A Lyrical, Pastoral Novel: On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin

"--they would stand over her patchwork quilt and peer at the black velvet stars and the hexagons of printed calico that had once been her dresses."

Identical twin brothers Lewis and Benjamin sleep in their parent's 1899 oak four-poster bed, hung with the cretonne hangings of larkspur and roses their mother made as a newlywed, with linen sheets worn to holes, the mattresses sunk into two troughs. On the bed was the patchwork quilt their mother had made, "to remember me by," cut from the calico dresses of her youth in India and her best black funeral skirt. From their bedroom window they could see the Black Hill.

The house remained unchanged for the twins were unwilling to dismantle the memories of their mother embedded in the wallpaper, the Georgian pianoforte, the Coronation and Jubilee mugs. Hereford had been their home; though Lewis loved maps and far off places, he never left. Benjamin's love for his twin was like a binding vine holding Lewis back from pursuing a greater life. People come into their world bringing love and tradegy, hope and disappointment, and a few answered prayers.

On The Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin is a quiet story spanning the 20th c, full of eccentric and memorable Welsh villagers whose lives remain rooted in a past rapidly crumbling around them. A world outsiders consider quaint, antediluvian, or collectible, or a haven from the modern world.

I love this kind of novel that elicits a nostalgia for a world I have never known, bringing forward the forgotten people whose lives merit our compassion and admiration.

Toward the end of the novel a 1960s drop-out comes to Black Hill and becomes friends with the brothers. Theo invites the twins to his yurt, and taking a lotus position recits poetry, sharing his favorite poem by Li Po:

What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,
There is no end of things in the heart.
I call in the boy,
Have him sit on his knees here,
To seal this,
And send it a thousand miles, thinking. 

The poem, Exile's Letter, translated by Ezra Pound is one of my favorites as well, the story of parted friends and the nostalgia and longing for their shared days together.

On the Black Hill is lyrical nostalgia, though few of us would be willing to return to the rugged and harsh rural life depicted, we envy the characters' connection to the past, their community, and rootedness to the earth.

This new ebook version of On the Black Hill includes an illustrated biography of Bruce Chatwin.

Bruce Chatwin is the author of In Patagonia and The Songlines (also available from Open Road Media), books I enjoyed reading when they were first published in the 1970s. On the Black Hill won the Whitbread Literary Award for First Novel.

I recieved a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/bruce-chatwins-wales-one-of-the-finest-one-day-walks-in-britain-9765731.html
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/02/books/a-novel-of-pastoral-vision.html?pagewanted=all

On the Black Hill
Bruce Chatwin
Open Road Media
Publication Oct 18, 2016
ebook
ISBN: 9781504038348

Halloween Costumes of the 1950s

My Halloween costume in 1955 

I remember trick or treating on Rosemont Ave as a girl, walking down the streetlight lit sidewalks in the early dark, getting goodies from all the neighbors, most of whom I knew. I recall being a 'gypsy' several years, wearing Mom's full gathered skirts, loads of beads, and a scarf. I believed myself quite lovely and exotic.

My relatives loved a party and I found these great photographs of a costume parties held in 1958 and 1959.

My Grandmother Gochenour was the only clown I was not afraid of!

My Grandmother Emma Becker Gochenour in a clown costume.
Taken in the kitchen on Military Rd, Tonawanda.
I remember that red wall paper.

Dad's big nose and mustache and glasses looked funny in 1958, but later in life he did have a mustache and glasses!

My father Gene Gochenour

 Mom as an old fashioned, white haired lady...not like the Jitterbug Queen she really was!

My mother Joyce Ramer Gochenour

Chubb and Adaline (nee' Becker) Killian and
Rube and Dot Becker.
Chubb and Rube were my grandmother's siblings.

My Aunt Alice Gochenour Ennis with her mother Emma.
I believe the lady sitting in the background is
Mary Becker, wife of Levant (Lee).

Alice Gochenour Ennis and Rube Becker

Alice Gochenour Ennis

 My aunt and uncle were characters from Lil' Abner. Note the saddle shoes on my aunt!

Ken Ennis

Friend of the family Helen Ensminger and friend

Dorothy and Rube Becker

Us kids mostly wore store bought costumes.

From 1957, my cousins Steve and Linda Guenther
children of  Dad's sister Mary

And myself in 1957 as Mickey Mouse! I still have that clock shelf seen on the wall.

I wonder what was in the bag?

And later in life I was still wearing a costume for special parties. This is my costume for the senior costume day in 1969. Yes, that is an Avocado green piano! Mom and Dad made thewall  clock circa 1960 and I still have it.

A neighbor made me this pilgrim costume for Halloween 1969.
Seniors were able to wear costumes to school.

 My husband and I were invited to a costume party in the early1990s.

In the early 1990s my husband and I wore these costumes to a party.
I was wearing a pillow as if I were pregnant. My hubby had taken
Mime classes and this was his costume. That's the Phillies Phanatic in his arms.

 Then our son came along, and Halloween was fun all over again.

Our son's earliest costume was Peter Pan which I made.
He is posed with our first Shiba Inu, Kili.

 My friend Jan made this costume inspired by my Poe quilt!

My quilt group friend Jan was inspired by my Edgar Allan Poe quilt
to make a costume with a purple curtain and a raven!

Edgar Allan Poe by Nancy A Bekofske

Have a safe and fun Halloween!

Restoring a Sense of Order to the World: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

I was eager to read Amor Towles novel A Gentleman in Moscow after reading rave reviews from my Goodread friends and enjoying the opening pages through the First Look Bookclub. I loved the writing and tone of those first pages. When I got my hands on a copy I read it in three days and was in happy tears at the end.

Count Alexander Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, Member of the Jockey club, and Master of the Hunt is a Former Person, a member of the aristocracy slated for execution but for having his name linked to a 1915 revolutionary poem. Count Rostov is instead placed under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in the heart of Moscow. It is June 21, 1922. The Count is 33 years old. It is his luckiest day.

He will not return to his luxury suite stocked with priceless heirlooms and beloved books; he is moved into an empty 100 square foot room, former servant quarters in the attic. The Count chooses a few items to take with him. And when I read these following lines, I knew their truth from having moved many times and carried 'things' that brought a sense of home with them:

"...we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience...allowing memories to invest the with greater and greater importance...Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion. 

But of course, a thing is just a thing."

I found myself marking passage after lovely and insightful passage that elucidate the characters and our common experience.

The Count adapts to his new reality, mastering his circumstances. He takes a job as the head waiter in the hotel restaurant. He is befriended by Nina, a whimsical nine-year-old girl whose parting gift is a universal pass key to all the hotel rooms. Nina grows up, then leaves her daughter Sophia with the Count to follow her husband sent to the Gulag. The child is ignored by the police only because there was doubt about her patrimony. A Soviet official hires the Count to educate him in the culture of the West, and over fifteen years they develop a mutual respect. And Sophia grows to become an accomplished pianist. (Hear the music of the novel here.)

As the world the Count knew and loved is dismantled under the Bolsheviks, "who were so intent upon recasting the future from a mold of their own making, would not rest until every last vestige of his Russia had been uprooted, shattered, or erased." The Count's university days friend Mishka has been struggling, asking, "What is it about a nation that would foster a willingness in its people to destroy their own artworks, ravage their own cities, and kill their own progeny without compunction? " Mishka answers his question with his realization that self-destruction was not an abomination, but Russia's greatest strength, "We are prepared to destroy that which we have created because we believe more than any of them [The British, French or Italians] in the power of the picture, the poem, the prayer, or the person."

Sophia asks the Count why he returned to Russia from Paris. His only answer is that, "Life needed me to be in a particular place at a particular time, and that was when your mother brought you to the lobby of the Metropol." And the last pages of the novel become comedy, a happy ending, a righting of things knocked over in the skirmish, "an essential faith that by the smallest of one's actions one can restore some sense of order to the world."

You may think a novel about thirty-two years living in the Metropol Hotel would be dull and without interest. The novel is episodic, skipping from one important time to another, but new people enter the hotel and affect the Count's life. Read the author's comment on the structure of the novel at http://www.amortowles.com/gentleman-moscow-amor-towles/gentleman-moscow-qa-amor-towles/

But I was mesmerized, charmed by the Count, drawn in by the slow revelation of his past and enticed by his plans for his future.

Eugene Gochenour's Memoirs: Running a Coffee Truck

In this installment from my dad's memoirs he talks about running a side business, a coffee truck in Lockport, NY.

Gene Gochenour

"A few years after we opened the station a friend talked me into going into the coffee catering business with him. His name was Sam Letcher and he had worked for a coffee catering service so he had some knowledge about the business. Since neither of us had established credit we asked my father to cosign for a loan at the bank for us, which he did. The loan was for two hundred and fifty dollars. 

"We bought an old truck and I painted it green, built shelves for the coffee and donuts, and had our name painted on it. We called our business “S & J Coffee Service” When Sam applied for our business license, he put down Jean, instead of Gene, on the form. I was not about to go to the trouble to change it. We decided to run the business at Lockport, a town about twenty-two miles away. There were several coffee catering businesses in our area, but none there. We rented the second floor of an existing business on Market Street in Lockport. The second floor had not been used years so we had to clean it up, then install our coffee urns and supplies.

"Every morning, Monday through Saturday, I got up early, and went to Gallager’s Bakery at the city of Kenmore where I picked up about twenty dozen donuts, then drove to Lockport. I drove a 1950 Dodge sedan then, and I filled all the seats with trays of donuts and on the way I would eat one. But after a week or so, I did not eat any, and I would open the car windows, because I didn’t even like the smell of them! 

"When I arrived at our building in the morning I made about sixteen gallons if coffee, and then loaded the coffee urns and donuts on the truck. After I had loaded the truck Sam would come in and drive to various businesses to sell the coffee and donuts, Then I would go back and work the rest of the day at the station. On Sundays I drove to Lockport to get the truck and bring it back to the station to wash and service it. Then I drove it back to Lockport so it was ready for the next week. Each day the unsold donuts were dropped off at the station, so our customers always had free donuts. Of course we had a coffee machine at the station also. 

"The vehicle we used for our coffee business was a step van that we had paid one hundred and twenty five dollars for. We decided we needed another vehicle so we bought an old Ford panel truck. It had been used by a paint contractor so it needed a good cleanup. I painted it, put in shelves, and had it lettered with our business name. On the first trip to Lockport, Sam flipped it over on a curve, and totaled it. Luckily he did not get hurt in the accident.

"I stopped going to Lockport when we hired a lady to work for us a few months after we started. I never made any money from that business, and after a few years I sold my part of the business back to Sam for the original amount I had invested. I never should have been talked into getting involved in another enterprise, because I had all I could handle at the station!"

Clyde Bellecourt Tells His Story as Founder of the American Indian Movement

After reading The Apache Wars and The Sand Creek Massacre I was ripe to learn about the Native American civil rights movement that occured while I was in my late teens and early twenties. As if on cue, Edelwiss offered The Thunder Before the Storm, The Autobiography of Clyde Bellencourt, the founder of the American Indian Movement.

"We started a movement to take back everything that belonged to us: our spirituality, our hunting and fishing rights, our water rights, our gold and minerals, our sacred rites--and our children."

Starting with his childhood on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, Clyde Bellecourt (his colonial name; The Thunder Before the Storm, Neegonnwayweedun, is his Ojibwe name) relates a grim story. Clyde grew up hearing his father's stories of being taken from his family to be educated in a boarding school so hateful that he enlisted during WWI. Later he discovered the origin of his mother's limp: at boarding school her punishment for speaking her native language was to scrub floors with bags of marbles tied to her knees.

Clyde grew up without knowledge of his native culture, spiritual traditions, or language, which had been violently supressed for generations by a Eurocentric majority culture. He was deemed "incorrigable," a truant and runaway, resistant to the mission school authority, repeatedly in juvenile detention, and in solitary confinement in prison. His life mirrored that of many Natives on the reservations, with high rates of alcoholism and drug abuse resulted in a typical lifespan of 44 years.

While in prison Clyde became part of an Indian cultural program and an Indian Folklore Group. He learned his native language, ceremonies, prayer songs, and history.

"I was typical of the other Indians there: spiritually and emotionally bankrupt."

It was the beginning of Bellecourt's spiritual revival that lead him to becoming an activist, using "confrontaion politics" to demand the end of discrimination on the local and national level. European education, organized religion, and the Bureaus of Indian Affairs were the institutions that needed to change. He became the leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The goals included addressing immediate concerns in housing, youth, employment, education, communication, and citizenship. The long range goals included unification of the Indian people, participation in local affairs, and fostering economic equality. Bellecourt brought back the Sun Dance which had been banned.

AIM found friends in civil rights workers including Coretta Scott King, religious leaders such as Dr. Paul Boe of the America Lutheran Church, and local political leaders along the way, but they were also targeted as 'terrorists' by local police, the FBI, and the American government. AIM was besieged, spys infiltrated the group, including assasins, and members were murdered.

Like many visionary leaders, Bellecourt is not a paragon of perfection; he struggled with demons-- alcohol, drugs, and infidelity; he was imprisoned on drug related charges; and he survived assasination attempts.

I was glad to read about Bellecourt's work to remove racism from American sports, particularly the National Football League and the Washington Redskins name. It helped me to understand the associations of this kind of branding from the Native American viewpoint. "Redskin" was used to "denigrate and dehumanize" the natives, who believe the term refers to the bloody scalps taken by  bounty hunters. The "tomahawk chop" to Native Americans is a reminder of the weapons used to scalp their people.

I consider how I grew up with cowboy and Indian TV westerns and movies, the cliches and easy stereotypes, racism in the form of entertainment. We kids didn't know about the drive to exterminate First Peoples, the lies and broken treaties, and the continued supression of Native culture that was still ongoing. I had a cowboy hat and a holster, squinting my eyes as if always looking into the sun, a little blond-haired girl imitating what she saw on tv.

At college a friend told me about going to Pow Wows and of his interest in the Indian ways. It just seemed like a fad. And while I was working my husband through school, barely in my twenties, Wounded Knee seemed far away and alien.

I have been spending a great deal of time, now in my 'golden years', making up for the ignorance of my youth. It is frustrating to know that the entertainment industry still forms most of young people's historical knowledge. I know--the goal of public education is to make good citizens, and somehow that means supporting the image that America was always right. But I think that making good citizens should include the understanding that America has committed heinous crimes, but that we are continually learning to see the error of our past choices. Right now I am afraid that we may not be learning, as a culture, to recall history and resist making the same mistakes.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Thunder Before the Storm: The Autobiography of Clyde Bellecourt as told to Jon Lurie
MNHS Press
Publication Novemeber 15, 2016
$27.95 hard cover
ISBN: 9781681340197

Brilliant Reimagining of Shakespeare's The Tempest: Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

Contemporary novelists reimagine Shakespeare's plays in the Hogarth Shakespeare series. I have read Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl (The Taming of the Shrew) and Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time (A Winter's Tale) but have not yet read Howard Jacobson's Shylock is my Name (The Merchant of Venice).

I was particularly eager to read Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood's versions of The Tempest, because I'd read so many glowing reviews, and because I had read and enjoyed Atwood's last book The Heart Goes Last (my first time reading this author, which amazes me).

Hag-Seed is definitely my favorite in the series so far.

I won't concentrate on a plot synopsis since so many other reviewers have already done that. I'd rather address what aspects of the novel particularly impressed me.

I loved Hag-Seed's play within a play structure, so Shakespearean, where all the contemporary characters in the novel correspond to the original play and perform The Tempest while creating a live theater situation where the audience becomes a part of a play based on the Tempest.

I'll try to explain this again.

The protagonist, the brilliant and original artistic director Felix, was about to direct The Tempest when he was disposed from his job as artistic director by self-seeking men. Felix retreats to a primitive cabin in the middle of nowhere, his only companion the memory of his deceased daughter Miranda. After many years he takes a job under a false name and becomes Mr. Duke, literacy teacher in a local prison, teaching inmates Shakespeare through performance of the plays. When Felix learns his old enemies are now Ministers who want to end the prison literacy program he decides the time has come for him to take his revenge. The Ministers come to the prison to see a video of The Tempest performed by the inmates. But Felix and his prisoner actors plot a live theater experience that will bring his enemies under his power.

The intricate structure of the novel knocked my socks off. Additionally, as Felix teaches The Tempest to the prison inmates the reader is also educated about the play's themes and characters. And then at the end of the book the inmates offer reports on what happens to the characters after the events of the play. They offer original insights, such as Prospero's lack of oversight allowing Antonio to usurp him; a questioning of the strength or weakness of goodness; the theme of second chances; and theorizing that Prospero is Caliban's father. I also liked how the minor characters, the prisoners enrolled in Felix's course, have distinct personalities and back stories that relate to the roles they are assigned.

"The last three words in the play are 'set me free'," says Felix." Felix has identified nine prisons within the play, and so we understand how Atwood conceived of Hag-Seed.

Readers of this series don't have to be experts on Shakespeare's plays to enjoy the novels, although an understanding of the plays heightens the enjoyment. If you are rusty on the play, you can skip to the author's synopsis at the end and read it first.

I received a free e-book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Hag-Seed
Margaret Atwood
Hogarth Shakespeare
Publication Oct. 11, 2016
$25 hard cover
ISBN:9780804141291

For an interesting follow-up to this book read Shakespeare Changed My Life by Dr. Laura Bates, telling how teaching the Bard to prisoners impacted their lives.

All Between the Lines: The Eastern Shore by Ward Just

"A properly edited page was a thing of beauty," thinks Ned Ayre, the protaganast of Ward Just's new novel The Eastern Shore. Contemplating his life dedicated to the news, trying to write his memoirs, Ned feels like an archaelogist 'assembing fragments of a dead civilization." The man who worked magic with his blue pencil, editing other's stories, could not create order from the threads of his life, his 'Rosebud' moment eluding him.

Ned's love of the news is an obsession that divides him from his parents and his lovers, a love affair that ends badly as the newspapers decline and close, no longer valued or profitable.

In this introspective novel, Just probes the stories of our life: the fictions we weave, like Ned's Uncle Ralph and his WWI stories that never happened, but which he believes happened; the untold truth buried because it does not make good press; the stories that should never have been told and ruin lives.

I was left feeling mournful and contemplative by this novel. I understood Ned's longing to break out of his small town, a place of changeless comfort and sureity. And I mourned his inability to make sense of his life.

Some will say there is no plot action, too much of the story is shared through story telling. But I was compelled by the novel; it recalled to mind many who dedicate their lives to something they believe in only to find after 40 years that what they loved has become meaningless and unvalued. How could anyone live without the news, young Ned thinks in amazement. Yet he lives into a world where the news and the great stories are left behind. Change betrays us all.

Between the lines we come to understand what Ned learned the hard way: the paper-thin line between all the news we need to know and all the news; how factual reporting can cross the line into the sacred and the private.

I requested this book through Edelweiss because several years ago I read Ward Just's novel An Unfinished Season and it left a lasting impression on me. I am even more impressed with Just after reading this book.

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbaised review.


The Eastern Shore
Ward Just
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication October 18, 2016
ISBN-10 0544836588
ISBN-13 9780544836587