Archive by Author | Sherry

Sunday Salon: James Hilton, Wodehouse again, and Hurricane Blues

Sep14

We’re still in Fort Worth, refugees from Hurricane Ike. Computer Guru Son stayed in Clear Lake where we live, and he’s in one of the few places in all of Houston that still has electrical power. It’s strange since Clear Lake was right in the path of Ike, but the power lines are buried underground. So I suppose that’s why we have electricity when no one else does.

Son took some pictures yesterday afternoon, but then he discovered that while he has electricity, he no longer has an internet connection. So I can’t show you what it looks like down where I live. He says that all the traffic lights are out (no power and lots of wind damage), everything’s closed except for HEB, and people are driving like crazy fools with no traffic signals. Some places such as Nassau Bay, Kemah, and Seabrook are still flooded, and police are allowing no one into those cities. Engineer Husband says NASA officials are “assessing the damage” and hope to reopen Johnson Space Center by the end of the week.

And what hath all this Ike news to do with reading, you ask? Well, I’ve had time to read while waiting to return home. We hope to leave tomorrow morning to go back. In the meantime, I’ve read Random Harvest by James Hilton, the same author who wrote Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hilton actually lived in Hollywood during the 1930’s and after, and all three of the above named books were made into movies. I’ve only seen the two versions of Lost Horizon. Mr. Hilton also won an Academy Award for his work on the screenplay of Mrs. Miniver, a movie I did see last year and enjoyed in spite of, maybe because of, its unabashed patriotism.

I also started on a new-to-me Wodehouse romp, Bertie Wooster Sees It Through. I’m fairly sure I’ve never read this particular Bertie-and-Jeeves adventure; at least the first few chapters don’t seem too familiar. So far Bertie’s been almost trapped into an engagement with a distant cousin, Florence, refused to shave off his moustache in spite of Jeeves’s disapproval, and spent a night in the pokey as the result of tripping a police officer. I’d says he’s off to a good start.

I may or may not have an internet connection for the forseeable future. I would imagine that restoring power to Houston is more urgent than restoring my connection to the worldwide web. If I’m not here in writing, I’m here in spirit. Keep on reading.

Semicolon’s September: Celebrations, Links and Birthdays

Charlie Gibson, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama

Sep13

Charlie Gibson asks Sarah Palin if she’s conceited enough to think she can serve as vice-president:

GIBSON: Governor, let me start by asking you a question that I asked John McCain about you, and it is really the central question. Can you look the country in the eye and say “I have the experience and I have the ability to be not just vice president, but perhaps president of the United States of America?”

PALIN: I do, Charlie, and on January 20, when John McCain and I are sworn in, if we are so privileged to be elected to serve this country, will be ready. I’m ready.

GIBSON: And you didn’t say to yourself, “Am I experienced enough? Am I ready? Do I know enough about international affairs? Do I — will I feel comfortable enough on the national stage to do this?”

PALIN: I didn’t hesitate, no.

GIBSON: Didn’t that take some hubris?

PALIN: I — I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink.

So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.

Charlie GIbson asks Barack Obama how he feels about his historic nomination to be the Democratic candidate for president:

GIBSON: Senator, I’m curious about your feelings last night. It was an historic moment. Has it sunk in yet?

OBAMA: No. You know … you have been working so hard, 54 contests, so many months, meeting so many people, and then to suddenly walk into an auditorium with 17,000 people and realize you’re the Democratic nominee. That’s a pretty big dose to swallow all at once, but I will say that talking to my grandmother last night probably drove it home.

GIBSON: What’d she say?

OBAMA: Here’s a woman, who, well, she just said she was really proud. And, I thought back to all the work she’s put in, all the sacrifices she made, ah, she’s now a little too fragile to travel and so she watches it on TV and she’s going blind, so to hear in her voice, what this meant to her, that was a pretty powerful moment.

GIBSON: Public moments are not your own. There’s a million people pulling you in a million different directions, but when everybody clears out, the staff is gone, you’re in your hotel room at night and you’re alone — do you say to yourself: “Son of a gun, I’ve done this?”

OBAMA: You do say to yourself, “My, how far we have traveled.” And, and I say a little prayer to not only thank God for the blessings, but also to make sure that you’re worthy of the honor.

Fair? Not even close. But Ms. Palin just keeps on ticking. I don’t think the press is going to be able to do anything about her popularity because no one really believes that they are fair and unbiased anymore. So we, the voters, take their interviews and their editorials and their punditry with a grain of salt and draw our own conclusions.

Semicolon’s September: Celebrations, Links and Birthdays

Reading through a Hurricane

Sep12

Two from Camille at Book Moot.

Jen reviews a middle grade fiction title, Hurricane by Terry Trueman, on a hurricane in Honduras and its aftermath.

Semicolon review of Galveston’s Summer of the Storm by Julie Lake.

Semicolon review of Isaac’s Storm by Eric Larson.

I suggest for the younger set, although it’s about a summer storm, not a hurricane: The Storm Book by Charlotte Zolotow.

Other picture books on hurricanes:

Hurricane! by David Wiesner. Two brothers enjoy the excitement of a hurricane and the fun of climbing on a downed tree in their front yard.

Hurricane! by Corinne Demas. Margo and her family prepare for Hurricane Bob in 1991.

Semicolon’s September: Celebrations, Links and Birthdays

Ike Watch 2 and Poetry Friday

Sep11

Well, we evacuated. Or rather we were told to evacuate, and we obeyed. We’re in Fort Worth now. The traffic wasn’t too bad; it only took us seven hours to get here from South Houston. We left twenty year old Computer Guru Son in Houston to weather the storm and take care of the house, at his insistence. He’s young and thinks he’s invincible. However, he promised to move farther north into Houston if things get too bad or if he loses electricity.

So here’s a nice Poetry Friday hurricane poem to cheer us all up as we think: it could have been much worse. It could have been the wreck of the Hesperus.

The Wreck of the Hesperus
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr,
To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailòr,
Had sailed to the Spanish Main,
“I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.

“Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!”
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable’s length.

“Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow.”

He wrapped her warm in his seaman’s coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.

“O father! I hear the church-bells ring,
Oh say, what may it be?”
“‘T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!” —
And he steered for the open sea.

“O father! I hear the sound of guns,
Oh say, what may it be?”
“Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!”

“O father! I see a gleaming light,
Oh say, what may it be?”
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave
On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow’rds the reef of Norman’s Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman’s Woe!

Semicolon’s September: Celebrations, Links and Birthdays

Semicolon Author Celebration: William Sydney Porter, aka O Henry

Sep10

I’m not much of a fan of short stories. They’re too short for me. Just as I get interested in the characters or the plot, the story is over. The End.

However, I will make an exception for the short stories and sketches of William Sydney Porter, nom de plume O Henry. The reason he thought he needed a pseudonym will be revealed later in the post, ala O Henry himself who was a great fan of the twist at the end of the story, the reveal that surprised the reader into laughing wryly and shaking his head gently.

Will Porter was born on September 11, 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. He came to Texas at the age of twenty in 1882 hoping to get rid of a persistent cough. (Texas used to be a haven for tubercular patients, not that Mr. Porter had tuberculosis. He may have thought he had.) He worked on a sheep ranch, then moved to Austin where he worked as a pharmacist, draftsman, bank teller, and then a journalist. He married a wife Athol, who did have tuberculosis, and the couple had two children, a son who died soon after birth and a daughter, Margaret.

He and Athol moved to Houston, and he wrote for the Houston Post (newspaper, now defunct). It was the bank teller thing that got him in trouble. The bank he had worked at in Austin was audited, and some money seemed to be missing. Mr. Porter was accused of embezzlement, andhis father in law posted bail. But William then did a very stupid thing. He ran away to New Orleans, then to Honduras. He was on the lam for about a year, but heard that his wife was dying back in Austin. So he returned, managed to stay with his wife and daughter until Athol died, and then he was sent to the penitentiary in Ohio to serve out a five year sentence. Why Ohio? I couldn’t find any reason. Maybe interstate banking or something?

Anyway, it was in prison that W.S. Porter really began writing prolifically and in prison that he decided that he needed a new name, a psuedonym. He became the New York short story writer, O Henry, and he became famous. Unfortunately he also became an alcoholic, and he died in 1910 of cirrhosis of the liver, penniless and alone.

Famous O Henry stories:

The Gift of the Magi: the classic Christmas story that O Henry called “the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house.”

The Ransom of Red Chief: In this story two would-be kidnappers are foiled and bamboozled by a ten year old brat. I read it out loud this evening to two of the urchins, but one fell asleep and the other one, Karate Kid, thought he could have outwitted those bungling kidnappers with more style and intelligence than the boy in the story.

The Last Leaf: A story about superstition, selfishness, and sacrifice. I’ve read it and enjoyed it although I could see the twist at the end coming halfway through.

The Last of the Troubadours: J. Frank Dobie called this story “the best range story in American fiction.” It’s about the feud between the sheep farmer and the cowman and about the actions of a quixotic troubadour.

The Furnished Room tells of a young man’s search for his runaway love, run away to sing on stage in the theaters and music halls of New York City.

The Book Den on O’Henry’s short stories.

Semicolon’s September: Celebrations, Links and Birthdays

Ike Watch

Sep10

We’re all waiting for Hurricane Ike and deciding whether to evacuate or “shelter in place.” Since the forecasters are targeting the hurricane to make landfall farther south and west of where we live in South Houston, we’re planning to stay put for now. If the blog goes dead on Friday or Saturday, you’ll know we ran away or should have, one or the other.

We have a family member in the hospital in serious condition, and I have parents who are not not in good physical condition to make an evacuation trek like some people made for Hurricane Rita. Some people spent more than twenty-four hours trying to get to the other side of Houston. I’m not sure my dad would survive such an ordeal. So we have even more reasons to stay where we are unless it looks as if Ike is drawing a bead on Galveston Island. We’re about 30-40 miles inland from Galveston.

Please pray for all the Texans who are making preparations for the storm, and if you live on the Texas coast, stay safe.

Semicolon’s September: Celebrations, Links and Birthdays

In the News

Sep9

Palin and Book Banning: Here’s the original news story from Alaska that got Sarah Palin tagged as a book banner. I’ll let you read it and judge for yourself. Then I’ll just say that I agree with Roger, who is emphatically NOT a Palin supporter.

Palin Rumors: Charles Martin is keeping a list of Palin rumors and comments as to their truth or falsehood. The book-banning thing is numbers 40-42 on the list.

Michael Gerson on the Saddleback forum: “Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral — the qualities that made Adlai Stevenson interesting but did not make him president. Obama took care to point out that he had once been a professor at the University of Chicago, but that bit of biography was unnecessary. His whole manner smacks of chalkboards and campus ivy. Issues from stem cell research to the nature of evil are weighed, analyzed and explained instead of confronted.”

Semicolon’s September: Celebrations, Links and Birthdays

Advanced Reading Survey: Cranford by Mrs. Gaskell

Sep8

I’ve decided that on Mondays I’m going to revisit the books I read for a course in college called Advanced Reading Survey, taught by the eminent scholar and lovable professor, Dr. Huff. I’m not going to re-read all the books and poems I read for that course, probably more than fifty, but I am going to post to Semicolon the entries in the reading journal that I was required to keep for that class because I think that my entries on these works of literature may be of interest to readers here and because I’m afraid that the thirty year old spiral notebook in which I wrote these entries may fall apart ere long. I may offer my more mature perspective on the books, too, if I remember enough about them to do so.

Author:
Mrs Gaskell was the daughter of a Unitarian minister and later married another Unitarian minister. The death of her son caused her to start writing as a means of alleviating her grief. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was an immediate success, bringing her the friendship of Charles Dickens in whose magazine Household Words she published the novel Cranford, first as a serial.

Characters:
Miss Mary Smith, narrator of the events at Cranford.
Miss Deborah Jenkyns, a spinster and resident of Cranford.
Miss Maty Jenkyns, Deborah’s sister.

Other inhabitants of the village of Cranford and characters in the novel include:
Miss Pole
Mrs. Jamieson
Lady Glenmire
Mrs. Forrester
Mrs. Fitz-Adam
Captain Brown
Miss Jessie Brown

Quotations:
Miss Smith: “I have often noticed that almost everyone has his own individual small economies—careful habits of saving fractions of pennies in some one peculiar direction —any disturbance of which annoys him more than spending shillings or pounds on some real extravagance.”

Miss Pole: “My father was a man, and I know the sex pretty well.”

Miss Matty: “My father once made us,” she began, “keep a diary in two columns: on one side we were to put down in the morning what we thought would be the course and events of the coming days, and at night we were to put down on the other side what really had happened. It would be to some people a rather sad way of telling their lives. . . . I don’t mean that mine has been sad, only so very different to what I expected.”

Miss Matty: “Marry!” said Miss Matty once again.”Well, I never thought of it. Two people that we know going to be married. It’s coming so very near.”

Miss Smith: “We felt it would be better to consider the engagement in the same light as the Queen of Spain’s legs—facts which certainly existed, but the less said about the better.”

Martha, Miss Matty’s servant: “Reason always means what someone else has got to say.”

My thoughts thirty years later:

This story of the lives and incidental affairs of a group of elderly spinsters in a village in VIctorian England would seem at first glance to be unrelated to my hectic and technologically dominated life with eight children, a husband, and a brother-in-law in Houston, Texas. But I remember it as being full of gentle insights into human foibles, a bit melancholy at times, and warmly humorous at other places in the narrative. I’d enjoy reading it again and would recommend it to lovers of Jane Austen or Jan Karon’s Mitford series or Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire novels.

I’d really like to see the PBS mini-series based on Mrs. Gaskell’s book, but I have so many things I’d like to watch and so many books to read. I’d also like to read Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South, which is about the north and south of England, not about the American Civil War.

My thoughts after a re-read, summer 2025, almost 50 years later:

I read this book again, now almost fifty years after reading it for the first time, along with a group in June and July of this year. I remember very little of the plot of this novel, a little more about the characters, and much more about the atmosphere of the novel. Cranford is a lovely little community of mostly spinster ladies, and reading about the daily lives of these sweet, but also provincial and insular, women is a delight. Re-reading Cranford was like being immersed in a warm bath of old-fashioned Victorian values and culture, the best parts of VIctorian England. Mrs. Gaskell is a bit Dickensian—again, she published Cranford in installments in Dickens’ magazine Household Words—but Cranford is more homely and intimate, less dramatic, than Dickens’ many novels.

Oh, I still haven’t watched the miniseries, but I plan to do so soon.

Semicolon’s September: Celebrations, Links and Birthdays

Sunday Salon: I John, Dragons, Controversy and Short Stories

Sep7

I’ve been reading and meditating on the book of I John in the Bible this week, and the dominant thought that keeps running through my mind is that Jesus commands us to do such a simple thing: to love each other. And we find that simple command so hard to obey. I want to be told to climb mountains, paint great works of art, end world hunger, create technological miracles. Do hard things. And yet the hardest thing of all, the thing I cannot do very well, is love my brothers and sisters, my children, my friends, my enemies. Why not, and what would it look like if we did? What would it look like for Republicans to show love for Democrats and vice-versa? What would it look like in my home for me to truly love my children and my husband “with actions and in truth”? I need to get practical and think of at least one action that I will take this week to love the people that God has placed in my life. Maybe with a lot of practice and by God’s grace I can work up to two acts of selfless love per week in few years.

I also started reading The Search for the Red Dragon by James Owen this week. It’s the sequel to Here, There Be Dragons. (Semicolon review here.) So far, so good, and I’m looking forward to getting back to it after writing this post.

I posted my review of Looking for Alaska by John Green, and the author himself found my review and had some comments. I’m thankful for the frank, but civil and courteous, discussion about young adult literature that my review and questions and Mr. Green’s comments instigated. Take a look if you’re interested in issues of censorship, discernment, and decency in young adult literature.

Semicolon review of Looking for Alaska with related questions.

John Green’s response and comments by readers.

I’m looking forward this week to finishing Mr. Owens’ book and to starting A Bell for Adano, the September selection for Biblically Literate Book Club. I also have the schedule or Semicolon Author Celebrations for the rest of the year posted in the sidebar. I’ll copy the schedule here, too:

September 11: O. Henry, b.1862, d.1910.
September 18: Samuel Johnson, b.1709, d.1784.
October 9: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, b.1547, d.1616.
October 30: John Adams, b.1735, d. 1826.
November 13: Robert Louis Stevenson, b.1850, d.1894.
November 27: Kevin Henkes, b.1960.
December 11: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, b.1918, d.2008.
December 18: Charles Wesley, b.1707, d.1788.

For those who don’t know about my new Author Celebrations, I’m providing a place (linky) on the Thursday birthdays of certain authors where you can come by and read about the author here at Semicolon and also leave a link to your post celebrating that author’s birthday. This Thursday, the 11th of September, we’ll be celebrating the birthday of the famous short story writer, William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry. Everybody’s heard of The Gift of the Magi, but here’s a website where you can taste others of O. Henry’s short stories. Anyone have a suggestion for me and the urchins to read aloud one night this week?

Semicolon’s September: Celebrations, Links and Birthdays

The Week in Quotation Marks

Sep7

We are blessed in the 21st century with crystal-clear photographs and action films of the living realities within their pregnant mothers. No one with the slightest measure of integrity or honor could fail to know what these marvelous beings manifestly, clearly, and obviously are, as they smile and wave into the world outside the womb. In simplest terms, they are human beings with an inalienable right to live, a right that the Speaker of the House of Representatives is bound to defend at all costs for the most basic of ethical reasons. They are not parts of their mothers, and what they are depends not at all upon the opinions of theologians of any faith. Anyone who dares to defend that they may be legitimately killed because another human being “chooses” to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.
Edward Cardinal Egan
Archbishop of New York
August 26, 2008

“Let me be a clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits,and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics…it has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president.
And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and, you know, teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits.” ~Barack Obama, September 1, 2008

“We need a president who doesn’t think that the protection of the unborn or a newly born baby is above his pay grade.”. ~Fred Thompson, RNC, 9/2/2008

“But here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion — I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country. Americans expect us to go to Washington for the right reasons, and not just to mingle with the right people.” ~Sarah Palin, RNC, 9/3/2008

“I’m not running for president because I think I’m blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need. My country saved me. My country saved me, and I cannot forget it. And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath, so help me God.” ~John McCain, RNC, 9/4/2008

Semicolon’s September: Celebrations, Links and Birthdays