Category Archives: Commentary

Wide-ranging observations from a skewed perspective

07.18.23
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Interacting With Entities

Canada goose. Photo by Michael Gil, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

I wrote a story called “Encounters With Monsters.” It was about interactions with human beings, from the viewpoint of a migratory Canada goose. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure that a goose on a golf course could see people as monsters.

The literary magazines have not yet beaten down my door for the opportunity to print this story. Since many people will never see a story told by an animal as adult fare, I think I’ll change my pitch and sell it as the text of a picture book for young readers.

Meanwhile, I’ve started thinking I should write another one—definitely for adults—called “Encounters With Entities.”

Here is one such encounter:

Interpol on Speed Dial

A few years ago we went to Italy with our friends Bill and Marsha. We rented a car in Florence. My name was on the contract, but Bill did most of the driving, because—well, Bill likes to drive . . . even in Italy!

Florence, a driver’s paradise. Photo by Infrogmation, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.

After a splendid week driving around Tuscany, we needed to return the car to the downtown agency where we had rented it. Florence, like many medieval towns in Italy, is old and confusing. It is a Rubik’s cube of one-way streets. If you rent a car in the center of town and manage to escape to the countryside, that does not guarantee you will ever solve the puzzle of getting back to the same place. The streets are all different, like the staircases at Hogwarts.

Bill turned into a street by a large hotel. It seemed to lead the right way but turned out to be a dead end. Bystanders waved at us sternly to turn around, which we did. As we exited that cul-de-sac, I spotted a sign in English: “PRIVATE ENTRANCE. HOTEL WATSAMATTAYOU GUESTS ONLY.” 

Somehow, we reached the darkest heart of Florence, returned the car, and went on our way.

FIVE MONTHS LATER comes a letter from the European Union. Inside the officious-looking envelope there’s a traffic ticket in the amount of €93.50, for “driving in unauthorised zone.” Ransacking my brain, I remembered the dead-end street beside the hotel. We had committed not just a faux pas but an actual Eurocrime.  

They must have had a camera snapping the plate of every car in that street. They must have had a computer programmed to match each plate with those of legitimate hotel guests. Their program must have had a subroutine that traced the plate to the rental agency and found my name and home address in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. 

And here’s the kicker: When the jury of computers had weighed the evidence and found me guilty, my punishment was too important to come from Florence city hall or the local polizi or even carabinieri headquarters. 

No. The computer forwarded our case to Geneva so some obscure office of the European Union, in all its majesty, could issue my ticket. 

In those days the euro was worth a third more than the dollar. In the five months (did I mention FIVE MONTHS??) since we did the crime, the exchange rate had tanked further. So that €93.50 came to well over a hundred clams. 

We shared the joy with Bill and Marsha, our unindicted co-conspirators. We were all tempted to shred the ticket and forget it. After all, the long arms of Jean-Claude von Shakedown couldn’t reach us on U.S. territory. 

BUT . . . we might want to visit Europe in the future. Imagine being turned back at Amsterdam passport control because the One Great Eurocomputer choked on an unpaid trafic violation. 

As William Shakespeare said, though in a slightly different context, “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

Bill and Marsha chipped in their half, we sent the required Euros to Geneva, and as a result we are still welcome in Europe. 

Valued customers, no doubt.

Dear and Gracious Reader, if it can happen to us, it can happen to you. Maybe it already has. 

Alternative History

Now picture, if you will, the same incident happening twenty years earlier—before Italy joined Europe and before computers gobbled up all continents.

Italian cop in Florence. Photo by Xeph, licensed under CC-BY-3.0.

Way back then, that same street might have already been blocked off to “unauthorised” traffic— for big hotels have ways to make their voices heard in heavily-touristed cities. But in those halcyon days, enforcement might have been on the honor system; or, more likely, it might have been entrusted to a red-faced little man in a comic opera uniform. He would have lunged into our misguided path, waving a white-gloved hand and blowing his whistle. 

He would have approached the driver’s side and addressed us in rapid Florentine. Bill and I would have shrugged, held up our hands, and chanted “No parlo italiano!” The little man in cape and shako would have then repeated the same phrases at twice the volume. We would have shrugged, gestured, and chanted operatically. He would have made obscene hand signs, which we would not have understood because they were in Italian.

We would have ended the episode by driving away unscotched. 

Case closed.

Just possibly, we might have been roused in our hotel at two a.m. by a carabinieri rifle squad. But even then (here comes my point, Reader, in case you have lost track) even then, there would have been a person—a brigadiere perhaps, or a maresciallo—whom we could have addressed. One might have pleaded or even begged. Maybe one could have paid a sort of fine on the spot—perhaps a thousand lire for each member of the squad. But there’s no way a few thousand lire would have added up to more than a sawbuck. 

Carabinieri keeping the peace. Photo by Dickelbers, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

The expense incurred twenty years later, doing things à la européenne, came from the cost of all those computers and all that bureaucracy. If you think Italian bureaucrats are bad, multiply them by every signatory to the Schengen accords. Translations alone must cost a fortune.

But when a total robot citation arrives from a major world government, five months after the foul deed, without the shred of a claim that any human ever witnessed the crime, or cared—what are you gonna do?

You can’t fight city hall if there’s no city hall to fight.

And that’s only one example.

It’s Everywhere! It’s Everywhere!

Thesis: Life is now more a matter of interfacing with entities, and less a matter of dealing with people.

Big Joe Williams sings the blues, 1971. Photo by Patrick Denoréaz, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Sometimes I wish I were a musician. If I were a musician, I could write and perform something like this:

Mmm . . . I got those old Interacting-with-Entities Blues,
Oh, yeah, I just got to tell you this news—
There’s no reason not to tell you,
I got those Interacting-with-Entities Blues, oh, yeah . . .

You’ll have to imagine the tune on your own, Fair Reader. I can’t be expected to do everything.

More on this subject another day.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

07.11.23
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Mister Catbird

Wisconsin, where I live, is known for inclement weather. Winter seems to last about six months here in Madison. 

Then there is a brief spring, followed by three months of warm, GLORIOUS SUMMER, which tapers off in a wine-and-gold two-month autumn until snowflakes fly around November 1. 

Since summer does not last forever, I spend as much time as possible in my backyard. When not mowing or weeding, I sit in a chair, reading a book and sipping something. I glance up now and then to appreciate how lovely it all is. 

One view of my backyard.

A black locust towers over our house. The tree is in the front yard, but I can see its top, over the roof, from the backyard. It’s thing of beauty and a joy forever, especially with its green leaves yellowed by the afternoon sun.

Another view of my backyard.

There is a sound track, too. My favorite part is the catbird’s call. 

Gray catbird. Photo by Hari Krishnan, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This small gray bird, Dumetella carolinensis, flits about the backyard, perching in one of our tall spruces, or sometimes briefly in our forsythia, a red cedar, or my wife’s special Montmorency cherry tree. 

“But tell me, O New Favorite Writer, how do you know your catbird’s a he? Couldn’t it be a she?” 

No, Dear Reader. He could not. Which is something I did not know until I did a bit of research. It’s surprising what you can learn by writing a blog. More on catbird vocal dimorphism below.

For now, suffice it to say that Mister Catbird is a phenomenal singer and mimic, much like his Southern cousin Br’er Mockingbird. 

And he does all his vocalizing from a kind of throne. Though our common robins, sparrows, and cardinals use the same trees and bushes, when Mister Catbird perches there, it becomes a special thing.

The Catbird Seat

It’s known as “the catbird seat.” 

The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms says, “To be in the catbird seat means ‘to be sitting pretty, to be in a favorable position.’” The book, like other sources, calls it a 19th-century Southern Americanism but admits in a roundabout way that nobody ever heard of it until 1942, when James Thurber publicized Red Barber’s use of it.

James Thurber in 1960. Photo by Ed Ford, World Telegram staff photographer. Public Domain.

James Thurber (1894-1961) was a cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist and playwright—a literary icon whose work appeared often in the New Yorker. Today he is mostly remembered for his short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” but during his lifetime he published many stories, as well as humorous essays, memoirs, and cartoons. One of his stories is called “The Catbird Seat.”

I won’t give you any spoilers, in case you’d like to read this now somewhat dated, but still entertaining, story. What concerns us here is how it got its title. Its main character, a file clerk named Mr. Martin, is disturbed by a co-worker, Mrs. Bellows, who sprinkles her office repartee with a variety of odd expressions. 

It was Joey Hart, one of Mr. Martin’s two assistants, who had explained what the gibberish meant. “She must be a Dodger fan,” he had said. “Red Barber announces the Dodger games over the radio and he uses those expressions–picked ’em up down South.” Joey had gone on to explain one or two. “Tearing up the pea patch” meant going on a rampage; “sitting in the catbird seat” means sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him. 

Red Barber in 1955. Photo by Al Ravenna, World-Telegram staff photographer. Public Domain.

Red Barber (1908-1992), “the Old Redhead,” was a sports announcer who over a long career called major league baseball games for the Cincinnati Reds, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Yankees. A native of Columbus, Mississippi, he spoke slowly, with a soothing southern drawl, countrified and unflappable even when describing the hottest action. 

Did Barber ever use the phrase “in the catbird seat” before reading Thurber’s 1942 story attributing it to him? That must remain one of those enigmas lost in the mists of time. 

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the catbird seat as “a superior or advantageous position.” I guess that’s about right. “He’s sitting in the catbird seat” means he’s got no worries—however things turn out, he’s covered. 

If you’re in the catbird seat you can sit aloof and entertain yourself with pretty songs while you wait for others to find out the bad news.

Our friend Mister Catbird perches, sometimes hidden by dense foliage, but always in a place where he can supervise the whole world. And he comments.

The Catbird’s Song

He sings one of the most complex songs of any bird. It’s a long, polysyllabic thing, a startling series of whistles, squeaks, squawks, and burbles. It lasts several seconds and is then repeated, only with its elements re-arranged. 

That’s how I know it’s a he, Dear Reader. Because the catbird I’m hearing is not singing a normal “catbird” song, which is relatively brief and simple. Nor is he chirping the single meow-like syllable that gives him his name.

The complexity of Mister Catbird’s call comes from the fact that he’s imitating a series of other birds’ calls. Ornithologists think this is simply a way for a male catbird to show off, attracting the female of the species to his rich repertory of bird sounds. It’s like a guy who gets up at a party and rattles off a series of impressions—John Wayne, Dean Martin, Jimmy Cagney (“You dirty rat!”), Cary Grant (“Judy Judy! Judy!”) and on and on. 

Only Dumetella carolinensis is actually a talented mimic, unlike our friend at the party. 

Do yourself a favor, Dear Reader, and take five minutes to watch and listen to this YouTube video sponsored by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in which Greg Budney, former audio curator of the Macauley Library, shows examples of catbird mimicry.

After hearing all the calls the catbird masters in Budney’s video, you may imagine what it sounds like when they’re all run together by Mister Catbird in my backyard.

It makes me think of a general issuing detailed orders to the troops. 

It sounds like an NFL quarterback barking a complex cadence before the ball is snapped—half of the syllables to inform his teammates about the play, the other half only to fool the opponents.

It’s the auditory equivalent of the gestures a third-base coach uncorks between pitches. You’ve seen it if you’ve ever been to a ballgame. He pats his left shoulder, rubs his elbow, taps his foot, shakes his head, doffs his cap, etc.—so his teammates will know what to do but the other guys won’t figure it out.

Even though I know Mister Catbird’s song is just an act to impress Miz Catbird, I still can’t shake the feeling that his baffling cascade of sounds must mean something. 

He is, after all, in the catbird seat.

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Gray catbird. Photo by Rhododendrites. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0

One could do worse than be a catbird.

But if it’s not in your power to be a catbird, the next best thing would be to recognize when you happen to find yourself in the catbird seat. 

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

07.04.23
by

Independence

“In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776 . . .”

That was 247 years ago. 

Today is the 248th Fourth-of-July in the era of the United States of America. 

Legal Gavel by Blogtrepreneur. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

These days, gentlemen and ladies are apt to rush into battle over the Constitution, which became law thirteen years after Independence was declared. One of our three branches of government is largely absorbed by the task of discerning whether acts of government are within the Constitution or outside it. Then, once the Justices have their say, ladies and gentlemen rush to dispute the result, campaigning for either a change of heart or a change of Justices. 

So, yes, the Constitution is important.

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Yet in our darkest hour, our president, one of the great legal minds of his or any age, resorted not to the Constitution but to the Declaration of Independence, the more ancient document.

A Portrait of Mr. Lincoln at His Memorial by SavidgeMichael. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Abraham Lincoln reasoned that the Declaration preceded the Constitution. The Declaration in a sense fathered the Constitution and was superior to it—or at least more basic, more fundamental. The Constitution, he said, could not become a suicide pact for the nation; its strictest construction would not suffice for dissolving the Union. 

The Constitution of 1789 codified the structure of government in a state that existed for larger purposes, announced in 1776. Before there was a Constitution, the Declaration of Independence already said “all men are created equal.” The Constitution—in which the framers parsed fractional numbers to satisfy fragmented constituencies—could not abrogate that original guarantee.

The Declaration’s 56 signers explosively asserted that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .”

This doctrine was the necessary foundation of revolutionary acts. Inconveniently, it happened that some who signed this guarantee of freedom owned slaves, whom they had no intention of letting go.

Slaveholders and non-slaveholders endorse freedom in Philadelphia, 1776. Painting by John Trumbull  (1756–1843). Public Domain.

Thus the stage was set for the Civil War 85 years later. In the midst of that orgy of blood, the Chief Executive chose to force the republic back upon its first principles. 

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In the days when children were thought capable of learning things “by heart,” we memorized Jefferson’s stirring preamble to the Declaration easily. It came ringingly off the tongue, while the stilted phrases of the Constitution’s preamble got lost in a chorus of mumbling. To promote the general welfare is fine and dandy—but Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are the heart of our national mission.

Therefore, starting in 1777, we have always celebrated July Fourth as Independence Day.

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Seventy years ago, the young men of our family—my uncles—in the small town of Knoxville, Illinois, used to go to Gil Hebard’s gun store and buy fireworks. Not only pinwheels, fountains, and sparklers, but also skyrockets and miniature buzz bombs were legal then in the Flatlands. 

“Epic Fireworks Stars in the Sky Firework Rocket Effects for 4th of July – Epic Fireworks” by EpicFireworks is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Enveloped in the sultry evening, my uncles Dick and Garrett LaFollette, Earl Chaney, and Richard Henderson fired their sky-sizzlers with great gusto, arching them above a huge elm tree that overspread Grandma’s yard. After the main event, we kids lit snakes and sparklers and shot up rolls of paper caps in our cowboy pistols. 

The Public Square across the street was littered with scraps of pastry left earlier in the day by piggish contenders who plunged their whole faces into the pie-eating contest under a hot sun. There had also been sack races, three-legged races, and giant slices of watermelon for everyone. 

A reasonable person might wonder, what had these hijinks to do with the deep principles of liberty that Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence? It’s hard to say, Dear Reader, but—something, surely. 

The hoopla was connected with our liberty. Otherwise, why did we get up to these robust exertions on July 4, but never in the more moderate weather of Constitution Day, September 17? 

Now, seven decades after the spectacles that enlivened my youth, we still make a big deal out of Independence Day. We still have picnics, speeches, fireworks, and tomfoolery. We poise our politicians over galvanized tanks and give everybody with a pitching arm the opportunity to dunk them in cold water. 

There is something republican, and also democratic, about that. 

There would not be much need to celebrate, had 56 brave souls not inked their signatures to a parchment 247 years ago and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the twin dreams of freedom and equality. 

Happy Fourth, and be careful with those sparklers. If you don’t watch out you’ll put somebody’s eye out.

“Sparklers” by visual.dichotomy is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

06.27.23
by

The Joy of Covid

Fooboo leapt into the window seat and set up a clamor. 

How much is that Fooboo in the window?

It was too early in the day for our neighbor dog to drag his master past our window, and Fooboo long ago became bored with the mailman’s daily sallies. 

I stood up from our dining table—which we use in the living room, as a breakfast/lunch/dinner nook.

I ambled to the window, and lo!, there stood Milo Bung, my old schoolmate. Milo was about to ring the bell at our side door—which we use instead of the front door. 

Milo’s melodious bing-bong triggered another spasm of barking, so I couldn’t hear any thoughts in my brain. I shooed the dog off the window seat and bade him be still. 

Then I cranked open the casement window. 

Which wore me out.

“Over here, Milo,” I croaked. 

He took his finger off the button and turned towards my casement window. 

“Oh, there you are!” He sidled over, scratching his elbows.

“Don’t come any closer,” I squeaked.

“Yeah, I heard you were under the weather,” Milo said.

Dread Disease

“Under the weather?” I said. “Under the weather? I have COVID!”

COVID-19. Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins, Center for Disease Control. Public Domain.

Milo rolled his eyes.

“I do. I have it. We both tested positive,” I wheezed. “So it’s more than just under the weather, old pal. We’re victims of a major global pandemic.”

“Yesterday’s news,” Milo said. He favored me with what I suppose he meant as a cheerful smile. “What you’ve got, at most, is a well-entrenched endemic.”

“Thanks for your support.”

“Well, you’ve got medicine, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” 

“And you’re getting better?”

“Thank God.” 

“And also, be sure to thank all those doctors and nurses, and the robber barons in Big Pharma, too,” said Milo, “working day and night on the taxpayer’s dime to develop vaccines. Had you not been immunized, you might have gotten sicker.”

My wife and I had just returned from a long trip. Somewhere along the Danube, we had been occupied by the virus that made our return home a miserable one. 

A Bullet Dodged

But Milo was right. It could have been worse.

I sighed. “When we were young, I never heard of such a thing as a global pandemic.” 

“Nor I,” said Milo, using his shirt tail to polish his bifocals. “Guess the first we heard the term was when Michael Crichton and Robin Cook started writing all those lurid medical thrillers. Death from Ebola and all them.”

Death from Ebola? It was not a title I recalled.

“Be that as it may. My point, Milo, is that once I learned a global pandemic was possible I assumed it would be cataclysmic—we’d all die.” 

“Well, amigo, a lot of us did die. Not you and me personally, of course, but a lot of—well, you know. People. Millions of people, all around the world.”

It was a sobering thought.

“So what are you going to do?” Milo asked.

“What do you mean, what am I going to do?”

“When you get out of quarantine?”

Post-Covid Challenges

“First thing, I’m going to the hardware store and buy a new set of hex keys.”

“An astounding act of celebration,” he declared.

“The bathroom faucet handle came loose, and I seem to be missing the Allen wrench the right size for that set screw. Must have lost it somewhere along the way.”

“How could you?”

I gave him a stony glare. “I’ve only had that set of wrenches for forty-five or fifty years.”

“Well, go ahead, then. Splurge.”

My hapless friend, a direct descendant of King Æthelred the Unready, stood pondering, head bowed. 

“And after I get the hex keys, I’ll say a little prayer for all those souls who caught covid before the world piled up four years of clinical experience.”

Milo Bung peered up at me through my window screen. “Guess we could all say that one.”

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

06.20.23
by

The Joy of Flying

British author Alex Comfort brought forth The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking, full of frank advice and racy illustrations, in 1972—fifty-one years ago.

Recent journeys have persuaded Your New Favorite Writer that a similar manual is desperately needed so that people may experience in full the joy of airline travel. 

All I have so far is a bit of text, shown below. But let me know if you can provide salacious drawings to illustrate my text. We might submit the package to Random Penguin, Inc., and make a fortune.

WARNING: SOME ADULT CONTENT MAY HAVE GOTTEN MIXED IN WITH OUR USUAL JUVENILE FARE. READ THE FOLLOWING AT YOUR OWN RISK.

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For eons it was held impossible that humans should fly. Then aviation was invented. People waxed giddy with the romance of flight. On came the age of barnstormers and wing-walkers. 

Lillian Boyer stands on the wing of a flying biplane. Public Domain.
A B-314, the California Clipper, at Pearl Harbor before World War II. National Air and Space Museum (NASM 85-14240), Smithsonian Institution.

That was followed by an age when the legendary rich could fly on a giant Zeppelin or a Boeing 314 flying boat—both options loaded with first-class amenities and oodles of personal space—merely by purchasing a ticket. 

However, flight has now become the forlorn lot of the masses. I say it is high time—nay, half past high time, Dear Reader!—for someone to write up aviation as art form and the dire expedients needed to cope with it.

Return to Upright Position

If you fly at all, you are certain to encounter the classic Sagging Airline Seat. You will be either (a) a victim of this equipment failure or (b) the embarrassed perpetrator of it. Airline seats were designed to be lowered to a semi-reclining position, ostensibly to help you relax in style and comfort. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE THIS FEATURE, Gentle Reader. It is a relic of primitive times, before modern technology enabled the airlines to avoid the humiliation of bankruptcy by stuffing 437 passengers into a 220-passenger space. 

A seat with a mind of its own. Photo by Paul Colins at thehigherflyer.com. Fair use.

In the brave new world of modern jet travel, lowering your airline seat has become an act of vandalism. You are thrusting your head and shoulders into the lap of some poor soul behind you, who already can’t figure out how to remove the wrapper of his chicken giardino entrée without smearing tomato sauce all over his hula shirt. Given these constraints, no decent human being would dream of pushing the seat-angle release button located in the armrest. The problem is: certain airline seats—at least half a dozen in each plane, apparently—have figured out how to recline all by themselves!

What to do if you are the victim of a Sagging Airline Seat? No option is truly satisfactory. You can announce loudly to the cabin at large that “some people have no consideration of others!” and hope the passenger ahead of you gets the hint. Or you can escalate the situation by shoving forward on the reclined seat back, hard enough to catapult your tormentor into his own tray-table. But regardless which course you choose, that seat will soon be sagging back into your space.

That’s bad enough, Dear Reader, but what if you are the unwilling perpetrator? With no intent at all to recline your seat, you find yourself slumping backwards, into the space of the person behind you. Your seat has chosen to lie down on the job. Perhaps you even receive a violent impetus from behind, driving you rapidly toward the first-class section; yet you know you will never make it that far. 

The best tactic is to press your seat-angle button, simultaneously grasping your own seat back with the other hand and yanking forward decisively—or if not decisively, at least resolutely. Then, when the seat sags again on its own initiative, usually within five minutes, you can lean around your seat, eyeballing the person behind you, and perform an elaborate shrug, implicitly absolving yourself of any further guilt. This will satisfy all but the most truculent fellow passengers, at least to the extent that you can both spend the entire rest of the flight mumbling and grumbling. 

These are the only known and approved methods to experience the joy of flying in the context of a chronically malfunctioning seat. 

What a Relief

Another true “joy of flying” maneuver is the well-known Gotta-Go-Potty Shuffle. This is best achieved some forty minutes into a domestic flight, or an hour and twenty minutes into an international flight. It works best if you are the window passenger in a three-seat row; but even if you are only the middle passenger, the discombobulation of at least one perfect stranger can be quite satisfying. 

Oh, joy! Here comes the beverage cart. Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash.

Once you have forced your inboard seatmate or seatmates to stand up and move down the aisle to give you room, if you have timed your escape right, you can start heading toward the rear galley area just as two burly and surly cabin attendants commit irrevocably to wheeling a bulky, impassable beverage cart down the aisle. That’s all right. Go ahead, squeeze by.

Start by approaching the aisle one row forward of the cart’s progress, and place both of your feet into the space of the person sitting in the aisle seat. You may need to kick aside the strap of their under-the-seat backpack, but don’t let that bother you. Once you achieve this position you will be looming over that aisle passenger, clearly in their space, maybe even supporting yourself by placing your hands on their armrest. Extra points can be awarded if this passenger is trying to sleep and you are waking them up. 

Then, as the cabin attendants move the cart forward past the seat row you are usurping, shove yourself into the three-inch space on the near side of the cart. This will force the attendants to wrestle the cart sideways and widen the three-inch gap to six inches. Now, strike while the iron is hot. Blunder your way through that six-inch gap. Extra points may be obtained if you can manage this while being significantly overweight.

It is important to act with confidence. Do not show fear or self-doubt. The customer is always right, and as an airline passenger you have been abused enough by the airline and you’re not going to take it anymore! Plow on down the aisle. After all, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Vive La Différence!

A lofty view from the apex of the Three-point Stance. Photo by Kristoferb, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

While we’re on the subject of toiletting, here’s another thing. Women may not know it, because they don’t usually pee standing up. Whereas men do so all the time, and with casual abandon. 

Thus all men who ride passenger planes are familiar with the Airline Lavatory Three-point Stance. That is: Two feet planted equidistant on either side of the toilet, body canted forward to suspend the, um, source of urination directly above the open bowl, and the crown of one’s head lodged against the inward-sloping bulkhead. This stance confers stability even in stratospheric turbulence, given sufficient neck strength. And it leaves both hands free for important actions like unzipping, rezipping, and, importantly, aiming. 

Come to think of it, there may be men who have not yet mastered this position. I beg of you, gentlemen: practice, for all our sakes. 

Anyway, I thought you women, who may have supposed the male role is all beer and skittles, would want to know about this continuing challenge to our manhood.

Final Results Pending

There are many other refinements, not yet mentioned, to the art of flying with joy. But before proceeding further with the project I will wait till I see the sample illustrations.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

06.13.23
by

A Writer’s Week

Dear Readers—The following, though almost comic in its brevity, is a concise snapshot of the thrills, glamour, and enjoyment that are part of an up-and-coming author’s daily life. 

Sunday, June 4

Church as usual in the morning, and daughter Katie expected for dinner in the evening. That should leave me four or five after-lunch hours for literary work and my Mandatory Nap.

I spend two hours revising the blog post for Tuesday, June 6. It’s about Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans, and how that nasty fight of yesteryear echoes down to our day. What if this post draws fire from Hamilton’s or Jefferson’s 21st-century followers? I must get this right, as near bullet-proof as I can make it. Don’t want to get drawn into politics.

Fooboo. Photo by author.

At three o’clock, I took the dog, Fooboo, for a walk. It’s a beautiful day, but quite hazy, due to wildfires in Canada.

Then back to work. I read and digest a new chapter written by a colleague in Tuesdays With Story, one of two writers’ critique groups I belong to. This chapter is a vivid excursion into a dystopian society of the near future. I mark a few passages of tangled syntax or confusing concepts, but it’s a great read. This kind of work is time-consuming, but you’ve got to give feedback so you can get feedback. Otherwise you’re just shouting into a vacuum.

Katie arrives at five, bringing her dog Lucy to dinner with her. Time to put off the literary lion and put on the dad.

Never got my nap. Hmpf.

Monday, June 5

Ian Fleming. Fair use.

A late breakfast, accompanied by all we could stand to watch of a disappointing 2014 biopic on the late Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. Then it’s time to get to work.

This is one of two or three mornings a week I manage to carve out a few hours for writing new material. I bang away at the first draft of my new World War II novel, tentatively titled Brother’s Blood. This seems to me the most brutal and exciting part of writing. A story does not exist yet, except some fuzzy notion in your head. You make it come to life by writing words, sentences, and paragraphs. How does one do that? I don’t know, but one must do it. Two and a half hours later, out of breath, I emerge with another chapter and a half snug in my laptop. 

Time to wash breakfast dishes and clean up the kitchen. Over lunch I read the penultimate chapter of Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, the book that prompted my upcoming blog post. 

Almost forgot to record that somewhere in the middle of the morning’s writing, I took a few minutes to email my fellow writers in Tuesdays With Story, to make sure everybody understands which chapters we’rre reviewing tomorrow night. I’m the group’s gatekeeper for stories to be critiqued, and I host the Tuesday night meetings, which are a hybrid of in-person and Zoom encounters.

Arthur Koestler. Photo by Eric Koch for Anefo, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.

After lunch Fooboo takes me for another walk. His real, official name is Midnight, so I’m walking Midnight at noon. Midnight at Noon. Great title for a book! What would it be about? Alaskans and Norwegians, especially Spitzbergers, are proud of their midnight sun, but this is Midnight at Noon. Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, a political thriller about the Bolshevik experience in Russia. But no. This would be Midnight at Noon. I ought to keep it under wraps lest someone steal my title and write the book before I even know what it’s about.

After walking Fooboo I take my nap. Now it’s three p.m. I’d better look at the blog post again, and then read another story for tomorrow night’s meeting. But revising the blog post takes the whole time. I call it quits for now—can’t miss Jeopardy!

After supper and our nightly Scrabble game, I’m back at the laptop, seeking out royalty-free images to decorate the Hamilton blog post. Then I spend an hour entering the text and images in WordPress, adjusting their positions, highlighting and coloring text, etc. I finish around 9:30. 

Tuesday, June 6

I’m behind on my reading for tonight’s Tuesdays with Story meeting, so most of today will be consumed with reading the work of my fellow writers and registering comments on same. I enjoy this process, even though some of my colleagues write in genres or subject matter I have no interest in. The fact that I am not the author’s intended audience has notthing to do with my responsibility to read the piece and give intelligent feedback. Sometimes it’s a kind of drudgery, but it’s drudgery that might prove useful to a friend who hopes to break into publication. By suppertime, I’ve finished all six items and have printed out my comments so they’ll be close at hand when we begin our discussion.

So the nightly ritual of Jeopardy!, supper, and Scrabble occurs just as scheduled.

At seven, Mike and Jack show up at the door. Ensconced with wine in the sunroom, we three are joined via Zoom by Amber, Amit, Judy, Suzanne, Bob, Kashmira, and Jaime. Two hours fly by as we comment on one another’s work with comments that swing frequently between praising and challenging. Critiquing is an art. To receive critique with an open and discerning mind is a discipline. 

Wednesday, June 7

The morning’s first business: follow up on last night’s meeting. There is a Tuesdays With Story  newsletter, with rotating editorship, that summarizes the feedback each author received. After first updating my own list of future dates and presenters, I send reminders to all who presented material last night to send their concise summary of feedback received to this month’s editor. And I send the editor list of who presented last night and who is on the docket next time. 

This week’s Blood Pressure Challenge is a letter from the Kia car company advising me that I’d better apply for a free steering wheel lock to protect my apparently all-too-stealable 2016 Kia Soul. I navigate their website and fill out their form. The software does not accept it and advises me to call their 800 number instead.

While waiting for Kia to answer the phone, I peruse other websites in my self-assigned quest to determine whether I am a fool for not switching my weekly blog from WordPress to Substack. I learn that there are different forms of WordPress, and I’ve chosen the wrong one. It appears, by the way, that I should also be considering Medium and Ghost. In addition, I learn that actual reasons to choose any one of these platforms over the others exist only in web marketing techspeak—no matter which forum one reads. None of these programs would stay in business if they had to explain themselves in English. We would all figure out that we don’t need any of the things they claim to do. But as it is, we will never know that, because we’ll never find out what it is they claim to do.

After two hours down this rabbit hole, I hang up on Kia and make myself a sandwich. After lunch, I nap and walk the dog. 

Then it’s free reading time. I’ve got a tall stack of books. I order them from the public library and then try to cram them into my head before they’re overdue. Right now I’m on Spencer’s Mountain, by Earl Hamner, Jr. It’s the coming-of-age novel that gave birth to the Waltons TV series. It’s what we now call a young adult novel, a quick read but well worth reading for its distinctive voice, its narrative flow, and the skilful plot management. Even though I’ve seen it all on TV, it still draws tears at all the right places. 

Kristin Oakley

After Jeopardy! and a quick dinner of microwaved yakisoba, I’m off to Mystery to Me Bookstore, that magical Madison venue where my friend Kristin Oakley is unveiling her new novel The Devil Particle. It’s the first of a four-book series—a different genre, story line, and approach from her previous novels. But if you liked Carpe Diem, Illinois and God on Mayhem Street, you might like this one, too. Kristin’s launch party brings out lots of good friends—writing guru Christine DeSmet, author Peggy Williams (whose new book will be published next spring!), internet marketing maven Celeste Anton, and Milwaukee publisher Kira Henschel. It’s nice to be together in one room, all unmasked. And I get my copy of The Devil Particle SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR!

Thursday, June 8

The long weekend is already beginning. After two sets of geriatric doubles tennis in the morning, I make my usual Thursday rounds: I pick up the church’s mail at the Struck Street post office, drop it off at the church, and stop at the fish store to pick up half a pound of salmon for tonight’s dinner and a pint of seafood gumbo for lunch. 

After the gumbo (After the Gumbo—another great book title!), I’m off to Winnequah school in my Literary Lion persona. Attentive Readers may recall that I read my middle-grade manuscript, Izzy Strikes Gold!, aloud to grandson Tristan’s fifth-grade class last winter. Today they get their yearbooks—yes, fifth-graders get yearbooks now—and spend time milling around in the corridor signing one other’s yearbooks. The teacher, Matt Fielder, has invited me back to see the kids and sign their yearbooks. More than fifty years have passed since I last signed a yearbook. It’s very nice to be asked.

Arriving at home, I face an infrequent chore. We take Fooboo out, drench him with water from the hose, soap him up, rinse him down, towel him off, and turn him loose. He does not like it one bit, except for  running around the backyard shaking off water and rolling in the grass. Since he’s still too wet to be re-admitted to the house, I spend quality time with him in the yard, so he won’t be lonesome. 

I lounge in my zero-gravity chair and start on my next library book. (I finished Spencer’s Mountain.) The new book is Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons. I saw the movie with Paul Scofield and Robert Shaw when it came out in the Sixties. I caught the last scenes of it recently on TV and was struck by the dialog between Sir Thomas More and his accusers. So I got the book to read it and perhaps get a few clues how a great playwright does it.

After an hour, the dog’s ready to go in, and Jeopardy! is coming up.

Friday, June 9

The day begins on the East Side of Madison. I join a couple of friends, Norm and Karl, for breakfast at a local cholesterol shop. Our geezers’ triumvirate meets three or four times a year to grouse about how life is getting to be strange. 

I rush from breakfast to Winnequah school, where Tristan graduates from fifth grade at 9:30—yes, fifth-graders have graduations now. A good time is had by all. 

By the time I get home, it’s noon. Besides lunch, I have an email saying that the June issue of Well Read magazine has dropped, featuring my short story, “Beast of the Moment.” I take a few minutes to announce it on social media, complete with a link so people can read it. I’m proud of this, the first short story I’ve published in a long time. Short stories are about as hard to write as novels. Just shorter.

I spend the first part of the afternoon dashing off an issue of my irregularly published e-newsletter, The Haphazard Times, to let my loyallest fans know about “Beast of the Moment.” I take the opportunity to mention that a special price of twelve dollars a copy is temporarily in force on my novel, Price of Passage.

I accomplish a bit of yard work and house cleanup Then Katie, Elsie, and Tristan descend on us, along with my sister, Cynda, and her husband, Steve. We spend the afternoon and early evening celebrating the kids’ graduations from their respective school grades—fifth and eighth—and my approaching 78th birthday. We can’t celebrate together on my birthday, because Joelle and I will be in Budapest, ready to start our adventure cruising down the Danube. 

That’s all for now.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

06.06.23
by

Hamilton vs. Republicans

Alexander Hamilton. Portrait by John Trumbull, 1804. Public Domain.

Alexander Hamilton has got me thinking about Republicans.

Hamilton may have been a republican, but he was not a Republican. 

Hamilton was the disease Republicans vowed to cure.

I’ve been reading Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow’s scholarly biography. It’s the book that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to create the musical show Hamilton.

Out of respect for your time, Fair Reader—and to put my own subsequent remarks in context—I shall boil down Chernow’s quarter of a million words to a few paragraphs, immediately below.

Summary of Chernow’s Book 

Hamilton was a meteor that flashed across American skies in the late 1700s and very early 1800s. The glare of his arc obscured a lot of other guys desperately trying to get noticed. 

President George Washington in 1795. Portrait by Gilbert Stuart. Public Domain.

A poor immigrant from the West Indies, Hamilton became George Washington’s right-hand man during the Revolutionary War, and the postwar confusion, and the early Constitutional period. When Washington was elected president, he chose Hamilton as secretary of the treasury. Besides consolidating and funding the existing Revolutionary War debts, starting a national bank, and putting America’s currency and credit on a sound basis, Hamilton organized nearly everything else about the infant government. He pushed all his many projects, from the Coast Guard to the Whiskey Tax, on to ultimate success.

In his pushiness, he made an enemy of Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s Secretary of State. Besides the fact that Hamilton leaned toward the British, from whom we had just separated, while Jefferson favored revolutionary France, the two men held opposing images of the future United States. 

Hamilton advocated a strong central government to protect U.S. commercial interests, foster trade, and preside over an expanding industrial economy. He also abhorred slavery and wished to see it abolished. Jefferson idealized the independent farmer spread across the landscape—including those independent farmeers of the South who owned battalions of slaves to help with their independent farming. He distrusted cities, financiers, and a centralized government.

The Founding Fathers abhorred political parties; but factions immediately arose in the new American republic, based on contrasting worldviews and economic interests—and you had to call them something. Hamilton and his teammates were called Federalists. The name came from the Federalist Papers, a series of essays Hamilton had written, or caused to be written, promoting adoption of the U. S. Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson as president, 1801. Portrait by Rembrandt Peale. Public Domain.

Jefferson and his friends, including fellow Virginians James Madison and James Monroe, accused Hamilton of trying to sell America back to the British. They suggested that Federalists wanted to replace our elected president with a monarchy—despite the fact that Federalist-in-chief George Washington would never condone such a thing. The Jefferson crowd were called anti-Federalists, or more lastingly, Republicans—simply meaning they favored a republic, not the monarchy they feared the Federalists would impose.

Federalists vs. Republicans: It was the birth of the American two-party system. Things went downhill from there.

Chernow of course adds numerous details, which I have spared you. But that is the gist of it.

The Upshot

Hamilton came to a tragic end, which need not detain us here. 

But what of that two-party system? What happened to it? Why is it that, 225 years later, we do not still have Federalists and Republicans? 

Hold on a moment, Gracious Reader: Are you sure we don’t?

Around 1800, when France’s woes were an American spectator sport, U.S. fans of the French Revolution organized themselves as “Democratic Clubs.” These clubs aligned with Jefferson’s Republicans, at least on foreign policy. So the Republicans started calling themselves Democratic Republicans and, later on, just Democrats. 

Meanwhile the Federalist party shot itself in the political foot too many times and went out of business, to be replaced by a party called the Whigs. Named after a similar party in the United Kingdom, the Whigs were not quite Federalists, but they had a lot in common with them. They wanted a strong central government that would foster infrastructure—roads, canals, railroads—to grow the domestic economy. They also favored a national bank and protective tariffs. 

Sound a lot like Hamilton, don’t they, these Whigs?

The Democrats—and remember, Democrats were Republicans—espoused Jeffersonian ideals. They aimed to protect farmers, including the slaveholding farmers of the South. They rejected urbanism, industry, and finance. They opposed a strong central government. 

Senator Stephen A. Douglas. Original photo by Julian Vannerson, with Photoshop work by Kosobay. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, for example, wanted each state to make its own choice on slavery. This idea, which he called Popular Sovereignty, would have allowed Northern states to salve their consciences by prohibiting the immoral institution while simultaneously the Southern states could go on exploiting African American slaves. Douglas thought it was the ideal solution.

As the slavery question came to dominate politics, the Whig party—which was not all of one mind on slavery—withered away. A new party was born to take its place. Founding delegates meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin, thought “Republican” would be a good name. The Democrats having discarded the label long before, it was up for grabs. So old Whigs like Willam H. Seward and Abraham Lincoln became Republicans. 

By 1860, the two-party system comprised Republicans, who now occupied the niche the Federalists had carved in the 1790s; and Democrats, who formerly had called themselves Republicans, back when they stood against the Federalists.

All clear so far? 

Maybe not? Perhaps a review is in order. 

Hamilton led the Federalists, who wanted a strong government fostering industry, trade, and commerce. Jefferson led the Republicans, who wanted a weak central government, states’ rights, and a system tilted in favor of dispersed farmers.

Through a process of evolution, the party that carried on Hamilton’s outlook called itself “Republican” in the mid-nineteenth century, as the Jeffersonian Republicans decades earlier had changed their label to “Democrats.”

Switch-a-Roonie

When the Civil War came along, it was a war between the Republicans and the Democrats. That’s an oversimplification, but conceptually it is true.

The Republicans won the Civil War and the Democrats lost the Civil War.

Then the Republicans, assuming the slavery question had been settled, went on to other preoccupations: high finance and large-scale industry—typical Hamiltonian concerns.

The Democrats, after losing the Civil War, hoped to restore their party’s good name in the North while restoring society to its antebellum status in the South. 

Now, Kind Reader, it is beyond Your New Favorite Writer’s competence to sketch how the two-party system evolved from a quasi-Hamiltonian versus a quasi-Jeffersonian party a century ago to a Big Government party and a Small Government Party today.

I am only here to suggest that today’s Democrats seem to espouse postures of which Hamilton, the Federalist, might approve. And today’s Republicans seem to espouse postures that Jefferson, the Republican, might endorse.

Would it be folly to suggest that today’s Democrats are a continuation of Hamilton’s Federalists, and that today’s Republicans now carry on the tradition of Jefferson’s Republicans? 

Perhaps it is folly. Yet there is something in it.

So What?

Reading Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, I especially enjoyed one statement by the author: “If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.”

Hamilton set the pattern of the federal government as an active partner in setting the United States up to be a great nation—commercially, politically, and on the world stage. Because of Hamilton we have a federal government that is not afraid to step into the lives of its citizens and assume a directive role.

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others were wary of such confident assertiveness by the Executive Branch. They strove to establish primacy of the Congress over the Executive. With almost 250 years of perspective, we can say they largely failed in that mission. Congress today is more an appendage of the presidency than the other way around.

Largely for this reason, today’s Republicans wage a twilight struggle against federal overreach, highlighting many cases where people’s lives have suffered unreasonable intrusion by the federal government. They are opposing a well-entrenched foe—the Democrats, moved by a vision of the good things government has accomplished, and all the good things it might yet accomplish, if only the Republicans would let it.

The chief lesson of our common past is that the passions of today did not spring full-blown from our own brilliant imaginations. They are the echoes of similar passions begun centuries ago and modulated along the rocky pathways of the intervening years. 

Lord help us all if we fail to grasp the implications of this fact.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

05.23.23
by

All the Time There Is

On a nice day in May, as I lay in my zero gravity chair in the backyard, looking up, examining cloud patterns etched in a blue dome, its bottoms fringed round with the yellow-green of spring trees—it occurred to me that however much time this reverie took, I could spare.

Growing older, I become more patient. With each passing year—each step closer to the chasm that ends this life and drops us into the next—I am less concerned about running out of time.

When young I was often impatient.  

Now, my impatience is all used up.

In the midst of the storm and strife, the middle years of life, there are things to accomplish that seem time-bound. We must prove ourselves in some minor skill before we can move up the ladder. We must pile up enough gold to send our kids to college by the time they are ready to go. We need to stretch and to strive, to scrimp and to save, to squirrel away assets against the future.

All that is behind me. Now, everything worth doing seems to want all my attention. It is less vital to finish than to engage. 

Kipling sketched a remarkable image of the afterlife—only I suppose it applies to my here and now:

When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.
And those that were good shall be happy: they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comet’s hair.
They shall find real saints to draw from—Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all!
And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;
And no one will work for the money, and no one will work for the fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!

We who have lived beyond the hustle and urgency of mid-life know a secret we could tell to those still trapped in that gosh-awful hurly-burly. But it’s no good; they would not listen. 

Or rather, they would not hear. Even gifted with the best intentions and the strongest focus, they could not hear. You don’t have ears for that secret until it becomes your own. 

It is the whisper of Eternity. It says: Go. Do. Enjoy. Be. You have all the time there is.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

05.16.23
by

Fonix

A news story stunned my ears last week, courtesy of Wisconsin Public Radio.

“A bipartisan bill is expected to be released this month that would change the way most public schools in Wisconsin teach reading,” reported Corinne Hess. 

“. . . Instead of being taught reading through pictures, word cues and memorization, children would be taught using a phonics-based method that focuses on learning to sound out letters and phrases.

“According to [the Department of Public Instruction], only about 20 percent of school districts are using a phonics-based approach to literacy education. Other reading curriculums that don’t include phonics have been shown to be less effective for students.”

Whoa. Stop the presses!

Bipartisan? Could peace be at hand in the Great Reading War?

Phonics

When I was a kid in 1951—yes, 72 years ago—our teachers taught us phonics. They leaked the remarkable secret that each letter represents one or more sounds in the spoken English language. (I mean American English, Dear Reader. I hold no brief for British, ANZAC, or South African speakers who utter tortured diphthongs where we would use vowels.)

We learned that “a” can be pronounced long, as in “bake”; short, as in “flag”; soft, as in “father”; and so forth. We learned that “c” is sometimes hard, as in “cat,” and sometimes soft, as in “recess.” Interestingly, “bicycle” has a soft c and a hard c, both in one word. “Y,” also interestingly, can sound like a long “i,” as in “tyke,” or as a long “e,” as in “candy,” or as a short “i,” as in “bicycle.” But sometimes it has a special motive force of its own, as in “Yankee.” 

We were taught that phonics rules had exceptions—quite a few of them, actually. For example, sometimes the sound normally represented by the letter f is actually spelled with the two letters “ph,” as in “telephone.” Sometimes the two-letter combination “ch” is pronounced like a hard c or a k, as in “chorus,” not with the soft “ch” sound of “chair.” And so forth, and so on. 

Oh, so many exceptions. Yet, even with all these exceptions, the whole thing hung together and made a kind of sense. 

Light bulb. Photo by MEHEDI HASAN ( KΛΛSH ) on Unsplash.

When you met an unfamiliar word you could “sound it out,” and nine times out of ten it turned out to be a word you already knew. You could produce a string of sounds from a word’s letters, and you would suddenly recognize the word. 

Hallelujah! A light bulb went on in your head. 

Sometimes you had to try three or four runs at it, using alternate pronunciations, but eventually you could figure it out. 

The opportunity to sound out the words you didn’t know made reading a joy. You could move forward at a decent speed. A great bonus was that when you figured out a word, all its snags and bumps stayed with you. So when you discovered that “diaphragm” spelled dy-uh-fram, not dy-uh-fraggum, you remembered that silent g ever afterward.

It was never a perfect system, but it worked pretty well for those of us who were thoroughly drilled in phonics in the first two or three grades of school.

So what could possibly go wrong? 

Politics, that’s what.

Poor Johnny

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published a book called Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It. Flesch’s thesis was that a new method of reading instruction—the so-called “whole word” or “look-say” method—was robbing a generation of youngsters of the power of reading. Instead of learning to associate letters with sounds and thereby sound out the words they were reading, young people were expected to simply recognize words one by one, from their general shape. This made reading into an insurmountable guessing game, according to Flesch—akin to the challenge faced by young Chinese who need to learn thousands of separate characters.

Horace Mann. Public Domain.

The whole word method was not actually new—education guru Horace Mann embraced it in the 1840s—but it had gradually supplanted phonics instruction in American public schools in the first half of the twentieth century.

When Flesch launched his withering critique in 1955, it met stiff resistance from a liberal educational establishment that had largely adopted the whole word method and rejected phonics. This debate soon went the way of all debates in our fractured society: The politicians made it their own. Reading became just another battlefront in our great cultural war. If you were conservative you favored phonics; if you were liberal, you pooh-poohed phonics and favored the whole word approach (also called the whole language approach).

That frozen paradigm has persisted through six or seven decades. If you were for phonics, you might want to put the 19th-century McGuffey readers back in the classroom; you might also be suspicious of fluoride in the water supply and aspire to Make America Great Again. On the other hand, if you favored the whole language approach, you were probably a card-carrying member of the teachers’ union and wanted to put Critical Race Theory in the classrooms. 

A Freshening Wind

Now, there seems to be a shift in the wind. For the first time in my long memory, it seems both sides have tired of treating reading as a political football and are seeking to coalesce on “evidence-based” or “scientific” methods of reading instruction. And scientific evidence has accumulated in favor of phonics to the point where it cannot be ignored. 

Tony Evers. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

But here’s what’s really new: The Republican assemblyman drafting new legislation on the matter is working with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to draft a plan teachers can embrace. Liberal Democratic governor Tony Evers, himself a veteran educator, sounds willing to endorse a bipartisan phonics plan.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if educational practices, for once, were not held hostage to partisan ideologies? One would like to think it can happen.

A Personal View

I was taught phonics. My wife, also a product of the 1950s, learned to read by the whole word method. I am a good speller and know a lot about the way words are put together. My wife is not a confident speller and is deaf to many verbal nuances. 

On the other hand, there are probably people who became excellent spellers and wordsmiths without ever being exposed to phonics. And there are probably people who learned phonics but did not learn to read very well. No theory can fully capture the natural differences in people’s aptitudes and learning styles. 

As a traditionalist, I look askance at laws that would dictate teaching methods statewide. What ever happened to local school boards?, I wonder. Should not they, rather than the legislature or the DPI, control the curriculum and pedagogy in their own schools? 

In an era when powerful forces militate for broad uniformity of policy in all arenas, there is something to be said for the idea of local variation—or at least, for the possibility of local variation. It’s hard to imagine that Milwaukee and Black River Falls have the same set of problems and need identical solutions.

Even with that caveat, if current trends bring about a re-emphasis on phonics, that’s probably a good thing—especially if we can bury the hatchet on our longstanding war over how children learn to read.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

05.09.23
by

Uses of the Past

T.S. Eliot.
We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

—T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

What is it that drives me back upon the past, to consider what has gone before and view it in a new light? I feel the need more strongly with each passing year. 

When we get old, we want to make young people understand. 

Understand what? 

The portents of the past, things our children and grandchildren do not know simply because they were not there. The world I grew up in was not only different, it was instructive.

My mind reels back to Streator, Illinois, population 17,500—the town where I lived between the ages of six and twelve. The years were 1951 to 1957. The rhythms and facts of life told us who we were and taught us how to be.

Downtown

People needed things. But shopping malls, strip malls, and convenience stores on the edge of town—these had not yet been invented. So what were we to do? We went downtown, of course. 

All the stores were on Main Street, or on half a dozen streets that intersected Main in what was called “the business district.” We had a big, solid bank; two department stores, Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward; a couple of dime stores; dry goods stores, men’s and women’s clothing stores; a store that sold sheet music, band instruments, phonograph records and the machines to play them; two movie theaters, a few family-style restaurants, and several taverns. 

Stores opened at nine a.m. and closed at five p.m., but on Saturday they stayed open till nine at night. People drove into town from outlying farms. They walked up and down the streets, shopping or window-shopping in the stores. 

We town-dwellers did the same thing. Thus the streets were crowded every Saturday night. You were always bumping into people you had just seen at school or at work yesterday. Sometimes you encountered an old friend you hadn’t seen in nearly a week! 

It taught us we were members of a community.

Sunday was a day of rest. Nothing was open on Sunday except the churches, a few gas stations, and the little mom-and-pop stores—one in each neighborhood—that sold newspapers, candy, bubble gum, cigarettes, and the occasional quart of milk or box of crackers. 

Diversity

For a few weeks in summer, muscular, leathery men in clean blue jeans, western shirts, and cowboy hats joined the promenade on the streets of town. They were Navajos and worked most of the year repairing track and roadbed for the Santa Fe railroad. They worked their way north, arriving in our area in early summer. They lived in dormitory railcars that were parked on a siding near the high school athletic field. 

On Saturday nights, these Navajos got cleaned up and went downtown like everybody else, adding an exotic element to our community. When they were in our vicinity, they just came downtown on Saturday night, like everybody else. It was what you did. 

Our parents taught us that people who are different from you are still people, and that people who do hard jobs are worthy of respect on that account alone.

Women’s Work

Men went out to work in offices, shops, or factories, or on farms. Women worked at home doing housework, which was more demanding in those days. Clothing was washed in cylindrical tubs, then run between a pair of rollers on top of the tub to wring the water out. Then you hung the clothes on a cotton line in the backyard to dry. 

Doing laundry in the 1930s, a decade before I was born. U.S. Government photo. Public Domain.

When the sun had dried the clothes stiff, they were taken down, remoistened with water from a sprinkling bottle, and ironed. Irons were electric, but they were not yet steam irons. Therefore clothes had to be dampened before ironing so the wrinkles would come out. Wrinkled clothes were considered unsightly; permanent press fabrics did not exist. The woman of the household spent at least one full day each week, maybe two, on laundry and ironing.

Every spring Mom had a special job to do, part of spring cleaning. She had to clean soot off the walls. We burned soft coal for heat all through the winter. Tiny specks of soot wafted through heating ducts and clung to walls and other surfaces. Most of our walls were covered with wallpaper, which in those days was literally paper. You couldn’t get it wet. 

So mom used a special wallpaper-cleaning compound. You rubbed a lump of it across the wall, picking up soot, then folded the soot inside and used a clean part of the lump on the next stroke; over and over again. When coal furnaces and old-fashioned wallpaper were things of the past, the wallpaper cleaning compound was re-merchandised as Play-Doh.

Not only laundry and housecleaning, but food preparation was more labor-intensive. Housewives took full advantage of canned foods and the new frozen foods—TV dinners—that became available, but most food was not prepackaged. It had to be cooked on a stove, electric or gas-fired. We didn’t have microwave ovens yet.

Women used lard a lot in cooking. Often the lard was actually bacon grease, drained from the skillet and saved in a tub in the refrigerator.

There was no “Take Your Children to Work Day.” Opportunities to shadow Dad at work were rare for most of us. But we got to see Mom hard at work on her many tasks every day. It gave us a respect for our mothers. 

Skylarking

For all that, life was not just a daily grind. There was a fair amount of skylarking. 

A ride in the country. Public Domain photo.

Gasoline was cheap, traffic was light, and America’s love affair with the private automobile was in full bloom. Often on weekends in the summer Dad loaded us into the car for a drive in the country. We just drove around, looking at farms and forests. We kids rolled the windows down and stuck our faces out into the slipstream like cocker spaniels. We seldom exceeded fifty miles per hour, which was about what the roads would allow. The Interstate system was just starting to be built; none of us had ever experienced driving on a superhighway.

A mug of freshly poured root beer. Photo by Markmark28, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

On the way home we would stop at the root beer stand for—what else?—root beer. It was a delightful treat on a Friday or Saturday night. We learned that life had simple pleasures to offer, and they are good.

General Mills and the other cereal companies offered wonderful emoluments for children—secret decoder rings, a square inch of land in the Klondike gold fields, miniature atomic submarines that rose and sank in the bathtub when fueled with baking soda. 

You had to send in one or two boxtops from the sponsor’s cereal brand, along with twenty-five cents “in coins or stamps,” to a postal box in Battle Creek, Michigan. It usually took two or three weeks for the small parcel with the prize to arrive in the mail. That taught us the principle of delayed gratification.

Instructional Value

Far be it from me to suggest, Dear Reader, that our daily routines were a preconceived set of lesson plans to educate us in important life skills and attitudes. But that’s what they amounted to. That was the effect.

I lie awake nights wondering if my grandchildren will grow up easy marks for fast-talking salesmen because they were never wooed by the siren song of the Duncan Yo-yo representative in the vacant lot beside Marx’s store on a balmy afternoon in May.

No wonder I’m starting to look haggard. I guess we’ll just have to hope for the best.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

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