Book Review: As Southern As It Gets

Title:  As Southern as It Gets

Author: H. Jackson Brown

Date: 2017

Publisher: Nelson

ISBN: 978-0718098100

Length: 224 pages

Quote: "Grandmother's handwritten recipes."

Talk about short, easy-reading books. Well, on the Internet, there’s the list as article, or “listicle.” This book is a list as book—a listook? Lisk? A person’s name or a recipe name is a paragraph. 

This is a long list of memory triggers for Southerners. Long, but incomplete. “Dale Earnhardt. Dale Earnhardt Jr.” The mind goes to “Davey Allison.” That’s not on the page. (Davey Allison, a young, popular NASCAR driver from Alabama, died in a helicopter accident one summer when Dale Earnhardt Jr. was in middle school.) And Lake Speed, the name used by an actual driver who raced with them that summer, later the name given to a lake in North Carolina near the homes of several NASCAR stars, is also not on this list. Richard Petty, I’m glad to see, is on the list, right before Ricky Skaggs. 

The list is not given in consistent alphabetical order or any other kind of order. Items seem to have been added just as they occurred to the author (and presumably some of his friends). The book could have been written to order for gift shops from Texas to Maryland, where it's likely to be on the shelves, and will remind visitors what not to miss.

If you try to analyze this book, it’s political in a very subtle, polite, Southern way. The point of these lists is that the Southern States cover a lot of territory, geographically and otherwise. People who can be described as Southerners do not necessarily look or sound alike, nor do all of us relate to all of these memories in the same way, nor are all of these memories really exclusively Southern. “Southern” includes all three corners of Virginia—three different cultural and ecological places—similarly cornered North Carolina, culturally distinct South Carolina,, both halves of Georgia plus Atlanta and the islands, Florida, the self-styled “three States of Tennessee,” Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Cherokee Town, Seminole territory in Florida, arguably Texas and Oklahoma, and, more arguably, Maryland and Kentucky. Southerners are Black, White, Red, and also Cuban, Puerto Rican, West Indian, and Cajun. Most let themselves be culturally defined by a religious identity; some have none. We have furious diversity. 

The rest of the country used to goad us with insinuations that we all sounded alike. Even now that television is breaking up the different dialects we learned from our elders, Southerners do not sound alike to our own ears. A “Southern accent” generally means one of a wide range of ways people speak English as a first language; for some Southerners English is still a second language. “Southern accents” identify socioeconomic classes as well as regions, and pack enough social-political baggage that you used to hear young Southerners speaking BBC English to communicate that we wanted to opt out of that whole mess.

My natural sister and I grew up in the same place but don’t sound like it. I have paid enough attention to the politics of practical linguistics to understand why we sound so different; we chose two ways to make a statement about rejecting snobbery. Growing up in Virginia, we heard our elders say things that they would correct us for saying to them. At school we were told that those ways of speaking were “wrong.” (I had only one teacher who went so far as to scold people for saying "thuh" instead of "thee," and "a-gan" instead of "a-gayne," in sentences like "Excuse me, Ma'am, the sink is stopped up again." Most teachers had relaxed on those points.) Saying things like "ain't," or "ya" for "you" or "I'm gonna" for "I shall," were the way people who had grown up in dreary little tract houses near factories, or in mining camps, or similar, were expected to speak. They were the way our elders would speak to the yardman to communicate acceptance and understanding. They were “wrong” for use among our own socioeconomic class. Feh, who needs! Kids mostly spoke "wrong" and let the teachers scold, figuring that scolding was teachers' favorite thing anyway. I married a diplomat and usually speak the way white-collar White Americans in Washington speak; when I had a mild head cold I was told I could pass for a native of Maryland. My sister married a coal miner’s son and sounds to me as if she’d grown up, with major hearing loss (which she has), in a coal camp. You could say that I speak to yardmen the same way I do to teachers, and my sister speaks to teachers the same way she speaks, or they speak, to yardmen.

“Southern” includes those diverse socioeconomic indicators, too, of course. We like to think of “class” as merely a matter of courtesy, equally available to rich and poor. It’s not, of course. A venerable cultural tradition has always allowed rich Southerners to copy some points of style from the lower classes, and considered this cute. That tradition merged into the twentieth century European fad for artists and designers to “take their inspiration from the streets.” So it’s none too surprising that people like Jeff Foxworthy, Lewis Grizzard, to some extent even President and Mrs. Carter, whose manners drip “background,” can charmingly affect “redneck” or blue-collar styles. Up to a certain point that sort of thing has always been considered adorable but you have to know where to stop. Actually being poor, or even fanatically frugal, is not considered nearly so cute as affecting blue-collar styles while wealthy. Actually being Yankee-ish...well, there's a reason Hillary Clinton moved to New York instead of pursuing her political career in Arkansas. 

But here’s a mix that at least tries to represent everybody, and if it’s a little heavy on the shrimp for my taste, it most definitely succeeds in getting Southerners to share memories from the twentieth century in which we grew up, without breaking down in division between those who did and did not have Confederate ancestors. And these memories include more sports, music, and pop culture, so they’re less fattening than an equally unifying Southern Living cookbook.

This Daughter of the Confederacy appreciates the author’s intentions. Pride in our own great-grandfathers is all very well; I don’t imagine my great-grandfather would have wanted his memory used to make perfectly nice people who are only third-generation Southerners feel left out of things. Black beans go just fine with cornbread. 

Checking the Amazon page, I note that somebody grumbled that he could have written an equally long list of things he likes about being a Northerner. Well, for pity's sake, why doesn't he? 

Book Review: Southern Fried Makeover

Title: Southern Fried Makeover

Author: Carla Jablonski

Date: 1999

Publisher: Pocket Books

ISBN: 0-671-03437-5

Length: 149 pages

Quote: “‘Maybe you should try to find out about your man’s interests,’ Gigi instructed Janet, ‘instead of expecting him to pay attention to yours.’”

Carla Jablonski had an axe to grind. That’s the only explanation. Gigi Rabinowitz , high school antifeminist and Cher Horowitz’s new worst friend who makes even Amber seem lovable, may have been based on a real person, and that real person was the late Helen Andelin from California. A couple of Gigi’s bad manners even have counterparts in the Southern States, like Gigi’s encouraging Murray to use the bordering-on-obscene word “honey”to refer to De. More of them do not. Gigi reads not as a real Southerner transplanted to Beverly Hills, but more like a Northerner transplanted to Georgia first and then Beverly Hills, trying very very hard to be a Southerner but not quite getting it right.

Item: Gigi introduces herself to Cher, De, and Amber, before their parents push them to work together on a project, by jumping up on a table in the cafeteria and lecturing Janet, De, and others on their dating behavior. At length. Hello? Helen Andelin was invited to speak to groups of church ladies. It is hard to imagine, even for a homely little thing who’s been bullied at her old school, given a makeover, and unleashed on a new school to take her revenge on strangers, a real Southern Belle preaching at people without a solid invitation. A real Southern Trash Act who wanted to challenge Cher’s popularity would drop her barbs by ones, behind the backs of her victims. 

Item: Gigi defends herself from the “Southerners are racists”meme by overtly flirting with Murray, who is Black, in the presence of De, who is also Black, and Sean, who is also Black—and single. According to the books Murray is generally agreed to be more attractive than Sean; according to the TV stills on the covers there’s little difference between them. A real Southerner might feel obliged to show he or she was willing to consider interracial dating, and somewhere in the former Confederacy there probably has been a formerly pudgy and homely girl who wanted to feel that she was getting revenge on a cheerleader by stealing a cheerleader-type’s boyfriend, but I find it hard to imagine a real Southerner making a play for someone else’s date in the victim’s presence. Girls who took Helen Andelin’s Fascinating Girl seriously would’ve known enough to make their bids for Murray’s attention behind De’s back.

Item: Gigi overtly brags about her successes and bashes the other kids’ successes. Real Southerners know that that’s not the most effective kind of verbal attack by age three at the latest. Bragging is such a Yankee-ish way of annoying people, so much more the way Cher and De exasperate people than the way a Southerner would.

So the only way to read Gigi is to imagine that her real formative years, in the North, possibly with her real father, were so horrible that during the year Daddy bought her all the cosmetic surgery Gigi decided to forget her real childhood, like maybe in Chicago, and pretend she was from Atlanta when she moved to Beverly Hills. Her parents say they've always been married to each other, but they seem like unreliable sources of information. 

This explains some of Gigi’s other mistakes...like “honey.” Real Southerners do call people that, just as they say “bless your heart,” but these expressions are always put-downs. If Gigi were a real Southerner with a social personality that’s one big cry for help, such that she wanted to annoy De and flirt with Murray, she’d be calling De “honey.” Murray might be “darlin’” or “handsome,”or else Gigi would be drawling “Mur-raaayyy”in an insinuating cooing tone that’d make De’s fingers twitch with rage. Or, if Murray were not by far the nicest boy in their class—he calls De things like “baby”and “honey” because bickering is the way the two soulmates keep their relationship age-appropriate, but otherwise he’s nice—and Gigi wanted to turn him off, then she might be saying things like “Murray-honey, I’m sure any of these six other girls would rather sit next to you than I would.”

But wherever Gigi really comes from, Jablonski certainly succeeds in showing us why every girl at their school wants her to go back there. Cher and her crowd are consistently Clueless, and have not noticeably matured between grades ten and twelve, but Gigi is a real poison-pill.

And Daddy Horowitz wants the Rabinowitzes as clients. And the Rabinowitzes want Cher to be Gigi’s friend, especially when the girls’ school is tapped for a talent search: The winning V.J. will get a glamorous internship that will move him or her to a different school, near the TV studio. Cher instantly wants to take this opportunity to highlight her beauty-consultant skills by coaching all the contestants, and she and De want Gigi to lose so much that they almost forget how much more pleasant a place their school will become if Gigi wins and goes away.

As if that message didn’t make the moral clear, there’s a subplot; Murray almost loses his friend Sean to competition for the V.J. job before the boys consider the advantages of cooperation. The book doesn’t spell out whether Gigi or the boys will win. Readers already know that, and they know why: The young men who played Sean and Murray had a full-season contract...

Anyway, it’s funny. 

Book Review: Mystery at Shadow Pond

Title: Mystery at Shadow Pond

Author: Mary C. Jane

Date: 1958

Publisher: J.B. Lippincott

ISBN: none

Length: 121 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Raymond Abel

Quote: “Mr. Willey scares me...Usually he doesn’t say a word, and that makes me think he’s cross.”

Siblings Margie and Neale Lawson live on a farm. Mr. Willey, their neighbor, who lives alone and buys milk for his cat, shows signs of being a miser. He “could live on beefsteak and ice cream if he wanted to. But even your grandfather could never persuade him to spend an extra penny,” so he grows thinner and his cat grows fatter.

That’s not the mystery the title promised, though. Someone is snooping around the farm, and meanwhile the Lawson parents are fretting about having to sell a horse the children love. First the children have to find out what their recently deceased grandfather left behind that might interest thieves. Then they have to find their grandfather’s treasure. Mr. Willey’s memories of their grandfather and a friend who died before he did, and his thoroughly normal, non-social, food-oriented cat, will help.

This is a wholesome little story primary-school-age readers can enjoy—could read aloud to preschoolers if they felt like it. “Treasure” and “poultry” are about the most challenging words used, and though there’s no suspense about who the thieves are, an adult might pass an enjoyable fifteen minutes finding out how the children recover the treasure. I thought this writer’s mysteries were on the easy-reading side when I was in grade two, but I was a precocious reader. Many primary school children of my generation liked them, and as an adult I appreciate their nostalgic, topophilic Maine atmosphere. 

Book Review: Cher's Furiously Fit Workout

Title: Cher’s Furiously Fit Workout

Author: Randi Reisfeld

Date: 1996

Publisher: Pocket Books

ISBN: 0-671-00322-4

Length: 163 pages

Quote: “We are totally the bomb. Of course, we do have that little annoyance known as high school to contend with.”

Cher Horowitz is a type of character, the narrator whose faults are obvious to everyone but herself, that had always before been done much better in the U.K. than in the U.S. Jane Austen’s Emma was very young, self-centered, a fashion victim, helping a friend impress a rich husband, trying to impress one rich man and not realizing that she’d already made quite an impression on a different one, almost but not quite failing to achieve the wedding that was every fashion victim’s dream in the 1820s. Well, as some movie producers realized in the 1990s, if Emma were a contemporary Bright Young Thing she’d still be in high school. The producers ran with this idea, got excited, got carried away and almost let it run them off their feet—but authors H.B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld rescued them with the unprecedented creation of Cher Horowitz, the embodiment of the concept of “gilding fine gold and painting lilies white.” Cher was Emma plus the stereotypes of Teen Princess and Jewish Princess and blonde and California Girl. In real life it’d be hard for anything to be such a self-parody and live—but in the movie and the TV series, Gilmour convinced us that there just might be a golden girl as pampered, as sheltered, and as clueless as Cher, and she might be a lovable child at heart.

She’s exasperating. She says and does things that make you just know the reason why she has school friends has to do with Daddy’s deep pockets, and want to say to the adults in her life, “Spanking was not always altogether bad.” And at her sweetest she’s merely a naïve little girl. She’s not a real heroine, nor destined ever to be one. She’s a caricature, meant to give us an opportunity to laugh at the golden Teen Princesses of our schools....but gently.

There is something lovable about the chutzpah of a high school girl even aspiring to be a Teen Princess without having a steady boyfriend. And having adventures that end happily, with Cher achieving at least part of her goal, and still being uncoupled. If you’re looking for teen heroines who stand on their own two feet, there’s Menolly inDragon Singer, Hermione in Harry Potter...and...and...well, there’s Cher Horowitz in Clueless.

In this episode, Cher is still in grade ten, and teetering on the verge of being left out. Her very best friend, De, played by the young Stacey Dash, has decided to reconnect with her Black heritage (by buying books by Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, of course; no slumming for these kids). Her second-best friend, Tai, has taken a volunteer job. Even her worst friend, Amber, makes a bid for attention in her own right by running for class president. Cher, feeling a need to call attention to herself, decides to make an exercise video. But it’s hard to motivate her friends to stop preening their sleek little selves long enough to do actual exercises.

Like the rest of the series, this is a self-parody with a happy ending.

Those who look for political or at least social overtones everywhere will find a few. Cher’s circle of school friends represent all the major ethnic minorities; in addition to Cher and Amber being Jewish, De being both Black and Jewish, and De’s boyfriend Murray and his pal Sean being Black, their other school friends have Chinese, Japanese, Iranian, Hawaiian, and Spanish names, and of course the little boy whose name was Christian, in the first book or two, was “gay.” Cher even has a grandmother who still remembers how to cook chicken soup, and Murray’s always annoying De by trying to talk and dress like a rapper. These kids, as epitomized by De’s quest for self-understanding through bestsellers, feel some sense of ethnicity, but their real identity is strictly Beverly Hills. There were kids like that in 1996; there still are. And as long as Americans accept any sense of obligation toward any “historic victim groups,” kids like them will, five years later, lap up the benefits. They’re so sleek and pretty and poised and prepared, if they don’t win any competition they ever enter, they’ll just know it’s because of prejudice against their ethnic-minority heritage.

But for now they’re all just kids, and they’ll succeed in making a juvenile exercise video, giving readers lots of opportunities to laugh at their follies along the way.  

Book Review: The Hills Are Calling

This Sunday Book review is being pre-posted, so there's no adorable adoptable animal...how would I know which animals are still unadopted at the time of reading? 

Book Review: The Hills Are Calling

Author: Irene B. Brand

Date: 1990

Publisher: Mountain State Press

ISBN: 0-941092-224

Length: 189 pages

Quote: “‘Don’t cross my path again. I only warn once.’ As Adams climbed unsteadily into the saddle, he held Don with his wicked stare, and Don thought, Why is this man wretched?”

Irene B. Brand’s intention in this “inspirational novel” was to present a good oldfashioned romance that avoids the ordinary kind of unhealthy fantasies, so it is my sad duty to warn readers that this whole novel is one long indulgence in an unhealthy fantasy. Here is no premarital sex, no murders or elopements or impossible fortunes. The romance is clean, with just a few family-filtered kisses before the protagonists are married. The book is still pervaded by one of the most harmful fantasies in which Christians can indulge.

That fantasy is: “Christians, or at least Christian ministers, know all the answers in life.” Don, the minister given the leading part in The Hills Are Calling, comes to town and immediately falls in love with one man (Adams, the mean drunk) and one woman (Addie). It is probably not homoeroticism, but a desire to make this novel a bit different from every other wholesome-type romance you’ve ever read, that prompts Brand to tell us that Don is impressed by Adams’ handsome face, but not “even the eyes of love” could call Addie beautiful. However, what Don is really in love with is not these people as they are, but his fantasy that he can rescue them from their “wretchedness.” Don is not physically afraid of Adams merely because the bigger, stronger man threatens to beat him up, and later does; he just holds on to his perception that nobody becomes a mean drunk unless he is really “wretched” and in need of the sort of counselling Don can offer. When he meets the two single women in town, the pretty one who works at the post office and the plain one who is complaining about a local character tampering with her mail, he’s not (conscious of being) attracted to the plain one because he senses that he’s not enough of a catch for the pretty one; he’s drawn to the plain one because, although he never thinks about a woman’s right to privacy needing any defense, he wants to cure her “bitterness” with more counselling.

In a really inspirational story, even on the level of Christy, events would shake Don out of his pseudospiritual pigheadedness. Some people who did or did not go to his church would know things Don didn’t know. If not physically crippled, he’d be at least mentally humiliated, forced to confront his imperfection and mortality. Although Don’s self-confidence is a realistic portrait of the act very young men tend to put on, he needs to develop a more realistic form of self-esteem, a faith that the Great Spirit can still work through even complacent oafs like him if he consents to move his ego out of the way.

In The Hills Are Calling, what needs to happen, to make Don a believable or likable character, fails to happen. He steamrollers along, his fantasy undisturbed by reality. Adams is wretched! And Addie is bitter! And both of them are so eager, and so grateful, for Don’s counselling! (Well, at least after Don improbably beats him up Adams is grateful for Don’s counselling.) This by itself would not be altogether unbelievable—once in a while a very young Christian does get to watch an alcoholic hit bottom, and Addie wouldn’t be the first lonely girl who, in the bad old days when a woman really couldn’t depend on her ability to work for her living, expressed a need for counselling in order to snag a promising preacher. But nobody else knows anything Don needs to learn, either! All the old married people in the fictional town are just sheep, bleating gratefully about how much they need a minister...and although, in real life, this by itself would be an indicator of how much Don stands to learn from them, the story doesn’t go on long enough for Don to see the indicator. At the end of the book other characters’ lives have changed, but Don is still the selfrighteous adolescent fool he was at the beginning of the story, with no hope for change and people depending on him for guidance, and God help them all.

The book doesn’t fail all its characters, or readers, as badly as it fails Don. What deserves mentioning is the fact that, apart from their “less educated” dialect, the townsfolk aren’t portrayed as hillbilly stereotypes. Adams is, of course, a stereotypical drunkard (apparently not a true alcoholic), and Addie is a stereotypical 1930s romance heroine as played by Greta Garbo. The other townsfolk get only cameo appearances, as generic parishioners—but not as hillbillies. The ones Don doesn’t have to pray over in their sickbeds, or bury, actually work. They’re either much older than Don, or much younger, but they’re presented as the kind of people we can believe Don would be interested in knowing.

The blurb promises “humor, drama, pathos, and superb dialogue.” ??? It’s a romance, people. There is a minor character who tries to make people laugh, and in real life his twinkly eyes might have that effect, but the novel is no more hilarious than it is suspenseful. I didn’t laugh, or even smile, once while reading The Hills Are Calling. The drama is about as predictable as it is in most romance novels: Jack shall have Jill and all will be well. The pathos is believable: this is the 1930s but Brand actually lived in West Virginia and didn't confuse it with the fantasy of "AppaLAYsha" from Eleanor Roosevelt's guilt trips. The dialogue is readable, but “superb” is not an adjective that comes to my mind. 

The book would be more satisfactory if it didn’t have to compete with its blurb. I wish Don had learned a lesson; my fingers itch to add a few chapters to the end—“Then Don remembered the little boy who’d told him he fought like Max Schmeling when he’d finally pitched into Ezra Adams on Paul’s behalf...and Don realized that this big, mean drunk was fighting like Joe Louis.” Or, “‘Reading my letters again, are you?’ Addie yelled, as the still-warm clothing he had just dropped on the floor draped around Don’s head. ‘What’s the matter with you now?’ he asked, wondering what had become of her joyous new life in Jesus. ‘The matter with me is that I’m married to you,’ Addie bayed, ‘but I won’t be for long!’” Still, I could deal with the limitations the romance genre imposes if the blurb hadn’t promised “humor, drama, pathos, and superb dialogue.” Authors need to stop writing inflated blurbs for each other, or letting others write inflated blurbs for them. This is a sweet, clean romance, if you’re in the mood for one; it is not The Grapes of Wrath, Gone with the Wind, or even Christy. 

Book Review: Uncle Shelby's ABZ

Book Review: Uncle Shelby’s ABZ

Author: Shel Silverstein

Date: 1961

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ISBN: 0-671-21148-X

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: large cartoons (suitable for coloring) by the author

Quote: “[A]lthough Uncle Shelby has never been blessed with children of his own, the little ones have always had a very special place in his tired old heart...I have heard them playing and laugh­ing outside my window while I was trying to sleep and I have thought about them...And so this book—to help all my little friends get all the things in life that they so richly deserve.”

In other words, this book is a collection of mean practical jokes people, mostly older children, have played on innocent young children. The publisher did not recommend sharing it with children. 

It’s funny for those who are old enough to laugh at a collection of more than thirty mean jokes that wouldn’t work on adults, and that it would be cruel to play on children. They range from a drawing of a lion identified as a dog who likes to be scratched, to a suggestion that if you brush your teeth often and keep them bright and white a predator will find you first in the dark, to a certificate children are advised to turn in at the grocery store to receive a real live pony, to a joke about a travelling salesman who told the farmer “I don’t need to sleep with anybody, I just need directions,” to a recommendation that kids count their fingers while holding their hands over an outline of a six-fingered hand. There’s a smudge on a page identified as where a quarter was supposed to have been glued, if Mommy didn’t pull it off and keep it. Then of course there’s the scrambled alphabet, and the drawing of an oboe (a diabolical suggestion to make to a small child, all by itself) mislabelled as “gigolo.”

Recommended to those for whom laughing-out-loud-as-therapy works well enough that they never feel all that mean.

Book Review: Love and Laughter

I'm pre-scheduling some book reviews. If I get online within 24 hours of the time they go live, each will be presented by an adorable adoptable animal who has an especially appealing picture posted at its Petfinder page. So here is Scarlett, a five-year-old untrained hound, looking for someone who wants to teach her basic house-pet skills: 

I can't say much for the nannyish approach this organization takes to rescuing dogs who are at risk of being euthanized, or used in gruesome medical experiments by somebody like Anthony Fauci...but if you want to rescue this dog from a group that sound as if they're getting a lot of dogs killed in the name of "rescuing" them, paste https://www.petfinder.com/dog/scarlett-54096655/dc/washington/rural-dog-rescue-md384/ into your browser.

Title: Love and Laughter

Author: Marjorie Holmes

Date: 1967, 1972

Publisher: Doubleday (1967), Bantam (1972)

ISBN: none

Length: 239 pages

Quote: “It doesn’t take money to achieve an atmosphere of charm and quiet. It merely takes time, efficient management, and the little artistic touches...”

And also, as Holmes goes on to show on pages 9 and 10, a family who want the same kind of charm and quiet for which Mother envies her single friends, which is probably a family where all the children are over age twelve. When Grandma wanted an “atmosphere” at dinner, she had the children fed somewhere else. Which probably involved paying someone money.

The writer known as Marjorie Holmes (a pen name) wrote a successful book called I’ve Got to Talk to Somebody, God. Seeing that the book had sold well, the old Washington Star newspaper started printing regular short columns by Holmes. These columns were secular, and dealt with the brand-new, made-for-TV “traditional” family lifestyle in which all husbands were full-time breadwinners, all wives were full-time homemakers, all sons went into the Army, all daughters moved away to wherever their husbands had come from or gone, and everybody was happy-happy-happy because they had the latest expensive toys.

Although a full-scale industry grew out of publishing the complaints of people for whom this lifestyle pattern didn’t work, it was working pretty well for Holmes. Here and there we find a gentle murmur of dissatisfaction...but Holmes did seem to have a nice life, with the income from a big-city newspaper to help support her “cabin” at a posh lakeside community in suburban Virginia. She wrote short pieces about her children’s love of water, about holding a child’s hand, about letting neighbors’ children visit her home, about squirrels, about catalogue paper dolls, about the joys of helping her husband with some of their home improvement projects and watching all the neighbors pitch in to help with others. Being a Total Woman, Full-Time Wife and Mother and Part-Time Writer was a truly plushy job for those who could get it; what all those other women (and men) were complaining about was that they couldn’t get it, that simply finding a husband (if female) or a full-time job (if male) wouldn’t put you straight into a family life like Holmes’s, even in 1967.

Holmes was grateful. Her way of showing gratitude was to write these pieces, with occasional touches of humor, but more often with heartfelt sentimental bliss. This is a volume of Blessings being Counted: baby carriages, suitcases, even a ticket for fishing without a license (it was legal to fish from the pier, but not from their own boat, at the lake)—and even the children. Not everyone had them, Holmes knew. She herself might not have them forever. Best to write down what she loved about them, in case she needed to remember it someday.

The result was what 1970s pre-feminist literary circles dismissed as calendar art. Some pundits even claimed that in a good story somebody had to die, and of course there were, at the time, the Radical Red Writers clamoring for revolutionary work that would make people fighting mad, like Richard Wright or Allen Ginsberg, or at least thoroughly dissatisfied, like all those depressing Europeans you had to read for college credit. Meanwhile, ordinary unpretentious people were buying more copies of books like Holmes’ than of books like Wright’s. When one wasn’t trying to impress other artsy types with one’s tolerance for the ugly, depressing, or positively psychotic avant-garde, whether or not one had a house by the lake or even had children, it was nice to remember the good things about being a mother. Or a father. If a book like Love and Laughter didn’t make you glad to be a parent, it might at least make you glad to have one.

Anybody who can construct sentences on paper could write a book similar to Love and Laughter, and these days dozens, if not hundreds, of bloggers are doing it. If you enjoy the filtered reality, as distinct from fiction, found by reading blogs, you’ll enjoy having one of the best collections of this kind of writing bound in a nice little feel-good book.

Book Review: Do You See What I See

Status update: A series of miscellaneous posts have been sponsored by someone who wants them to be presented by Petfinder's most photogenic homeless cats and dogs.

This book review is brought to you by a cat called California...obviously just so her foster human could shorten it to "Cali." Guess why? California is actually in Washington, D.C., where she was found as a stray earlier this month. Not much is known about her but she's described as friendly and affectionate. It goes with the facial markings that suggest a cheerful mood. 

If clicking on the picture doesn't work, paste https://www.petfinder.com/cat/california-54627193/dc/washington/humane-rescue-alliance-foster-homes-dc03/ into your browser to adopt Cali.

Book Review: Do You See What I See

Author: Russell Targ

Date: 2008

Publisher: Hampton Roads

ISBN: 978-1-57174-559-0

Length: 239 pages plus notes, bibliography, and index

Illustrations: black-and-white photos

Quote: “Our principle (sic) source of suffering is our defense of the story of who we think we are—the story of Me.”

Interesting quote for a memoir...by definition a printed copy of “the story of Me.” Russell Targ, currently 87 years old, is an extremely nearsighted (legally “blind”) physicist and a believer in extrasensory perception. His other books have been about ESP and a Buddhist-flavored New Age spirituality. He is still encouraging people who want to experiment with ESP, according to Google, in Chicago. Google didn't mention whether he's still riding his specially adapted motorbike.

So, do his accounts of how psychics were able to draw images similar to real locations convince readers that ESP is real? Only if you want to be convinced. If you are asked to draw a landscape every day, whether you’re thinking about the location of something someone is looking for or about images you’ve seen on television, in the course of a year it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll draw one image similar to the location of something someone is looking for. You could have picked it out of the person’s mind, or you could have produced a coincidental resemblance.

Americans seriously, scientifically debated about the existence of ESP, fourth-dimensional space, and other concepts that interested Targ, in the mid-twentieth century. During the 1960s and 1970s there was a great deal of rational, non-occult interest in finding out whether we had, or could develop, some limited degree of telepathy, perhaps with one or two close friends. At least two fellow “brainers” and I attempted to communicate through telepathic dreams, while living in different neighborhoods, to save postage and telephone expenses. We had what seemed to be the usual results: one or two stunning successes—often with trivial bits of information, I remember "seeing" the last dress my friend had bought—but usually not even a sense that a message had been transmitted, and massive failures to transmit important bits of information. Our results convinced me that what information got through was more a matter of friends with similar temperaments thinking alike than of telepathy actually being a useful way to transmit messages. Targ’s experience was apparently different...or at least it took place earlier.

What's been learned later in the twentieth century is that when people testing their telepathic skills are physically close to each other, even if they then separate themselves by a mile or two before attempting to transmit a message, most people who have the High Sensory Perceptivity (HSP) trait will get encouraging results. This is due not to ESP but to perception of people’s reactions to what they’re thinking about. Most, if not all, HSPs were told we were psychic if we were alive in the mid-twentieth century...but high sensory perception is a different phenomenon from extra-sensory perception. Targ is a classic case of HSP, which is why I remain skeptical about his ESP.

HSPs consciously, normally perceive things that non-HSPs need some sort of amplifying device to perceive. Individual HSPs have different combinations of “super” senses and, in some cases, impaired senses. For example, people with normal perceptivity don’t feel a difference between one fingertip, and three fingertips held close together, touching most of the skin surface on their backs; HSPs do. People with normal perceptivity see seven stars in the Big Dipper and five of the Pleiades without a telescope; HSPs see eight stars in the Dipper and seven Pleiades. HSPs can usually feel, and sometimes even see, differences in the atmospheric field surrounding a living body where blood circulation and skin temperature are high or low, which is often known (mostly to charlatans) as “the aura.” HSPs probably notice pain at lower levels than other people do, but use our perceptivity to learn to manage pain and treat the conditions that cause it, so The method by which HSPs can diagnose, and occasionally cure, painful or disabling conditions in other people is empirically verifiable and teachable, but taking a class in it is unlikely to help non-HSPs use it, just as taking a class in music is unlikely to cure tone-deafness. None of this is the same as either the hope that psychics might be able to trace fugitives, or the intimacy that allowed Upton Sinclair and his wife to “read” each other’s pheromones and eye movements well enough for each of them to guess what the other was drawing (and hiding) well enough to draw something similar.  

Targ is, beyond all doubt, HSP. The claim that the trait is genetic is supported by its correlation with physical traits. HSPs come in all colors, but within a family HSP siblings are usually taller, thinner-boned, and fairer-skinned than non-HSP siblings. Targ, being Jewish (not even Scandinavian), 6’5”, with partial albinism, was an extreme example of this correlation. Despite a combination of genetic and traumatic eye damage severe enough to be classified as blindness, he seems to get more use out of his damaged eyes at 70 than some people get out of normal eyes at 25. Given that he does have HSP, is it possible that he’s conditioned himself to believe that he has ESP because his normal perceptivity was always acute? It is likely.

In Do You See What I See, Targ describes a few memorable successes of his own and his friends’ ESP experiments...and hints at a dull majority of failures similar to what the rest of us obtained. Does this prove that he and his friends were truly psychic, or does he prove that the unconscious mind guesses, just as the conscious mind does, and anyone who keeps guessing for seventy years is sure to have some great stories to tell? Probably, whichever opinion you inclined toward before you read it, Do You See What I See will confirm.

Meanwhile, it’s about as entertaining as talking to any seventy-year-old with an intact memory is likely to be. Targ knew some interesting people; the one you might have been wondering about was chess champion Bobby Fischer, Targ’s brother-in-law. His life at the time of writing had acquired an inspirational quality, with the suggestion that not only happiness, but some form of erotic love, may have remained available to him after a colostomy. His self-description as “a blind biker” may be somewhat misleading since he was actually a “legally blind,” nearsighted rider of a specially adapted motorbike, but perhaps it’s defensible on the grounds that it establishes Targ as an interesting, likable, practical researcher.  It’s also been known to turn skeptics off his book. This is unfortunate. “Blind biker,” like “heart transplant” and “portable phone,” may once have described impossible dreams but now describe real things.