Ten Tiny Book Reviews

Today this is Katherine.  Jim has been making scrapple and between steps we've tackled our together-puzzle we do every Sunday morning.  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was on in the background.  

While Jim cooked, I tidied up a few business bookkeeping things like inventory & a payment I received yesterday. I looked at our checking account & tracked anything that used to be tax deductible.  I haven't figured out the new rules so I am soldiering on with the old rules until I learn differently.  

Then I checked last week's to-do list.  All done there.  I backed up into late January.  Not so good.  Undone item #9 was to catch up on my tiny book reviews.  I haven't written a word in ages & this seemed a good way to put my toes in the writing water again.  Instead of the other tedious items on my to-do list, I am catching up on my wee book reviews.  

In the last four months I read 11 books.  If I wait any longer, I will never remember them. They are presented in chronological order.  Just so you know.

1. One Summer by Bill Bryson.  The book discusses huge numbers of historically important events that converge in the summer of 1927.  Babe Ruth, various Presidents, Sacco & Vanzetti.  The career of Charles Lindbergh glues the narrative together.  Fascinating stuff.  Non-fiction.

2.  Commonwealth by Anne Patchett.  An accidental visit to a christening ends up with divorces & marriages as the result of partner swapping & an odd bond between the six step-kids evolves.  The book asks the question: Who owns our stories?  One sibling tells their story & a novel about them is the result.  Makes you wonder if any of us have stories of our own.

3.  Origin by Dan Brown.  The book shows off Barcelona wonderfully.  The art & architecture descriptions made me want to go there.  The Brown trope of a cult Catholic group exists with a bit of a twist this time.  The dark-haired beauty is there as well.  It is ultimately about the goods & evils in technology ( a poor man's The Circle).  A fun & fast read.  Not great.

4.  Monday Night at the Blue Guitar by James Starkey.  This is Jim's first book.  He is working at getting this & the other two published.  I read it the first time in Santa Fe on the patio of our casita at La Posada maybe five years ago.  I love that memory.  I loved re-reading it too.

     The book follows Jake Merced, high school journalist, as he discovers a mystery at a music store called The Blue Guitar where midnight concerts with dead jazz greats materialize on Monday nights. Jake's English teacher, Mr. Sanger who is nearing retirement, likes kids & hates the phoniness of schools.  Both Jake & his teacher have initiations held together by one teaching Catcher In the Rye & the other reading it in class.  

     

5.  News of the World by Paulette Jiles.   Spoiler alert on this one. A 70 year old ex Civil War soldier finds himself returning a Kiowa captive (10 year old white girl) to an aunt and uncle.  He begins with a sense of duty, but he regains love & joy through the little girl & he kidnaps her back from the torturous Prussian immigrant family he returns her to.  The book is about the messages of our lives.  "Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally, but it must be carried by hand through life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed." The man is buried with his war messenger badge and this note: "He had a message to deliver, contents unknown."  Exquisite book.  

6.  Beezup by James Starkey.  Jim's second book.  Jake & girlfriend Kristen are in Estes Park tracking down missing teen piano prodigy Billy Beezup who may have been kidnapped.  The book is an ode to the Colorado mountains & great food.  Jake bounces between seeing Kristen at the prestigious music camp she attends in Estes & coaching a recreational softball team in addition to working at the Four Season's kitchen in downtown Denver. There are chase scenes and interesting camp characters & tense moments & sweet moments & interesting comments about parenting when it comes to softball and music.  The end is wonderful.  

7.  100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  A wondrous book following the Buendia family & the town of Macondo.  The first Jose Arcadio creates the town & becomes lost in the insanity of lost & failed dreams juxtaposed to the monotony of life in Macondo.  His solitude is spent tied to a chestnut tree in the midst of his delusions chatting with his dead friends.  Ursula, his wife, holds all of life together for generations.  Each generation finds a descendent in solitude in a silver shop or the house or estranged from the family.  The solitude is deadly.  The beautiful town is destroyed by civilization--government, religion, business (the banana company does the most harm), nobility, elitism, greed, & debauchery all play their parts. All is circular.  Spirits of the dead help and live with the living, but even they vanish.  Wish I'd read this years ago.

8.  Slaves to the Rhythm by Terry Connell.  Terry is a dear friend & this is the story of his caring for Stephan (a remarkable man and the love of Terry's life) as he progressed through an AIDS diagnosis and death when the epidemic first happened.  Terry juxtaposes the tragedy of his life tending to Stephan to his Catholic upbringing with 10 brothers & sisters. Efficiency was all & FAITH trumped FAMILY.  Terry's struggle to maintain through Stephan's struggles highlights the good his family taught him while attacking his family's lack of compassion for him.  They coped with his gayness, but not his relationships.  The book made me think of dualities constantly in a very Joseph Campbell kind of way.  The love & loss duality & the pain & beauty duality dominate the diary sections where Terry nurses Stephan.  Fear & desire dominate the family sections where delightful details highlight his Philadelphia upbringing.  I learned so much. 

9.  Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo.  Spoiler alert again. This is the one day experiences of ultra-rich Eric as he rides in his limo, has sex with two women & his wife, sees an anarchist protest (rats are released--creepy), sees a famous rapper's funeral in the streets, and finally talks to his driver, his bodyguard (Eric shoots him) & his childhood barber.  He participates in a movie scene.  He destroys his financial empire and sees himself shot in the fancy computer stuff he's created (think Minority Report) at the end.  Then he is shot.  Thank God.  This is a dark world.  The structure and writing are spectacular.  The post-modern world is not my cup of tea though.

That's it for now. A small to-do done & I'll go upstairs & cross off wee book reviews on my to-do list. Thanks for listening  

Remembering Dale

Dale Bartkus died last month.

Kathie and I were in Mexico for the first few weeks of January and didn't hear about Dale until a week after we got back in town.  We knew he was struggling and we should have expected this news, but it is still a shock.

I've probably never told him, but Dale was one of the giants in my life.  He took me under his wing almost immediately after I entered the halls of Green Mountain High School for the first time.  He--I can hear his magnificent voice now--cajoled me into becoming a faculty representative to JCEA.  He taught me how to do that job and he taught me about the politics surrounding teacher unions and negotiations with the administration.  He was instrumental in alerting the editor of "The Insight" to my rather breezy style in memos to the staff and I ended up being a long time columnist.  So, what little fame I managed to accumulate in Jeffco is largely due, again, to Dale's influence and that magnificent voice.

He helped my teaching more than I ever admitted to him.  He was the one clever enough to get the department to buy COMIC VISION, the book I used to teach Humor in Literature.  He insisted I read the Bergson essay in that book and that essay became the foundation of so much of my teaching for the next thirty-five years.  He introduced me to Mary Ellen Chase's BIBLE AND THE COMMON READER, an indispensable book for anyone attempting to teach Bible as Literature.  We sat during planning periods and talked about those two works and so many others.

Dale's knowledge was encyclopedic and sometimes really irritating, the way Dietrich's knowledge pissed off Barney Miller, but it was always accurate, insightful, and offered with love.  We didn't need to Google stuff when Dale was in the department; we just asked Dale.

He taught me about drinking Dos Equis and eating clams and listening to jazz and appreciating art and even about the difference between the active and passive voice.  He modeled what a man should do to maintain the nuts and bolts of his life.

Mostly, he taught me how to be reasonable and fair minded, although I still have a hard time with that lesson.  I remember when I first started talking to him.  One day we were talking about the advantages of a life long career as a teacher and I snapped back that I wasn't going to be JUST a teacher for the rest of my life.  My stint at Green Mountain was only until something better, more lucrative, more fame producing came along.  I was such an asshole back then.  Dale, instead of being hurt, or snapping back, simply said--again in that deep voice--"That's a threatening statement Jim."

Once we were in the lounge and a colleague who shall remain nameless came in braying about something JCEA had done that was outrageous and she launched an ad hominem attack on both of us. As Dawn Troup used to say, I started "getting the jaws."  I was ready to lay into this creepy bitch, but not Dale.  He calmly and rationally explained JCEA's position, told her he understood her concerns, and gave her the numbers to call.  He never raised his voice.  He kept a smile plastered across his face.  He acted like an adult in a situation where most adults would have punched her out.  I'm sorry I can't be more specific, but it is a moment I will always remember.

Kathie and I were among the first inductees to Green Mountain's Hall of Fame.  I appreciate the honor, but Dale should have been there first.  I was at Green Mountain for all but the first two years of my career and I can tell you that no one loved that school and that neighborhood more than Dale Bartkus.  He was devoted to the place and he modeled that devotion to all of us.

More than that, he loved the kids that filled his classroom.  He worried about them.  He wanted to know everything he could about them.  He gloried in their triumphs and cried over their tragedies.  I wasn't there, but Kathie remembers a funeral for a beloved student who died in a tragic car accident on highway 93 (I think) between Boulder and Golden.  Dale and Kathie were in attendance and after the the ritual was over, he asked Kathie if he could hold her so he could weep in someone's arms.  Now, with Dale gone, I know just how he felt.

And he was so madly in love with Carol, so awed by her talent and her brains.  He loved his boys, Tony and Nick, their wives, their children.  I can't imagine the depth of their loss.

Dale Bartkus was first and foremost a teacher.  He taught me the greatest lesson of all.  Being "just" a teacher might be the most fulfilling life of all.

Thank you Dale for everything.