have apparently forgotten on Freudian principle.  She wasn't at the motel when we arrived, and he greeted us naked, all of him, hugely obese, with a brash voice to go with the behavior.  I think Gram had a sharply witty comment, but mainly I remember our shock.  Aunt Ella was humiliated.  The photo is of her and her two sons, whom we obviously liked, because we took more photos of them, which I can't find at present.

One of them worked in Spearfish (at a bank?) and was a bare-legged Roman soldier-spear carrier in the Passion Play, which outdoor amphitheater facing Lookout Mountain is the only other photo from the Black Hills, taken in daylight.  He got us tickets, and we duly went to this famous American successor of the Oberammergau Passion Play, the Jesus acted by the then well-known Josef Meier, a seventh-generation Passion Player, whose daughter Johanna became an equally well-known Wagnerian opera singer.  It was definitely a trip highlight with the Last Supper and the Crucifixion, the dramatic tomb appearance and Ascension.  Many years later, when I was going to Norfolk Junior College (now Northeastern, with a different campus) and working at Tom's Music Store, that Passion Play came to the Norfolk Auditorium, and I got to see it for free by ushering, so I was there all three performances to full houses.  (In those years Norfolk got outstanding performers through its Community Concerts series, such as Basil Rathbone with Helen Gahagan Douglas and the duo pianists, Ferrante and Teicher, though I don't know whether the Passion Play was part of that or not, probably not.)  The tradition was so pure that it was a deja vu experience, the same as I had remembered it from childhood--except for the necessary cramped-stage changes, of course.  Not quite the same grand effects as in an outdoor amphitheater for 7,000.

While looking for some photos, I found a "Souvenir Folder of Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey Circus Featuring Mr. and Mrs. Gargantua the Great," one of those accordion-pleated postcard folders from one of my two visits to the giant circus.  One side is circus animals and views; the other whole side is devoted to the silver-back gorilla and his mate, Gargantua and M'Toto.  I'd forgotten entirely about them, though Time said he and the phony King Kong-like publicity about him, picturing him as a ferocious mankiller, helped bring the circus out of the Depression Days.  He was with the circus from 1938 until 1949, his death; the "marriage" was in 1941.  An Internet entry says he was a captured baby gorilla named Buddy before his circus days. 

A recent survey cited in the August 31 The Week says that "One in four American adults did not read any books last year . . . . 27% say they read more than 15 books."  I don't believe either figure.  We're not that book literate.

In the meantime I finished Gregory Curtis' The Cave Painters:  Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists, an up-to-date history of the great painted caves in France and Spain containing some of the most beautiful art ever made in the dark cave depths, now all inventoried and analyzed.  Chauvet is not only the best but the oldest, 30,000-32,000 years old, 4,000 years older than the next, 14,000 years before Lascaux, that first classical art period lasting 20,000 years according to Curtis, pointing out that our western culture is only about 4,000 years old.  (Chauvet and Cosquer weren't even discovered until the 1990s.) 

I'm chugging through Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare:  The Biography, which will be one of the most definitive from now on.  And I'm juggling James Lee Burke's Pegasus Descending and Dick Francis's Under Orders.  I happily discovered the Francis while waiting for a new prescription in Walgreen's, the first new one by him in six years when we were told he had quit, unable to go on after his wife's death.  Francis belongs to my detective pantheon with Tony Hillerman, Henning Mankell, Nicholas Freeling, Janwillem Van De Wetering; I think I have all of each, plus Raymond Chandler's and Dashiell Hammett's most famous, probably all of K. C. Constantine's quirky ones, Paula Gosling's Solo Blues.  (Constantine was a very special English-teacher-me favorite because he got our notorious contractions dead on, like "I couldn't've," more accurate than any other.)  I've gone through phases, of course, like Dorothy Sayers' very British Lord Peter Wimsey and Agatha Christie;  Ross Mcdonald (Kenneth Millar), whose California sagas with Lew Archer became too formulaic for me; the espionage travelogues of Helen McInness.  Burke and Michael Connelly, whose The Concrete Blonde is the most accurate--and unflattering--literary treatment of attorneys and courts I've read, stand good chances of joining my select list.  (I don't like the ones into psychotics.)  As long as Dave Robicheaux is in them, Burke's become a great favorite, for I loved my trip to Louisiana's Cajun country and was, no thanks to a minor accident, even in the police department in New Iberia where the fictional Robicheaux works.  But we need a different actor than Alec Baldwin, who played him in Heaven's Prisoners (1996).  This fondness for mysteries came not just because I like puzzles but because Aunt Audree loved detective stories, kindling my early interest, and traded Erle Stanley Gardener, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen with me.  It's a form invented by Americans, Edgar Allen Poe being credited with the first, and our fondness for police/detective procedurals occupies much of our TV time.  Oddly, except for her two cleverest, And Then There Were None and The Murder of Roger Akroyd, I've found Agatha Christie dully formulaic/predictable but relish the movies made of her Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple often on PBS and the Biography channels.  My fondness for Dick Francis, his series based esoterically on (mostly) English horse racing, stems largely from his heroes, probably the most honorably decent men in detective fiction (even though they're brutally beaten up for it).  I've learned much about the Southwest tribes, particularly the Navajos, of course, from Tony Hillerman's Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, also much more meaningful after all my trips to New Mexico (and Arizona).  The Hopi and Zuni have some of the most fascinating mythology in the world, a New World equivalent to the well-known Graeco-Roman myths, the Navajos apparently adopting and adapting their neighbors' tales/beliefs.  (I am partial to the Thunder Twins.)      

In 1948 my grandparents bought a new Kaiser, and that's why, most unusually, I missed the beginning of my seventh-grade school year, when I was 10.  We had gone on a long trip before, driving down to Clarence, Missouri, to see Grampa's father and mother and other family, but this time we were going to see Grampa's sister Ella and her family in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, and Gramma's brother, Forrest, in Deer Lodge, Montana, and take in the Black Hills and Yellowstone and more along the way.

I have mentioned in other entries that Conoco had the Touraide service then, so that I had duly sent in for and received a booklet with marked road maps and accompanying tourist information for the most direct routes to our destinations.  Gram had also insisted I read up on the two national parks, considering me what people in the Hall of Justice considered me, a kind of Information Central, since I was such an avid reader.

The driving was divided between Mom and Grampa, while Gramma and I split the back seat.  The joke was that I saw most of the trip out the back window.  Taking the necessities from Dad's Army-surplus camping gear (for his hunting and fishing) in those post World War II days--cots, cookware, cooler--we set out first for Mitchell and the Corn Palace.  Gramma was always a thrifty traveler, wanting to see the most in the short time allotted, a principle I always used for my later vacations, the cram-it-all-in-and-come-home-exhausted route.  I barely remember it, though Grampa marveled at the novel use of corn, naturally, in all those autumn-colored designs.  I don't recall the Badlands--surely, we must have detoured off to circle through them--but I know we had to stop at Wall for Wall Drug, the most advertised pharmacy/tourist site in the nation then.  Tourist traps always have the same clutter of souvenirs and postcards, and all I remember is very cold water.

I've been to the Black Hills so many times since that I cannot swear to the route, just the major sights we thrilled over.  It seems we stayed in Hot Springs and saw bison on our way through the Wind Cave area to Mount Rushmore.  We usually ate breakfast on the roadside, eggs and bacon and toast, coffee for the adults, over the little cylindrical gas stove.  While it was being prepared, Gramma would send me off to pick wildflowers or other natural souvenirs, which she then stuck in a magazine.  We rarely ate in cafes, to save money, buying lunch meat, bread, milk, the Ritz Crackers that Gramma favored as a snack, filling our thermoses with coffee, milk, water at gas stations.  Likewise, sometimes we stayed in motels; sometimes we stayed at a farm place, with permission, Grampa and Mom sleeping on the army cots, Gramma and me on the car seats with the doors open.  Obviously, we had pillows and blankets too, though it was August.

Mom went right on by Wind Cave, but Gramma and I wanted to see a real cave, so, after much cajoling, we finally stopped at a very second-rate one, Sitting Bull Caverns,  Claustrophobic or otherwise, Mom refused to go, but we other three did, climbing down a rickety ladder stairs with the guided group into the chilly, clammy cave, with bare light bulbs hanging along the passages, very drippy, muddy, and narrow.  The crystal formations were worth seeing.  We were told repeatedly, of course, not to take anything; but outside near the entrance, figuring no harm to the site, I did get a cloudy, encrusted crystal.  Actually, I think Gram picked it up for me.  I wasn't that daring.  One cave was enough as far as everyone thought but me.  They also dismissed the many Reptile Gardens--Mom hated snakes--and roadside zoos that filled in unforested areas.

Somewhere in that area we went through a bentonite mill, because I had an ice-cream-pint container full of that surprisingly light (in weight and color) grey powder as proof, bentonite a volcanic clay mined and processed to use for waterproofing oil drilling, now even used for health reasons.  

I have only the photos from one roll of film for the whole trip, black and white, the box camera apparently leaking some light in the lower left-hand corner.  I'm guessing that I was delegated to take certain pictures, since the first one is from a distance in deep grass looking past some pines back across a ravine toward the road (surely during our breakfast stop).  If I can figure out how to incorporate these old, faded photos, I will.  I just bought a new digital camera but haven't got it all worked out yet. (NOTE:  I did, obviously.)

When I wrote the last entry, I assumed readers would know that my grandparents had poultry and livestock to feed and fatten for ultimate selling, not for their self-sustenance.  Evelyn Bruegger's old joke about "assume":  never assume; that makes an ass out of u and me.   I'm from the last age of the family farms, more lamentation, as those have disappeared in corporate mergers.  Case in point:  the largest land owner internationally is supposedly Ted Turner, who has 1.8 million acres around the world, including 128,000 in Patagonia (Argentina).  He is now Nebraska's biggest land owner with 357,719 acres by the most recent count--until he buys some more Sandhills ranches, which will again make state newspaper headlines.  He's rather a special case, preferring to raise bison, the natural livestock of the Great Plains and far more ecologically sound than cattle.

I can still drive country roads and remember many of the names of the farms every mile or even half mile, reciting Bruegmans, Jiraceks, Hydes, Fitzgeralds, Kienows, Peters, for instance, within, say, three miles on the road to Bloomfield, places empty now or gone, like my grandparents' own farm.  Agribusiness has taken over with huge, expensive machines, too costly for the young farmer, who heads to the city for work.  Bad.  That's why it was recently noted most of our population is now metropolitan.

So when Heat made a big deal out of the Italians clinging to ancient traditions, I don't see that as much different from simply turning back the clock here.  I'm not sure how those Italian mountain dwellers are doing it, but foregoing electricity, plumbing, televisions and telephones sums up the sacrifice.  Furthermore, when Buford tells me someone claims to be able to tell from tasting the eggs or the beef what and where the chickens or cattle were fed, my eyebrows go very high.  I'm sure there's a difference in grass-fed as opposed to nutrient-fed cows or chickens, but to specify any further is specious.  We had fresh farm eggs my whole childhood, and the only difference we noted was whether they were white or brown, brown being falsely considered inferior.  (My problem is the same with cars.  To obsess about food or cars is beyond my practicality:  food is nourishment, helpful or harmful, first and foremost, as cars are to get from Point A to Point B, and to fall into ecstasy over either is sentimental claptrap.)

My tastebuds are probably too old, but, when I read that chili flakes and hot peppers are worked into a dish, I know that "nuances" of a hint of Spring are unlikely.  I am a cook, not a chef.  I have made decent pasta and croissants and much else and have to say that, for someone who likes spices of all kinds except curry, simple is better.  The worst meal I ever made was an attempt at coq au vin with poor ingredients--hard to find around Center--for a visiting second cousin and his family from the Chicago area, who would've been and were far happier with Mom's basic menus.  When someone makes a major deal out of presentation, I know that I'm dealing with that omnipresent Image factor in American culture:  as long as it looks good-better-terrific, regardless of what's underneath or behind or wherever . . . . Aesthetics is important to food, surely, but not the point of the exercise.  Except possibly in Japan, the country supreme for design in all things.

When someone describes two major crews, prep and kitchen, splitting the restaurant day, and the absolute necessity for stressful speed at all times involving many staff, certainly that explains much of the expense of fine restaurants and pampered consumers.  And that has created, backhandedly, our fast-food fetishes.  But good food takes time in the preparation and the doing, which Heat does make some points about, except for the service finale.  But I should stop making my point.  Educated by farm experience, I'm not likely to be that impressed by food writers.  And I'm sad about what has happened to our rural areas, emptied into poverty and dying small towns dependent on all those people once filling the countrysides.

I'm not sure I should be writing anything.  Just had an argument with a very big boulder, unseen, while turning in a Hy-Vee parking lot and lost to its brute force.

Anyway, I just finished Bill Buford's Heat (An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany), at once funny, entertaining, informative, appalling.  A former New Yorker fiction editor, Buford couldn't find anyone to write a biography of Mario Batali of "Molto Mario" on the Food Network, so he enslaved himself at Batali's three-star Babbo, a New York Times favorite, to learn about Chefdom, and "enslaved" is the operative word.  My problem is that 25 years of judges and attorneys has left me surly and cold toward Giant Egos, and chefs are right up there with the other foul-mouthed, arrogant celebrities, tediously the media foci nowadays.  I thought immediately of Gordon Ramsey out of BBC America and his F-word:  the obscenity and its variants form about 40% of his splenetic speech as for Batali, but the coy allusion is to "Food," not his snarling, screaming, cursing humiliation of anyone working under him.  None of the chefs in the book is any better, though we are meant to admire them for their furious egocentric creativity, their utter dedication to overpriced cooking, their ugly treatment of underlings in the sacred hierarchy of the kitchen.  And I can't.  When I discover that chicken stock is made of chicken feet, I decide I don't want to eat there, even if I could afford it--and I never could, so the issue is moot.  I'm not sure that Buford meant a negative reaction, and clearly the rave reviews he's received means others relish the shriveling contempt chefs have for the rest of us, the secrets behind their successes.  (I've already said that Buford is very funny and entertaining, stylish.)  But there's my grandparents and what I learned on their farms, and I find the writing of worshipful food critics as excessively silly as ever, even as Buford goes to extravagant pains--pains, the real physical pains of cuts and burns, should be emphasized--to travel from amateur to  master chef-master butcher.

Oddly, Buford ends up at a place where I just realized I had always had a sidelines seat.  In his final chapter, he has this paragraph:  "When I started, I hadn't wanted a restaurant.  What I wanted was the know-how of people who ran restaurants.  I didn't want to be a chef:  just a cook.  And my experiences in Italy had taught me why.  For millennia, people have known how to make their food.  They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer's knowledge of the way the planet works.  They have preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families.  People don't have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and, it's true, those who do have it tend to be professionals--like chefs.  But I didn't want this knowledge in order to be a professional: just to be more human."

What he says was true of my maternal grandparents, like all the other farmers I knew growing up, self-sufficient with all the necessary staples around them.  Cows for milk (cream, butter) and beef, chickens for meat and eggs, pigs for pork and lard; a huge garden including potatoes, carrots, peas, asparagus, cucumbers, pumpkins, onions, tomatoes, beets; at the Bloomfield farm an apple orchard and black walnut trees.  I remember Gramma having honey but don't know whether it was from hives in the orchard or not.  I think there were hives but a beekeeper tended them.

Grampa Koftan did his own butchering, storing the excess at the locker plant with its big walk-in freezers, so that the bacon was home-made and, to me, then, excessively fatty with too much "gordo"--pure white essence of fat--that Batali and other chefs seem to salivate over.  He smoked/cured his own hams or had someone else do it and made his own sausage.  (I was a bit grossed out by the pig intestines used for the casings, still used, as Heat made obvious and Alton Brown has mentioned on "Good Eats.")  I think Grampa even pickled pigs' feet, another of Mom's favorites, though we also bought those at our grocery stores (I've rarely seen any in the supermarkets).  Gramma rendered pork fat into lard and canned much of the beef, put with the rest of her canning in the fruit cellar dug into the hillside, cool, dark underground shelves at the bottom of a crude staircase for all those Mason jars.  (Mom loved Gramma's canned meat.  I didn't, finding the taste OK but the texture too, uhm, slimy, the way I feel about avocadoes.)  Apples, carrots, potatoes were stored in burlap sacks or bushel baskets, sometimes sand used around them.  I think it was cool enough down there for the milk and cream, too.  Black walnuts were saved, safe in their shells, another taste Mom had grown up enjoying but too bitter for me.

Everything possible to be canned was canned:  beets pickled and straight, carrots, peas, asparagus, pumpkin, small onions, dill and sweet pickles, tomatoes and tomato juice (which had a habit of spoiling easily).  Likewise, milk went into the separator on the porch, where it came out as milk, cream, whey.  Grandma churned her own butter, very pale, almost white, and saltier, not so sweet as store butter.  (Churning our own ice cream was a wholly different matter and much more fun than churning butter, but rare, though just as hard work in those days before REA and electricity on farms.)  As I recall, she also made her own cottage cheese, something else Mom liked.  The whole idea was to not have to buy store products except when the home supplies ran out, in winter, say, or when the farm couldn't provide, as with flour, sugar, molasses, Karo syrup (for pancakes), nuts, lunch meat, Kraft cheese, oysters (for Christmas), whatever.  And to cook with your own natural products, what we today call organic, so that when Buford's chefs start raving about natural eggs and their quality, I am remembering only that I collected such eggs and am not impressed.

As a townie, I found soft store bread superior to Gramma's baked aromatically several times a week, to my present shame, as I also preferred the leaner store bacon, Spam and minced ham to her canned meat, Crisco to her lard.  I did like her vegetables and pickled beets better than the kind Freddie's had, and, as I've mentioned, we always had our own garden and did a great deal of canning--and, later, freezing--for the same economic and seasonal, rather than gastronomic, reasons.  Besides being occasionally supplied by her parents, Mama also bought and bartered produce from farm wives living around Center, produce I do regret losing to government regulations and modern technology.  Besides eggs and chickens, either live or dressed, we got cream that still seems unreal, so thick it had to be spooned out, could not be poured--ever.  Whipping that or using it in sauces or on desserts was a pleasure I do blissfully recall.  Dad would also have farmers pay him in meat, or he would buy a side of beef, a slab of bacon, for the locker plant freezer, bulk being far cheaper, as Buford learns when he buys a whole pig and butchers it in his New York apartment. 

I know the processing was passed along generationally, farmers conservative sorts intent upon doing as their fathers and grandfathers did (no wonder they're too often Republicans), as Buford makes apparent is still occurring in Italy's veneration of its long history, though here our technology has thrown all heritage notions aside, and we now find ourselves trying to recover lost breeds and seeds.  I learned from Mom as she learned from Gramma and Gramma undoubtedly learned from Great Gramma, and I presume much of Grampa's knowledge came from his Czech background.  Certainly he taught Mom how to plant, harrow, thresh, and drive tractor.  Of course, Dad came from farm stock, too, but Gramma Luckert died when he was a boy, and Grampa Luckert was a poor farmer, his sons carrying that burden till they could leave.  Dad hired out after the eighth grade to various farmers, ultimately Grampa Koftan.

I learned about birth and death on the farm, naturally, chickens being stupid whether as fluffy little babies or giddy, squawking, pecking hens.  Grandma bought big square cardboard boxes full of holes and peeping chicks to put in the henhouse under the heat lamps, to feed and water to adulthood.  They weren't amusing little Easter toys, tending to panic and pile up in corners where those underneath would suffocate, so we always got scolded if we alarmed them.  We seemed always to be cleaning out dead little bodies.  Grandma preferred using a hatchet to kill her chickens, but Mom insisted I learn how to wring their necks off as part of her regimen for making me self-reliant (like sewing on my own buttons, ironing my own shirts, repairing lamps and faucets).  I tried the hatchet, but wringing was actually easier, as the headless hens then hopped and flopped around, spraying blood from their necks, in those last muscular spasms, like putting frog legs in the frying pan where they "swim."  Picking off the feathers was the hard, nasty part, holding the feet and repeatedly dipping the carcass in a pail of boiling water to loosen the smelly quills.  We cut off and threw away the thin, dirty yellow feet and gutted the bodies, gizzards, livers, and hearts to be saved as delicacies.  Knowing how chicken houses smell and the amount of dung produced, I was shocked that chefs would use the feet for broth and cook the red crests in Heat.

Dangerous pregnant sows would finally spit out baby pigs like farting, the little weakling runts rescued from the litter and kept in the house by the stove, fed and petted till they caught up with their brothers and sisters or died.  Little pigs being spurted out was great fun watching, and I think I saw calves born, though I've seen so many documentaries of animals birthing and still remember the great public fuss over Disney's 1954 The Vanishing Prairie, showing the birth of a bison calf, that I'm not that sure now.  I pointedly did not enjoy the hog butchering, which Grampa always did in a corn crib, those big open-slatted storage areas for the dried corn cobs to feed the livestock, including the pigs, and provide Gramma the cob fuel for her kitchen range.  (You don't see many corn cribs now, except in movies of the South, where women are raped and men are tortured as watchers/voyeurs peek through the slats.)  Hog butchering was a very noisy, an excruciatingly noisy affair, the pigs squealing horribly as they were murdered, their carcasses then hung as Grandpa and his helpers then proceeded to carve the remains into usable, edible portions.  It was also very messy and bloody, especially as the hog was gutted, and I never liked much bloodiness, a family joke why I did not become the doctor Mom wanted me to be.  I usually chose to stay in the house until the pig stopped shrieking, and I only watched part of the butchering because my cousins did.

I was running this all in my mind's movie as I read the chapters of Buford's butcher apprenticeship and his mentioning that ordinary people studiously ignore how meat is produced, deliberately refuse to think of where it comes from--or they become vegans.  I thought that was accurate but somehow funny, at the least quirky, having grown up with my farm education.  It reminded me of my sister, who refused to eat veal because she knew it came from chained-up little calves but loved her steaks.  And it oddly reminded me of a fellow faculty member when I was teaching at Western Illinois in Macomb.  A New Jersey Jew--I mention that only because he made such a point of it--who didn't know how to read a map or drive until we taught him, Jonathan asked me once, very sincere, very worried, if he left eggs in the refrigerator too long, would they hatch.  The big difference between the City Mouse and the Country Mouse is that the latter's had a farm education.    

My sister said she and her husband had gone to the Knox County Fair all four days/nights last weekend.  It helped that their oldest was there with the grandchildren, but they would've gone anyway, for it's an important social event of the year.  It has always been so, though many changes have occurred, of course.

For all my school days, the fair signalled the beginning of the school year around Labor Day; instead of mid-August, it was the tail end, usually at the start of September.  Admission was 50 cents for me, maybe more for adults, which is why we could afford to go both daytime and back again at night.  We went from hillside bleachers to a concrete grandstand with roof at the west end where the ballfield was, and that's where the grandstand acts were each afternoon and evening, regular circus performers, comedians, musicians, sometimes with local talent thrown in.  On a portable stage jugglers and acrobats went through their routines, the one held like an amber fossil for me the flagpole guy bending himself into pretzel shapes at the top of a swaying flagpole bending deeply with his weight.  I remember the quality as being very high, not Ringling Brothers but better than the traveling carnivals that traveled around our area.  Today I understand it is country music acts every night.  Glad I grew up when I did.

When I was in high school, the major nightly event was the dance in the pavilion.  Back then Big Bands reigned, and having someone like the Bobby Layne Orchestra was equivalent to our own Glenn Miller as we danced to "In the Mood," "Sentimental Journey," "Darktown Strutters Ball," "Cherokee," "Margie."  Not all were big bands, but that was the kind of popular music played.  Sometimes we had a local/regional group like Larry Erbst's, who played for most of our dances in Center, but never on the big weekend nights, Saturday and Sunday.  Then we'd have a major orchestra with more than one of everything, sax section, trombone section, trumpet section, oh, yeah.  I had been brought up on dancing by Mom, who loved it and taught me how to fox trot, waltz (the best!), polka, schottische, even the varsuvienne (but not the jitterbug or the cha cha or the bunny hop), and I was consequently one of the best dancers, who also loved it enough to get out on the dance floor first--always a hangup for others--and to dance every dance.  Mom was a great partner, especially for the waltzes, though she outweighed me enough to swing me around.  I was virtually forbidden to go outside--where the drinking was going on--unless I had to cool off, staying by the pavilion doors.  I knew anyway that Mom and Dad would tell me whom I danced with the next day, if I hadn't already told them.  Dad's garage-welding shop-filling station was Gossip Central--I didn't need the recent news item that men gossiped as much as women--since he came home with juicier stories than Mom from the courthouse, also a gossip focal point.  Of course, at intermission, we headed for the church luncheon stands or drove out to the six-mile corner and back with all the windows open to dry our sweaty clothes.  (I wish I could lose water weight now as I did then.)  NOTE:  The six-mile corner was just that, east of Bloomfield at the T-intersection, south to Wausa, north to Crofton, or taking a correctional jog to go on east to U.S. 81.  Several country stores still existed, some even with gas pumps, which was the case then at the six-mile corner.

The midway had the regular carnival rides and gambling games for prizes.  We generally had the same franchise every year and complained mightily when we didn't.  Uncle Larry took me for my first octopus ride when I was little, and I passed out, so he had them stop and carried me off, where I whoozily greeted Mom.  The octopus became a high school favorite.  I didn't much care for the ferris wheel because of my acrophobia--my head starts to lift in floating dizziness at aerial movie highjinks, and I didn't really enjoy the Sears Tower or the Empire State Building, though I like flying, oddly--and because of jerky friends, like J.B., who deliberately rocked the seat.  The Tilt-A-Whirl was fun, gravity plastering me against the back of the netted compartment.  I don't know the name of the bullet-shaped contraption, one on each end of a huge revolving arm, so that the compartments turned and could be upside down, clearly the case when I lost everything out of my pockets and recovered very little after the ride.  (I was always warned about the carnies, who obviously led hard lives.)  When I was small, I favored the merry-go-round and the little cars endlessly circling; I even liked the merry-go-round later and got to deal with all the children's rides again when my sisters were little, for I was generally the one to shepherd them while Mom and Dad visited with dozens of people, the major adult attraction of the fair.

I was never that good at gaming, throwing balls at well-worn stuffed creatures or shooting pellet guns at moving ducks or tossing hoops over prizes, best at lobbing coins into dishes so that I brought home more of those than the rare kewpie doll or stuffed animal.  What I and the folks and Gramma and Grampa and everybody else really liked was the bingo stand, a dime a card, corn kernels as the markers, at which I won at least three blankets among the better prizes, good ones that we had for years.  I think there were two stands because the game was so popular--you'd hover behind someone to take the spot--but I don't recall whether they were church-run like the food stands by Bloomfield's major churches, each with a different reputation, or whether the American Legion or such a group ran the bingo.

We went through every building, naturally, from the animals on the east to the agricultural and crafts displays on the west, also where the all-important school building was, with its exhibit clusters by school in a kind of walled maze as we walked around each corridor to find our own work, our own school, and count the ribboned purples, reds, whites.  That was important in a kind of fine arts competition. The school building was always the best for me, the one I often went to first, the only one I returned to, crammed with art work from kindergarten up, full of displays with unusual materials, pictures from different kinds of seeds, papier-mache volcanoes, the wonderful imaginations of children drawing, painting, scribbling, modeling.  Only the crafts of women--quilting, knitting, crocheting, flower arrangements, sometimes paintings--approached the creativity of the schools.

The county fairs are generally for the farm kids, the 4-Hers, with all their riding horses, livestock, and projects, and I think that's the major emphasis now.  I did belong to a 4-H group briefly, a Gardening group, when the County Agent, who lived in Center, got all the boys in town together for that purpose.  I think we had some kind of fair display but honestly don't recall.  We lasted only one year, Oscar requiring too much fussiness from precise measurements to journals.  I did most of the family's gardening anyway, first with Dad's help, and then by myself, though Dad was always big on tomatoes.  (In his last years he would buy as many as a 100 plants to set out and pamper, and we'd just shake our heads.)

I will add that the animals building became a must-see early for me because that's where we bought my first dog.  Actually, my first dog was a female mongrel low to the ground, as seen in photos when I was about two.  I vaguely remember her, mostly crying when she was gone, learning later that Dad had to take her out north and shoot her.  Anyway, Mom and I saw this toy dog in his puppy group, a little mostly-black-with-white Oriental terrier with corner teeth that stuck out like bulldog fangs, and she bought it for me.  I can remember how that little puppy drank so much milk when we got him home that his belly distended and his legs simply slid outward till he lay against the floor.  That was tiny Zippy, the smartest dog I ever had--and I always had dogs thereafter--who would play hide-and-seek, jump at the sink when he wanted water, did tricks.  Mom later accidentally drove over him coasting in from grocery shopping at Freddie's.  I went looking for another puppy every year at the fair, but the people from Hartington, I think, no longer raised that breed, and I don't remember where I got my next one, Jigger.

The county fair was also the best time to get cotton candy and caramel corn, though the Boltons had that stand on Bloomfield's Main Street during the summer anyway, the best caramel corn ever.

I should also mention that occasional rarities came with the midway, thinking specifically of a truck display at the south end next to the parking area that had a tank with a whale, another first.  Biggest fish I ever saw growing up..  Weird, but that was the point.  Another reason the Knox County Fair was a special end to summer. 

As noted in several places, the programming of children as consumers is almost as efficient as religious school catechisms in creating automated responses.  Pavlov would be proud.  With 3- to 5-year-olds tasting actual McDonald's and store-bought products, the children tested reacted to the bright McDonald's packaging with no taste capabilities demonstrated.  In other words, they chose repeatedly whatever was in McDonald's wrapping and said it was better, whether it was the actual fast-food franchise's or store-bought food.  Likewise, whatever was not so packaged tasted worse, also including McDonald's or store-bought. 

Francis Ford Coppola was quoted in the August 17 The Week:  "[Coppola] . . . says he merely is trying to maintain the sense of wonder he had as a youngster. . . . 'At 5 years old, I saw the world as a very enchanted place.  I thought of myself as a kind of magical elf. . . .'  Drawing on the innocent belief that anything is possible, Copola said, is essential to his creative process.  'If you observe children in those magical ages of 1 1/2 to 5, there's something they have that is so captivating and magical--the art they draw and the little stories that they tell.'  But holding on to that feeling isn't easy.  'So many people are battered over that period of adolescence, battered in terms of conforming to the group.  That's really the battering ram that knocks the belief in magic out of people.' "

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80.  Anyone who keeps learning stays young.  The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young." --Henry Ford 

Watching a brand-new Cirque du Soleil group yesterday--I've seen all the previous ones several times over every time they pop up on TV--I reached into my mental scrapbook and pulled out the following pictures.  The first circus I ever saw was a shoddy traveling affair down at the Fair Grounds in Bloomfield, a small tent with a kind of midway, wagon cages of my first lion, my first tiger, a single elephant, also my first, lumbering through its little routine to finally stand on its hind legs, a group of horses circling with a trick rider or two, trained dogs, some mean monkeys, some clowns, some jugglers and acrobats in elementary trapeze and tumbling routines, not far beyond what we were getting for the grandstand acts at the County Fair in those days before TV ruined the traveling entertainment business.  I had my first Cracker Jacks there, I think.  It was all dusty, hot, grimy (I did notice that), small (the same few people over and over), but I was still wide-eyed, for one of my favorite toys was a very large, complete three-ring circus with menagerie and sideshow and all kinds of performers in vivid paper reproduction that I played with on our front porch, very fragile and subject to wind.  I'd gotten it the same way I did my atomic bomb ring, cereal boxtops and money order.  (Advertised on "The Long Ranger," I think, the ring held a little silver metal bomb with a plastic red-finned end I took off to look into the tiny bomb capsule for the same ricocheting light show that a TV screen has when there's no reception.  But I had to go into the closet or somewhere dark to see it.)

Anyway, I did get to see The Greatest Show on Earth (the movie name was the circus' motto), Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey, in Norfolk by the train tracks, once with Mom, Gramma and Grampa Koftan, once with Ethel and Charlie Clark as a companion for their son, Tom.  We parked in made-for-the-occasion lots and walked over the tracks to the encampment of tents.  I don't recall if the two visits were before or after the terrible Hartford circus fire that killed around a 100, the Big Top not flame retardant until after that July 1944 disaster.  (I didn't know until I checked that date that the circus had wanted to flameproof its tent, but the Army wouldn't release the product because it was wartime, everything important reserved for the military, everything else rationed, like sugar, gas, nylons.)  Subject to the weather, full of light and smells, it was a Big Top, a huge, long canvas oval with three rings all going with different troupes in the same categories, all trapeze artists, all wire or rope walkers, all wild animal tamers, so that it was hard to watch all three groups at once, with clowns circling the outer track for more diversion.  What we could see depended on seat location:  once we were in the middle; once we were toward one end.  The best act was always in the center ring, where the MC ringmaster stood in his special costume, scarlet coat, black top hat, black riding boots, the band at one corner by one of the performers' entrances.  The performers were largely foreign--at least their names were on the programs--definitely international, and included special families like the Flying Wallendas of two and three generations and famous clowns like the sad-faced Emmett Kelly.  With Ringling Brothers' reputation, they were the best to be had, wintering in Sarasota, Florida, where circus performers are still trained.  I noticed they all wore special clogs to and from the rings, slipping them off before they did their routines.  (Years later I saw the Circus World Museum at Baraboo, Wisconsin, also a Ringling Brothers headquarters, when I went up to the Dells.)

Several features were age-old, like the opening parade emphasizing the variety ahead; the ring-sized cages quickly erected with lions or tigers herded in from wagon cages down chutes, roaring as their tamers snapped whips and made them sit on stools or jump over one another; the tiny comic car out of which came an impossible number of clowns or a "clown"--a stuffed dummy, substituted for the live clown--shot out of a cannon, or the splendid trapeze artists doing doubles and triples and passes between their muscular catchers, all set to the big circus band's waltzes, Sousa marches, dramatic drum rolls.  Supposedly new at the time were special theme numbers, costumes all matched to tropical gaudiness or lunar fantasy (I remember the latter, with yards and yards of silver lame and glittering moons the girls sat on, fake rockets), the performers costumed accordingly, coming in on elephants and in horse-drawn fantasy wagons in a pageant, then girls all costumed alike, twisting and posing high up on long ropes twirled by men in the sawdust, completely encircling the arena, while the three rings were alive with prancing horses, tumblers using seesaws to stack themselves up, elephants balancing on stools or on their heads or lifting a mighty foot for a woman to lie under briefly, men climbing rickety ladders of carefully balanced chairs or walking high wires.  Who remembers the afternoon heat, the canvas roof glowing with sun, the aromatic mixture of animals, dung, sawdust, sweat?

Outside, to snare the audience on its way to the Big Top, were the menagerie and the side show.  I never got into the menagerie, the adults contending it was a needless expense, for we'd see all the animals in the show, true but . . . . The side show, very politically incorrect now, was a long row of big signs with its caricatured performers, the bearded lady, a hermaphrodite (for adults only), the giant man, the Siamese twins, the fat lady, the magician, the snake charmer, with a noisy barker presenting one act at a time as enticement. Inside, the various freaks, as they were considered, were on raised stands around the long tent's perimeter, each selling mementos after a brief performance.  That's how, after much wistful cajoling, I ended up with the giant's ring, a cheap thick metal one into which I could fit my  fingers, and a little book of magic tricks with a lemon yellow cover and Gay Nineties typography, explaining how to do mostly card and hand tricks, making things disappear up sleeves and into scarves, and requiring in several instances chemicals I'd never heard of and didn't know where to get. Always careful about my prized possessions, I kept both for years.

I have since seen the Ringling Brothers, its Nebraska visit now limited to Omaha and the Municipal Auditorium arena, air-conditioned, noises and smells kept off at a distance, still three rings, but considerably lessened by years, expenses, and TV competition, though I did see Gunther Gebel-Williams with his spectacular act of putting a tiger riding on a horse, two natural enemies.  I think he also had white tigers, which our Doorly Zoo prides itself on (as does D.C.'s National Zoo, the main reason I went there when I was in Washington).  And the fliers on the trapezes were still my favorites.

Of course, the highly theatrical Cirque du Soleil began with Canadian street performers in Quebec and had a phenomenally rapid success I've watched on TV since the 1980s to where there are several troupes now, some permanent as in Las Vegas and New York, several themes, including a Las Vegas eroticism with nudity called Zumanity, which would never play in Norfolk, Nebraska.  Or Omaha. The Circus of the Sun is an entirely different production, elaborately expensive, spectacular fantasies constantly in highly choreographed motion built around special music (the songs deliberate nonsense, often meant to imitate several languages), highly dramatic lighting, gorgeously exotic, sometimes grotesquely surreal costumes, skintight or revealing lots of skin or painted/dyed to resemble skin in its obeisance to the Cult of the Body, no animals, featuring--European style--one group at a time on a central thrust stage, the audience in a lower horseshoe around it, and the acts clearly the best that money and fame can currently buy.  It is a dream world fit for our times, not really for little boys. 

"The creative mind is the playful mind.  Philosophy is the play and dance of ideas."  --Eric Hoffer

Monet sunrise to

Turner sunset, my days are

painted memories.

Tomb walls have such leaves

Sumac's Egyptian pinnate fronds

Ramses symmetry

Low in greying west

red cymbal clanging over

city's evening hum

Great blue herons stalk,

stilt-legged stiffness poised to strike,

swift bayonet beaks

Grasses churning with

the channeled wind on steep creek

banks, sketching Van Goghs

Immediately

springs from the asphalt cracks green

botany's revenge

Shards of color flit,

flower drunk, unrolling black

straws tippling nectar

Serrated green

and silver hearts flashing signals

from cottonwood heights

Glen lit by linden

leaves glowing green above cool

shadowed tinkling pools

Bleached bones along the

trail tell me plainly future's

sweet economy

Turned to stone finding

mediocrity's tattoo

branding my old age

After Joslyn, I went to the Lauritzen Gardens to see, for the first time, the recently opened Model Railroad Garden.  Kenefick Park, up a steep hill south of the Visitors Center, overlooks Interstate 80 and its Missouri River bridge from the top of the river bluff and has two of Union Pacific's largest, most historic, most awesome locomotives.  "On grand display are Centennial No. 6900 - the largest and most powerful diesel-electric locomotive ever built - and Big Boy No. 4023 - the world's largest steam locomotive."  The Centennial drive wheels are nine feet high, as I recall, and both engines dwarf visitors, of course.  These giants sit nose to nose at a right angle and are dramatically spotlit at night, UP's Welcome to Omaha.  The staircase and park are designed to present Union Pacific's role in Omaha and Western history.  The area is free, sharing the parking lot of Lauritzen Gardens, which is not free.  (Though Burlington House at the east end of the downtown mall is the restored headquarters building of that railroad, now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe headquartered in Fort Worth, it gets left out for General Dodge, whose Victorian mansion sits on a high bluff overlooking downtown Council Bluffs and whose name is on our main east-west street, and his Union Pacific, one of the city's biggest employers, now North America's largest railroad company, covering 23 states, with a brand-new glass skyscraper headquarters here.

So Lauritzen Gardens already had railroad ties, and it's no surprise the four trains running in the new display are all yellow gold with red trim, Union Pacific, nor that one of the locomotives is a model of Big Boy.  One of my favorite parts of the gardens is the long green tunnel with its brook gurgling along the walkway, Garden in the Glen, the lowest part, beyond the brick-walled Victorian Gardens, leading to the Arboretum/Bird Sanctuary.  The Rose Garden is up a steep bank, and the Model Railroad Garden is terraced into that bank between the Rose Garden and the end of the glen, beginning of the sanctuary.  Wow!  I thought the Kenefick with its giant locomotives was an ideal spot for little boys.  Shaded by thick trees, with big cedar trunk sections used to signify the ecological theme and to support the many bridges over pedestrians' heads, the layout winds up and down that hillside among large, scattered models of Omaha's most famous, mostly historical buildings.  I mistook them for exceptionally detailed ceramic models because they're heavily protected by epoxy resins, polyurethane of some sort.  Not only did the docent pointedly mention the remarkable use of natural materials, but the brochure explains what materials are used for each model.  The same goes for the many bridges, made of twigs and small limbs by a Tennessee mechanical engineer-model railroader in various styles.

Since I mentioned it in the last entry, I'll take the Omaha Building at 17th and Farnam:  "Built in 1888 and originally called the New York Life building, this was Omaha's first skyscraper and now houses the law firm of Kutak Rock.  Its Italian Renaissance architecture is interpreted on the lower floors' stonework through elm bark, tops of columns are cinnamon sticks, trim is made of burning bush, the cornerstone is white cedar with red twig dogwood, and the eagle ornamentation above the entrance is made of pine cones and tree fern stem."  How's that for keeping to a garden theme?  The new Union Pacific Center with its glass exterior:  "Exterior tiles on this replica are made of buckeye bark, window trim is forsythia and reed, edge trim is bamboo, the roof framework is comprised of contorta and grapevine, the flags at the entrance are linden leaves, and the 'Union Pacific Railroad' lettering is grapevine."  Again, wow!

I talked to the volunteer docent in his trainman's uniform and cap.  He and other model railroaders happily volunteer and hope to add three more trains next year.  He explained that the biggest problem under the trees was keeping the tracks clean.  Rainstorms and Omaha's frequent windiness mean twigs and other debris; bird droppings and spiders (I spotted a huge funnel web of a wolf spider near a bridge) are also problems, as is the resident flock of wild turkeys.  The landscaping has to be watered by hand.  He explained that all the tunnels but one, the longest, are no longer than a man's arm, to facilitate cleaning.  We were standing by the longest tunnel, and he said he'd just had to remove a raccoon from that earlier in the week.  When I said it was paradise for little boys, he said, rightly, "For big boys too."  I was right back in my childhood when every Christmas I wished for a Lionel model train and never got it.  The only model trains I ever had and which I remember were (1) a cheap little wind-up tin one when I was 3 or so and we lived in the station, which Uncles Larry and Earl wrecked, according to Mom; later, one summer when she was going to Wayne State to keep up her teaching certificate, during World War II, she brought me (2) a miniature train of heavy metal, cast lead or something with fine detailing, no track needed, that is on my all-time list of Favorite Toys.  Wes Eisbenbeiss wrecked that one, according to Mom.

A note about the Omaha Building:  I mentioned in the previous entry that it was our Stanford White building.  That  famous Victorian architect of McKim, Mead and White had several love nests in New York City, equipped with mirrors and a red velvet swing for his sexual pleasures.  He designed the second Madison Square Garden, Judson Memorial Church, Washington Square Arch, several other notable New York buildings, and several Long Island mansions.  When 13-year-old Evelyn Nesbit and her mother showed up from Pennsylvania, because of the young girl's beauty, she became a model and then a Floradora girl and allegedly was the original for Charles Dana Gibson's Gibson Girl.  Stanford White, 47, took her virginity at 16 and was her lover for a couple of years.  Later, after other men and other affairs, she married a hot-tempered, possessive Pittsburgh millionaire, the arrogant Harry Thaw, who liked to whip women.  In 1906, a year after he married the then-20-year-old Nesbit, they ran into White at a restaurant and later at Madison Square Garden's roof theater, where, in a jealous rage, Thaw shot White three times in the face.  Thaw's trials were two of the most famous murder trials of the period--first a hung jury, then an insanity conviction.  The story became The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), one of Joan Collins' better roles in a ho-hum movie, and Elizabeth McGovern played Nesbit in Ragtime (1981). 

A news item today about the recovery of three stolen Picasso paintings set their worth at $66 million.  I think there are six in the New Orleans "Spared from the Storm" exhibition at Joslyn, plus a charming small bronze Mask of a Faun, so the total worth of all the show's works must be astronomical.  I laughed at the funny bronze Turtle by the surrealist Max Ernst, squashed to oval stylized flatness but recognizable.  Without naming everything, I enjoyed a fine large Renoir drawing, the "Study of a Tree," an apple tree blossoming in spring on twisted branches, not the usual rosy plump pink nudes.  (The Joslyn has a Renoir of two girls at a piano, one playing, one turning pages.) There's a Mary Cassatt mother-and-child  (the Joslyn has a woman reading), the American Cassatt being the only woman accepted as an equal by the French Impressionists.  George O'Keeffe has a very large "My Back Yard," a typical New Mexico landscape in bright light colors so that it looks like a huge watercolor but isn't.  Used to his much duller, muted neutrals in cubist paintings that are abstract puzzles elaborately fitted together, I delighted in the Fauvist early Braque, "Landscape at L'Estaque," with those saturated colors Matisse loved, emeralds, blues, oranges, blazing yellows and pinks and reds, like having a brass band march brazenly around in dazzling uniforms for your eyes.  Joslyn's Jackson Pollock is much bigger and better, however, which is why it's usually gone on loan.

Signaling my admiration in the prior entry for Gerome's technical skill in creating tactile effects with the gold blouse set off with red and orange shimmers, absolutely "touchable" as silk, I used the Faustian bargain of selling one's soul (but past tense) to emphasize how very much I admire humanly made beauty.  As an amateur artist since I was a child, I know a bit about creating special effects, color optics.   I did not mean art had to be realistic (me?  the one always looking for the new, the experimental?), for I've put up with enough BS over my decades from grumbling Norman Rockwell fans and the bad, tired joke of "Well, I may not know much about art, but I know what I like (and this ain't it)!" about abstraction.  I taught Humanities and art courses during my college faculty years, after all.  And when Kutak Rock had an open house to show off their then newly refurbished Omaha Building, our Standford White historic classic stocked with all kinds of art, most contemporary and hence not realistic, I still remember a very annoying judge complaining to me over the abstractions of color and design.  His slammed-door-shut mind obviously had never looked at microscopic or telescopic views of nature, never paid attention to rock formations, oil streaks on pavement, refracted reflections in all our glass.  Such a tightly girdled sort has never even considered how abstract the comic strip art is I often admire for turning a few deft lines into a circus of characters not at all realistic.  Actually, all the time I was at the exhibition, studying how artists had worked their magic, I was thinking of the problem of reality and illusion and connecting it with the TV news and the nature of film, which I'll deal with another time.

And I mentioned the Faustian bargain probably because I've just joined Netflix on a trial basis, having discovered it as a treasure trove of foreign and independent movies, and two of my first selections were the Czech Jan Svankmajer's dream-nightmare versions of Alice in Wonderland,  Alice & Darkness Light Darkness (1988), and Faust (1994), surreal experiments with stop-motion animation, Claymation, special effects, puppets, human characters, blending the real world with the imaginative:  when the human Faust tries to escape his fatal contract with the demonic puppets, Mephisto, Mephistopheles, and Lucifer, fleeing out of the basement labyrinth where the theater is back into the streets of Prague, he is run down by a red car, which a policeman discovers has no one in it, The End.  The Alice was a bit too gritty and stiff for me, though having the stuffed toy White Rabbit scissor off the cut-out playing-card jacks' heads at the Queen of Heart's "Off with their heads!" was clever, but the Faust is provocative fun and good for several viewings.

Returning briefly to Joslyn, in the south basement corridor is a companion show to the paintings and sculptures, "Stan Strembicki:  The Lost Library."  He's a photographer who discovered that the New Orleans Alfred Lawless High School library burst from the Hurricane Katrina floodwaters and spewed books out onto the grass, gravel, asphalt, mud.  The pulpy paper, not quite papier mache, lost print in blotches, so that a book page looks like a typographical experiment seen through a white sheet shot full of ragged holes.  His overriding principle was not to touch anything, just take wondrous close-ups, then blow them up, of the books lying amid clover, on brick pavement, with twigs and leaves across the pages, or smears of mud or miniature sandbars.  The books are often famous, Voltaire's Candide, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Thoreau's Walden.   It's like reading them in mysterious code, with many words just ghostly shadows, one of the most engrossing photography exhibitions I've ever seen.  Such destruction of books makes any book lover weep, but Strembicki has made a peculiar, triumphant beauty out of disaster, and, believe me, these photographs are beautiful.       

Last Wednesday I had one of those days to keep me going and living in Omaha.  First, the Sci-Fi Channel had as its daily marathon Roswell, a high school series above other high school series for me (titled in the UK Roswell High, its original working title here), because (a) New Mexico is one of my favorite states, which I've covered as thoroughly as Wyoming and Montana in several trips;  I've been, then, to that notorious UFO center several times; (b) this alien invasion is benign, involving a brother and sister and another couple from royalty on a dying planet, saved the way Clark Kent/Superman was.  Max (the handsome Jason Behr) and Isabel (Katherine Heigl, more famous now on Gray's Anatomy and in Knocked Up) are adopted by an ordinary human, very loving couple, just like the Kents.   Michael 's (Brenden Fehr, later in CSI: Miami) adoptive father is an abusive alcoholic, and Tess Harding doesn't show up until the second season after Max has his romance with a beautiful little waitress, Liz Parker (Shiri Appleby).  The brooding Max has the superior gift of magical healing, a nice change from often ugly aliens trying to destroy us.  By holding his hands over Liz's fatal bullet wound or cancer-stricken children, he makes them well, a major secret of the series, of course, like Clark Kent's being Superman.  The villains are government agents trying to ferret out dangerous aliens as security risks, familiar enough.  The cast are the usual 20-somethings masquerading as high school teenagers.

I didn't watch much of the marathon, one episode after another from 8:00 to 3:00 usually, because I wanted another visit to Joslyn Art Museum's current big show, "Spared from the Storm:  Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art,"  the premier showing here of about 90 of the most prized pieces, covering 300 years.  The advertising says the New Orleans Museum is arguably the South's most important, certainly supported by this exhibition.  The museum sustained multimillion dollar damage from Hurricane Katrina, had to fire most of its staff (who saved all the artworks), had to close for six months, and is still recovering. 

Immediately at the beginning is the 10-foot-tall Marie Antoinette by the 18th century's "greatest woman artist, Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun."   The works are arranged chronologically, all superior, though I'm not as interested in the early academic centuries, the fussy baroque, with some smashing exceptions, a large Copley portrait, a Tiepolo of his own lively red-haired son (8?  10?) looking boldly out at the viewer, an Ingres drawing plotting out the composition of his famed Apotheosis of Homer, the figures almost all nudes (all clothed in the final painting), penciled lines graphing out the drawing for enlargement.  (Ingres is one of the supreme drawers of all time, this study representing his careful preparation.)

However, the 19th and 20th centuries will mean a few more visits, since I see more each time.  The first visit is always overwhelming with names and first impressions, like a banquet of too many rich foods.  I need a digestive break and a nap before I come back for more, at least here where I can.  (One-time visits leave my eyes hurting from necessary excess.)  One of the highlights is the Degas grouping, including a portrait sketch, a bust of him by another sculptor, and a huge unusual painting of his American sister-in-law arranging flowers, not at all like his well-known concert and ballet pictures but somber and expressionistic.  Most people don't know his mother was an aristocratic New Orleans Creole, though they may have seen some of his New Orleans paintings done on family visits, like the popular Portraits in a Cotton Office in another museum.

Besides the Rodin male nude, The Age of Bronze, a woman had to scold some giggling girls over, the show has several huge portraits through all the periods (I mentioned the Copley), including larger than life Robert Henri's The Blue Kimono (1909) and John Singer Sargent's Portrait of Mrs. Asher B. Wertheimer (1898), high society all in white draped with lengthy strands of pearls.  Robert Henri made his reputation back East in Philadelphia as one of the Philadelphia Four, but his real name was Robert Henry Cozad, until his father killed a rancher near the central Nebraska town founded by the family, and flight and name changes--and pronunciation, Hen-rye--were in their best interests. I've yet to see the small Henri museum in Cozad in the artist's childhood home.

Sargent's flair has always fascinated me, most recently with his dashed-off, dashing watercolors, as sensational as Winslow Homer's.  Standing in front of regally white Mrs. Wertheimer, I am as astonished as always at the slapdash of paint daubs that merge at a distance into a realistic illusion.  Jewelry, especially like pearls, requires deft handling of light reflections to create realism, and these are smashing, long smears of dirty grey paint with small circular slashes of white full of confidence, and voila!  A pearl necklace dripping from her neck. 

Light is always the key to such illusions, in photography as well as painting.  The Dutch are astonishing masters at it, like a still life in Joslyn's own collection with glinting gold and crystal goblets, the Rembrandts Simon Schama showed on his current The Power of Art TV series (based on his book, which I have), or the Vermeer I saw in Washington, D.C., the most flabbergasting I've ever seen of thousands of tiny points of white-paint light painstakingly re-creating jewels (pearls!), clothes, table items.

But Sargent's pearls are right up there, and my current favorite in the show is Gerome's much smaller Turkish Bashi Bazouk Mercenaries Playing Chess in a Market Place.  The show has artistic pairings such as Joslyn's own two Bouguereaus on the south side, New Orleans' on the north wall.  One of Joslyn's Bouguereaus, Le Printemps/The Return of Spring, is a huge coy nude surrounded by naked cupids, attacked once here by a madman shouting it was obscene and featured in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, an Edith Wharton novel.  Besides a bust of Gerome, Joslyn has the small The Muezzin (Call to Prayer) and the large The Grief of the Pasha, both exotic like the New Orleans', the latter featuring the pasha seated beside his dead pet tiger showered in rose petals, on a figured carpet in an Alhambra-like hall of ornate Moorish architecture.  Its subject is so odd, I've looked at it repeatedly over the years.  The New Orleans' chess players is a tour de force in paint's illusions, in the fabrics, a silk vest of gold reflecting oranges and reds, an unwinding red turban with satiny white design, embroidered robes and blouses, pleated skirts and turbans, a tasseled tapestry on an overhead beam, an ivory hilt, a glinting brass hookah, an embossed gold wallet, pale and dark skin, four of the five men in a pool of light set off by a small black blob of a crow closest to the viewer on a pale ochre foreground wall.   I would have given my soul to have painted that gold silk-satin vest, gleaming more than any camera could do justice to.

Making connections all the time, knitting my world together, I stymie myself in writing entries.  As with eating or rainfall, too much is not a good thing.  The same happens with my creative projects, as I need to choose and do but hang myself up on which and find playing a new computer game easier.  (I have recently become addicted to playing Rise of Atlantis.)  I need to solve this problem of saturation:  too much to write about, too many projects I'd like to do.  I am not Hamlet, the allegedly indecisive Dane (who's actually plotting his way to vengeance and his own death all the way). 

So I'll start with some footnotes on recent subjects.  As to children and their/our technological toys, several times recently the HP back-to-school oversized insert has trumpeted the following for back-to-school computers:  "Your child WANTS IT.  And you WANT to BUY IT for them. (Next page) The URGE to BUY is GOOD . . . (Next page) . . . GIVE IN to the URGE.  (Next page) DON'T THINK of it as TECHNOLOGY.  Think of it as a SYMBOL of your LOVE."  Aside from the punctuation errors with the marks of ellipsis, one has to admire the crass honesty of advertising.  Apparently it's what has helped result in Friday's "Cathy" comic strip in which small children and the elderly are paired on the theme of "At last we're all together and the wisdom of one generation can be passed on to another!"  (Next cel) "Little Emma's teaching Grandpa how to set his phone to 'vibrate'!  Ethan's teaching Aunt Miriam how to import photos!  Sophie's teaching Grandma how to surf YouTube!"  (Next cel) "Any wisdom being passed on from Old to Young?"  "Of course there is!"  (Final cel showing a little boy and a baby)  "...See?  Jake's teaching his baby cousin how to change her ringtone!" 

Same error with the marks of ellipsis, by the way.  The three spaced dots/periods represent omitted words, more properly used when one is quoting another source.  But if there's a sentence ending in that area of dropped words, one needs a fourth period, the actual sentence-ending period.  Using Hamlet's famous soliloquy as an example: "To be, or not to be . . . . To die, to sleep . . . . 'Tis a consummation . . . wished."   Two sentence endings, then just an omission within a sentence.

One more footnote:  From a review of a new Charles Ferguson movie, No End in Sight,about TV news, in the August 10 THE WEEK:  "Badly informed officials allowed Baghdad's museums to be looted; dismantled the Iraqi army, leaving 500,000 armed men unemployed; and permitted a culture of rampant cronyism.  Ferguson's horrifying footage of stacks of bloodied bodies and Iraqi civilians being arbitrarily shot on the street by U.S. military contractors shows what the nightly news isn't airing."