Friday, April 22, 2016

Southwest China Quilts at Michigan State University

Phoenix appliqué detail. Some of the fabrics were twill, others looked like handkerchiefs

My weekly quilt group went on a field trip to the Michigan State Museum in East Lansing to see Quilts of Southwest China on the last day of the exhibit.
In southwest China traditional bed coverings are made of small pieces of appliquéd fabric. MSU and the Yunnan Nationalities Museum in Kuning documented this folk tradition. 
 The traditional motifs include fish, scorpion, birds, crabs and other animals.
Fish appliqué detail




Piece work in a potholder style construction, individually constructed blocks sewn together
 
Several quilts included appliqué outlined in embroidery.



A traditional Chinese bed with bed coverings

Paper pattern templates on the right
 
Some of the bed coverings had large additional borders to hang over the side of modern beds. The flanges are limp as these bed coverings had no batting. The appliqué made the centers stiffer.

The exhibit will travel nationally after its debut at the MSU Museum.  Hear curator Dr. Marsha McDowell talk about the exhibit:
http://wkar.org/post/msu-s-china-experience-also-covers-art-quilts#stream/0

Thursday, April 21, 2016

67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence

On May 4, 1970 the Ohio National Guard and student protesters engaged in a conflict that resulted in four students dead and nine wounded. It was the culmination of days of increased emotional conflict that began when President Nixon announced that American troops were going into Cambodia to cut off supplies to the Viet Cong. He thought it would help end the war. Students at Kent State University did not see it that way.

Fueled by 3.2 beer, the fine spring weather, high emotions, and a culture of idealism, students began protesting. They burned down the campus ROTC building. The Ohio governor called in the National Guard and the campus was put under a military take-over. Students protested the military presence, attacking the Guard with curses, throwing stones and bricks and bags of human feces and urine. And at some point the Guard felt vulnerable, and either were instructed or emotionally reacted with use of force. And 67 shots from military grade rifles splattered the crowds--the innocent and the threatening, and those walking to class and the merely curious.

In May of 1970 I was a senior in high school and the heady last weeks of school activities and parties betrayed my inner life, my deep sense of loneliness, self doubt, and a longing for connection. My diary pages are filled with everyone I talked to, joked with, every event I attended, poetry, dreams, mentions of books I read. But the greater world is not present.

I was aware of the cultural and political climate, but I resented the confusing conflicts of the world; I was a girl still trying to figure myself out. The body counts, protests, generational war, violence, hate, distrust, drugs--these were scary. While the events of May 4, 1970 at Kent State University occurred I was avoiding television news and hoping someone, any one, would ask me to the senior prom. It was as big a problem as I could handle. I was seventeen years old.

I have never had any illusions about the 1960s being the 'best of times' to grow up. For years I avoided thinking about those days. Starting with the Cuban Missile Crisis to The Ballad of the Green Berets, the War on Poverty to Hell No, We Won't Go, and sit-ins and Hippies and Earth Day-- it seemed I grew up in one long arc of culture and political wars. There were the assassinations and the brutal response to Civil Rights workers. We went from the bubble gum silliness of I Want To Hold Your Hand to Hey! Look! What's that Sound! and the drop out idealism of The Age of Aquarius. On May 6 anti-war protesters at Memorial Park in my home town of Royal Oak, MI marched to the local draft board; it turned into a melee. In August the park was the scene of riots between thousands of youth and the police. The national discord had come to my hometown.

I requested 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence by Howard Means because, nearly fifty years later, it was past time I dealt with those days and understood what had happened. It was a painful trip, like witnessing a horrible accident you can't look away from.

Howard Means' book is thorough and detailed, including newly available oral histories. He recreates the events that escalated fear and high emotions, politicizing students who reacted in visceral hate against the overwhelming military presence on the campus: 1,317 Guardsmen with bayonets on their powerful M1 rifles, hundreds of trucks including armored personnel carriers, mortar launchers, and helicopters. Rumors spread fear. Town residents boarded up businesses and family men kept armed watch over their homes.

Human beings, young men and women in their late teens and early twenties, lost their identity and became bums, pigs, commies, traitors, hoodlums, hippies. The students were no longer 'our children', they were the enemy. Rational thought was lost. Compassion was dead. The opposing forces were just a bunch of kids, really, scared armed boys and angry kids yet to understand the deadly earnestness of this escalating local war.

After the shootings the students could have easily been sucked into the moment, charging the Guardsmen, resulting in more deaths. Thankfully, four men stepped in. A highway patrolman, Major Don Manley, convinced General Canterbury of the National Guards to give students time to disperse before further action. Graduate student Steven Sharoff meet with Gen. Canterbury and was told to move the students off. Sharoff told the students to sit down and popular geology professor Glenn Frank, an ex-Marine with a flat-top haircut, addressed the students with anguished voice and in tears, pleading for them to disperse before there was a slaughter. He convinced them, saving lives. The Guard who had surrounded the students made exits and the students slowly left.

The aftershock rocked the country. Protests and student strikes rocked the country. People tried to understand what had happened and how it had happened, who was to blame. The President for taking the war into Cambodia? The Ohio governor for sending in the National Guard? The Kent State leadership for it's 'appeasement' when the students burned down the ROTC? The protesting students who threatened and cajoled the Guardsmen? The Guard for ordering fire? Guardsmen who were scared and reacted viscerally in self-protection?

Here's the kicker. There is no resolution. No PI, detective, policeman, rounds up the usual suspects, details the series of events, and IDs the murderer. No court case judge found a guilty party. We do not know exactly how the National Guards came to shoot at the protesters.

The great divisions in America have changed but survive. The dehumanization of people who do not fit our world view or philosophy is rampant. I see comments on social media from individuals who have no compunction in announcing they hate so-and-so. When will we learn to talk and listen? To seek common ground? To build bridges and not walls?

Means ends the book with a quote stating that without forgiveness there is no healing and "the murder goes on forever." That does not mean to forget what had happened; the deaths of the four students must serve as a reminder and lesson.

I received a free ARC through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
"Using the university's recently available oral history collection, Howard means delivers a book that tracks events still shrouded in misunderstanding, positions them in the context of a tumultuous era in American History, and shows how the shootings reverberate still in our national life."
67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence
Howard Means
DeCapo Press
Publication Date: April 12, 2016
$25.99 hard cover
ISBN 9780306823794

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Ta-Da! Some Finished Quilt Tops

Sometimes it seems I never finish anything I start. I need fabric or batting or time. I need to tear out or remake. I despair and walk away. So I am very satisfied to have actually finished a quilt top.

The Fox Kit quilt from Sew Fresh Quilts is done. This is more complicated to assemble than I usually attempt. Thankfully, Lorna's instructions are amazing with step by step colored illustrations.



Next up is my process on the Vintage Baseball quilt from Northwater Quilts.
I have already altered the original pattern with the use of the Tigers fabric. I want to turn this into a lap quilt. Instead of adding pennants in the corners I will add them in an additional border, one for each pennant year.

I am also planning on --gasp-- not hand quilting these quilts. I will have them machine quilted. I have hand quilted 95% of my quilts since 1991. I machine quilted smaller artsy pieces. 

I am getting into the 21st c. of quiltmaking.

I have a few corners to clean up with additional appliqué, but am thrilled to have finessed the last border on Love Entwined!

I still can't face the next border, so will set it aside for a bit. This quilt will be hand quilted, when I decide it is finished.


Tuesday, April 19, 2016

No Easy Answers: Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

Hurricane Katrina reminded us that disaster preparedness is fundamental and imperative, especially for New Orleans.

New Orleans for-profit Memorial Hospital owners were unwilling to invest money in moving generators from the basement. They neglected to arrange for emergency transportation of patients. Staff lacked sufficient training.  When levees broke after Katrina, flooding the hospital, the result was five days of dysfunction, chaos, and horrific decisions made by ad hoc leadership.

And deaths. Lots of deaths. 45 patients died in those five days.

When I joined Blogging for Books I was given choices of books to request. I decided on Five Days at Memorial based on the numerous awards and commendations Sheri Fink's book has earned.

Fink's story The Deadly Choices at Memorial appeared in the New York Times Magazine and won a 2010 Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award. Her six years of research culminated in a 500+ page book that cogently presents a complex and unsettling account of medical professionals under unusual stress and raises ethical questions.

Fink reconstructs the events during the disaster in narrative with vividly drawn portraits of patients and health professionals. The conditions inside the hospital were hellish. Generators were flooded and power was lost. Ventilators stopped and so did air conditioning. The heat was stifling. Communication to the outside was lost and unreliable information was being passed. Toilets were overflowing. Patients were moved into the lobby. Patient families were evacuated first. As conditions worsened, and staff suffered from lack of sleep and shock, things spun out of control.

Triage ordained those in good health evacuated first, then those who needed some assistance, and those most ill were to be last. Evacuation of patients involved carrying them carried down unlit stairs, pushing them through a whole in a wall into a parking lot, then carrying them up open metal steps to the helipad. Helicopters arrived sporadicly. Waiting patients died.

Respected surgeon Dr. Anna Pou had assumed leadership. When the staff was told to evacuate a decision had to be reached about what to do with the remaining patients--the most seriously ill, many with DNR orders. Dr. Pou and several others injected these patients with a potent mix; they all died. No patients were left behind when the last nurse and doctor left.

When it became apparent that these patients had not died a 'natural' death Pou and two nurses were arrested. The public was outraged: the nurses and doctors of Memorial were seen as heroic and no one wanted to see them charged with manslaughter. The jury acquitted them.

Patients who were airlifted out ended up languishing in open air while waiting for ambulances to reach them. Doctors watched them die. Had Dr. Pou's decision saved the patients from a painful death? Is euthanasia, or putting patients to 'sleep' ever an ethical choice? At least one patient was injected because he was too obese to move although mentally alert and viable. Do conditions of war or disaster alter moral prerogatives. and should we condemn people in untenable circumstances for not behaving as if conditions were normal?

There are some things we do not want to think about. They are the most important things we need to address. Fink's book is a warning and offers a vehicle for conversation about complex and frightening situations.

I received a free book through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Five Days at Memorial
Sheri Fink
Broadway Books
$17.00 paperback
ISBN: 978-0-307-71897-6

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Barren Cove by Ariel S. Winter: A Sci-Fi Retelling of a Classic Novel

I read Barren Cove in a day, mostly in one evening sitting. From the first line to the last, I loved every page, my brain lighting up in strange and wonderful ways. The story is fresh and original. It is a sci-fi literary novel perfectly written and plotted. The characters distinct, for all their being robots. Yes, robots. And I quickly noted that the story line was a retelling of a 19th c. classic novel. Brilliant!

Sapien rents a beach house to get away from the city and for an opportunity to contemplate. Younger robots had chosen to deactivate. What was he hanging on for? One of the last human-built robots, Sapien lives in a world where robots reproduce 'children' and human life no longer holds any value.

When Sapien decides to visit the beach house owner, a human named Beachstone, he encounters a beautiful female robot name Mary and her distorted brother, Kent. There is a 21st c. gardener robot named Kapec and the house computer Dean. A young robot Clarke has a wild and cruel streak. Sapien is drawn into the family mystery when Dean tells him their history, how Asimov 3000 raised a human child with his children Mary and Kent, alienating his son, and the violent family war that ensued. Sapien does not find the answers he was seeking, but he finds clarity.

I would love to deconstruct the novel but I won't take the fun away from you. But I will say this is an amazing retelling of Wuthering Heights.

I received a free ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Barren Cove
Ariel S. Winter
Atria Books
Publication April 26, 2016
$25 hard cover
ISBN:9781476797854

From the publisher:

Los Angeles Times Book Prize nominee Ariel S. Winter explores the secret legacy of an enigmatic family in this thrillingly atmospheric novel with a compelling and unexpected twist.

Sapien is a relic of a bygone age, searching for meaning in a world where his outdated allegiances to a time long past have left him isolated and hopeless. Seeking peace and quiet, he retires to a beach house at Barren Cove, a stately Victorian manor even more antiquated than he.

He becomes increasingly fascinated with the family whose lives are entwined with the home—angry and rebellious Clark; flamboyant Kent; fragile, beautiful Mary; and most of all, Beachstone, the mysterious man whose history may hold all the answers Sapien has been searching for. As Sapien unlocks their secret loves and betrayals, the dangerous past of Barren Cove will indelibly change him...and who he is fated to become.

A brilliantly imaginative and poignant tale in the tradition of Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman, Barren Cove is a luminous and surprising exploration of legacy, loss, and humanity itself.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Spring Comes to Michigan!

Today we took a wild flower nature walk in Royal Oak, MI a few blocks away from where I attended high school. Bloodroot was in full flower throughout the woods.
The Royal Oak Nature Society has made Tenhave Woods a protected natural area. It was originally a wood lot owned by early settler. High fences (try) to keep out the deer that love the wildflowers, too.
 A vernal pond has turtles and lots of liverwort and duckweed.
 Our naturalist guide explained that Liverwort is spore bearing, not seed creating like Duckweed.
High winds have knocked down trees, opening the canopy and leaving the woods with less protection. So more trees are toppling. The guide has known some of these tress for fifty years. He pointed out American Elm, Butternut, and Tulip trees. He remembers when Chestnut still grew in these woods.

Our guide found this patch of Dutchman's Breeches years ago and altered the path to allow it to flourish.
The woods has two kinds of Trout Lily: one has a red repel and the other yellow.

The May Apple will flower in another week.

The Trillium, both red and white, are not yet in flower either.
Flower nestled in the roots of trees.
We went from ice and snow to 70 degrees in a few weeks. This is Michigan.

Poetry Month & A Poem


April is National Poetry Month. I have been receiving a poem a day with Garrison Keillor's A Writer's Almanac for years, plus this year I am receiving the Knopf Poem a Day. I have written about poetry over the years:

101 Famous Poems
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2013/09/one-hundred-and-one-famous-poems.html
Emily Dickinson
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/02/love-poems-by-emily-dickinson.html
Stephen Crane
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2014/03/roots-of-understanding-stephen-cranes.html
Robert Hillyer
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/04/roots-of-understanding-poetry-of-robert.html
Edgar Allen Poe
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-grandfathers-edgar-allen-poe.html
Rainer Maria Rilke
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-rilke-of-ruth-speirs-new-poems.html
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2014/04/roots-of-understanding-letters-to-young.html
Thomas Hardy
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/01/selected-poems-by-thomas-hardy.html
Anne Sexton
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-poetry-of-anne-sexton.html
Ezra Pound
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-early-poems-of-ezra-pound.html

And in 2015 the entirety of A Year With the Fairies by Anna O. Scott!

Today I want to share a poem I wrote, well, many years ago. It is based on one of my first memories.
*****

"In the beginning was the word"
Nancy A. Bekofske


Recalled:
two figures seated at a kitchen table
lost in the glare of unfiltered sunlight.
Shadow players, male and female,
each with lighted cigarettes streaming blue smoke.
White light, white walls, and shadows moving
and talk about grown-up things while
                                                        I played, pushing
                                     some wheeled toy across the floor
                                             into my parent's dark bedroom,
                  into the nursery with its barred bed now forgotten,
                                          down the narrow uncarpeted hallway,
           into the slatted venetian-blind light of the living room 
                                 the radio standing on the floor playing
                            "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White"
          or was it "The Poor People of Paris," I've forgotten,
                                                   back into the kitchen

where they sat, talking still, pushing papers about,
some business, I suppose, when I heard a name,
a word never before spoken for all I knew,
and I longed to make its magnetic beauty mine:
                                        I stopped my play and mouthed that word
                                                    like a sacred prayer recited in private,
                                                             savoring it on the tongue, my ears
                                                                          ringing with pure response,
                              that one word opening my mind to majestic possibilities.

"What did you say, hon?" Bending down, indulgent,
the man asked, and my mother, embarrassed
urged me to repeat myself, so they could understand.

                                                       I knew they would never understand
                                       the magic of that moment, even at, say, three;
                               I could not utter that word, it would have been
                        a misuse, like swearing with the Deity's name.

They returned to their conversation, dismissing me,
a child, as having done a child-like thing
of great amusement to the wisdom of age.

                                                           Only I knew the worth of the word,
                                              a sound so potent it could stop adult speech
                                                                        and demand their attention
                                                                                      to listen to a child
                                                                                 who had just learned

                                                                   the power of a beautiful word.