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Keith Green, b.1953, d. July 28, 1982

Jul28

Also on this date in 1982 singer, songwriter, and man of God, Keith Green died in a plane crash which also killed his two of his chldren, pilot Don Burmeister, missionaries John and DeDe Smalley and their six children.

Now there are plans to re-release many of Keith Green’s songs in a sound-enhanced version and to release much music that has never before been available.

That was 25 years ago. Now Green’s work is about to be rediscovered.
EMI/Sparrow Records is painstakingly going through recordings saved by his wife, Melody. An iTunes release with music never before heard by the public is planned for August. More material will be released next year, said Bryan Ward, director of artist development with EMI Christian Music Group.
The July 28, 1982, accident doused one of the brightest lights in the Jesus Movement, a youthful Christian counterculture. The bushy-haired evangelist with a distinctive tenor voice was posthumously inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.

I’ve written about Keith Green before here and here. I miss his prophetic and musical voice.

Marika by Andrea Cheng

Jun8

A few months ago I read another book by Andrea Cheng, Eclipse, the story of precocious eight year old Peti, the talkative son of Hungarian immigrant parents. Marika, the book I just finished, is narrated by a girl character, a little older than Peti, eleven rather than eight, but it has the same feel of a very serious story about adult problems being told from a child’s point of view.

I’m not sure, judging from the two books I’ve read, that Ms. Cheng is really a juvenile author. I think she writes adult or young adult books with child narrators, told in a child’s voice. The subject matter in the two books includes child abuse, adultery, genocide, and rape (mentioned), and I’m just not convinced that elementary school children would appreciate the rhythm or the content of either book.

That said, however, Marika is a great novel. The blurb in the back of the book says that Andrea Cheng is the daughter of Hungarian immigrants and that Marika, the character and the book, are loosely based on her mother’s story. Marika, the character, is a young Hungarian girl who happens to have three Jewish grandparents. Her family is culturally Catholic, but they can’t escape their Jewish ethnic identity in World War II Budapest. Marika’s struggles to understand this identity and what it means to be Jewish even though you don’t believe in the Jewish religion, even though you don’t want to be Jewish, from the core of the story.

Here’s a sample of Marika’s voice, on the day she is rescued by her father from confinement in a Jewish prison:

“I sat by the window and looked down at the Danube below, flowing so peacefully along its banks. Lots of people wrote poems about the Danube. We had to memorize one in fifth grade about the wind blowing off the water. I recited it to myself, and when I was done, I sobbed.”
48hbc
That’s the tone of this book: serious, sad, flowing, yet childlike. Marika does mature over the course of the novel, and that growth is reflected in the way she writes about her experiences. However, as the novel ends, and the reader finds out how the war ended for each of the characters in the story, the feelings continue to be mixed. Some survive the war and the Holocaust, and others, of course, do not, a very adult and true lesson to learn about life.

The Loud Silence of Francine Green by Karen Cushman

Jun8

“It was probably just a silly rumor, but I’d heard that nuns had their heads shaved, and I was afraid they relaxed by taking off their veils and running around bald, something I certainly did not want to see.”

A lot of this book reads like a “silly rumor”. However, some of it is true-to-history, and how is a young adult reader to tell the difference? Were Catholic schools and Catholic nuns back in the 1950’s really repressive and threatening? Probably some were. Were some people blacklisted for Communist sympathies in Hollywood during the so-called “red scare”? Yes, some were. Did those who were blacklisted become so intimidated and frightened by the questions and the pressure from the FBI that they committed suicide? Not unless they were already disturbed and depressed. (The author’s note in the back of the book says that “at least two” of those Hollywood types who were blacklisted committed suicide, but I can’t find any names or independent verification of this fact.) Did children really learn to fear The Bomb and the Reds so much that they worried that airplanes flying overhead might drop a bomb on them? I’m sure some imaginative children did.

Author Karen Cushman lived in California during the late forties/early fifties. I didn’t. She attended a Catholic school. I didn’t.
She says she was taught to “duck and cover” in case of a nuclear attack. I wa taught to go out into an interior hallway and cover my head in tornado drills, but by the time I went to elementary school in the 1960’s, no one was talking about nuclear attacks or fallout shelters to schoolchildren in West Texas. At least, not to me.

So, I’m giving the events in this book the benefit of the doubt. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to read as a straight story. It felt more like a series of caricatures: the angry nun teacher, the poor Jewish liberal actor blacklisted as a consequence of his compassion for the poor and downtrodden, the friend who speaks out and gets herself into trouble, the pious goody-two-shoes who wants to become a nun, the empty-headed teenage sister who’s only interested in fingernail polish and boys, and the bumbling dad who can’t figure out what to do to protect his family from godless Communists and atomic bombs.

Only the narrator, Francine, felt like a real person. Francine is conflicted; she wants to be friends with Sophie, the afore-mentioned outspoken defender of lost causes, but she doesn’t want to get in trouble. Francine is a self-described coward. She’s become accustomed to being overlooked and ignored, and some part of her likes to be unnoticed. The nuns at school and her family at home never ask for her opinion on anything, so Francine isn’t even sure she has any opinions of her own. Francine’s supposed to be a representation of the American public, silent in the face of McCarthyism and persecution of Hollywood Communists. But Francine is more than a symbol. As a character, she insists upon being more complicated and interesting, just as I’m sure the politics and culture of the 1950’s were more complex and multi-layered than this simple presentation would indicate. And the ending is confusing and would be epecially so for those “imaginative young people” to whom I would think this book is targeted. What happened to Sophie and her father? Did the Big Bad FBI put them in a dungeon somewhere? Did they emigrate to Russia? Did they just decide to move and start over elsewhere? The uncertainty is realistic, but annoying, perhaps giving young people the idea that America in the 1950’s was a place like Chile in the 1970’s where people just disappeared never to seen again except as bodies in a mass grave somewhere.
48hbc
It’s a middle school/young adult novel of one author’s experience of the 1950’s, the red scare, and growing up to become a person with thoughts and ideas of one’s own. There’s some humor in the vein of the opening quotation, a decent plot, and one very engaging narrator. In Texas idiom, I’d call it “fair to middlin”.

Reviewed, much more favorably, by Fuse #8.

Portrait of Jennie by Robert Nathan

May2

Unlike everyone else in the known universe, I hated The Time Traveler’s Wife. I thought it was way too long, way too confusing, and way too crude and sexually and violently graphic. This book, A Portrait of Jennie, is a much gentler, shorter (125 pages) book with a plot comparable to The Time Traveler’s Wife. I liked it very much.

A Portrait of Jennie was published in 1940; it’s out of print but available used from Amazon. In the story, it’s 1938, and the narrator, a starving artist, meets a little girl named Jennie. She’s a girl from the past, and she inspires a painting that captures the interest of an art gallery owner. As the girl re-appears in the narrator’s life, a bit older each time, she continues to inspire paintings and, finally, love.

Author Robert Nathan wrote many novels, a couple of children’s books, and some collections of poetry. According to Wikipedia, he had seven wives. You wouldn’t think he’d know much about romance and long term love and commitment, but A Portrait of Jennie is poignantly romantic.

A Portrait of Jennie was made into a movie in 1948 starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten. Nathan also wrote The Bishop’s Wife, a novel which was also made into a movie.

Quotation Time:

“I suppose most artists go through something of the sort; sooner or later it is no longer enough for them just to live —to paint, and have enough, or nearly enough, to eat. Sooner or later God asks His question: are you for me, or against me? And the artist must have some answer, or feel his heart break for what he cannot say.”

The Small Rain by Madeleine L’Engle

Apr19

I’ve been working on several projects this year: my Newbery project, my TBR list, and my Madeleine L’Engle project. I want, over the course of the next year or two, to read or re-read all of Ms. L’Engle’s books —or as many of them as I can find. I started with A Winter’s Love, published in 1957, my birth year. Here’s what I wrote about that book. I then read Camilla, one of her first novels published in 1951 and then re-published in 1965 after A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery and made Ms. L’Engle famous. I wrote about Camilla here.

During my blogging break in March, I re-read Ms. L’Engle’s first published novel, A Small Rain. It’s the story of Katherine Forrester, the daughter of two famous musicians. her mother is a celebrated concert pianist, and her father is an eccentric, but talented, composer. The novel follows Katherine through her lonely and difficult adolescence and ends with her plan to return to study with her beloved piano teacher, Justin, in Paris on the eve of what turns out to be World War II.

After reading A Small Rain, I had to skip ahead chronologically in Ms. L’Engle’s oeuvre and read A Severed Wasp, probably my second favorite of all Ms. L’Engle’s novels. She wrote A Severed Wasp (1982) as a sort of sequel to A Small Rain (1945) some thirty-seven years later. In this book, Madame Forrester Vigneras is an elderly woman beginning the task of looking back on her life and evaluating, forgiving, and coming to terms with the people and events that made her who she is. She has settled in New York City after a career as concert pianist travelling all over the world. The book contains multiple insights about love, marriage, forgiveness, aging gracefully, and simple grace, and it demonstrates maturity, wisdom, and craft gained by the author over many years of writing.

I highly recommend both books, read together if possible.

“. . . there was nothing Felix Bodeway couldn’t talk about, nothing he couldn’t put into words as facile as they were intense. And maybe that was good . . . maybe that was a way of exorcising things that worry you. For when you put something into words, it becomes an affair of the intellect as well as of the emotions, and therefore loses some of its fearsome power.” —A Small Rain

Words are useful for entrapping emotions and experiences and confining them to manageble proportions. It’s part of why I blog. I like using words and sentences to define my thoughts and feelings about a book or an issue or an everyday occurrence or even an episode of a TV show. Then, I can remember and re-examine and take out whatever is illogical or immoral or unreal, just leaving the true and the lovely essence of whatever it is I’m writing about.

At least, Truth is the goal. And truth, if one can get to it with words, even approximate it, does minimize, sometimes eliminate, fear.

Next L’Engle book to read: And Both Were Young, published in 1949.

What do you think about the covers of these 1980’s paperback editions? I’m not much of a design critic, but I think they’re odd with their pieces of face.

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Apr10

Once upon a time, about twenty-five years ago, I read a biography of Huey “Kingfish” Long, and I only remember the highlights: Huey ran Louisiana in the 1930’s, was a populist to end all populists, had a proposed program called “Share the Wealth,” and was assassinated by some guy who was in turn shot by Long’s bodyguard(s). Robert Penn Warren’s 1947 Pulitzer prize winning fictional account of the life and times of Willie Stark, popular governor of an unnamed Southern state, pretty much follows the general outline of what I remember of Long’s career. However, it’s been a long time, so I can’t vouch for the details.

The book is much more than Huey Long renamed and fictionalized, however. It’s an exploration of how power corrupts, of how we’re all, as Willie says, “conceived in sin and born in corruption.” The novel is misnamed. It’s either about Willie and one of his men, the narrator, Jack Burden. Or it’s about all the King’s women —his long-suffering wife, Lucy, his mistress, Sadie, and his upper class lover, Anne. For a Southern novel it’s strangely silent on the subject of race and race relations. It seems that in the Louisiana of Willie Stark, black people are to be seldom seen and definitely not heard. It’s the white voters who count, and Willie has a gift for making the poor white hicks of rural Louisiana feel as if they’re an important part of the power structure. He’s one of them, he says, a hick, too, raised up by God to lead them on to good roads, decent sanitation, free education, and universal health care. And he’ll pay for it all by taxing the rich. Gee, haven’t we all heard that speech before? Maybe old Huey/Willie has been reincarnated several times since the 1930’s.

“For what reason, barring Original Sin, is a man most likely to step over the line?
Ambition, love, fear, money.”

All the King’s Men explores all of these motivations for sin and corruption. The novel’s characters display the consequences of action and of inaction in a world in which the choices are between using evil means to create some possible (corrupt) good or remaining pure by not participating in the world, particularly the world of politics, at all. I think there is a Third Way, as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair would say, but perhaps I am mistaken. Or perhaps in Louisiana there are only two possibilities: become corrupted by the process or stand back and let the corrupt men rule the state.

It seems to me that all this should relate to New Orleans post-Katrina, but I’m not sure how it does.

Resurrection Reading: Night by Elie Wiesel

Apr7

No, I’ve never read this account of Mr. Wiesel’s experiences during the final days of World War II as he is enslaved in first Birkenau, then Auschwitz, then Buna, and finally Buchenwald, not until this week. It’s not a long book, only a little over a hundred pages, but it’s about the most powerful indictment of the evil that lies deep inside every man that I’ve ever read. If you don’t believe in “original sin,” Night will change your mind. It’s a very, very dark story, and the fact that it’s true and told in a quite factual manner makes it even more disturbing. The Nazi persecution and near-extermination of the Jews happened; it’s depressing, but unavoidable. And as Mr. Wiesel shows in his book, even those who were enslaved and murdered were not able to remain pure; he tells over and over again of how son turned against father, how friends fought each other for a scrap of bread, and of how he found himself doing and thinking things that would have been unthinkable before his captivity.

So why is this “Resurrection Reading”? Well, despite the “night” that pervades this book and despite the death that is its constant theme, the book points me, as a Christian, to resurrection. Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” By extension, only the dead need a resurrection, and only he who is aquainted with both the depravity of man and the evil that is within his own being is aware of his need of a saviour.

As the book ends, Mr. Wiesel has been liberated from Buchenwald, but he looks into the mirror and sees a corpse. Only a resurrection can help this particular patient.

Night is definitely appropriate and powerful reading for a Holy Saturday of darkness.

Marty

Feb13

Someone on a blog somewhere suggested the movie Marty, and we borrowed it from Blockbuster and watched it last Friday afternoon. It’s a light, sort of romantic, movie, perfect for Valentine’s Day, but at the same time the themes and some of the scenes are jarringly tragic and almost painful to watch.

Marty was made back in 1955, and it won four Oscars that year, including Best Picture. Ernest Borgnine (Oscar for Best Actor) stars as a 35 year old Italian butcher who’s still not married in spite of the fact that all his younger brothers and sisters have already tied the knot. His very Italian mother and all of his customers and friends wonder, loudly and persistently, why Marty doesn’t have a girl. In fact, they all say, with their thick Italian accents, “Marty, you should be ‘shamed of yourself. Why aren’t you married yet?”

Marty, however, isn’t married for the very good reason that he hasn’t found a girl who’s interested. “Ma,” he says, “sooner or later, there comes a point in a man’s life when he’s gotta face some facts. And one fact I gotta face is that, whatever it is that women like, I ain’t got it.”

Marty also calls himself “a fat, ugly man,” and it’s obvious from the beginning of the movie that Marty is a man whose self-esteem has suffered a series of blows from heartless girls and interfering friends and family members. His mother, essentially good-hearted but worried about her son and his future, convinces Marty to make one more trip to the Stardust Ballroom in hopes of meeting a girl. And, wonder of wonders, he does! Unfortunately, for Marty and for his girl Clara, everyone in Marty’s life, including Marty himself, is more used to Marty the Lonely Bachelor, than Marty in Love. Change is threatening, and Marty’s best friend is jealous of the time Marty spends with Clara. His mother, who so much wanted him to marry and have a family, is now afraid that a daughter-in-law might push her out into the cold. (Marty lives with his mother in an old 40’s style house, with a porch!, in New York City.)

Will Marty call Clara for another date as he promised he would? Will he continue to see Clara even though his friends and family disapprove? Or will he listen to those bad advisors and end up hanging out with the guys, asking that eternal question: “Whatd’ya wanna do tonight?” “I dunno. Whatd’you feel like doin’?”

This movie was such a challenge to Hollywood stereotypes: a movie about a nearly middle-aged butcher and an awkward chemistry teacher. And the “ugly ducklings” never turn into swans, either. They find a meaningful relationship without becoming something other than what they are. The leading man in this movie isn’t tall, dark, or handsome, nor is he witty, suave or debonaire. The girl (Betsy Blair) isn’t such a “dog” as some in the movie call her, but she is sweet and shy and rather unassuming. My urchins, who hate Napoleon Dynamite, will cringe to hear me say so, but the movie reminded me of a kinder, gentler Napoleon Dynamite.

It’s good to see a movie in which Hollywood celebrates ordinary, average guys and gals who live simple lives and still want love and marriage and all that implies.

The story and the screenplay for Marty were written by playwright Paddy Chayefsky, who, according to Wikipedia, has been compared to Arthur Miller. I was going to write that Marty also reminded me a bit of Miller’s salesman, Willy Loman, but again much kinder and gentler and much less tragic than Mr. Loman. I thought this story about Mr. Chayefsky, also from Wikipedia, showed a a good picture of his character:

He is known for his comments during the 1978 Oscar telecast after Vanessa Redgrave made a controversial speech denouncing Zionism while accepting her award for Best Supporting Actress in Julia. Chayefsky made a comment during the program immediately after hers stating that he was upset by her using the event to make an irrelevant political viewpoint during a film award program. He said, “I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation and a simple ‘Thank you’ would have sufficed.” He received thunderous applause for his riposte to Redgrave.

Marty was a good movie, and I really liked the porch.

Newbery Project: The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles by Padraic Colum

Feb4

In 1922, the first year that the Newbery Medal was awarded, one of the “runners-up” later called “honor books,” was The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles by an Irish storyteller named Padraic Colum. Mr. Colum was a poet and a playwright and a friend of James Joyce, but his retelling of myths, legends, and folklore for children came to be his most enduring work. Padraic Colum won the Regina Medal in 1961 for his “distinguished contribution to children’s literature.” Some of his other books include The Children’s Homer, The Children of Odin, The Arabian Nights, and The King of Ireland’s Son. Padraic Colum was born December 8, 1881, and he died on January 12, 1972.

“In transferring a story of the kind I heard then to the pages of a collection, elements are lost, many elements —the quietness of the surroundings, the shadows on the smoke-browned walls, the crickets chirping in the ashes, the corncrake in the near meadow, or the more distant crying of a snipe or curlew, and (for a youngster) the directness of statement, or, simply the evocation of wonder.” ~Padraic Colum

Padraic Colum grew up listening to stories told by the fire or in the meadow, and The Golden Fleece is written in the voice of a storyteller; it’s meant to be read aloud and to evoke wonder. The syntax and writing style are poetic and begging to be read to listening ears. In addition to the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Colum blended into his narrative many of the older Greek myths: Persephone, Pandora’s Box, Theseus and the Minotaur, and the Labors of Hercules, just to name a few. I’m planning a year of ancient history and literature next school year, and I think The Golden Fleece will be our first read aloud as we study Greek history and literature.

Willy Pogany, the illustrator for this compilation, is one of my favorites. In some of the other books I have that are illlustrated by Pogany, his illustrations are full-color paintings, but the illustrations in The Golden Fleece are black and white line drawings reminiscent of the pictures on Greek vases. I can envision having my urchins copy one of the pictures in the book as an art project, then maybe make their own drawing in the same style.

Although The Golden Fleece would be perfect for read aloud time, I also think that all those kids who can’t get enough of Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief might want to go to the source, so to speak, and I can’t think of a better source for Greek mythology than Colum’s The Golden Fleece. So, as I begin my Newbery Project, Padraic Colum’s Newbery Honor Book wins a Newbery renewal for its beautiful use of language and powerful storytelling voice. This one stands the test of time, maybe because the stories themselves are timeless, but also because the storyteller, like Orpheus the Singer, knew how to tell a tale.

“Many were the minstrels who, in the early days, went through the world, telling to men the stories of the gods, telling of their wars and of their births. Of all these minstrels non was so famous as Orpheus who had gone with the argonauts; none could tell truer things about the gods, for he himself was half divine.

Orpheus sang to his lyre. Orpheus, the minstrel, who knew the ways and the stories of the gods; out in the open sea on the first morning of the voyage Orpheus sang to them of the beginning of things.”

The Newbery Award: 1923 and 1924

Feb1

In 1923 and 1924, the second and third years that the Newbery Medal for Distinguished Children’s Literature was awarded, only one book was named for the award, no honor books or runners up as they were called at first.


1923 Medal Winner: The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting (Stokes)

1924 Medal Winner: The Dark Frigate by Charles Hawes (Little, Brown)

Since I’ve already read The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle (it was OK, not my favorite kind of story), I thought I’d try to find a copy of The Dark Frigate by Charles Hawes. I looked it up, and it’s available from several libraries in my area. But the most interesting thing I found was the subtitle. Get a load of this subtitle: wherein is told the story of Philip Marsham who lived in the time of King Charles and was bred a sailor but came home to England after many hazards by sea and land and fought for the King at Newbury and lost a great inheritance and departed for Barbados in the same ship, by curious chance, in which he had long before adventured with the pirates.

King Charles I? What was Newbury?

I read a book recently (From Cover to Cover: Evaluating and Reviewing Children’s Books by Kathleen T. Horning) that gave this information about the early history of the Newbery Award:

The proponents and producers of formula series books launched a verbal attack on children’s librarians, claiming that since they were mere women (and spinsters at that), they had no right to judge what was fit reading for red-blooded American boys. Librarians, in alliance with the Boy Scouts of America, countered by emphasizing “good books for boys” in their early recommendations, thus advancing the notion of gender-specific reading tastes.

The first several winners of the Newbery Medal are a case in point. They are for the most part titles that would be touted as books for boys.
p. 151, From Cover to Cover by K.T. Horning.

So I’m thinking that Colum’s tales of ancient Greece, and Dr. Doolittle, and the adventure tales of Mr. Hawes are all books that were chosen to appeal to those red-blooded American boys who would otherwise have been reading Tom Swift or Horatio Alger’s stories or . . . what? What series were those spinster librarians trying to outclass in the early to mid-1920’s? Do the Newbery award committee members still try to choose books that will apppeal to boys or has the pendulum swung in other direction, to choosing books that will appeal to feminist girls? Or is gender appeal something that award committees should not discuss or consider?

Attitudes about “fit reading” have changed since the 1920’s. Most librarians (and parents) that I know of are perfectly content to not only allow, but positively encourage, boys and girls to read series books that are of very little literary value. I mean by this rather slippery term “literary” that the books that aren’t literary are books that won’t even make children laugh fifty years from now, much less make them think. They still don’t award the Newbery to Captain Underpants or to Garfield Takes the Cake, but nowadays, as long as they’re reading something . . .

Do you think children should be encouraged to read whatever attracts their interest, or should they be required to read books that will make them think, books that have literary value? Or is it a false dichotomy? Should they be allowed/encouraged/required to read both?

So, anyway, next week I’ll be reading The Dark Frigate, and on Sunday I’ll tell you how I liked Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles.

More posts from my Newbery Project.