Reading in 2019

During 2018, I added twenty-three books to my account at LibraryThing, two of which I already owned but had neglected to add to my account. These books bring the total number of books in my personal library to 993. That figure, however, isn’t an accurate representation of the total number of books in my library because I have given about fifteen of them away to friends and relatives or to the local library.

I read twenty-one books in 2019. I am currently reading book number twenty-two, but I don’t anticipate finishing that book before the year ends. I had started a couple of other books during the year but ended up putting them aside temporarily and plan on returning to them at some point in the future. As I have said in previous posts, I don’t include books of poetry in my overall total because I don’t consider a book of poems ever totally read. I usually return several times to each book of poems that I buy. During the year 2019, I purchased five poetry collections, three by Joseph Millar and two by Thomas Reynolds, a local poet.

The year 2019 started with me reading fiction, beginning with Ivan Doig’s Mountain Time, Bucking the Sun, and English Creek. The characters in these novels led me to reread Doig’s The Bartender’s Tale and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana, not having read the novels in sequence. Through my reading of both Elliot West and Mary Clearman Blew in previous years, I discovered those novels set in the American West that I had neglected, and this realization led to my reading Dorothy Johnson’s Buffalo Woman, more of Mildred Walker, particularly her The Curlew’s Cry, and more of A.B. Guthrie, Jr., particularly his Arfive, The Last Valley, and Fair Land, Fair Land, which has a particularly tragic conclusion.

For those interested in discovering Ivan Doig’s fiction, I recommend English Creek, which is narrated by a fifteen-year-old male during the summer prior to the start of World War II. The same narrator, although much older, appears in Ride With Me, Mariah Montana. 

My teaching led to my reading Leonardo Trasande’s Sicker, Fatter, Poorer, Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie’s Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Elizabeth Cline’s Overdressed: The Shockingly High Price of Cheap Fashion, and Kate Grenville’s The Case Against Fragrance. My students this semester had the option to pick their own topics for the position essay. It was difficult for many of the students to choose an arguable topic with which they have personal experience. Although some of them chose topics like the benefits of attending a community college, the merits of online classes, or the disadvantages of working while in high school, all of which they were able to support with their own experience, some of the other students struggled with the assignment and instead of delving into their experience, they chose topics that have been receiving attention in the news, such as medical marijuana. As a result, I have decided during the next semester to resurrect a fact-finding assignment in which the students will have to choose from a list of research topics. I plan on creating research questions about fast fashion and fragrances, for example. 

One book I discovered quite by chance is Bryant Simon’s The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives. I was browsing through a secondhand bookstore and saw this book on display. While describing the fire at a chicken processing plant in North Carolina in 1991, in which 25 employees were killed and 55 injured, the book also addresses low wages, disappearing low-skilled jobs, and processed food. The description of how the chicken was processed would definitely make one never eat chicken nuggets again and possibly give up eating chicken entirely. Simon’s mentioning of the books Kitchen Literacy and Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture resulted in my ordering a used copy of each book, and I have added these books to the other sixty or so awaiting my attention. 

A few years ago, my wife and I followed part of the Oregon Trail as we drove through Nebraska and Wyoming. That experience was the impetus for my reading Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail, which describes an attempt to duplicate what the pioneers had experienced. The author bought a wagon and mules, and, with the assistance of his brother, he followed the original trail, beginning in St. Joseph, Missouri. The book recounts what the original travelers experienced and describes the mishaps and the people encountered during Buck’s trip. Much of the historical material comes from John Unruh’s The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1860. I have that book but haven’t yet read it. In addition to The Oregon Trail, I read Mary Barmeyer O’Brien’s Heart of the Trail, which is subtitled as The Stories of Eight Wagon Train Women. Some stories are better than others, with the weaker ones supported by questionable sources, such as an encyclopedia and Time-Life Books.

Most recently, I read Mari Sandoz’ The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men. The Buffalo Hunters describes the mass slaughter of one species over a period of sixteen years. It was tough reading that book at first because of the gore and the rampant shooting of so many animals. It’s unfortunate that we had an economic system that thrived on the extermination of the buffalo, with some hunters making thousands of dollars at one time from selling the hides while the railroads profited from the numbers of hides, tongues, and bones that were shipped to the east. Even though some historians consider The Buffalo Hunters as a definitive source for its description of the elimination of the buffalo, I wish that Sandoz had documented the information appearing in her book. I often found myself wishing for footnotes as I was reading the book.

I mentioned last year wanting to read Maxine Gordon’s Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon. That book remains on my list, and I hope to get to it soon. I plan on returning to Ivan Doig’s Dancing at the Rascal Fair in the new year; it’s a book I started but had discovered that it precedes English Creek, and I wasn’t ready at the time to interact with characters that I had not yet encountered in Doig’s other books. Otherwise, I plan on reading some of the titles on my bookshelves that have not yet been read and rereading other ones. I have enough books to declare a freeze on buying any other books, but I am not sure that I can make that commitment. Ideally, it should take me another couple of years before I can say that I have added 1,000 books to my account at LibraryThing. It is getting difficult to find any extra space in my home office.

Autumn Pictures_2019

My collection of autumn pictures appear below. Some autumns are more colorful than others, and this year was not particularly colorful where I live in northeastern Kansas. Many trees simply turned brown.

I have been using the manual settings on my camera, adjusting the f-stop and the shutter speed. Although I sometimes adjust the ISO setting myself, I more often use the auto setting for the ISO and get better results than what I could achieve. I might have used the RAW setting if I had a good photo editing program, something like Photoshop, but I haven't gone to that expense. I hope you find something to like here.

These pictures are arranged to show the progression of the season. They start on October 8 and end on November 3.

Going Public

This blog will start to become somewhat more public next month. The college where I work has asked its faculty to provide the bibliographic information for any publications, including blogs. These publications will be made accessible to students, starting in November. I don’t know how the college can make a blog more accessible, but I suppose that there might be a handout listing faculty blogs and providing a short description of each one. 

After thirteen years of activity, I have decided to go public with my blog and to identify myself as the author. Originally, when I created this blog, I didn’t want to hamper my job search efforts, and that’s why I chose a pseudonym. My son was in middle school at the time and once I learned about his social studies teacher creating a blog and encouraging others to do so, I decided to investigate the matter further and ended up creating the Red Moon Café. At the time, I had a seller account at Amazon and instead of creating a new pseudonym, I simply altered my seller name, changing it from FirstCityBooks to firstcitybook. I live in what is known as the first city of Kansas, and some of the businesses identify themselves as First City Photo or First City Quilts, for example. After Colonel Leavenworth violated his orders in 1827 and decided to build a fort on the western side of the Missouri River, in what was known as Indian Territory, the city of Leavenworth eventually sprang up to the south of Fort Leavenworth, starting in 1854, the same year that the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened up Kansas and Nebraska to settlement.

There might be a few things of interest at this blog to someone conducting research. One popular post, according to Blogger, is the one in which I describe my students investigating the dead at the Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery. Many of my students, while conducting their research, stumbled onto the death of Sgt. Frederick Wyllyams, who was killed outside of Fort Wallace in 1867 when the fort was attacked by the Cheyenne. His body was eventually moved when Fort Wallace closed down, and he was reinterred at Fort Leavenworth. Sgt. Wyllyams proved to be popular among my students because of the photograph of his body pierced by arrows.

Blogger tells me that there have been 94,524 pageviews of my blog. Not all of them have been me. Peter Bacon’s Jazz Breakfast carries a link to my blog. Dave Sumner’s Bird Is the Worm used to carry a link to my blog before he redesigned his website. Dean Minderman at St. Louis Jazz Notes has also included my blog in his annual list of blogs and websites that evaluate the best jazz releases for the year.

I probably have gotten the greatest number of hits when I provide a link to a new post on Twitter. It is something that I need to do more often. My accounts at Twitter, Bandcamp, LibraryThing, and SoundCloud all provide a link to my blog and identify me as firstcitybook. It is much easier to dig into my Internet presence by looking for firstcitybook than by looking for James Cooper because there are so many other people with my name. Only my students refer to me as Dr. Cooper.

Pokaz Trio

One piano trio I have discovered recently is the Pokaz Trio, which is based in Ukraine and has been receiving attention with the release of its album Kintsugi. The entire album is available at YouTube and elsewhere. Two tracks appears below. I shared the first track on a Facebook group named New Jazz Lovers. It's a group that I joined recently and have contributed to a few times. I hope you find something to like in this music. I recommend the entire album.

Throwing Out the Past

When not working in the yard or cleaning my home office during the short break that I have before fall semester classes start, I have been reading four years of a journal that I kept between 1980 and 1984.

My entries initially focused on the poetry that I was writing for some of my classes. At that time, I focused on ideas more than sensory perceptions in my poems. I was also fixated on line length in my poems and altered my language to fit the length of the line, not recognizing that my foremost aim should be clarity. One of my teachers, a visiting poet with whom I took a short tutorial during my last semester of college, recommended that I become conscious of an audience when I write. That awareness would have made my writing more accessible and would have allowed me to worry less about form. Making the transition at that time was difficult to achieve. My entries sometimes reflected my anger at my teachers and classmates for not recognizing what I was attempting to achieve in my poems.

After I finally finished my undergraduate degree, I started to record my job search efforts. Although Wichita, where I was living at the time, had a bus system, it wasn’t convenient or readily accessible. My job efforts were hampered by not having a vehicle. It would have been so much easier finding even a temporary job if I had had access to a car. I probably wouldn’t have lived in the city if I had had a choice. The noise from barking dogs and neighbors in the same apartment building often made sleeping difficult.

There was a marked difference in the entries I was writing during my job search. My entries became much more descriptive as I recorded my employment search and my observations. Not having any family nearby and having very few friends, I often wrote much more in my journal during holidays, often recording things that I had done when I was much younger.

Later, these entries described my move to Connecticut, where I temporarily lived with my sister before I moved to Hartford and earned a living of sorts by proofreading and substitute teaching. Several of the last four or five blue books described my relations with a woman I had met at work.

Overall, while sometimes painful to read, these blue books record how I apprenticed myself to language. I had written plenty of essays in college. Even so, it took this regular habit of writing for myself before I became comfortable with my writing voice. In retrospect, it wasn’t important what I wrote; it was more important that I gained practice in using language.

Jan Harbeck: A New Discovery

A recent review of Jan Harbeck's The Sound the Rhythm led to my discovery of older titles in his discography, particularly In the Still of the Night and Copenhagen Nocturne. Sometimes when I'm riding the recumbent bicycle in the living room, I turn on the TV, click on YouTube, and call up Jan Harbeck's "Harlem Nocturne" and "I Love Paris," both of which appear on the Copenhagen Nocturne album, and both of which still allow me to pedal more than four miles in twenty minutes. I am including these videos below. I have not yet had the time to burn my downloads of his albums onto CD. That task is reserved for when I finish grading my student essays this summer.

I mentioned once before that I provide my students with examples of the music that I listen to while grading their essays. I have included these two videos of Jan Harbeck in my list of music selections. It will be interesting if the students say anything about this music next week, the last week of the summer session.

Pictures in Canvas_Spring 2019

As I probably mentioned once before, one thing I like about Canvas, the learning management system that I am using for my online classes, is the ability to add my own pictures to designate the assignment modules. I often think of these pictures as metaphors for what the students are asked to do in any one assignment module. My pictures for Spring 2019 appear below. I have tried to get student feedback, but no one has yet commented on my pictures and what meaning that they convey.

The last four pictures come from a park located above the Missouri River in Leavenworth. I enjoy walking along North Esplanade Park and often take my camera with me. The park where I used to walk has been closed off since March because of the flooding.

The students were asked to take a position in the argumentative synthesis. That view from a solitary park bench has been enlarged to show the incorporation of more sources in the expanded argumentative synthesis. The revision assignment reveals the rapidly approaching end of the semester. Earlier, the students are greeted with the serenity of the introductory materials before they start taking a path in the first week of class and cross a bridge into critical reading for the rhetorical analysis.  The picture for the informative synthesis, on the other hand, is the closest thing, and the most realistic, to what the students face in that assignment as they compare and contrast what appears in three articles on the same topic.

Long before I decided to pursue degrees in English, I wanted to be a photographer. I had enlisted in the Air Force with that intention right after I finished high school, only to learn that I am color blind and not qualified for that career field in the military. That initial interest in photography appears in my playing with the pictures that my students see in Canvas.

Flowering Trees

The flowering trees have been particularly pretty this spring. These pictures were taken over a two week period and show some of the changes that occurred during that time. I sometimes get outside in the afternoon to take a walk along the Missouri River. I can justify the time by telling myself that I can use some of these pictures in my online class to designate certain assignment modules.

Magnolia Blossoms_2019

My annual collection of magnolia blossoms appear below.  On the second day of taking these pictures, I took something like 530 pictures. Once I downloaded them onto the computer, I had to sort through them and kept something like half. It was a windy day and my shutter speed wasn't always fast enough. I was also moving between an aperture setting and a shutter speed setting as I worked on capturing what I thought might be a great shot. The thirteen pictures appearing below are probably the best ones. These magnolia blossoms got my wife singing a Grateful Dead song, which is a feat in itself. If I should happen to come across any other pictures that might be worth sharing, I will add them in another post.