January 2008 Archives

The weekend was consumed by the final football playoffs and more reading, bread baking.  Unfortunately I want the Patriots to have a perfect season, but I wanted "Old Man" Favre, a mere 38, to go on breaking records and doing so brilliantly.  The Manning family is creating its own football dynasty, so I should be happy at Eli's success, but I'm not.  (I like Peyton's commercials even better than his quarterbacking.)  I was all prepared to get a splitting headache with my two favorite teams, the Packers and the Patriots, colliding on February 3rd. 

Last night was Iain Stewart's continuing coverage of the volatile Pacific Rim on his "Hot Rocks" series, attributing the major Japanese traits and accomplishments to their volcanic mountainous terrain over colliding tectonic plates, meaning frequent earthquakes.  I found the Scottish geologist more credible last week when he was exposing how Californians deliberately avoided thinking about their geology while living over the San Andreas fault, also building where poor soil and blazing chaparral contribute to mud slides, earthquakes and landslides ignored alike for the treasured view.  John McPhee did this in one of his brilliant books of essays, The Control of Nature, one of the three sections explaining why Los Angeles has no business existing except for human willfulness and the aforementioned denial attitude.  In Japan's case, Stewart claimed that the dense population crammed into small coastal plains caused the extreme formal politeness in order to cope, among other traits.  And no denial in that scenic landscape:  earthquake drills are mandatory for the smallest children up through adult training.  Mud slides are contained in costly concrete channels in the worst areas.  But putting heavy industry on landfill tempts the earthquake gods.  I get easily carried away by geology and geography, too often ignored in cultural influences.

Anyway, from Stewart's Japanese tour, I stayed there with Kurosawa's 1963 High and Low, actually based on one of Ed McBain's (Evan Hunter's) 87th Precinct novels, besides which Kurosawa loved Georges Simenon, France's premier detective fiction writer (Commissaire Maigret novels), and American film noir, which this film certainly is.  Kurosawa is right up there with Truffaut and Bergman among my favorite directors, and not just because he turned Shakespeare into brilliant Japanese versions with Throne of Blood [Macbeth] and Ran [King Lear].  (I should mention that I whipped through Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage over the weekend too, not as authoritative as Peter Ackroyd's but briskly establishing our greatest writer's cultural context and everlasting mystery.)  Returning to Kurosawa, I've mentioned a number of our westerns based on his originals, his Seven Samurai becoming our Magnificent Seven (and other versions), Yojimbo becoming A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing, Hidden Fortress influencing Star Wars.

The Japanese title for High and Low is actually Heaven and Hell, referring to the villain's last speech when he refuses to see a priest, asking only to see his once-wealthy victim.  "My life has been like hell since I was born."  "But if I had to go to heaven, I'd really tremble."  The whole movie is full of sharp dualities, one being the wealthy victim's having achieved success by his own hard work, learning the shoe trade from the ground up, in contrast to the medical intern complaining about the rich man's fine house sitting on a bluff above his slum-area apartment where he froze in the winter and roasted in the summer.  That house generated such hatred that the med student plots a kidnapping and murders three people in his effort to bring the rich man down.

The black-and-white film, with all those film noir night scenes and deep shadows, criminal elements, ominous score, is the most expeditious of all the Kurosawa films I've seen.  The weakest part is the beginning, to establish the groundwork for the crimes which will then turn the movie into a fine police procedural briskly moving to capture the criminal.  The wealthy man--who married a well-to-do woman whose dowry also set him up--is a corporate executive upset by the profiteering chicanery of the other executives, cheap shoddy shoes glued together, not at all durable, money more important than product.  He has mortgaged everything and planned to buy up enough stock to be able to outvote both the boss and the other corrupt, "gruesome" directors.  The kidnapper wrecks that plan when he phones saying he has the rich man's son.  The crunch is that he doesn't; he has erroneously taken the chauffeur's son, who was wearing the rich boy's western outfit (the boys were playing cowboy).  But he says he'll kill the boy anyway if he doesn't get a truly exorbitant ransom.  At first the rich man gruffly says it's not his son, so he won't pay.  But his morality, more than his wife's and the chauffeur's pleading, changes his mind, meaning that he will lose everything, including his job and the fine house.  The dramatic irony is that, though he is financially ruined as the med student wanted, the well-publicized sacrifice makes the self-made rich man into a national hero.  The rest, as I said, is how the police search for, find, and trap the young criminal.

What made the movie uncomfortable for me--though it is a beauty I'll talk about in another entry--is that the young intern is called psychotic, mad.  But he has the same motivation as the young gunman who recently murdered and terrorized people here at Westroads in early December, one of the latter's notes indicating his rage against the rich.  Nor is this murderous vengeance so much psychotic as it is sociological, have-nots striking back at their perceived superiors.  I'm referring to what, for instance, we call "going postal," disgruntled workers slaughtering bosses and fellow employees, only too common in our gun culture.  We have had political revolutions based on the same sentiment, the French and the Russian, to merely name two.  It is murderous class warfare, of course, made easy by the impersonal tool of killing, the gun, so that a mere grudge is cause enough to slaughter strangers--or families, for that matter.  (Such political massacres are certainly in evidence in Africa presently.)  In one High and Low scene, detectives checking out phone booths to find those with good views upward to the home actually comment that they understand the kidnapper because the house sits on a high bluff arrogantly above the grimy, noisy reality of shacks, "looking down at us."  Our idiom is "looking down on us," condescencion the meaning.   "Going postal" often includes highly planned plotting, as this movie does.  A surprise from another country in 1963, courtesy of a Netflix DVD.        

For some reason I certainly don't remember, we have many more photos of Mary than Edward, but we do have some of the couple, as here in a photo I find charming, though the figures are a bit distant.  Great Grandfather Peters is at the left; Great Grandmother Peters is at the extreme right in a hat which shows up in another photo--or at least the same kind of hat.  They are picnicking with the Wiltses (?).

It is 8, with a wind chill of -6, very much January, so it is appropriate that I have this old postcard of, as it says, "Winter Scene on the Niobrara River, McLains Bridge."   I presume that's the bridge in the foreground with the team and buggy on it, not the one in the background.  We also have two of Carns Bridge and Carns, Neb., the latter addressed to "Jos. Koftan, Bassett, Nebr."  They are so dim, I will have to have a better day to photograph them.  I found the approximate spot of long-ago Carns, on the border of Keya Paha and Rock Counties, northwest of Newport, slightly northeast of Bassett, obviously on the river.  Supposedly it's where the Black Hills Trail crossed the Niobrara.  Doc Middleton's gang of horse thieves allegedly headquartered near Carns.  Google Earth shows apparently a farm at the spot Lat. 42.73472, Long. -99.48194.  Where McLains Bridge was, I cannot find.

Any Nebraskan knows the Niobrara is now a National Scenic River, noted in camping/hiking magazines as the meeting area of four distinct ecological zones east of Valentine, an extremely popular canoeing and rafting stream in the Sandhills (one of the world's largest stabilized dunes area, a recent question on Jeopardy, Nebraska a long ways from most of the world's deserts).  Tourism on it is hotly contested by the ranchers along it.  Beginning in Wyoming, it runs across the top of Nebraska until it empties into the Missouri, a Lewis & Clark camping site, near the original Niobrara town site.  That's the biggest dip South Dakota takes into the top center of my home county on the map of northeastern Nebraska.  The French trappers' name for the Niobrara, as I've mentioned in Knox County history, was L'eau Qui Court [low key coor], the title over the Niobrara (town) cemetery and the original name of my home county (Knox), usually translated, as by the little South Dakota town across from the old Missouri River ferry site, as Running Water.  Niobrara is the same, a Native American word for "running water."  I relish early territorial maps because they use the French name.  My French tells me it is literally The Water Which Moves Swiftly.  Why do I make such a point of it?  Because Laurence and Fern Koftan first lived in a little place on the river, where Velma was born.

I don't know that there's much difference in the two photos above, except that the first has Fern's handwriting and the second seems clearer.  The pictures below have, first, Fern and her sisters and then one with Audree in the yard.  Between the two pictures, siding has been put on and a kind of boardwalk built over the barren ground.  I'm presuming the barrel was to catch rain water, which people still did when I was little.  I don't know who the two women are up by the house in the second photo, but I'd guess one is Gramma K.  What I remember is that Mom said they lived there until she was three, which doesn't explain Audree's being in the photo.  The house was clearly identified as Velma's birthplace, and it was considered part of the Mariaville community.  Where the river is, I don't know, though Mom said the place was right on the river, and she contended they had to watch out for water moccasins, which I found strange because that snake hasn't been sighted farther north than southeastern Nebraska.  Rattlesnakes are still found in the area, of course.  On the Peters homestead, for that reason I was very wary of the west pasture and a long hill so covered with whitish crumbly rock that it was called Sugar Loaf, though Sugar Loaf was where Mom found arrowheads as a child and said Indian pipe grew.  Cousins Denny and Mike Ellingson had to contend with rattlers when they stayed summers in the 1940s-50s with Gramma and Grampa and were out in the fields, shocking grain and such. 

I didn't have the photos here when I wrote of Ken Burns' moving treatment of World War II, the last good war.  When I went to Durham Western Heritage Museum to see the giant Christmas tree, I took photos of the bronze statues in the main lobby, all from the 1940s World War II era, constant reminders to visitors of how much we owe our veterans.

I couldn't choose which was better, the original or the enhanced.  I can say it is the Peters brothers.  In the back row, left to right, are George, b. 26 October 1875; Edward, b. 9 October 1857; and John, b. 16 March 1873.  In the front sitting, left to right, are William, b. 26 July 1864, and Charles, b. 30 May 1868.  They had two sisters, Ellen (Nell), b. 27 May 1856, and Ida, b. 8 March 1870.  So Great Grandfather Edward LeRoy Peters was second to his sister, Nell.  Other family photos of the other Peters may come later.

That is, of course, Mary Jane Maher Peters, married to Edward LleRoy.  And here the two are with their family.

That is Grandma Koftan's writing, obviously, with "Dad," "Mother."  And she's the littlest, with those wonderful curls, sitting between her parents.  Forrest LeRoy was born 9 September 1882; Glen Elmo, 8 July 1884; Nellie M., 25 June 1888; Myrtle Ida, 4 February 1891; Fern Effie Adelaide, 5 June 1895.  I know factually that Myrtle and Fern were born at Mariaville, as was Velma (Mom)--though up on the Niobrara River--because I have copies of the birth certificate data.  I presume the others were also born there on the homestead, a better version of which is below:

During a grey weekend when taking photos of photos wouldn't have been successful anyway, I had too much else going on to write an entry.  Naturally, much of the daytime was squandered watching big-butt bullyboy behemoths belligerently battling in their patriotic paradigm of arrogant American aggression, to the point of stealing the name of "football" from what the rest of the world rightly calls football, since what we call soccer largely depends upon footwork, not brutally bashing beastly opponents, our cleated footwork for hostile invasions and end runs.  In short, we should have named our sport soccim and left world football alone.  All four teams I favored won, and Favre was fancilly funny in his Play of the Game, so I was happy.

With Netflix rentals, I watched through two-thirds of Carlos Sauras' flamenco trilogy, El Amor Brujo (Love, the Magician), Manuel de Falla's gitaneria/gypsy piece, which I didn't like much with its murdered faithless lover, and then an unusual version of the biblical, always salacious Salome, including the dance of the seven veils, naturally, which I liked very much, since it's not often the beheading of John the Baptist  is clattered out in flamenco and the severed-head-on-a-platter keeps on dancing.

I also finished two books, short ones, and got 100 pages into a third, Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives:  A Novel, just translated in 2007, often included in Best Books of the Year lists.  Derek Walcott's short The Prodigal gave me these memorable, very applicable lines:  "I sipped the long delight of a past time/where ambition was too late.  My craft was stuck./My deep delight lay in being dated/like the archaic engine.  Peace was immense."

I got through the other, an anthology of the Scientific American's short humor(ist) columns, Steve Mirsky's Anti Gravity (The Lyons Press, 2007), during commercials, which I mute for just such short reading spurts.  A very punny writer, he often had me laughing, as here:  "On Thanksgiving Day, I saw a bird get stuffed.  The bird was a great blue heron . . . . the heron fired its beak into floating vegetation in a canal. He came up with a face full of foliage in the midst of which was a honking big catfish.  The avian epicure thus grabbed both the salad and the sushi courses in one swell sloop."  Who cannot enjoy this guy?  Especially in his levity brevity!

In a column on how movies mangle bugs:  " 'Insect pheromones figure prominently in insect fear films,' Berenbaum and Leskosky note, although in the 1978 movie The Bees, the characters call the chemical communication compounds 'pherones.'  Lose the 'er' too, and the insects could just call each other." 

He has no more use for creation science or intelligent design than I or most scientists do and took on the theologically conservatives' rapture over March of the Penguins as I'd already recounted to certain friends, which made me feel fine:  "Conservative commentator Michael Medwed thought the movie 'passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice, and child rearing.' . . .  Penguins are not people, despite their natty appearance and upright ambulation.  Their traditional norms include waddling around naked and regurgitating the kids' lunch.  But it would be as absurd to castigate them for those activities as it is to congratulate them for their monogamy.  Besides, the movie clearly notes that the penguins are seasonally monogamous--like other movie stars usually reviled by moralists, the penguins take a different mate each year.  And there are problems with them as evidence of intelligent design.  While caring for the egg, the penguins balance it on their feet against their warm bodies; if the egg slips to the ground for even a few seconds, it freezes and cracks open.  A truly intelligent design might have included internal development, or thicker eggshells, or Miami.  Finally, penguin parents take turns walking seventy miles to the sea for takeout meals.  The birds have to walk."

Furthermore, he quotes a sportswriter who quit watching basketball when it went to tall freaks running up and down dunking, why I get SAD in the winter when only basketball is on, which mention came on the same day as Marilyn vos Savant's "Ask Marilyn" opened with the too pertinent question about American Idol:  "How can people who are such bad singers think they are really good?" to which the woman with what Guinness once said had the highest recorded IQ replied, "Conceit," explaining that audiences ironically prefer the giant egos of small talent ". . . we're amused by them or embarrassed for them--sometimes both."  Given my four years of college vocal lessons and tyrannical choir directors in almost entirely classical contexts, I could jeer and cheer, having steadfastly refused to watch that nontalent show with its crudely rude judging panel after the first few bad hearings.  Maybe 2008 would be newly improved after all.

  

I mentioned the school and one-time general store at the corner of the Peters property in the previous entry.  I have some pictures of that, one a blurry sepia gloom but with more buildings than the store and school, then one of the school and store Mom got from a California woman, Evelyn W. Dale, after the latter's letter and photo to Nebraskaland Magazine, July 1988.  Mrs. Dale's grandparents were also Mariaville homesteaders, and her father had been born and reared in the area.  She even remembered that her mother had boarded with the Peters family while teaching the Mariaville school.  Throughout my childhood I was confused by the Rock County Mariaville north of Newport and the Knox County Morrillville, the latter between Bloomfield and Center, where Mom and Dad and their families went to school.

About the photo below she wrote, "Enclosed is a photo taken by my father many years ago showing the 'downtown' district of Mariaville:  the post office, general store and school."  So I'm going to guess that at the far left in the blurry photo are the post office and someone's home.  Strangely in the good photo the school windows look boarded up, but I think it's just shutters against the weather, for there's smoke coming out of the chimney (and the store's too, with a strong south wind).  As I said, I remember the general store across the road, an empty playhouse when I was very little, as briefly run by (Great) Uncle John and Aunt Nellie (Peters) Feddersen.  Uncle John was no more a store manager than Great Grandfather Peters was much of a farmer (they both apparently preferred books), from what Gram and Mom said.

Here's a fancy little Mariaville School Souvenir, dated "Sept. 5, '98 --April 21, '99," with the teacher's photo on the cover, next to the photo of the Peters homestead.  With that shorter school year, I wonder if they had any holiday vacations.  Inside the Souvenir is a list of 37 pupils, including Glen, Forest (missing the second r), Nellie, and Myrtle Peters.  Myrtle is fifth down in the right column, Forest (sic) and Nellie ninth on the same line, and Glen twelfth in the left column.  

  
There's a rather good photo of the pupils, with the Peters children in the photo, I assume, but nothing indicating who or where.  The boys' caps are striking, as are the smocks for the four girls in front.  I assume the tallest in the back row is the teacher, though, with overalls, he might be the kind of large eighth grader I once went to school with.  I have another very dim Mariaville school photo with a fancy outline that has "Myrtle Ida Peters" on the back, but it's like peering through fog.    

I was a bit depressed because I got another bothersome inmate request for the worst part of a trial, the jury selection known as the voir dire, from 1988.  I had to do that section last year for his co-defendant, because it had been reported but never typed up because the co-defendant had pled guilty, which knocks out anything that happened up to that point during the initial appeal process.  At any rate, as we discovered, I actually had a hearing in 1993 on this very matter, indicating that I can't transcribe what I didn't report, and I wasn't in the courtroom during the jury selection (which was, luckily, the usual case).  I had other proof in other places, including my log, but that hearing is in the court record, and my sigh of relief was probably heard whooshing through the air over the city.  This business of continuing appeals forever, unless there's something definitely wrong that hasn't been discovered earlier such as the recent DNA case reversals, is wasteful in every sense, certainly mine.  But I was very startled--after resuming some Buddhist studying about the interconnectedness of everyone and everything--to do a crossword today that started with 1 down as "Omaha" ("Warren Buffet's hometown") and included "voir" as an answer for "____ dire (jury selection process)."

Anyway, yesterday, returning from filing my affidavit that the inmate's got all he's ever going to get from me (and stop bugging me!!), I bought a little tripod.  In order to do family history, I've tried to photograph the family album pictures, which I've glued in solidly on the large pages ("Do Not Remove").  But I shake, and the tripod does help, as I'm going to prove right now.

Here are two versions of our earliest family photo, barring a mysterious tintype of a child.  What I have written below is:  "The Reverend George F. Twigg.  Born in Halifax, England, Aug. 19, 1810.  Grandfather of E. L. Peters.  Daughter Sarah Ann (b. 15 May 1834 d. 17 March 1916) married John Peters (b. 4 January 1830 d, -- 1920).  'Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.' Alexander Pope, Moral Essays I."   That last poetic line is one the Peters family often quoted.

The Reverend Twigg is Gram's great grandfather, E.L. Peters being her father.  E.L., Edward LeRoy (b. 9 October 1857 d. 5 September 1930), my great grandfather, looked like this:

Edward and Mary's homestead in Rock County north of Newport, Nebraska, what I've been calling the farm Up West where Grandma and Grandpa Koftan and Audree and Earl lived at various times looked like this in 1911.  I'm guessing the color is brown.  This is where (Great) Grandpa and Grandma Peters had social gatherings to recite poetry and other literature.  They were movers in the local Chautauqua circle, as I understood from Gramma Koftan and Mom.  As noted previously, they are buried in the Randolph (NE) Catholic cemetery by (Great) Uncle Glenn and his wife, Paula. 

The stained-glass section over the big front living room window can be dimly seen and now is in Cousin Penny's possession through Cousin Denny, I think, over in Iowa.  The place as I knew it in childhood looked like this:

The house and yard are to the right.  To the far left is the little barn I considered the worst muck I ever had to be in, sinking in mud and manure up to my calves.  The white building in the foreground was the hog barn where we watched sows birthing their litters.  Behind it is the big corn crib with central opening for the tractor and such, where Grampa butchered hogs.  Barely visible behind it is a white chicken house under which I had to get out the baby skunks. ( All of these comments have been in previous entries.)  And behind that is the red chicken coop.  Way up in the right-hand corner is the school, the social center for the neighborhood, especially for card parties, with a playground we'd walk up to use.  Across on this side of the road from the schoolhouse once stood a large general store once run by (Great) Uncle John and Aunt Nellie Feddersen.