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.