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A Great Wild Mercy

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Singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer has a new album that was released October 13th. Titled A Great Wild Mercy, the chorus of the title track conveys what so many feel today.

I’m tired of all the rage / tired of all the worry / I’m ready for a great wild mercy.

As I wrote in a post earlier this year, Carrie Newcomer has always explored “the intersection of the spiritual and the daily, the sacred and the ordinary. Over the course of her career she has become a prominent voice for progressive spirituality, social justice and interfaith dialogue.”

It was the richness of the voice, along with the depth of her spirituality and the accessibility of her songs, that drew me in when I first heard her live in 2014. “We are living moments of grace and wonder, shadow and light,” Newcomer says. These are the moments she captures in her music.

Hers continues to be a voice we need to hear today.

Take More Time, Cover Less Ground from the new album has an almost jaunty sound that nonetheless shares important truths. As Newcomer wrote on her most recent A Gathering of Spirits newsletter, the song is based upon a Thomas Merton quote and “it’s about the practice of attention and developing a sense of gratitude and awareness even in the midst of a busy day.”

The song begins with . . .

I’m an old wind up clock in an ancient tower / I’m a long table lamp and the appointed hour

I’m what’s never been named and what’s nameless still / I’m the echo that comes back from the bottom of the well . . .

And it works its way down to the chorus.

Time to pick it all up and lay it back down / Time to know what I seek has already been found / Time to listen to what never made a sound / Time to take more time and cover less ground.

Writing in her newsletter, Newcomer tells a story that helps explain the concept of taking more time.

My friend Parker tells the story of a surgeon who is explained something important to a new resident who would be assisting during the surgery. The surgeon said, “This is a very delicate and important moment in the procedure and I will have only 3 1/2 minutes to make the repair and tie off the vessels.” The new resident said, “I get it, at that point you really need to hurry.” But the surgeon replied, “ Just the opposite. Because this is delicate and so important, I need to slow down, be completely focused and do each movement intentionally.”

Take More Time might be what the doctor ordered, to expand the moment from the inside with interest, curiosity and gratitude.

The spiritual also comes to the forefront in Start With A Stone. Newcomer says that it “isn’t in the bread, it’s not in the wine, it’s not in a scroll or in any one line.”

Start with a stone, the humblest of things / From this relic of bedrock eternity springs / Go back to the source, go back to your home / Heaven is waiting but start with a stone.

The full album of A Great Wild Mercy is now available on all streaming platforms as well as available for purchase through Newcomer’s website store, I-tunes or wherever you get your music.

Here’s the Direct Spotify Link for the full album.

On her A Gathering of Spirits newsletter — which includes music, poetry and commentary on art, spirit and life — Newcomer wrote a post in late December 2022 entitled Singing in the Dark, which is a song on the new album.

It begins by describing a recent visit to a monastery.

Last weekend I visited The Abbey of Gethsemani, which is the oldest Trappist monastery in the United States. There is a small hermitage on the grounds where monk, author, mystic, poet and social activist, Thomas Merton, lived and wrote his more than 50 books on spirituality, interfaith understanding, eastern and western mystic contemplative practice and peacemaking. The Cistercian (Trappist) monks of this community are dedicated to lives of simplicity, prayer, contemplation, meaningful work, solitude and union. Together they practice the daily Liturgy of the Hours, which means seven times each day they stop everything they are doing to gather as a community and sing. They believe this practice of regular prayer and singing is a way to express their devotion and that it is a manner of doing service to all humankind.

And then she writes about going to the 3:15 a.m. vigil around the Winter’s Solstice, when the monks sing in the darkest hours of the year. She’s honest about her feelings around the problems of “deformed religion.”

And yet, I found myself so deeply touched, moved by the idea that a community of monks keeping vigil, faithfully singing for those (awake or asleep) at 3AM, the most vulnerable time of the day. I continue to be comforted by the fact that there are so many of us who literally and metaphorically continue to sing in the dark, lean into the light and believe in what is still so worthy and beautiful, despite all the brokenness of a suffering world. I am encouraged that what continues to connect us may not be gravity (that pulls us down), but rather a song (that lift us up).

The lyrics to Singing in the Dark speak to that searching and hopefulness.

I’m a wayfaring stranger / hungry for some grace / A soul forever searching / a pilgrim to this place / I’m here to meet whatever is listening for me here / while all the world is waiting at the turning of the year

Singing in the dark / calling out the day / Joining with the voices / opening the way / sitting here . . . waiting for the spark / that bursts into being / singing in the dark.

Author Barbara Kingsolver has written of Newcomer, “She’s a poet, storyteller, snake-charmer, good neighbor, friend and lover, minister of the wide-eyed gospel of hope and grace.”

Carrie Newcomer is currently touring in support of the new album. A Great Wild Mercy — like so much of her music — is a gift to us all.

Enjoy!

More to come . . .

DJB

Carrie Newcomer portrait by Jim Krause via carrienewcomer.com

From the bookshelf: September 2023

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Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in September 2023. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy.

Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure (2022) by Rinker Buck tells of the author’s 2016 quest to take a flatboat from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, recreating the approximate route traveled by a young Abraham Lincoln and millions of other Americans of that day. When Americans think of pioneers, settlers in wagon trains heading west usually come to mind. Yet the role of the flatboat in our country’s evolution is far more significant than most realize. Buck undertakes this adventure to set the history straight, but in the process, he learns a great deal about himself, our country, and human nature.

The Tao of the Backup Catcher: Playing Baseball for the Love of the Game (2023) by Tim Brown and Erik Kratz is “a story about a part of the game that hasn’t drifted into a math contest.” A catcher at Eastern Mennonite University, Kratz is discovered by a scout who sees something that suggests he has what it takes to get to the majors. Perhaps not to be a star, but to be the guy who is always there when the star catcher needs a day off from bending down behind home plate, catching 100-mph missiles, and taking foul balls off the left kneecap. This is a story about Kratz and his nearly two-decade journey through pro ball. But more importantly, it is a story about the servant leadership of backup catchers who spend a career watching, listening, pondering, and ultimately setting aside their ego to make the team — and game — better.

Whose Body? (1923) by Dorothy L. Sayers is a delightful period puzzle that turns deadly serious for Lord Peter Wimsey as he works to find the answer to two mysteries. As the book opens he receives a call from his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, asking for his assistance in helping clear her architect of suspicion of murder. It seems that overnight a body, clad only with a pair of fashionable pince-nez, has appeared in his bathtub. At the same time, a famous London financier vanishes from his bedroom across town, leaving no trace. The body in the bathtub is not that of the financier, so whose body is it? The police do not suspect that the two cases are connected, but Lord Peter has his doubts.

The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly (2022) by Margareta Magnusson is a humorous look at how to live and age gracefully well into your final third of life. The first chapter is an exhortation to have a gin and tonic with a friend but there are also suggestions to embrace new technology and spend more time with young people. Magnusson was introduced to the world through her bestseller The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (or the clearing out your unnecessary belongings so others don’t have to do it for you). This follow-up work — which is a short 140 pages because “old people don’t want to read 400 pages” — is a witty yet useful take on how to approach life when more of it is behind you than ahead. Yet it is appropriate for all ages, including those who may not yet feel old, as her advice is simple and pragmatic.

Biological Diversity: The Oldest Human Heritage (1999) by Edward O. Wilson is a short work designed to introduce readers to the topic of biodiversity. We don’t have much time to waste if we want to reverse the trends of loss as human-induced changes to the habitat come with “such a velocity that it is too great for life to handle” and we simply do not know all the consequences of that loss. “Simple prudence,” Wilson suggests, “dictates that no species, however humble, should ever be allowed to go extinct if it is within the power of humanity to save it.”  Wilson — by that time a highly decorated and somewhat controversial natural scientist who had already won one Pulitzer Prize for his book On Human Nature and was soon to receive a second for The Ants — wrote this work to educate young people about the importance of biodiversity, the threats to it, and our response.

What’s on the nightstand for October (subject to change at the whims of the reader):

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: Click to see the books I read in August of 2023 and to see the books I read in 2022. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Photograph of the George Peabody Library, Baltimore from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

The blood cries out from the ground

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In my year of reading dangerously™, I’ve become immersed in the world of crime stories. I’ve focused — until now — on fictional accounts. But with Indigenous Peoples Day and a major movie release of this book both scheduled for October, I turned my attention this month to the true-life story of one of the most heinous crimes in American history: the Osage murders.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (2017) by David Grann is a well-known and highly praised work, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Awards for Nonfiction. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma, whose land sat above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. “To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties . . . In 1923 alone, the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.” And in 1921, one of the Osage, Anna Brown, was brutally murdered.

Grann’s story begins with that killing, and in a tightly woven tale he takes the reader through an evil crime spree arising from white settlers’ attempted dispossession of an Osage family’s Oklahoma lands. This shocking series of crimes saw dozens of people murdered in cold blood. Many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. Grann’s work exposes once again the dark and odious underbelly of race in America. White wealthy robber barons of the 1920s — openly displaying their wealth as they stole their way to riches — were often celebrated in contemporary accounts as captains of industry. But commentators and neighbors expressed contempt for the Osage, who had servants and chauffeurs — blacks, Mexicans, and “even whites” — to work in their homes. In contrast to many of the robber barons, the Osage came by their wealth honestly.

After white settlers pushed them out of Kansas and from land they were assured would be their home forever, the Osage were forced into a corner of Oklahoma that most whites regarded as “broken, rocky, sterile, and utterly unfit for cultivation.” However, smart tribal leaders and attorneys insured that the underground oil and mineral rights on this land belong to the Osage. And then oil was discovered.

In something of a perfect storm, the wealth that came to the Osage arrived at the same time as Prohibition. Both brought out some of the worst criminal elements in American history. And the government’s paternalism toward the Osage meant that most of the wealth that was rightfully theirs had to be “managed” by white “guardians.” These events came together to put a target on the back of the Osage nation.

Grann tells a parallel story as part of his narrative. Local and state justice systems — as well as the courts — were notoriously corrupt. Murders of the Osage went unexamined and no one was held accountable. Seeing this situation from a distance in Washington, a very ambitious J. Edgar Hoover, the newly appointed head of what was then known as the Bureau of Investigation, saw a chance to score a major win for this small agency and begin to build the national police force he coveted. Fortunately for the Osage, Hoover selected a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White was a rarity — a principled lawman who approached everyone with empathy and understanding — and he put together an undercover investigative team that solved a key murder in the Reign of Terror. After a protracted trial with bogus confessions, changing witness testimony, attempted bribes, and dramatic courtroom scenes, the men primarily responsible — including one pillar of the community — were given life sentences.

But as Grann reports in the final portion of the work, Hoover didn’t follow through and many of the other murders were covered up. Through dogged detective work and research almost 100 years after the fact, Grann was able to uncover more of the mystery. Again, Hoover’s desire to control the narrative about the FBI coupled with general racism against the Osage meant that the story was buried and forgotten until Grann brought it forward in this haunting true-life murder mystery. The FBI said twenty-four people died over a roughly five-year period from 1921 to 1926. In fact, the number is probably in the hundreds and the Reign of Terror as the Osage called it probably began as early as 1918 and lasted until 1931. History, he writes, is a merciless judge, laying bare “our tragic blunders and foolish missteps.” The historical record told stories that the principals at the time could not see.

The granddaughter of an Osage man who was poisoned in the 1920s during the Reign of Terror points out the vast expanse of prairie, and then quotes what God told Cain after he killed Abel: “The blood cries out from the ground.”

This “is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly compelling, but also emotionally devastating.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photos: Mollie Burkhart and her sisters (credit: Osage Nation Museum); The graves of Mollie and her murdered family members (credit: Aaron Tomlinson); Phillips Petroleum workers strike oil in Osage territory (credit: Bartlesville Area History Museum)

Free to be myself, regardless of fashion

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A work friend from Edinburgh who calls herself a “Fermanagh girl” recently posted a note on LinkedIn that caught my attention. It was the weekend, and Ruthanne suggested that one “may be having a lazy breakfast and seeking company that will drift you off to places of tranquility or provide some lesser-known heritage stories.” Her recommendation? The music, voices and sounds of nature from that morning’s Radio 3’s Breakfast tour of Northern Ireland’s loughs. Among the offerings from the pastoral setting of Crom Castle on Upper Lough Erne, was the Irish pianist and composer Joan Trimble. I listened, was mesmerized, and wanted to share some of what I heard on this MTC Saturday Soundtrack.

Born in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh in 1915, Trimble studied at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and Trinity College in Dublin before going to the Royal College of Music in London to study piano with Arthur Benjamin and composition with Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells. As the Contemporary Music Centre of Ireland notes, recognition as a composer first came with the publication in 1938 of songs and two-piano music.

Buttermilk Point, heard below in a studio setting and also in this live version, is a beautiful example of her folk-influenced sensibilities.

Trimble’s father “was a distinguished folksong collector, starting Trimble on a lifetime of immersion in Irish folk music.” You can hear that influence in her compositions The Green Bough and The Humors of Carrick.

The Coolin, her composition of a traditional Irish Air for cello and piano, is performed in this interesting arrangement by cello and accordion.

After studying composition with Howells and Vaughan Williams, Trimble’s Phantasy for Piano Trio won the 1940 Cobbett competition for English chamber music.

During World War II,

Trimble’s career as a duo-pianist with her sister Valerie took precedence; during the war, they regularly performed on BBC radio and at Myra Hess’s legendary National Gallery concerts. (Trimble also managed to work full time for the Red Cross.) The sisters’ success continued after the war, when they premiered two-piano concertos by English composers Arthur Bliss and Lennox Berkeley. In addition to her career as a pianist and teacher, she raised three children. As a result, Trimble’s compositional output was small; but it is well crafted, and she lived long enough to be recognized as Ireland’s most prominent female composer.

In works such as her Suite for Strings, the tunes “sound completely folk-like even though they are Trimble’s own.” As Mark Arnest writes for the Chamber Orchestra of the Springs,

Some of the most fearsomely modern music ever composed comes from the decades following World War II, when faith in and respect for the traditions that had culminated in the war were at an all-time low; but Trimble’s music is untouched by these experiments — “I am free to be myself, regardless of fashion,” she wrote — and is closer in spirit to the music her teacher Vaughan Williams composed several decades earlier.

The suite is in three movements. The opening Prelude is in duple meter and features strong rhythm and sophisticated, very unfolk-song-like harmonies . . . The slow second movement features a sweet and sad melody in triple meter. It’s further contrasted from the first movement by its simple harmonies — though they get more chromatic in the piece’s second half. A violin solo two-thirds of the way through is reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. The Finale features several sprightly tunes. The string writing throughout the suite is assured and effective, and justifies Trimble’s reputation as a composer whose works deserve wider hearing.

Trimble passed away in 2000 in her hometown of Enniskillen. On this fall Saturday morning, take time to enjoy this beautiful music, written by a very talented pianist and composer who was inspired by the folk tunes of her native Ireland.

More to come . . .

DJB

Image of Crom Castle, County Fermanagh by Chris Lacey via National Trust

If I were commissioner of baseball

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A CORRECTION AND A NOTE: I obviously wrote this little piece in a great deal of haste and just to have some fun. So my normal phalanx of fact-checkers * did not give this the once over. So there was (at least) one mistake. Tampa Bay was booted out of the playoffs so quickly, I simply forgot that they had won 99 games in the regular season. Oh well, I’ve gone back and changed any misleading numbers in this piece.

As for the note, again I wrote it in haste or fun. Some commentator tried to tell me it wasn’t worth considering, or at least I think that’s what s/he was saying. Neither Candice nor I could quite figure out the point of the comment, so I took it down. As I say in the “About MTC” post . . . I will check comments and if you disagree strongly just get your own newsletter.

I’ve been living the bachelor life for the past 10 days. That means three things:

  • First, I don’t eat as well as I do when Candice is home.
  • Second, I often end up eating supper in front of the television.
  • Finally, I watch way too much baseball.

These are all connected. I want to focus on #3.

The baseball playoffs began in early October with four wild card games on one day. I watched the vast majority of all four games. The eventual wild card winners — Texas, Minnesota, Arizona, and Philadelphia — took their first steps to sweep these best-of-three series. (Yes, all four series were 2-0 sweeps . . . which led to the first of several problematic days off.)

On to the Division Series games, which are best-of-five. Five teams across baseball won more than 90 games this year, and three of the five (Milwaukee and Tampa Bay were the exceptions) played for the first time in this round. As of last night, all five are now out of the playoffs. How could those teams with the better records all be out? Why, they never stood a chance.

There has been some exciting baseball, and we’ll never forget this play:

But there have also been a lot of blowouts over these two rounds, which has given me plenty of time to think about how I would improve the game if I were commissioner.**

First, get the (monetary) gambling out of baseball.

I am so tired of seeing David “Big Papi” Ortiz spray champagne on some schmuck who has just won a $100 bet I could scream. Listen, David Ortiz is not coming over to your house. I’ve written about this before, so go read the earlier article to get the full firehose of my opinion.

Second, make the regular season count again.

Baseball is unique because teams play day-in-and-day-out for six months over a 162-game season. But all three teams that excelled by winning 100 or more games over the regular season had a five-day layoff while the wild card series took place. These top regular season teams all looked rusty and were quickly dispatched in the first round in which they participated. There are, of course, explanations for those outcomes besides being disadvantaged by the layoff.

  • Atlanta pulled off that miracle win in game #2 against the Phillies, but let’s be honest: Philadelphia has Atlanta’s number in the playoffs at the moment. Those kind of streaks happen.

So, should we give some more advantage to those who do well — even exceptionally well — in the regular season? As commissioner I want the regular season to count for something, so I would consider:

  • Cut back on off days. After playing pretty much every day for six months, teams get rusty when they sit for 4-5 days. Squeeze that schedule however many rounds you have and let’s end before Halloween. November games are just stupid.
  • Put fewer teams in the playoffs. This is the best way possible: drop the third wild card team. Let’s go back to the system where the two non-division-winning teams with the most wins play one play-in game, and then move immediately into the Division Series. Hey, it worked for the 2019 Nationals!

UPDATE #2: Joe Posnanski has a good column today on how we came to have three divisions in each league. Before 1969 there were two leagues and the winners of the two leagues went straight to the World Series.

Third, limit the number of pitching changes.

I hadn’t given this much thought until Joe Posnanski wrote about it, but “few things are more annoying than when a manager comes out during an inning to pull a pitcher with nobody on base just to get the platoon advantage.” It interrupts the flow of the game. Joe suggests that MLB outlaw changing pitchers with nobody on base.

Finally, no cheerleaders in baseball.

Look at the video above at about the 25-second mark. When Atlanta pulls off that miracle, CHEERLEADERS in skimpy outfits run out onto the top of the dugout. Just like there’s no crying in baseball, there should be no cheerleaders!

Atlanta has a good team but they have an ownership group with no soul. As I’ve written earlier, the Braves started the very ominous period of building sterile corporate campuses/amusement parks. Their decision to build and move to Truist Park in the far northern suburbs was terrible. It was a move away from the city, public space, public transportation, and — most egregious from my point of view— communities of color.

Since these ideas have as much chance of being implemented as I have of being commissioner, let’s move along to a few other observations from my intense week of watching baseball.

  • The new rules are working. The games are faster, there’s more offense, and if you head upstairs for an adult beverage you’re likely to miss something fun and significant. That’s a good thing.
  • Second, I’m coming around on Harper. Maybe. Regular readers know that I dislike the Phillies Bryce Harper. A lot. When he played with the Nationals he was an aloof, arrogant, self-centered jerk, but he was ours. He’s also one of the most exciting players in the game. His clubhouse reputation has apparently improved since he went to Philadelphia, and I like his teammates Trea Turner and Kyle Schwarber (also former Nats). I’m still not going to root for Harper, but I won’t be sad when he does something amazing either.
  • Finally, Dusty Baker was the only thing good about the Astros last year; now he has company. I like Dusty and was glad when his Astros won the World Series. However, I’m now all in on Yordan Alvarez. What a monster! He’s just so much fun to watch.

That’s enough for now. My bachelor days are over yet the League Championship Series games await. Play ball!

More to come . . .

DJB

*There is no phalanx of fact-checkers here . . . there’s barely one (i.e. me)

**I’d probably need to be the king of baseball, as the commissioner is just a working stiff for the owners these days.

Photo of DJB at Nats Park during 2019 World Series. If I were commissioner, I’d get better seats.

Fighting for a people-powered future

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If our family had a dollar for every time I said, “I’m not going to give Jeff Bezos my money!” we still wouldn’t threaten his title as one of the world’s richest individuals but our nest egg would get a nice boost. Suffice it to say I’ve long had a visceral reaction to Amazon. When I saw this book with concrete examples of how to fight for local economies, data privacy, fair labor practices, independent bookstores, and “a people-powered future” it leapt off the shelf into my hands. I had to buy it.

Prime Day is a good time to spread the word.

How to Resist Amazon and Why (2022) by Danny Caine makes the case for resisting what at times seems to be the takeover of the world by this corporate behemoth. Caine — who co-owns the Raven Book Store (with his employees) in Lawrence, Kansas — has provided a wealth of strongly sourced information about how “big tech monopolies, especially Amazon, are bad for communities, small businesses, the planet, consumers, and workers.”

In seven detailed chapters, Caine focuses on the “why,” giving example after example of Amazon’s devastating impact on the book industry, small business in general, the labor force and workers’ rights, competition, privacy, the environment, and every level of government. And the examples are not from crazed left-wing socialists: a number of the exposes come from such bastions of corporate power as The Wall Street Journal and from trusted sources like PBS.

Sign at Books, Inc. in Alameda, CA

Between each chapter, Caine inserts an interlude that points toward the “how” part of the equation. These are tales of resistance and personal essays. The penultimate chapter then describes ten specific ways to resist Amazon.

What is wrong with Amazon? This is a company with a 150% turnover rate whose workers face inhuman schedules and are literally dying on the job. Their business model relies on preying on local businesses and even their own vendors. Amazon’s founder and long-time CEO is one of the richest individuals in the world “while his workers make low wages with impossible quotas.” They use their considerable weight ruthlessly when others try to stop those destructive practices.

Among the issues:

  • Amazon leads to the devaluation of products — By being able to offer items such as books on their site for impossibly low prices, Amazon’s business practices have led consumers to now expect outrageously low prices everywhere. A normal business cannot survive without making a profit.
  • Amazon is both a platform and a competitor — Amazon’s business model, writes Caroline Jenkins, allows them to “skew profit unfairly in their favor. They have been known to directly duplicate products being sold on their virtual shelves and sell that same product at a lower price than the original.”
  • Amazon is lying when it says it pays its employees $15 an hour — Many of Amazon’s “employees” are not actually their employees. Those people driving Amazon-branded trucks and wearing Amazon vests work for third-party contractors, who pay lower wages and don’t offer benefits. And those vans? Amazon makes their contractors buy a specific type of van that is conveniently just below the size that would require strict government regulation. When something bad happens to or with one of those vans/drivers, Amazon just throws up its hands. “Hey, they aren’t our employees.”

While the loss of personal connections and community-oriented support is at the heart of Amazon’s destruction of America, much of the fight requires government intervention to protect consumers from monopolies. We are seeing progress on that front from the Biden Administration. The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon on September 26th, alleging that the company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. That step has been long overdue, but the new FTC Chair Lina M. Khan wrote an article in 2017 that galvanized the moribund antitrust movement, and her recent appointment has already led to swift action.

Fittingly, a bookstore (and coffee shop) does business inside the Storyteller Building in Thermopolis, Wyoming. (From the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

Caine lists ten things you can do to resist Amazon, and they are pretty straightforward. Here are a few:

Shop local — Simple. Take the money you’d send to Amazon and spend it at your local grocery story, bookstore, drugstore, etc.

Cancel your Prime subscription (or better yet, your Amazon account) — That promise of “next day delivery” with Prime began exacerbating many of the problems and impacts of the company.

Avoid Amazon-affiliated brands — While I knew all about The Washington Post and Whole Foods, I was surprised to discover the names of some other brands affiliated with Amazon, including AbeBooks, Goodreads, and Ring. The Post is our local newspaper, but we’ve dropped home delivery and haven’t missed it. The amount we buy at Whole Foods continues to shrink, as we’ve shifted more-and-more purchases to our local farmer’s market, fish monger, and neighborhood grocery.

Unplug your house from Amazon’s privacy-invading security and surveillance network — Ring, which is being sold for Amazon by more than a thousand local police departments(!), is opening us up to Orwellian levels of privacy invasion and police surveillance. And you don’t want to know what Alexa knows about you (but perhaps you should).

Amazon is having a corrosive effect on our culture. The “value” of everything is compared against low consumer prices. There’s more to life than cheap underwear. Plus, Amazon’s next-day-delivery promise — which is literally built on the broken backs of its overtaxed workers — has helped exponentially increase impatience in our culture. You know what I mean: when the guy behind you honks his horn the second the light changes, or when a co-worker complains that you didn’t answer their email, which they sent all of 10 minutes earlier.

Read this book. Stop giving money to Jeff Bezos. Fight to keep your dollars in the local economy, to shield your data from ravenous online marketers, to enact fair labor practices and a living wage, and to keep your local independent bookstore alive and thriving.

More to come . . .

DJB

UPDATE: This cartoon captures my sentiments exactly!

The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed.

Top image from Pixabay.

Traveling through the ages of life

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A trim and stark memoir, written in plain language, begins with a simple sentence. Yet in the hands the 2022 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, it turns into an unexpected study of life.

Five years ago, I spent an awkward night with a student who had been writing to me for a year and wanted to meet me.

I stumbled upon this intriguing work at Takoma Park’s wonderful new independent bookstore — People’s Book — on a recent visit, and I’m glad I made the discovery.

The Young Man (2022) by Annie Ernaux (translated by Alison L. Strayer) is the account of her love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. That first awkward dinner followed by drinks at her home turned into weekend connections and daily phone calls. For some, hers is an awkward romance, although she notes that if the roles were reversed between man and woman few would look twice. It is awkward in some respects, as he “tore her away from my generation, but I was not part of his.” Yet she saw it as a relationship of mutual gain, where she was “the one who could change his life.” She led her young admirer to see making love as something more than “a more or less slow-motion satisfaction of desire,” becoming, instead, “a sort of continuous creation.”

In more than one domain — literature, theater, bourgeois customs — I was his initiator, but the things I experienced because of him were also initiatory. My main reason for wanting our story to continue was that, in a sense, it was already over and I was a fictional character within it.

This is not a salacious memoir; rather, Ernaux uses the backdrop of this brief romance to explore themes of the movement back and forth between youth and age, of memory and time, of misogyny and class, of life’s pitfalls and pleasures.

Along the way Ernaux is transported back to Rouen, the city where she lived as a young student, and to the places, now much changed, where she first experienced those heady years. It is, she suggests, as if she is living life backwards. Yet this time is different, as A. is very much a “young man of his times.” He would “say ‘stop’ or ‘that’s good’ instead of ‘thank you’ when I served him at the table . . . Work for him meant nothing more than a constraint with which he did not wish to comply, if other ways of life were possible . . . He had never voted . . . (and) believed that nothing whatsoever about society could be changed.” Thirty years earlier, she writes, “I would have turned away from him” not wanting to be confronted with the signs of her own working-class origins. Now she was the literary bourgeoisie.

Ernaux writes that during this time her memory “seemed to me infinite. There was a great sweetness to that layer of time which stood between us, it gave more intensity to the present.” She looks at this time without sentimentality and is able, through the power of her words, to “analyze all kinds of intersecting threads — aging, class, desire, regret — without a sense of shame or an impulse to sugarcoat any of the truths she uncovered during her time with A.” 

The Nobel Prize description suggests how The Young Man fits into her larger body of work.

In her writing, Annie Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class. Her path to authorship was long and arduous. Among her novels are A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story, and The Years. Ernaux’s work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring.

It is when A. begins to say that he would like to have a child with her that she realizes “that his role in my life — that of revealing where I stood in Time — had come to an end. Mine of initiatrix in his life had no doubt ended too. He left Rouen for Paris.”

It was autumn and the end of the twentieth century. Ernaux begins a new book and found “that I was happy to be entering the third millennium alone and free.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of Rouen by jimmy desplanques on Unsplash

Bully of the Town

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After a week when childish yet dangerous tantrums from a group of bullies dominated the news, I couldn’t get the classic Bully of the Town out of my head.

When I walk this levee round and round
Everyday I may be found
When I walk this levee round
I’m looking for that bully of the town

Bully of the Town is an old tune with somewhat unknown origins. It may have been a folk song known along the Mississippi River before it became a pop hit. The Traditional Tune Archive suggests that the song was originally written by Charles E. Trevathan in 1895 for the stage show “The Widow Jones.” It was sung in the production by Trevathan’s girlfriend, May Irwin. Bully of the Town was frequently heard at old-time fiddlers’ contests in the early 20th century and the Skillet Lickers (led by fiddlers Gid Tanner and Clayton McMichen, with Riley Pucket on guitar and vocals, and Fate Norris on banjo) recorded the song in Atlanta in April 1926, one of eight sides for Columbia records. Blues researchers suggest the song was developed from an earlier blues ballad based on a real-life incident in New Orleans.

Whatever the origin, one of my favorite instrumental versions was performed by guitar legend Norman Blake on his Back Home in Sulphur Springs album. The cross-picking is pure Norman.

Norman Blake

Blake also joined Nashville guitarist extraordinaire Bryan Sutton on Sutton’s wonderful Not Too Far from the Tree album (which he recorded with his guitar heroes) where they play the tune as a duet.

The incomparable folk guitarist Etta Baker recorded Bully of the Town as a finger-picked instrumental.

A rather raucous version by the Memphis Jug Band gives a flavor of how the tune may have sounded when it was played in the blues and old-time music venues of the American South.

The lyrics have been altered many times depending on the artist, genre, or venue but the many bluegrass groups that recorded the tune through the years usually played it as an instrumental. Allen Shelton (one of Jim & Jesse’s Virginia Boys) included it on his Shelton Special album from the 1970s as a banjo tune.

Levi Lowrey, who handles the vocals and second fiddle in this version with the modern Skillet Lickers, is the great grandson of Gid Tanner, who headed up the original band.

So why all the focus on bullies? Well, Tuesday was, as Joyce Vance wrote,

. . . a day for sad firsts, further evidence of the damage Donald Trump has done and continues to do to our country. Today was the first time a (thankfully former) American president behaved in such an outrageous manner as a defendant in a civil lawsuit that a judge entered a gag order against him. And it was the first time a Speaker of the House was removed by a motion to vacate.

And bullying was very much in evidence everywhere.

Let’s begin with Trump, that life-long insecure bully whose public pronouncements in recent weeks have become increasingly violent and morally depraved. Vance’s description is both accurate and entertaining.

With little fanfare (and none of the warning federal Judge Tanya Chutkan has provided Trump with in the District of Columbia case), New York state Judge Arthur Engoron slapped Donald Trump with a gag order this afternoon. The Judge entered the order after Trump posted on Truth Social about the Judge’s law clerk. The Judge said, “consider this statement a gag order forbidding all parties from posting, emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff.”

Trump had posted a picture of Judge Engoron’s law clerk standing with New York Senator Chuck Schumer — the type of picture people and politicians take all the time — and salaciously suggested she was his girlfriend. Surprise . . . that is not true.

Judge Engoron, in a no-nonsense fashion, ensured the post was removed. He admonished everyone . . . that “personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate, and I will not tolerate them in any circumstances.” In case that wasn’t clear enough, he put it down where the hogs could get it, saying, “Failure to abide by this order will result in serious sanctions.”

The ouster of former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is another example of the bullying traits of today’s Republican party.

Rep. Matt Gaetz essentially bullied McCarthy from the day he took over as Speaker, pressing buttons to get a rise out of the spineless leader. He finally filed the motion to vacate the chair, which passed with eight Republicans voting with all the Democrats. (Hey, it isn’t the job of the opposition party to protect the Speaker, especially one that has tried to bully them and has lied to them repeatedly over the years.)

In the Democratic caucus meeting, to decide how to vote, Rep. Adam Schiff quoted The Big Lebowski, when telling colleagues he agreed with Matt Gaetz that you couldn’t trust McCarthy. Gaetz “isn’t wrong, he’s just an a**hole,” Schiff said.

And then, as Heather Cox Richardson reported, Representative Patrick McHenry pulled another classless, bullying stunt when one of his first official acts as temporary speaker was to order former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to vacate her private Capitol office, announcing he was having the room rekeyed (and probably going beyond his authority).

What a bunch of rude, angry, bullying, and petty jerks.

Joyce Vance again:

All of that comes to a head in this moment — the effort to destroy versus the effort to sustain and nourish. The outcome is not certain, but to be an American means to have hope in the aspirational, to believe that we can persevere and move past difficulties . . . the burden is for all of us to carry, not just the judges who must hold Trump to account or the Democratic legislators who refused to support a politician who wanted the Speaker’s title so much that he debased the office. All of us have a solemn duty to stay informed, to prepare for the upcoming elections, to get engaged in local and national politics. Democracy hangs, quite literally, in the balance, and we continue to have important work to do.

More to come . . .

DJB

Image by John Hain from Pixabay

A prescription for sick cities

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What happens . . . when we throw out thousands of years of knowledge about how cities function? When local governments become addicted to growth? When our cities obsess over out-of-towners? When we lower standards?

When that happens, we have big problems.

Your City is Sick (2023) by Jeff Siegler is a deep dive into how the various causes of community malaise — poor planning decisions, neglect, disregard for current residents, and more — have led to the dysfunction we see today. Cities are like people, Siegler argues, and when humans forget all we’ve learned about health care, skip the vegetables that sustain us, eat a diet of attractive desserts, and stop exercising we get sick. Cities face the same challenges.

Like a blunt yet perceptive doctor, Siegler first helps us understand the disease. Then in straightforward, no-holds-barred language he prescribes treatments to push his readers to transform their cities through relentless, incremental improvements. Jeff, a long-time friend and colleague, recently chatted with me about his hard-hitting yet essential new work.

DJB: Jeff, you write that we are all in a civic relationship, whether we know it or not. What does that mean, and why is it important for the average citizen?

JS: The civic relationship is the one we pay so little attention to, yet it is always shaping us and affecting us. Those in great cities or neighborhoods they love are well aware of this relationship. They experience the streets, businesses, and buildings making their lives better on a daily basis. They get a sense of identity and pride from the decisions their civic leaders make and how their collective community behaves. Their life is enhanced by the place they call home. I think about the fact that ancient Romans were fiercely loyal to their neighborhoods and would insist they were listed on their graves. This is the type of allegiance a community should foster! Ideally, the communities we call home should lift us up and make us feel better about ourselves, but sadly, so many people have a relationship with their city or town that, at best, doesn’t provide them with anything, at worst, actually makes their lives much harder.

Jeff Siegler

You suggest that most Chambers of Commerce and Tourism Bureaus have lost their reason for existing. Why . . . and what should take their place?

I have worked with so many incredible people in the tourism and chamber industries, and I sympathize with their struggles. These organizations were created during a time when communities needed their services, but times have changed and the nature of the local economy is completely different today. These industries did not adjust and they are struggling to remain relevant. Successful organizations have to periodically look at their mission and ask themselves if they are as effective as they could be. Chambers would be better served to focus on entrepreneurship and real estate development to retain local wealth. I would love to see the same energy and attention the tourism bureau extends toward visitors being directed to residents and making sure they feel like they matter to the community. 

What is civic health and how will that help heal our sick communities?

Being a member of a community used to play a much larger role in people’s lives and we are seeing how this shift from connectedness to isolation is having devastating social impacts. For 70 years we have been building human habitats that aren’t fit for humans. A sick city is going to have sick residents and our places are making people physically, socially, mentally, and fiscally unwell. A healthy city will foster dignity, pride, connectedness, joy, companionship, and physical activity just to name a few. The concept of civic health is pretty simple, cities should be designed and managed with residents’ health and well-being as the primary concern. When this occurs, communities will heal, and as communities heal, so will the people that inhabit them. 

What is Silverbulletitis? How do you spot it? What measures are necessary to cure that disease? 

Silverbulletitis is the ever-pervasive belief that all community ailments can be solved with one big-ticket project. You can easily spot it when you visit a community with a downtown mostly comprised of empty surface lots with a smattering of crusty mega-projects, like the parking deck, the arena, the civic center, and so on. Someone in these communities keeps buying the same old failed magic revitalization pill. Community improvement, just like self-improvement doesn’t work like that. There are no shortcuts to getting better. There are no secrets to success. The fact of the matter is, community revitalization is a long, slow process that consists of a million small improvements, and these add up over time to something amazing. We have to give up on the idea that someone from somewhere else has a solution, or that something that took 50 years to break can be repaired in one year. The cure is in empowering locals, rebuilding the same way the community was built the first time, trusting residents to rise to the occasion when given the opportunity, and understanding that a community already has every single thing it needs to be successful. 

Jeff, what books on cities can you recommend for our readers?

The one that really opened my eyes was Happy City by Charles Montgomery. This book first introduced me to the idea of how the design of our infrastructure is constantly shaping our lives. I think of it this way: we intentionally design different rooms in our houses for different purposes because we understand the experience we want them to foster. A city is no different, we must be intentional in how we design the space between the homes and the buildings to foster the type of feelings and behavior we want residents to experience. Diving deeper into this concept has led me more recently to read Cognitive Architecture by Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander as well as Welcome to Your World by Sarah Williams Goldhagen. Once you realize how the design of your city is shaping your life, it becomes impossible to unsee, but it’s not a choice to take lightly. 

Thank you, Jeff.

Thanks for asking me to be a part of this David.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo from Unsplash

A brilliant love letter to baseball

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Baseball is boring. Until it isn’t. Even with the new pitch clock working its magic, there’s still a lot of standing around. There’s time between each half-inning to chat. Before the bottom of the seventh, the entire crowd stands up and sings Take Me Out to the Ballgame — a wonderfully anachronistic moment of civic harmony.

America needs more communal singing.

Unlike basketball and football, baseball is a game of perspective. It moves at a leisurely pace. Players, umpires, and fans have time to talk, get to know each other, and tell stories.

Nobody tells a better baseball story than Joe Posnanski.

Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments (2023) by Joe Posnanski may not be the most important book you’ll read this year, but if you care at all about the game this will be the book you’ll cherish. This is a love letter of the best kind, bringing together the long history of the game with the uniqueness of the moment when someone — player, umpire, coach, fan, sportswriter, or even you — fell in love with baseball, all told with Posnanski’s “trademark wit, encyclopedic knowledge, and acute observations.” These forever moments are magical or, to use Posnanski’s “favorite definition of magical: ‘beautiful or delightful in such a way as to seem removed from everyday life.'”

I hate it when George Will is right, but he perfectly captures the essence of the author when he says, “Posnanski must have already lived more than two hundred years . . . how else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories.”

The book title promises 50 special moments in the game’s history, but Posnanski admits that there’s more. He occasionally interrupts his countdown to the top moment in baseball history to insert five bonus memories so he can highlight trick plays, meltdowns, memories that are absolutely guaranteed to bring a tear to your eye, and more.

In all, there are 108 moments and memories. Even that number is magical. There are 108 stitches on one side of a baseball. The Cubs’ World Series drought lasted 108 years. Some physicists did a study and determined that Nolan Ryan threw the fastest pitch ever recorded at 108 mph. The Big Red Machine — the 1975 Reds — is, I believe, the greatest team of them all. They won 108 games.

Why We Love Baseball includes fictional moments from film, moments from the dead ball era before Babe Ruth forever changed the game, moments from players in the Negro and Japanese Leagues, and moments from our childhood. In fact, the book begins with Posnanski as a 10-year-old, when Cleveland’s Duane Kuiper is his favorite player. The Indians’ second baseman hit one home run in his career, but he was Posnanski’s hero because he always played the game with “verve and love.” The description of listening to that home run call on the radio is priceless. And there’s a beautiful postscript where Kuip, by then a beloved broadcaster for the San Francisco Giants, sends Posnanski an authentic game-used Duane Kuiper bat and cap out of the blue. That’s why we love baseball.

Posnanski finds Joe Niekro teaching the eight-year-old Chelsea Baker how to throw a knuckleball, which at age thirteen made her the best Little League pitcher in the country. You’ll discover why Mariners fans suffer endlessly “in exchange for the mere possibility of sublime rapture,” as with “The Double” in the 1995 ALDS versus the Yankees. “Sometimes we even get it.”

Joe helps us relive the “exuberant, carefree, exhilarating” Javy Baez no-look tag on Nelson Cruz in the 2017 World Baseball Classic. We read of old Sid Bream chugging home to score for Atlanta in the 1992 NLCS, a memory where in real time I ran screaming around the house as Skip Carey yelled BRAVES WIN! BRAVES WIN! There’s the marvelous set-up, telling, and then coda to George Brett’s epic pine tar home run meltdown. Most don’t remember that the call was overturned, the Yankees took the case to court where they were represented by the infamous Roy Cohn, the judge threw out their case with a two-word decision — “Play Ball” — and the Royals eventually won the game.

Those who have crafted the words that feed our memories also come in for praise. Vin Scully’s call of the final inning of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game is included, with the perfect line, “[T]here’s 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies.” John Updike, writing “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” in the New Yorker about Ted Williams’ failure to take a curtain call after a final home run, comes up with the classic, “Gods do not answer letters.”

Every moment you remember (and then some) are included: Giambi fails to slide. Galarraga’s imperfect game and his grace afterwards. Don Larsen, who may have had too much to drink the night before the day when “The imperfect man pitched a perfect game.” The ball conks off Jose Canseco’s head for a home run (and I’m still doubled over in laughter).

My personal favorite: Howie Kendrick’s go-ahead home run for the Nationals in Game 7 of the 2019 World Series.

I don’t have any quibbles with Joe’s top 5 moments, but I’ll only mention one so as not to spoil the ending. I’ve written about it before. It is “The Catch” — Willie Mays’ incredible catch and throw in the 1954 World Series. The catch itself was amazing, but Mays stops in full stride, “whirled and threw ‘like some olden statue of a Greek javelin hurler,’ the novelist Arnold Hano would write.”

Baseball is all about perspective. We love it, and yet it also breaks our heart. A. Bartlett Giamatti said it best.

It breaks your heart.  It is designed to break your heart.  The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

Spring Training
Credit: SpringTrainingCountdown.com

Why We Love Baseball — which I’ll pick up again and again — may help postpone that heartbreak this winter.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Clay Brown on Unsplash