Key Quotes About Fascim For The Resistance Fighters Of America!

 

As we face the incredibly dangerous and uncertain future with the probability that TRAITOR Trump and the other TRAITORS who support him and his fascism, it is incumbent on all of us who understand that danger to do everything within our power to resist that fascism  and the immeasurably destructive potential outcomes which are sought by TRAITOR Trump and those other TRAITORS who support him. With all three branches of government in their hands, there is little that can be done to prevent that incredible potential damage to both America and American Democracy.  Political resistance is the only weapon we have which has been proven to be effective in such situations.   Patriotic and determined resistance groups have given us effective examples of how this resistance is accomplished.  Those groups in much of Western Europe during both World War II and World War I.  There are also excellent examples of effective resistance in countries  such as Turkey, Iran, Chile, and Syria.  Study those examples!  Emulate those examples!  Read recent books about political resistance!  Attend educational opportunities to learn about fascism and how to resist it!  Become an active resister!  It is the only effective option we have!

 

The quotations below are from several famous writers and politicians.  Study them and the brave souls who verbalized them and practiced political resistance on a daily basis in their lives.  The first five of those quotations were all used as part of my official e-mail signature from January 20, 2017, to January 20, 2021.  I will be using and posting them wherever it is appropriate in the coming four years.  So should you!  Learn what you can do as a political resister at this most dangerous time in America since the day Fort Sumter was fired on.  GOD HELP US ALL!       

 

“I have lived my life and I have fought my battles, not against the weak and poor—but against power, injustice, and oppression.”  Clarence Darrow  

“Why, this far into the twenty-first century, are we once again talking about Fascism?  One reason, frankly, is Donald Trump.  If we think of Fascism as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.”  Madeleine Albright, “Fascism A Warning”, p. 5-6.  

 

 

“Bigger misfits haven’t been seen inside a White House since William Taft got stuck in his bathtub.”  John McCain, “The Restless Wave”, p. 267

 

 

“I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: Yes We Can. Yes We Did.  Yes We Can.”  President Barack Obama

 “These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." Thomas Paine 

 

"Fascism is capitalism plus murder."  Upton Sinclair

 

"A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such and intensity of intolerance toward  those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions, or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends."  Henry Wallace 

 

"There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that  he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind bars, and the man is outside." Upton Sinclair 

 

"Fascism is a lie told by bullies."  Ernest Hemingway

"But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for him." Upton Sinclair   

"I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system." Noam Chomsky

"The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle The Ethnic Resonance of Genre" by James Nagel--Book Review

 Nagel, James:  The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle The Ethnic Resonance of Genre (Baton Rouge, LA. LSU Press, 2001)

 Over the last several months, I have become more and more interested in that genre, or more appropriately sub-genre, of American Literature known as the short story cycle.  The short story cycle can be described as "...the collection of a group of independent stories that contain continuing elements of character, setting, action, imagery, or theme that enrich each other in intertextual context." (Nagel, p. 15)  To put it a bit more simply, a short story cycle is a collection of short stories which have common characters, settings, or other elements such as a common conflict, plot, or theme which is discussed in multiple stories by a single author.  Some of the best known examples of short story cycles which my not have been previously billed as such would include "The Nick Adams Stories" by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck's "The Pastures Of Heaven" or "Tortilla Flat", Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge", or Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg Ohio".  I have to confess that I have not read all these books although I have long been in love with "The Nick Adams Stories" and wrote about them at the link above.  I have also been a devoted fan of the work of Flannery O'Connor and John Steinbeck since I was in my early teens and have read nearly everything both of these wonderful authors have published.  But the short story cycles which James Nagel so ably writes about in this book which we are discussing here are more recent and, perhaps, more popular among modern American readers.  

In his book, Nagel devotes lengthy and scholarly chapters to each of the works he has chosen.  Those works are: Louise Erdrich's "Love Medicine"; "Monkeys" by Susan Minot; Sandra Cisneros's "The House on Mango Street"; "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brian; Julia Alvarez's "How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents"; "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan; and a second collection about Viet Nam and the Vietnamese people, "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain" by Robert Olen Butler.  I suspect that "The Joy Luck Club" is the best known of the collections discussed in the book.  I must confess, as I did about a few of the books listed above, that I have not read any of the works studied in Nagel's excellent work.  When I bought the book and read it, my interest was in the genre and not the work of any specific author.  I am writing and have already completed several short stories in my own version of a short story cycle.  At the bottom of the front page of this blog, I have a section or list entitled "Links To Other Sites About Appalachia".  At the top of that list are several links to some of my short stories which fall into my own short story cycle which I have tentatively entitled "Tales From Widespot".  I read Nagel's book to further inform myself about the short story cycle and to hopefully improve my own work.  Like many of the writers and readers which Nagel discusses, I had read quite a few short story cycles without even knowing what a short story cycle was.  In a few places in the book, Nagel writes about other reviewers who have reviewed various of the books he discusses without knowing the term short story cycle, or at least without having made it known to their readers if they did know.  

I realize that for many readers the concept of the short story cycle and Nagel's book might seem a bit arcane and not worth the time or bother.  But I can assure you, if you are a lover of literature, that Nagle's book is well worth reading and so are many of the short story cycles he discusses at length or only mentions in passing such as the works of O'Connor, Hemingway, and Steinbeck.  At times, short story cycles come so close to being a novel that they are generally billed as being novels.  My other favorite short story cycle which Nagel does not even mention in his book is "The Hawk's Done Gone" by the Appalachian author Mildred Haun.  In a non-fiction article which was published in "The Mildred Haun Review Journal", I compared Haun's book with "The Patron Saint of Ugly" by my friend Marie Manilla.  If you are a fan of Appalachian Literature and have not read Mildred Haun's book, I strongly encourage you to do so.  It is a fine introduction to the concept of the short story cycle.  So are "The Nick Adams Stories" and  "Tortilla Flat".  

But to get back to my discussion of Nagel's book, it is a wonderful way to learn about the short story cycle and to dig deeper into the histories of some of the more modern books which you might have already read such as Amy Tan's book or Louise Erdrich's.  I will be doing the same over the next few weeks and months and I promise that I will be writing about them on this blog when I do.  I will also be working to publish my own short story cycle collection and to add to it.  For me, the short story has long been my favorite form of writing.  It allows for few mistakes if the author is attempting to produce high quality work.  The books which Nagel disusses are all obviously high quality work and so is his discussion of them.  If you are student of literature, and particularly the short story, this is a book which you should consider reading.  If you do not enjoy reading scholarly books, you might not enjoy his book or even wish to read it.  I leave that choice to you but rest assured  I found the book well worth reading and writing about. 

Reflections On Reading "For Whom The Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway

 I have not read nearly enough of the works of Ernest Hemingway over the years and I have made an attempt lately to correct that mistake.  I began by rereading "The Nick Adams Stories" recently and wrote about it on this blog.  I had read those stories years ago and I had also read some of Hemingway's other classic stories which have been included in anthologies through the years.  But I had sadly neglected reading his novels which were the primary motivators for his having been awarded both the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.  I have never heard a single serious student of great literature ever rationally belittle the fiction of Ernest Hemingway.  I do not believe that I ever shall.  Both those awards were granted to "The Old Man And The Sea", but I  have never heard any serious student of great literature disparage any of his other novels as having been any less worthy of the awards.  He was a phenomenal writer and is generally mentioned on that short list of America's greatest writers.  My version of that short list would include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Mark Twain and Pearl S. Buck.  While some of you might argue mildly against the inclusion of any of those people on such a list, most would not.  I do not intend to turn this blog post into a discussion of any writer, prize winner, or unawarded nominee.  But I do want to say that I have long wished it was possible to read the entire body of work of every winner of both the Nobel and the Pulitzer.  Each of them is deserving of that attention and study from any serious aficionado of great literature.  I do not expect to be able to complete that list in one lifetime but I am trying.  

Ernest Hemingway--Photo by Getty Images

To get to the point of this blog post, "For Whom The Bell Tolls" is generally an undisputed masterpiece and fully deserves that descriptor.  I have always known that it is a great novel.  I simply had never gotten around to reading it and I am sorry that I waited so long.  In my blog post about "The Nick Adams Stories", I stated that  "Nick Adams loved to fish, hunt, drink, and have sex and those are three of the areas of life in which Ernest Hemingway wrote at a level which few writers ever achieve."  There is little writing about fishing or hunting in "For Whom The Bell Tolls".  This is a novel about an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War and the great majority of the writing is about war.  But there is also quite a bit of sexual writing which plays a key role in the character development in the novel and the relationship between the protagonist Robert Jordan and his Spanish girlfriend Maria.  That relationship only lasts about three days and yet, in many ways, it is the most important relationship in the lives of both characters.  There is also some discussion in the novel of hunting, but primarily the hunting of men in a war.  Fishing is only referred to in passing near the conclusion of the novel when the protagonist notices a trout rising to the surface of a stream over which he is preparing to dynamite a key bridge.  But those sections of the novel reinforce my opinion that the area of life in which Ernest Hemingway did his best writing are war, sex, hunting, and fishing.  

In this novel, Hemingway also addresses the issue of suicide even more directly and at more length than he did in "The Nick Adams Stories".  But very near the end of the novel, he has the protagonist Robert Jordan refuse to allow a compatriot to shoot him as he is too severely wounded to flee with his band of Spanish revolutionaries.  That is quite interesting in light of the fact that the author eventually chose to end his life via suicide by gunfire.  But his best writing in more than one book often addresses the issue of suicide, both the possibility of the suicide of a protagonist and historical suicide by one or more characters who were major players in the lives of those protagonists. It is generally conceded that when Hemingway discusses suicide in his novels he is reflecting both on his father's suicide and his own ever present consideration of the act to end his own life.  I must admit that I have never read a scholarly article about the issue of suicide in the writing of Ernest Hemingway but many professional and scholarly writers have attempted to analyze his literary ruminations on the issue as well as suicide as a familial issue in the Hemingway clan.  You can rest assured that enough has been written about Ernest Hemingway and suicide to fill more than a few books.  You can also rest assured that any book which begins with the quotation from John Donne: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." will also discuss death.  This is a novel about war and nearly all war novels are replete with death.  But this novel is about much more than death despite the fact that most of the members of the guerilla band of Robert Jordan are dead before the novel ends.

I would argue that this novel is a love story, perhaps two love stories, or even three.  There is the primary love story between Robert Jordan and Maria, who was a victim of war before the two even met.  There is also the love story between the other couple in the novel, the alcoholic guerrilla leader Pablo and his wife and co-leader, the loud, brash, dangerous, and somewhat masculine Pilar.  There is also the love story between all these Spanish partisans in Jordans guerrilla group and their homeland for which they have literally bet their lives.  This is a novel which no serious student of literature should ever neglect to read.  It is a masterpiece. 

"The Nick Adams Stories" by Ernest Hemingway--Book Review

Hemingway, Ernest. The Nick Adams Stories. (New York, NY, Bantam Books, 1972)

This has always been one of my favorite books and this is the second or third time I have read it from cover to cover.  I have probably read a few of the individual short stories in this collection such as "Indian Camp", "Big Two-Hearted River", and "The Last Good Country" a dozen times or more.  This book shows a side of Hemingway that is not the commonly understood man and writer in many ways.  The 24  stories are divided into five sections and arranged in something close to the chronological order in which they were written.  The sections, in order, are called "The Northern Woods", "On His Own", "War", "A Soldier Home", and "Company Of Two".  These sections are intended to present the stories as they fit into the key segments of Hemingway's life and also correspond fairly closely to the order in which they were written.  

The stories in "The Northern Woods" are all set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the character Nick Adams after whom they are entitled is generally conceded to be primarily an autobiographical presentation of a youthful Hemingway in the home of his father.  "Indian Camp" has always been one of my favorite stories by any writer.  It is direct, brutal but realistic, and shows Hemingway approaching the issue of suicide which was a major family issue with his father, brother, and several other family members either attempting suicide or succeeding in ending their own lives.  The short story tells the story of the doctor, his son, and an uncle attending the birth of a child in the home of a Native American couple in the Upper Peninsula.  The woman's husband is bound to his bed by a recent injury and they  are actually in a set of bunk beds during the childbirth.  At the end of the procedure, the doctor discovers that the father has quietly committed suicide in the upper bunk as his child is being born immediately below him.  The dialogue at the end of the story is some of the most linguistically simple and yet brutally powerful you will ever find by an writer anywhere.  The boy asks, 

"Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?"  

"Not very many, Nick."

"Do many women?"

"Hardly ever."

"Don't they ever?"

"Oh yes. They do sometimes."

"Daddy?"

"Yes."

"Where did Uncle George go?"

"He'll turn up alright."

"Is dying hard, Daddy?"

"No, I think it's pretty easy, Nick.  It all depends." 

When we consider the fact that both Ernest and Clarence Hemingway died by suicide by gunshot, we can almost visualize Ernest Hemingway, in Ketchum, Idaho, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, replaying that very dialogue in his mind as he loaded his shotgun to end his life.  I have always suspected that this section of dialogue from "Indian Camp" may well be the most purely autobiographical words Hemingway ever wrote.  But the stories are not all that dark and Nick Adams and his fictional father are not overly dark characters.  Nick Adams love to fish, hunt, drink, and have sex and those are three of the areas of life in which Ernest Hemingway wrote at a level which few writers ever achieve.  Some of the hunting and fishing language in these stories is pure poetry.  the sexual language is totally devoid of all those socially unacceptable locker room words so often found in the work of lesser writers.  But when Hemingway wrote about sex, he did not leave  his readers to wonder what he was talking about.  His meanings are crystal clear.  His language is admirable and accurate.  When he writes about any of these three topics, you know you are reading the work of an individual who has done sufficient homework on his topics to be considered an expert and a connoisseur.

"The Last Good Country" is a fascinating story about Nick Adams on the run from two local game wardens as a teenager in the company of his younger sister who is going with him to protect him from himself and his dangerous tendencies.  They are hiding in the "...last good country..." in the Upper Peninsula with streams full of hungry trout, berries to pick, warm beds of vegetation in which to sleep safely, and far too much country for two fat, liquor loving game wardens to ever find them.  The relationship between the siblings borders on things which most readers would not appreciate and Hemingway never crosses any of the lines which would make the difference for reader.  But he walks directly up to those lines, stares across at his doubting readers, and leaves answers hanging in the air to be considered, doubted, appreciated, and never found in the open.  It is also a wonderful story.  

 "Big Two-Hearted River" is, perhaps, the best known story in this collection but I would not go so far as to declare it flatly the best.  It is a wonderful story and is also one of my favorite stories both from Hemingway and from the greater body of American literature.  It is, on the surface, a fishing story about an isolated section of river which Nick Adams loves to fish in the Upper Peninsula but it also about a soldier returning home from war and remembering his friends in the war.  The fishing sections of the story are some of the best written descriptions of fishing from any writer, anytime, anywhere.  Isaak Walton would have been proud to know this version of Hemingway.  It is also a great story about a solitary person in a very solitary situation in a wilderness.  This story is one of those which no person should ever say they are a well read aficionado of either Ernest Hemingway or American Literature without having read. 

While the Nick Adams stories are not always the first of Hemingway's writing we hear mentioned, they are well crafted, introspective, autobiographical stories by and, at least in part, about a very complicated man.  They are well worth reading and rereading. 

 

Short Story or Vignette???

Since the time I entered Upward Bound at Alice Lloyd College when I was about 14, I have known and been friends with a fairly large number of published authors.  During my first summer in that program, I met and became friendly with Albert Stewart and William Howard Cohen both of whom were major American poets.  Albert Stewart was also the founder of Appalachian Heritage Magazine and a mentor to numerous young writers throughout his career.  William Howard Cohen was an internationally recognized expert on Haiku and served as the American Cultural Delegate in the area of poetry at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. Cohen was also an outspoken and highly effective environmental advocate who fought bravely and well against strip mining in Appalachia. He also mentored numerous young writers in both Eastern Kentucky and Florida where he lived the last years of his life.  I have always been extremely proud to have known and been friendly with both men.  During that first Upward Bound summer, the program directors also brought Harry Caudill to speak at one of our assemblies.  His strongly negative book about Appalachia, "Night Comes To The Cumberlands", was still in the height of its popularity and he was considered by many to be an expert on Appalachia.  I can say that I met Caudill and I can also say that I am proud that, as a native Appalachian, I was not pleased with him and still am not.  I have said all the preceding, a rather long winded introduction, in order to say this once again, I have known and been friends with a fairly large number of published authors, learned a great deal from them both about life and writing.  And that brings me to the title of this article, Short Story or Vignette???

Which is it, a short story or a vignette is a question which is frequently asked by readers and writers about short works of fiction.  It is also a question which should be asked even more frequently, especially by the numerous people who mistakenly believe they are writing short stories.  As a result of having known the writers I have known, I have come to regularly either buy or be given books by many people some of whom are genuine writers and some of whom only wish to be but have managed to make it into print anyway.  I have in my possession at this time several books written and published by people I know and labeled as short story collections.  A sizable portion of those "short story collections", most of them self-published through vanity presses, do not contain a single actual short story and are, instead, collections of vignettes some of which could have been turned into short stories by a skillful writer, and others which Leo Tolstoy, Flannery O'Connor, or William Faulkner could not have stretched enough to make them an actual short story.  That brings us to the key question I hope to address in this article.  What is the difference between a short story and a vignette?

A commonly used definition of the term "short story" runs something like this:  the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no shorter than 1,000 and no longer than 20,000 words. An actual short story should contain these five essential elements, characters, plot, setting, conflict, and theme. An equally common definition of the term "vignette" runs something like this: a brief, evocative account, description, or episode.  A less common definition of the term "vignette" runs something like this: a vignette is a cute little story which, on a good day, might include one or two of those key elements of a short story but never by any stretch of the imagination will a vignette contal all five.  By that I mean that a vignette is something a first grader might tell her mother when she returns home from school. Two or three old men sitting in the local country store, gas station, or barber shop swap vignettes.  Old, blue haired widows do the same in beauty shops, meat markets, and boutiques.  While I almost never say anything this personal or negative to any of my friends and acquaintances who have produced collections of vignettes which they insist on forcing to masquerade as short stories, I really do not like buying, borrowing, or being given such collections of vignettes which a vanity press has managed to make a buck on while perpetuating the misbegotten dreams of the people who cranked them out on a PC or antique Underwood in the lonely silence of their home.  

It is also interesting that, for a skillful writer, it is not necessary to produce a work the size of "War And Peace" in order to tell a good story with all five of those key elements, characters, plot, theme, setting, and conflict. While I despise what is now known and inordinately popular as "flash fiction", I also recognize that it is possible to tell a great story with a bare minimum number of well chosen, well organized words.  The best example of this I can think of is the classic Kate Chopin short story, "The Story Of An Hour".  This incredible little masterpiece of roughly a thousand words contains every one of those five key elements and perfection to boot.  With an opening sentence of less than thirty words, we meet the central character, Mrs. Mallard, learn that she has a heart condition, that she is/was married, that her husband is dead, and that someone cares enough about her to "break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death."  Then the story goes on in the remaining 950 or so words to work in a couple of absolutely masterful twists in which she weeps loudly and publicly in the company of her family and friends, retreats to her bedroom where she realizes with great joy that she is "Free!  Body and soul...free!" and then, as a combination of that great joy and her aforementioned heart condition, she dies without her family and friends ever knowing how happy she was to anticipate that freedom.  That my friends is a short story.  And I haven't even mentioned that in those thousand words, Kate Chopin threw in a train wreck.  

I am not completely opposed to vignettes and often use them myself, sometimes in the middle of what I believe are short stories I produce, sometimes in country stores, gas stations, and barber shops with my illiterate friends, and even at rare times in beauty shops.  As an addendum to this little article I will also insert a short list of some of my other favorite short stories and suggest that you read them sometime if you haven't already.

Desiree's Baby by Kate Chopin

The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Parker's Back by Flannery O'Connor

Ugly by Guy de Maupassant

A Rose For Emily by William Faulkner

Big Two-Hearted River by Ernest Hemingway
A View Of The Woods by Flannery O'Connor