Books or eReaders

 

"Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators"

                                                                            -- Stephen Fry

With this quote, I have a new favorite philosopher. Stephen Fry! You know, Jeeves to Hugh Laurie's Wooster. 

 

          That's him on the right as Jeeves.                             He'll be 65, August 24. 

                                                                                       Look at all the books behind him!                 

I don't remember when I first saw the very funny British comedy Jeeves and Wooster, I was certainly
an adult, probably over 50 when it aired in the U.S., probably on PBS, which has little to do with the topic of this blog post -- the contentious question Books or eReaders?

I do remember learning to read, though not exactly when. According to my mother, I was three. I  do very clearly remember actually learning. I would sit under the ironing board while my mother ironed and read to her. When I came to a word I didn't know, I'd spell it and she'd tell me what it was. By the time I was in the second grade, we were reading as a family. My mother, younger brother, and I would take turns reading aloud. Daddy enjoyed listening. There was no Amazon then and our town didn't have a public library so we read Momma's books from when she was a child.

My favorites were Johanna Spyri's Heidi and Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. By the by, did you know that that book's proper title is Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse and it's one of the best selling novels of all time?! I didn't, either. Ain't Wikipedia grand!

             

I also don't remember when I got my first eReader, but I'm on my third one so however long it takes to wear out two of them, it's been that long ago.

Books or eBooks is a question that seems almost limited to my generation these days. To be honest, I really don't understand the fanatic loyalty to hard copy books that some of my peers seem to cherish.

At our age, vision is very often not as good as it used to be. You can adjust the light available on your eReader. You can adjust the font size. You can even have your eReader read to you. And eReader attributes that I appreciate are not needing to keep up with a bookmark or page number if you lose your bookmark. Not to mention, that if the book you're reading is lengthy and you like to read in bed, you don't have to worry about breaking your face if you fall asleep and drop the book.

Another thing about eReaders that I especially like is the ease with which you can acquire another book. I don't know about you, but I experience low-level panic if I finish a book and haven't another at hand to start. This can quickly lead to financial ruin if you automatically turn to an online book vender  in the middle of the night. A definite eReader negative.

But, spend a few pleasant moments with a librarian at your local public library and you'll learn how to download a digital book from the library for free. You don't even have to worry about late fees, because the digital book automatically reverts to the library on exactly the right date. Or, as icing on the cake, you can go online and renew the loan if you need more time to finish the book. You have the same 24/7 access to books as with an online vender, but the money you need to pay your electric bill is safe. 

When I first went digital, I said I'd never buy another hard copy book. Well, let me just say, I still can't take my credit card into an area where books are being sold or I'll get into financial trouble. I still bring hardcopy books home from the library. I cherish books people give me as gifts. I love the "Little Free Libraries" scattered around my town. And I even rescue and mend books I find lying on park benches.

So my answer to the question "Books or eReaders" is a resounding YES!!!

P.S. I like stairs and elevators, too,

especially if they're ornate and take me where I want to go.

Freedom of Choice

 

The statue on top of this building is called "Freedom." 

Buckle up. You're in for a history lesson!

In 1854, Sculptor Thomas Crawford, originally from New York, was commissioned to design and complete a full-size plaster model of the statue "Freedom" in his studio in Rome, Italy. All nineteen and one-half feet of her. 

Jefferson Davis (yes, indeed, that Jefferson Davis) was in charge of the then ongoing construction of the Capitol building and all it decorations. There was a kerfuffle between the New Yorker and slave-holding Mississippian. Crawford had originally crowned Freedom with the liberty cap, a symbol of an emancipated slave. Needless to say, Davis being the boss, won the tussle. 

Crawford died in 1857 before the full-size plaster model could be shipped to the United States. In the spring of 1858, divided into six crates, she set sail for New York. During her voyage the ship began taking on water and put in at Gibraltar for repairs. The ship left Gibraltar only to begin leaking again and ending up in Bermuda. After stopping there in storage for a while, Freedom, or at least half of her, arrived in New York City in December, 1858. Finally all parts of the plaster model arrived in Washington, D.C. in late March 1859.

Casting of Freedom in bronze at the Mills Foundry outside Washington, D.C., began in 1860. The work was interrupted in 1861 by the Civil War and again when the foreman in charge of the casting went on strike. Instead of paying him higher wages, Mills turned the project over to Philip Reid, one of his slaves working at the foundry. Reid presided over the rest of the casting and assembly of the figure. Freedom was finished by the end of 1862. On December 2, 1863, a year and a half before the end of the Civil War and eleven months after the Emancipation Proclamation, former slaves completed the installation of this bronze woman called Freedom to her pedestal atop the Capitol of the United States. 

I find it ironic that "Freedom" a.) is personified as a woman; b.) that her design had to be approved by a slave-holding man; and c.) that she was finished and raised to her pedestal by slaves and newly-freed slaves.

Just like that beautiful statue standing high above Washington, D. C., women's rights, indeed almost everyone's rights, have followed a long and torturous path from that grand Declaration of Independence and the nascent days of The Constitution. And it looks like we've still got a ways to go.

With apologies to Arlo Guthrie and his Alice's Restaurant, "Freedom" is what I come here to talk about. Not a statue, or a symbol, but the real freedom for American citizens to make life-changing (even life-or-death) decisions about their own medical care -- specifically women citizens and anyone with a uterus. The Freedom of Choice. And that is exactly what I mean Freedom of Choice. NOT pro-abortion. And having only one choice, is no choice at all.

There are as many experiences of pregnancy as there are people who have been or are pregnant. 

I have a friend whose mother was advised by her doctor to terminate her pregnancy, but she exercised her freedom of choice and carried my friend to term. And I'm glad she did. That instance, however, did not in any way involve a "law" or a court's decision.

What about governmental regulations? 

In 1970 when Air Force Capt. Susan Struck, a career officer serving as a nurse in Vietnam got pregnant, she was transferred to a base in Washington, one of the few states where abortion was then legal. Not only was pregnancy a reason to discharge her, albeit honorably, but the regulation extended beyond that "The commission of any woman officer will be terminated with the least practicable delay when it is established that she...has given birth to a living child while in commissioned officer status."

Despite Struck's plan to give the child up for adoption (which she did) and the fact that she had 60 days of accrued leave for recovery time, a disposition board gave her a choice: Have an abortion on base or leave the military. An abortion or the end of her career? There is no choice here.

Struck's case was brought to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972. Her attorney in the case was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Although the Supreme Court ultimately declined to hear Struck v. Secretary of Defense, Ginsburg's legal wrangling led to the Air Force's decision to reverse its policy.

                             

Where was Liberty for women among these symbols? And it wasn't just the Air Force. It was the Department of Defense.

And it wasn't just the Federal Government who treated pregnant women differently from men although their pregnancy would not affect their ability to do their job. Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, women teachers could be required to take enforced, unpaid leave. Private companies could use pregnancy as a reason to deny disability benefits otherwise available to all employees. (I know, I know. pregnancy is not in and of itself a disability. But sometimes pregnancies do not follow a normal course, and mothers-to-be are put on bedrest or have other restrictions to avoid premature birth or miscarriage.) Businesses could refuse to hire someone because they might become pregnant. (I suppose they still can, but they can't say out loud that is the reason.)

Probably the most important thing about the Pregnancy Discrimination Act is that it was passed after the Supreme Court, in 1976, upheld the General Electric Company's right to treat pregnancy-based disability differently than any other nonwork related disability for insurance purposes on the basis that pregnancy-discrimination is not sex discrimination. That 1978 amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by Congress.

"Passed by Congress" to correct what many thought was a wrong decision by the Supreme Court.

The current Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. They said they were returning decisions relating to abortion to the States. Many of us think the current Supreme Court's decision to turn our decisions regarding our own reproductive health over to the various and sundry States was a wrong decision. It's already limiting our Freedom of Choice and endangering not just our reproductive lives but our actual living-and-breathing-free lives. 

Pro Choice is NOT Pro Abortion. It is just what it says. Pro Choice. The Constitution does not give us Freedom. It prohibits government from taking our Freedom away from us.

You and I cannot decide who sits on the Supreme Court of the United States. And we cannot change the fact that it has now given our Freedom of Choice to the State governments to do with as they will.

But we can, together, decide who sits in our State Houses and in our Congress with our votes. It's up to us to protect our Freedom. Our choices this fall will have real life effects on our mothers and sisters, our daughters and granddaughters, on all the men in their lives, and anyone whose lives are directly affected.

It's time to stand up for Freedom.

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Where the Crawdads Sing

 

A book. A movie

Where the Crawdads Sing, the 2018 book by Delia Owens was her first novel. It topped The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers list for 2019 AND for 2020. Okay, so Where the Crawdads Sing is not on this week's New York Times Best Sellers List, but it was on that list for more than 168 weeks.

Owens has a BS in zoology from the University of Georgia and a PhD in animal behavior from the University of California at Davis. Her studies of African wildlife behavioral ecology have been published in such scientific, peer-reviewed journals as Nature, the Journal of Mammalogy, and Animal Behaviour.

Although most of her field work was done in Africa, it's safe to say that she knows where from she speaks in describing the world of Where the Crawdads Sing. And she describes the saltwater marshes of the North Carolina coast beautifully.

In the Prologue she sets the scene, and the scene is as great a part of the story as the human characters.

     "Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows

     into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea, 

     and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace--as though not built to fly...."

     "Then within the marsh, here and there, true swamp crawls into low-lying bogs, hidden in 

     clammy forests. [....] There are sounds of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is 

     quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the 

     rotted duff; a poignant wallow of death begetting life."

 As in all good murder mysteries, Owens gives us a body. 

     "On the morning of October 30, 1969, the body of Chase Andrews lay in the swamp.... 

     A swamp knows all about death, and doesn't necessarily define it as tragedy, certainly 

     not a sin. But this morning two boys from the village rode their bikes out to the old 

     fire tower and ... spotted his denim jacket."

But is it murder or is it suicide? If it is murder, who dunit?

Kya's story begins the first of two timelines in 1952. She is six years old, the youngest of five children.

    

     "The morning burned so August-hot, the marsh's moist breath hung the oaks and pines 

     with fog. The palmetto patches stood unusually quiet except for the low, slow flap of 

     the heron's wings lifting from the lagoon. Kya [...] heard the screen door slap. Standing 

     on the stool, she stopped scrubbing grits from the pot and lowered it into the basin of 

     worn-out suds."

The sound of that screen door shutting was her mother leaving. In the following weeks, Kya's oldest brother and two sisters left, too. Her brother Jodie, seven years older than she, was the last to leave her alone with their father.

 

     "She knew by the way [Jodie] spoke that Pa had slugged him in the face."

     "'Kya, ya be careful, hear. If anybody comes, don't go in the house, they can get ya there. 

     Run deep in the marsh, hide in the bushes. Always cover yo' tracks; I learned ya how. And 

     ya can hide from Pa, too.'"

When I first heard about this book, I was skeptical about so much of the story. A six-year-old left in the care of a physically abusive, alcoholic? The local authorities were aware of the situation and they did nothing?

My initial skepticism of that part of the story evaporated pretty quickly when compared with my own experiences. 

I worked for Oklahoma's welfare department in the 70s, some twenty-five years after this story starts. I'm sorry to say, things were not much different. We had a sexually abusive family. The abuse was documented by older children who had gotten themselves out of the home. They provided us with photos. We took the photos to the local assistant district attorney and were told he didn't want to look at them. Nothing was done. And that was not the only time families were treated differently by the law. Not because they were "swamp rats," like in North Carolina, but because they were "white trash."

Then there was the question of how a six-year-old could survive without parental care and guidance. 

For a period of time after everybody else left, her father stopped drinking so heavily. He taught her about fishing and operating his boat. He had been injured in World War II and received a weekly disability check from which he gave her small amounts of money to buy food and fuel for the boat. But he took to drink again, coming home less and less often until he just never came home again.

The people in the village, for the most part, ignored her or ridiculed her. Over the years, when the authorities took note of Kya, they attempted to literally catch her and put her into "normal" situations like school or a group home. Attempts, she saw as trying to trap her like an animal.

There were a few people in the Barkley Cove community who did befriend her, albeit mostly from a distance -- Jumpin' and Mabel, the African American couple ran the town's equivalent of a convenience store. They treated Kya with kindness and respect and provided what parental guidance she received. Tate, the son of a fisherman, taught her to read and provided her with books from the library. And Chase Andrews, whose daddy owned the local Western Auto store, fed Kya's dream of being accepted in   Barkley Cove.

The salt marshes of North Carolina were Kya's natural habitat. Kya was smart. She learned about life, about survival, from those saltwater marshes. Kya mostly did what she could figure out on her own to do. And, like her mother, she was a talented artist, drawing and painting and describing her world. 

The second timeline weaves in, around, and through Kya's life. It starts in 1969 and covers the investigation of Chase Andrews' death, Kya's murder trial, and the rest of her life. 

The local authorities decided that the manner of death of Chase, a football star and the only child of the closest thing to society in Barkley Cove, must be murder. His status in the community must surely make him immune to suicide, and he was too athletic to just fall from the old fire watch tower. Someone must have lured him up there and pushed him to his death. Chase's clandestine relationship with Kya, the swamp girl, while planning to marry a more acceptable Barkley Cove girl, made Kya the most obvious perpetrator. Her low status, also made her the least able to defend herself -- a slam dunk conviction for the prosecutor and a satisfying solution to the mystery for the townsfolk. 

And now it's a movie!

Where the Crawdads Sing, the film is visually stunning. It was filmed in the saltwater marshes of Louisiana, and they are beautiful. Filled with the natural world, neither the book nor the movie mentions dangers from animals native to saltwater marshes -- I'm thinking, mosquitos and ticks and alligators, all of which can cause death either by disease or predation. Both the book and the movie focus on the most dangerous animal in nature. Man.

Where the Crawdads Sing, the movie, deserves very high marks. 

Kudos to the Producers led by Reese Witherspoon. They knew what they had and produced a movie faithful to the original story. 

To Polly Morgan, Director of Cinematography, for the lush photography.

To Screen Writer Lucy Alibar for fitting the story into the movie's two hour and twenty-five minute time frame.

To Casting Director David Rubin for putting together this wonderful cast.

To the actors including, but not limited to 

           

             Jojo Regina as Little Kya                            Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya

  
                 Sterling Macer Jr.  and  Michael Hyatt                                Harris Dickinson

                           as Jumpin' and Mabel                                                as bad boy Chase

and David Strathairn as Tom Milton

Kya's defense attorney

And certainly, high marks to Director Olivia Newman who knew what she had when the actors gave her good performances.

Both the book and the movie are excellent. Truth be told, you can only read the book. Or you can only see the movie. Each is worth your time on its own. Me? I'm glad I did both.