"Fahrenheit 451" By Ray Bradbury--Book Review

Ray Bradbury--Photo by britishfantasysociety.org

Reading "Fahrenheit 451" represents a return to reading dystopian literature for me which I have done intermittently since November 8, 2016.  In that time span I have read and posted about "1984" and "Animal Farm"  by George Orwell.  I have also attempted to maintain my regular reading list of Appalachian and general great literature but it has become increasingly more difficult to do so as the current illegitimate occupant of the White House has steadily veered farther toward compliance with his Russian Owner Vladimir Putin's wishes and attempted to force the country into a dystopian and Fascist bent in line with his own craving for illegitimate power and in response to his own seriously dangerous mental illness.  In many ways, this rereading of "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradury has been a pleasant return to a genuine classic of American Literature which I first read in my youth more than fifty years ago less than a decade after its original publication.  But the necessity of reading dystopian literature which has been forced on me and millions of other Americans by a treasonous band of Russian Agents who have managed, with the assistance of Vladimir Putin and his hackers, to seize the US White House has been a terrifying experience which those of us who actually value American Democracy have lived every day since November 8, 2016.  

But let's just get to the book in question and why it is a book you should also be reading with particularly close attention today.  "Fahrenheit 451" is a classic American novel which has generally been considered to be within the broad field of science fiction since its author, Ray Bradbury, was an acknowledged master of science fiction.  But it is bigger than one genre, any genre, since it has truly become one of the most important novels in the much broader field of American Letters.  It is also one of the acknowledged most important books in the much narrower field of dystopian literature.  As Bradbury says in an interview published in the Del Ray 50th Anniversary Edition of the novel, it did not start out, on its initial publication in 1953, as a bestseller or a potential classic. The hardcover first edition sold only 5,000 copies and the simultaneously published paperback sold about 50,000 copies.  Bradbury also sold a shorter version of the story to "Playboy" in the summer of 1953 for only four hundred dollars.  But over time, readers worldwide, especially politically and socially cogent readers turned it into one of the most widely read and bought books in all of American Literature.  It's place in all three of the genres I have mentioned above has been literally written in stone over the course of the last seven decades.  It is one of the greatest books in both science fiction and dystopian literature and will forever be solidly ensconced in the classics of all American Literature.  

Dystopian literature, especially dystopian fiction, is literature which examines the problem of governments which manipulate, control, and minimize their citizens often with overbearing, destructive, and invasive laws whose intent are to give the government absolute power and to homogenize the citizenry into a class of people without the power to resist the desires and goals of those in control of the government.  In "Fahrenheit 451", (the term is actually the temperature at which book paper burns), the United States has become a country in which books are banned, libraries have all been destroyed, and the people are mindless minions of the government whose lives are controlled by constant projections of government propaganda into their homes which often have every wall completely covered by large screens.  It is a crime to own and read books and the only job of the firemen, in a world where homes are all fireproof, is to find and burn books along with their owner's domiciles and, at times, even the owners.  The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman who eventually begins to steal books from the homes which he is sent to burn, hides them in his home, and begins to read them.  Eventually, his wife and neighbors report his crimes and his own commander at the firehouse, Captain Beatty, brings the firetruck and firemen to burn Montag out.  But Montag manages to kill Beatty and escape into the countryside where a few well read resistors live on the lam constantly moving in small groups and working to memorize and save as many books and as much knowledge as possible.  The novel ends in a nuclear war which destroys the cities and leaves these resistors with their memorized knowledge to save the world.  This memorization of books and the knowledge contained therein is a reminder of the Polish Resistance during World War II who formed what they called Living Rosaries in which each member attempted to memorize as much of the Bible as possible in case the Nazis controlled the entire world and outlawed the Bible.  It is said that Pope John Paul II, known then as Karol Wojtyla, managed to memorize the entire Bible. 

Ray Bradbury was a masterful writer and this novel is composed of alternating uses of long, flowing complex sentences and other periods of short, staccato phrases which pop like gunfire or walnuts falling on a tin roof.  It is a wonderful use of the language to tell a story which must be told on a daily basis in a world rapidly veering toward the governmental terrorism which it relates.  While some less astute readers tend to read the book simply as a work of science fiction describing a world which will never occur, the thinking reader will find it to be just as terrifying as anything written in the last two hundred years in America.  Bradbury wrote the book less than decade after the end of World War II and in many ways it is a response to the Nazi attempt to gain control of the world via the Blitzkrieg and the Holocaust.  But he also foresaw the world of helicopter televised police chases more than forty years before O. J. Simpson was able to illegitimately seize America's attention in a white Ford Bronco. Bradbury also built much of the book out of his knowledge of how effectively the World War II resistance movement helped in the defeat of the Nazis and Adolph Hitler.  The resistors who memorize the books and hope to teach them to others are also rooted in groups of WWII resistors who formed secret groups to memorize the Bible in case the Nazis won the war.  One of those resistors was the future Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, as discussed above.   This is a book which every person should read and most can since it has been translated into more than thirty languages.  It is a book which has direct bearing today on what has happened in America since November 8, 2016, and should be seen as a lesson in just how rapidly a group of amoral, power hungry criminals can distract, divert, and destroy democracy even in the greatest country in the world. 

Easter Trees In Appalachia

With this being Holy Week and tomorrow, Friday, April 19, 2019, being Good Friday, I have finally decided to write about a topic which pops into my head every year about this time and has for at least the last twenty years.  That topic is the fairly recent practice all over Appalachia of people creating Easter trees in their yards and houses.  They have been more common in Europe for about forty or fifty years.  One famous Easter tree is known as the Saalfelder Ostereierbaum, an apple tree in the garden of Volker Kraft in Saalfeld, Suringia.  Mister Kraft and his family have been decorating the tree since the early 1960's, starting with about a dozen and a half plastic eggs tied to the branches of the tree. Mister Kraft has stated in interviews that he had wanted to have an Easter Tree ever since he saw his first one near his home in 1945.  

The Kraft Easter Tree with about 10,000 Easter eggs.  Photo by Wikipedia.

But the general practises I have seen in Southern and Central Appalachia is to use much smaller trees than the Kraft apple tree and to use far fewer plastic Easter eggs.  I have seen them in nearly every state in Central and Southern Appalachia in yards of homes ranging from old mobile homes and sharecropper's shacks to mansions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to perhaps even a few million.  Often these trees will be comprised of only a few spindly branches with about a dozen or so plastic eggs.  But they may also hold a variety of other objects ranging from crosses to crowns of thorns to toy ducks and toy rabbits. They are also often created in flower pots and other containers both inside and outside the home.  Below is a photo of an Easter tree in a flower pot inside a home.  

Small Easter Tree In A Flower Pot Indoors--Photo by www.picturesso.com

The amount of variety in Easter trees is nearly as great as we see in Christmas trees and many of the people who create one also create the other.  They often claim that the Easter tree is a manifestation of their Christian faith.  I have no idea how they come to that kind of conclusion but I realize it can be a convenient excuse for someone who just loves gaudy objects in, around, or near their home.  I tend to think of these people as being somehow related to crows or lyre birds which gather glittering objects and carry them home to their nests.  Below is a particularly pitiful attempt at an Easter tree.  

A Pitiful Easter Tree--Photo by HubPages

This particular Easter tree leaves a great deal to be desired in my mind before it should ever be considered either an expression of religiosity or an objet d'art.  And that brings me to my own opinion of Easter trees.  I consider them to be one of the silliest and least justifiable wastes of time and resources I have ever seen.  You will never see one in my home or yard.  You will never hear me praise one no matter how gloriously its creator has endowed it with their wasted resources.  I do not consider them to be an expression of any form of religiosity worth supporting with one's belief.  In some ways, I am appalled at myself for even wasting fifteen minutes to write about them and search for photos of them to post along with this blog post.  I do not consider them to be anymore justifiable than I do those equally silly, but well meant, memorial stickers posted for the dead in the windows of a car which the owner is not likely to drive more than a year or two before trading it.  Saints, preserve me from Easter trees! 

"...And Ladies Of The Club" by Helen Hooven Santmeyer--Book Review

When this epic novel was published in 1982, the author Helen Hooven Santmeyer was 87 years old and living in an assisted living facility in her southern Ohio hometown.  The book made Santmeyer an overnight success at a time when most of her childhood friends were long dead. It covers life in a small,fictional Ohio town from 1868 to 1932.  The book rocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and made Santmeyer famous long after her previously published four books had amounted to almost nothing in sales or public acclaim.  One other book was published posthumously and one biography has been written, "Early Promise, Late Reward" by Joyce Crosby Quay. 

Helen Hooven Santmeyer Photo by G.P. Putnam Publishers

I initially bought but never finished a copy of the book in the 1980's after it made the best seller lists.  At the time, I read a few chapters and thought "this is a well-written book but it is just a women's book" which is nowhere near the truth.  I finally read it this time, nearly forty years after it was published, following a conversation with my wife and we read it together.  The book is a sweeping story about the fictional town of Waynesboro, Ohio, and begins shortly after the Civil War.  It follows the lives of the town and its people until the Great Depression.  It is filled with the members of nearly a dozen families who figure prominently in the life of the town and the characters are woven around and into the life of the Waynesboro Womens Club which is formed in the first chapter and continues for the life of the entire novel.  The families live in close proximity in a small Midwestern town and intermingle, intermarry, live, reproduce, die, and generally accomplish admirable lives.  Only one or two characters ever fail to amount to something useful and nearly all of them are striving to become somebody the world would be proud to know.  This is truly an epic novel in every sense of the word and is just as important in the overall story of American Literature as "The Grapes Of Wrath", "East Of Eden", or Frank Norris' Wheat Trilogy of "The Octopus", "The Pit", and "The Wolf".  At the last possible moment, Santmeyer managed to take a well deserved place in that group of American novelists including Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, and Pearl S. Buck who have produced great epic novels by grinding on day after day, week after week, year after year in the pursuit of an epic. 

When we ask ourselves "what is an epic novel", we sometimes come up with wide ranging and contradictory opinions of exactly what the term means.  After a diligent search on the Internet, I still wonder exactly what the term means.  One definition I found and like says that "an epic novel [is] one that is epic in scope and theme -- a text that covers a vast expanse of space and time in its quest to uncover answers to the deepest questions of human existence".  In fact, most definitions of epic seem to revolve more around poetry than novels.  It actually appears that even literary people cannot pin down a precise definition of an epic novel.  In my mind, an epic novel must cover a large span of time, let's say at least fifty years, and be centered around the lives of a fairly sizeable group of characters who go about the daily business of living.  Santmeyer's novel definitely fits that definition. 

The primary characters are the members of the Waynesboro Women's Club, their husbands, children, grandchildren, and even a few great-grandchildren.  The two most important families in the novel are the Gordon's, with Anne Gordon as the matriarch, and the Rausch's with Sarah "Sally" Rausch as the matriarch.  By the end of the novel, nearly every major character has lived and died.  Some of the deaths, including one suicide of a minor character, are  notable.  Some are ordinary and as simple of falling dead over an unlit kerosene heater due to a heart attack.  The Rausch patriarch, Ludwig, is a German immigrant and Civil War veteran.  His best friend, John Gordon, is the patriarch of the Gordon family.  If there is a major hero in the story, it is Ludwig Rausch although other characters live somewhat heroic lives, both male and female.  The story flows naturally through marriages, unrequited love affairs, adultery,  childbirth, epidemics, floods, and fires.  There is rarely a dull moment and the novel is well worth the number of hours the average reader will need to commit to completing it.

I tend to believe that many, if not all, of the female characters are partial presentations of Santmeyer herself who never married and worked most of her life as a librarian in a small private college.  Some of these women marry and produce long lines of progeny which Santmeyer never did.  But each of them tends to show some aspect of the life of a well-read, intelligent, self-assured, working woman which Santmeyer was to the very end of her long and productive life.  There is a young female writer working to produce good books.  There are more than a few female librarians and one or two spinsters.  The males are generally well respected and the only real villain is a woman.  At times, the novel does use some archaic terms to depict African Americans and yet one of the few women who survives the entire epic is a black housekeeper who has been totally devoted to her employing family all her life.  Ludwig Rausch is also quite loyal to his black employees just as he is to his white workers. 

This novel is well worth reading and has even led me to believe that, if I ever  find the time, I would like to read more of Santmeyer's books. 

"The Sleep Of Reason" by Edwina Pendarvis, P. J. Laska, & Peter Kidd

This little book of poetry has been in the making for a short while and, since I know two of the authors, I had been eagerly anticipating its arrival in my mail box for a while.  It appeared yesterday and I quickly slammed through it which I don't usually do with poetry.  I like to read poetry slowly, a poem or two at a time, and then return at least once or twice to reread it for better comprehension, appreciation, and respect for the poets involved.  I assure you I will do that with this little epistle at least once or twice more.  But, also out of respect for the authors, this work deserves your attention and awareness of its existence as soon as possible.  "The Sleep Of Reason" by Edwina Pendarvis, P. J. Laska, & Peter Kidd is available from Igneus Press, a small press which was founded by one of the authors, Peter Kidd, whom I do not know.  But P. J. Laska and I have been friends since the early 1970's when we first met and he was a finalist for a National Book Award in Poetry for his collection, "D. C. Images And Other Poems".  Laska introduced me to Edwina Pendarvis and she and I have been friends about two years although we grew up in different forks of Beaver Creek at slightly different times only a few miles apart.  

"The Sleep Of Reason" Front Cover

The book is entitled for an etching by Francisco Goya, the great Spanish artist which is more fully entitled "The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters" and is in the permanent collection of the Prado.  The etching is a metaphor for the many prices of ignorance, especially self-imposed ignorance.  It one of a series of about eighty prints which Goya produced about the "caprices" of Spanish society in his time from about 1746 to 1828.  According to Art Gallery NSW, Goya was making statements about many of the weaknesses of unthinking, uneducated, and willfully ignorant people.   Art Gallery NSW's analysis of the piece states that Goya's intent was to confront "...superstition, vanity and folly, as well as hypocrisy, cruelty, greed and injustice."  I cannot think of a better analogy for discussing the lives and works of both Laska and Pendarvis.  I do not know Peter Kidd or his work well enough, at this time, to make the same statement about his life and work.  Both Laska and Pendarvis are doctoral level retired professors, native Appalachians, and have spent their lives in the effort to confront and eliminate all those same weaknesses which Francisco Goya was addressing in his etching.  When I think of the two of them, I am also reminded of a quote from Clarence Darrow which I have used on my e-mail since shortly after November 8, 2016: “I have lived my life and I have fought my battles, not against the weak and poor—but against power, injustice, and oppression.”  When Laska and I met for the first time, we were both connected to Antioch Appalachia, a branch campus of Antioch University which was located in Beckley, WV, which has come to be recognized over the last forty years as having produced some of the finest, and most politically and socially active, writers in America and Appalachia.   When Pendarvis and I  physically met for the first time, we were on our way to a political protest in Huntington, WV.  This little book by Laska, Kidd, and Pendarvis continues that tradition of activism for all three of the authors.  Goya would have been proud to be associated with such work.  

"The Sleep Of Reason" rear cover

The book is small, only about 28 pages, but it is well worth the price of admission.  It contains eight poems by Pendarvis, seven by Laska, and eight by Kidd.  All are examples of outspoken beliefs about some or all of the character flaws which Francisco Goya was confronting in the work for which the book is named.  Pendarvis addresses the hanging of John Brown in 1859 in the poem "Farmer Brown Ascends The Gallows" and ends the poem with these powerful words: 

"He'd kept his eyes on heaven

and the hell of this world and the next.

He loved the beauty of action.

The crops he raised blossomed fire." (Edwina Pendarvis)

Those words epitomize several of the goals of a social activist, to always keep your eyes on the prize, to always know that we must confront injustice and ignorance wherever we find it, to take actions to bring about change, and to hope in our hearts every day that our actions will "blossom fire".

In his poem "Almost Dead Matter Walking Bags", Peter Kidd delivers some of his own political statements with the opening and closing words:

"a nation of self interested material/machine worshipers
forever waiting...

the Atom Bomb finger tips away
from the most sociopathic
narcissists in the world."  (Peter Kidd)

That, my friends is a strong political statement in today's America.  It is also a strong poetic statement in just about any other time or place.  If reading lines like those does not raise your political hackles, then you have none.

But this little book is also loaded with what is simply just good, solid poetry intended to expand both the mind and soul of the astute reader.  In her poem "Making Salt", Pendarvis uses Daniel Boone to make both poetic and powerful points.

"Boone, skulking his lonely way
through iron age Kentucke
found mastodon bones lying around a salt lick...

Squatting by his fire, beside
a behemoth, he poured cold
salty water into a flat pot." (Edwina Pendarvis) 

While some readers might wish to quibble about the use of the words "by" and "beside" in the same line, very few would argue with the deft phrasing and opulent word pictures the poem conveys.

Over the last forty plus years, I have been blessed to read most of the literature which P. J. Laska has produced, much of it in the manuscript stage, and I must insist that this little book contains some of his best work over the last decade or more.  You will find this book to be pleasure and a motivator for some social action on your own part.  You can buy the book from Igneus Press or from Ecces Books, 392 Rio Altar, Green Valley, AZ 85614.