Exactly what is Trump trying to prove?

Assuming he's trying to prove anything at all, of course.

I read a long article this morning about Trump's visit to McAllen, Texas, a town where the mayor and most of the residents say no actual physical border wall is needed, the current system is working more or less just fine, although the Border Patrol could use some improved technology (e.g., more cameras) and increased staffing at the ports of entry. And Trump agreed with them. The meeting included a show-and-tell of stuff intercepted at the ports of entry (drugs, weapons, various types of contraband) and the consensus was yep, the checkpoints are working. And then Trump told the folks at the meeting that he doesn't really mean a physical wall after all, he's speaking metaphorically, he just wants enhanced border security.

What the fuck?! The government has been shut down for three weeks now because Trump has stated over and over he wants a Wall, a real Wall, a concrete and steel barrier that would be a major physical barrier to anyone trying to cross the border illegally. He's had multiple hissy fits over the fact that Congress will not dedicate $5 billion to his wet dream of a construction project. And then he goes to Texas, right to the border, and says, oh, I'm just talking metaphorically. I repeat, what the fuck?!

He has said something similar in other meetings over the past couple of weeks, but every time there's an actual face-to-face meeting to negotiate an end to the budget impasse, he reverts to ranting about concrete and steel. It's bizarre.

If he doesn't want an actual wall, why the hell did he shut down the government? Just how senile is he? And if he doesn't want an actual wall, why are hundreds of thousands of people now forced to sit and wait indefinitely to be allowed to go back to work?

Maybe somebody should tell him that Obama wanted to build a wall. There's nothing quite like invoking Obama's name to get Trump to do the exact opposite.

Trump is infamous for constantly contradicting himself. Just about every incoherent speech he gives starts off with him saying one thing and ending with the complete opposite a couple hundred mangled words later, but he's definitely topping himself on this wall mess.

[I am, for what it's worth, feeling relatively proud of myself for making it all the way through six paragraphs in which I mentioned Cheetolini multiple times without once referring to him as a wank nozzle, orange shit gibbon, or some of the other phrases that come to mind when his name comes up. I'll just pretend to be an academic and save the good terms for this footnote.]

Another museum mystery

A new year, a new mystery at the museum. This time a minor one, but a mystery nonetheless. Why is this little pink box car stuffed full of rocks?

Seriously. It's full of rocks. It's part of a homemade model train set that was in the back of a display cabinet. In the process of shuffling stuff around in the museum we discovered not only could we not move the display cabinet while it was still full of stuff, we actually needed to jettison the cabinet entirely.

We being the S.O. and myself, of course.

The original intent was merely to shove the cabinet back closer to the wall -- there was a gap of almost two feet behind it -- to make it easier to move some other things past it. I cleared away some objects that were sitting on the floor in front and on the sides of it, and told the S.O. it was ready to shove. We were about to when he took a closer look at the beast and discovered it was racked too badly to move safely. The corners were spreading, there was significant crack in the base, and there were other issues.

Okay, if we can't move it safely the obvious thing to do is empty it, get it out the door and to the landfill, figure out a substitution for it short term, and think about investing in a totally new display cabinet for the long term.

Pink box car is hiding behind stuff right in the middle on the bottom shelf.

Minor digression (aka short rant). All the cases in the museum are apparently ones that came from retail businesses. They're all used and in various states of decrepitude. Some are quite decent; a few are pretty damn old with glass tops that are so scratched up you can't see through them. I can understand hanging on to the really old ones, the ones that look like they came out of a 19th century mercantile, but do not get why the museum felt compelled to keep the pretty modern looking but falling apart case the railroad stuff was in. The museum isn't rolling in money, but it could afford to drop a few hundred dollars on a decent display case. I checked the KC Store Fixtures catalog. A comparable case, one with the equivalent amount of shelf space, can be had for under $300.

Then again, the museum was apparently allergic to spending money on things museum professionals would consider essential, like archival storage boxes. As one of the sweet little old ladies told me when I first began volunteering, "Why should we spend money on boxes when we can get them for free from Larry's?" Larry's being a local supermarket. Well, for one thing, if you spend money on actual file boxes they'll all be a uniform size, they'll have lids, and you can stack them in the attic or the storage building without them turning into a leaning tower of weirdness. But back to the box car full of rocks.

Depot model on case. Notice the large gap between the case and the wall. Given that the case was full, that gap made no sense, but then many things at the museum didn't (and still don't).  

I began emptying the display case. I started with the top. There was a model of the Baraga railroad depot sitting on one end. It sat on a substantial piece of wood. I'd never paid much attention to the railroad stuff until this week when I got forced to deal with it -- it's one of those areas that fell into the I'll get to it eventually category -- and had assumed the wood was the base for the model. You know, the model was attached to the large chunk of wood, which measured about 18 " x 18", basically covering the entire end of the case from front to back. When I tried picking it up, it didn't move. That's when I discovered it was screwed down to the end of the case.

Curiosity compelled me to unscrew that chunk of wood. I already knew as soon as I saw those screws that sure as shit there was going to be a significant hole or a crack or some other flaw under it. I was right. That end of the display case had a hole in the top that you could drop a six-pack of cheap beer through and not worry about it hitting the glass anywhere as it fell. So why the heck did the museum keep that display case to begin with? At one point the museum had a surplus of display cases -- I was told the historical society gave a bunch to the Covington Township Museum when they were getting set up. Why give away good cases but keep a crap one?! But I'm veering into a rant again. . .

Whoever made the model put little green Army men into the cab of the engine. There's also one standing in the door at the back of the caboose. 

Back to emptying the case. I got the top shelf emptied. It turned out to be the usual weird mix of stuff where things were stuffed in there that had no relationship to railroading at all but apparently there was an empty spot of the shelf someone felt a need to fill sitting side by side with some really nifty stuff from the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic. No interpretive labels, of course. I should have gotten into that case years ago.

I am simultaneously impressed by the effort and appalled by the results. 

Then on to the bottom shelf, starting with the homemade model train at the back. It was a little strange (and I don't just mean the upcycled materials it's made from). There were large rocks sitting in the gondola car and the coal tender for the locomotive. Okay. Rock samples. Someone stuck them there to mimic a load, I guess. That sort of makes sense. I take out the locomotive and tank car first. They weigh next to nothing, which is what one would expect when something's made from old plastic bottles and paperclips. Then I grabbed the box car.

It was like trying to pick up a cement block one handed. The thing weighed a figurative ton. I get it out. I open the little sliding door. What do I see? Rocks. The box car is packed full of rocks.

At least I'm assuming it's all rocks. I did not have the energy yesterday to actually empty the box car. I'll do that the next time I'm at the museum, tempted though I am to just inventory the car as is and stick it out in the storage building for some other person to wonder about a few years from now. The one thing I've learned about the museum in my six years of volunteering is to never assume a stash of anything is just junk. Maybe all those rocks are just the equivalent of pit-run gravel, but it's just as likely that hiding in there will be a nice small piece of float copper or some decent Petoskey stones. Maybe there are some gold nuggets a now-deceased member brought back from prospecting in Alaska years ago. When it comes to the museum and it's never-ending odd little mysteries, you just never know. 

Why is common sense in such short supply?

I've been thinking about "the wall" lately. It's hard to avoid doing so when the federal government is shut down because the Toddler in the White House is throwing a hissy fit over not getting his way. I view this obsession with a medieval technology as yet another sign that the man is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Then again, considering that his most ardent supporters are equally obsessed with putting up a humongous wall to keep the close to nonexistent hordes of desperate women and children out, maybe he's just got an even lower opinion of his supporters than I do. If the only thing that will keep his deplorables happy is doing something stupid, then he'll do something stupid.

The whole emphasis on "securing the borders" by putting up a physical barrier to keep undesirables out has always baffled me. Walls have never worked. You can scale them with ladders, break through them, tunnel under, or walk around it blowing a trumpet (Joshua 6:1-21) but sooner or later the wall fails.

In fact, the wall, such as it currently exists along the southern border, is already failing. It's not keeping out undocumented immigrants. Most of them arrive by airplane clutching tourist visas in their hands and simply don't leave when the visa expires. It's not keeping out drugs. The absolute most devastating drug on the market in the U.S. today is fentanyl. It's coming in cargo containers from China, not being carried in backpacks through through the New Mexican desert. It's not keeping out foreign terrorists -- according to the FBI, the bad guys have figured out it's a lot less hassle to come down from Canada than it is to try to come up from Mexico. Among other things, quite a bit of the border between the U.S. and Canada can be crossed in a bass boat.

So if a physical barrier is a dumb idea, what would be a smart one? Well, if most of the people coming across the southern border claim to be refugees fleeing violence of various sorts, how about increasing the staffing levels for the federal workers who process those claims? People complain about the "catch and release" aspects, such as the fact there are long delays between the initial application for asylum and when the hearings are held. Right now asylum seekers arrive knowing there's going to be a long gap between when they get here and when the U.S. government decides their fate. They also know that if they manage to avoid being summarily targeted for expedited removal they'll be released on parole to await the hearing.

Here's a common sense notion: speed that process up. We don't need a wall to slow people down or more border patrol agents to arrest people. We need paper shufflers to speed up the pace of the bureaucracy. Hire more lawyers, more judges, and let the word get out that the time frame is shorter. It's a pretty sure thing that the number of asylum seekers will drop. It's one thing to make the trek to the U.S. knowing that after you turn yourself in you're going to have one or two or even three years to work here and send money back to the family in whatever poverty-stricken village you'e from and quite another to contemplate doing it when the turnaround time drops to a couple months. After all, Jeff Sessions claimed that close to 80 percent of the asylum seekers' claims are denied. That isn't exactly true but it's a handy talking point for this argument. If that many are denied in the end, then the common sense thing to do would be to speed the process up to get the ineligible applicants on to airplanes or buses faster.

Granted, it's not quite as manly, doesn't lend itself to a lot of posturing and macho bullshit about how tough someone is to say "I hired more lawyers" instead of "I ordered the troops to lay down concertina wire."

Actually, a truly common sense idea would be to stop freaking out over "illegals" and go for open borders. Sure, maintain border security in the form of customs enforcement at established border crossings but get a system set up where anyone coming in to the U.S. could work if they wanted to. Foreign nationals can be issued tax ID numbers now and pay income taxes while they're here; that part of the system is already in place. If everyone was working legally there'd be no incentive for employers to hire undocumented workers for less than legal wages and it would be harder to get workers willing to tolerate unsafe working conditions. If you can't hold the threat of La Migra over people's heads, they'll put up with a lot less crap. It would eliminate a lot of human trafficking -- who's going to bother paying a coyote thousands of dollars to sneak them across the desert or smuggle them in a cargo container when all you need is a bus ticket?

Yes, I know there are people who go ballistic at the idea of open borders. They're the same people who are convinced every Spanish speaker they encounter is here illegally and desperate to steal their jobs or sponge off welfare, usually simultaneously. My own thought has always been is that if you're so incompetent or unskilled that the only jobs you can find are ones that will hire people who do not read, write, or speak English and where the major work requirements are a strong back and a willingness to put in long hours for less than legal wages, you've got bigger problems than fear of competition from foreigners. 

Pulitzer Project: Ironweed

William Kennedy's Ironweed was a pleasant surprise. Not only did the L'Anse Public Library actually have it on the shelves (no Interlibrary Loan delays), the book turned out to be readable. Definitely a bit strange, but readable.

Ironweed is set in Albany in the late 1930's. It describes a few days in the life of Francis Phelan, a self-described bum. Phelan walked away from his wife and family in 1916 when his infant son died. Phelan blames himself for the child's accidental death and so runs away from everyone and everything he knew and crawls into a muscatel bottle.

Phelan bums around the country, works odd jobs here and there, and eventually ends up back in his hometown of Albany, New York. At times he's hanging out with two friends, and at times he's on his own. Sort of. He keeps seeing ghosts, people he knew years ago and that are now long dead. Some of the ghosts are people he just knew, hung out with in hobo jungles or met while riding the rails, but several are people whose death he caused, almost all unintentionally: a fellow he tangled with in Chicago who cracked his skull when Phelan threw him and he fell back against a concrete bridge pillar, for example.

The book flows smoothly despite the frequent flashbacks to different episodes in Phelan's life and his conversations with people who aren't really there. It's one of those books where you find yourself wondering exactly why you're reading it -- after all, it's the life of a bum at the tail end of the Great Depression, a dude who's definitely leading a fairly grim life -- but the writing sucks you right in. This book for sure falls on the upper end of the scale in terms of readability.

When I did a Google image search to find a cover photo, I noticed it was made into a film back in the '80's. The book won the Pulitzer for 1984; the movie was released in 1987 so Kennedy's agent must have done a good job of peddling the screenplay. Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep starred in the film. When I saw that my first reaction was "Why?!" The book is pretty damn grim, although Kennedy's writing is so good the plot doesn't repel you. However, I cannot imagine sitting in a theater for two hours to watch a movie about a drunken bum and his cronies lurching around from dive to dive and speculating about where they can find an abandoned building that would be safe to sleep in for a night. This is one movie that I will not look for online despite the superstar casting.

That said, I do recommend the book to anyone who appreciates good writing.

Next up: Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie. I know Lurie can write; now the only question is whether or not it's going to be another Interlibrary Loan request. The L'Anse library really does devote way too much shelf space to Danielle Steele.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum?

All the talk recently about just how we all should remember George Herbert Walker Bush got me to thinking about the whole notion that we're only supposed to say good stuff about dead people. Why?

Is it so the family won't be upset? Bush the Elder was a politician. His kids and grand kids have been around politics their entire lives. They know the man was not perfect, that some of his decisions were based more political expediency than on principle, like when he was trying to get elected in a Southern segregationist state so publicly opposed civil rights legislation. He had definite moral failings. After all, he pardoned Oliver North after that treasonous swine negotiated with both drug dealers and the anti-U.S. Iranian government. He also apparently believed that anyone who became ill with AIDS deserved it, at least until hemophiliacs like Ryan White entered the public consciousness. .

Okay, so it makes no sense for the ordinary person (or anyone else) to try to pretend once a politician is dead that they had no flaws. What about when it's someone you actually know?

I had been thinking about this recently anyway. I've hit the age where if I go to a social gathering it's more likely to be a funeral than a wedding. The life expectancy for women the year I was born was only 69, which means if I go by the old actuarial charts I've passed my sell-by date (it's now 78.9 so I've got a ways to go before more than half my age cohort is dead). Not surprisingly, I see obits and funeral announcements for various acquaintances on a pretty regular basis.

So is it okay for me to mentally start singing "Ding dong the witch is dead" when I learn that someone I didn't especially care for has beaten me to taking the dirt nap? You know, someone where if I were male I might give serious consideration to pissing on the grave? Am I obligated to say something nice if or when her name comes up in conversation? Or can I continue to use my favorite terms for her, which might not be obscene but certainly have never been complimentary?

As for why I've spent the past 40 years or so thinking of the person as "that bitch?" It's simple. She was mean to one of my kids. It's weird. I have several acquaintances who worked actively to destroy my relationship with the S.O. They devoted a lot of time and energy to trying to split us up (which I'm pretty sure neither of them remembers now) but I've never felt the animosity* toward them that I retained for this stupid person who made my kid unhappy. It's not like I spent a lot of time brooding about it but if the woman's name came up, my reaction was consistently to think bad thoughts and to hope her life sucked. I think the old aphorism "Hell has no fury like a woman scorned" is wrong. It's more like Hell has no fury like a pissed off mother.

Short answer to the question of do I have to say nice stuff now that she's pushing up daisies? Or, more accurately, do I want to? Nope. Depending on who's around, if her name comes up she's still going to be "that bitch."

*To be honest, there might be no ill will because they failed. As to why they tried to begin with? It's a mystery. 

Yet another thing that never fails to annoy me

The misuse of the word "miracle." It pops up in headlines and commentary way too often. Saw another one this morning: a reunion between a family who lost their home in Paradise, California, during the recent wild fire and the family's dog. The dog had gone missing during the evacuation. The people had managed to get one of their dogs into the car but not the other. They initially fear the beast was dead.

Like many pets, however, the beast had survived. I might be willing to let the use of the word miracle slide if the article had referred simply to the beast not becoming barbecue, but, nope, his survival wasn't the miraculous part. It was the reunion between him and his humans, or so the headline proclaimed.

Turns out there was absolutely nothing miraculous about the reunion. It was not a case of the couple going to view the heap of ashes that used to be their house and being stunned to find the dog waiting there. Well, the dog was waiting there, but it wasn't actually much of a surprise. Animal rescue volunteers had been working for weeks to find and rescue pets that had been left behind but managed to survive. They've been putting out food and water and working with owners to try to reunite pets and people.

In the case of this particular miraculous reunion, the animal rescue people had spotted the dog fairly quickly after they were allowed into Paradise to look for lost and injured pets. They had been able to identify his owners, they were leaving food and water at the house site for the dog. So when the owners got there and were reunited with the beast it was neither a surprise nor a miracle. The reunion was the result of hard work on the part of people. The owners knew (and had known for awhile) that the dog was fine. So why the hyperbole about miracles? I don't know. Click bait maybe? After all, it worked for me. I clicked on the link to read the story even if afterwards I was muttering about crap headlines and reports that focus on the wrong things.

An urban legend that refuses to die

Encountered another person on Facebook who's confused his life with that of a fictional character. In the 1982 film "First Blood" Sylvester Stallone's character, John Rambo, is a Vietnam war vet who does a rant about being spit on by "maggots" at the airport. The character of Rambo has been singled out to serve as a target for police brutality, apparently because he appears to be a harmless drifter, another down on his luck loser so the local cops can beat the crap out of him and no one will care. His rant encapsulates all the frustrations he felt as someone who should have been treated like a hero but instead was unappreciated, ignored, and insulted. It was an epic rant that apparently resonated with quite a few movie goers. It's been over 35 years and there are still dudes channeling John Rambo and confusing the abuse he suffered in the movie -- greeted by organized protesters who spit on him instead of showering him with vacuous platitudes ("thank you for your service") -- with their own lives.

Historians and folklorists alike have studied the "military personnel getting spit on" question for close to 30 years now, and guess what? Prior to that first Rambo movie there were no reports. Following the movie? By the end of the '80s it had become common knowledge that members of the military were spit on when they returned from Vietnam. The researchers who have studied this phenomenon have never been able to find a single verifiable incident -- it's always "it happened to a friend of a friend." You know what you call something that's attributed to a friend of a friend? If you're kind, it's an urban legend. Or, if you're me, you just call it bullshit.

The author of the book shown, incidentally, interviewed hundreds of people who initially claimed to have personal knowledge of spitting happening but in the end there was no corroborating evidence (e.g., news reports in print or on television) and it turned out the person making the claim was actually repeating "a friend of a friend" story.

Actually, some of the stories that get cited as "evidence" by the people who swear the spitting happened are so totally bizarre that it's amazing anyone believes them. One story, for example, claims that when service members arrived in Los Angeles, they'd duck into restrooms to change into civilian clothes to avoid being abused by the public. So many uniforms were removed and discarded that trash cans were overflowing with jettisoned Class A uniforms. WTF? If these service members were still in the military and were en route to a new duty station, they were going to need those uniforms. If they'd already been discharged and were heading home, they would have been in civilian clothes. If they were still in the military, sooner or later they'd need their Class A uniform, the one with the most expensive pieces, for some occasion. On the pitiful pay personnel got back then, no one still in the military was ever going to throw a uniform away because they'd have to pay real money to replace the various pieces. Classic sign of an urban legend: it contradicts common sense.

(Side note/minor digression: the uniform story reminds me a lot of the anti-Jane Fonda story about her betraying POWs by getting them to tell her their names and service numbers and then passing that info on to the North Vietnamese. Whatever moron thought that one up apparently forgot that when the POWs were captured they (a) were wearing dog tags with name and serial number, and (b) the one thing every person in the military is told is that when they're captured the only thing they're supposed to tell the enemy is their name, rank, and serial number. Fonda did ask guys their names but it was so she could let their families know she'd seen them and they were okay. She also carried letters from POWs back to the States to mail for them.) 

Anyway, I can understand Vietnam era veterans feeling neglected and mistreated, but it was not by the general public. The people they should be pissed at are the paper pushers in the Veterans Administration who refused for decades to acknowledge the harmful effects of Agent Orange, who dithered about recognizing and treating PTSD, and who put up roadblocks to almost every disability claim. Nothing new about that, of course. Veterans have been getting screwed over by an ungrateful government since the country was founded. 

The same person who's channeling John Rambo also made the claim that during the 1970's service members were told not to wear their uniforms while traveling because of the low opinion the public had of the military. Again, bullshit. For a brief time members were indeed told not to wear their uniform while traveling on civilian aircraft but it was not because of any anti-military sentiment on the part of the general public. The '70s witnessed record numbers of hijackings; service members were advised not to travel in uniform so they'd blend in with the other passengers. Arriving in Cuba in a U.S. Army uniform would not have been cool. However, as a general rule, including during most of the Vietnam conflict, if the military paid for the plane ticket, you had to be in uniform. The government was (and still is) notoriously cheap so when you flew on a civilian plane, you flew stand-by. If you weren't in uniform, the gate agent stuck you at the bottom of the stand-by list. In uniform you were at the top.

I do feel obligated (as usual) to note that way too many of the people who tend to do the super patriotic thank you for service garbage are the same ones who never had the time or desire to serve themselves and who freak out at the suggestion that maybe their high school age kids think about enlisting. I'm still wishing I could have somehow preserved the horrified look on a supervisor's face in Omaha when I responded to his lament about his no-clear-goals adolescent by saying, "Well, what about the military?" You'd have thought I'd said, "Hey, Don, how about if your kid tries prostitution for awhile?" So please don't thank me for my service (I'm Vietnam era) and I promise I won't call you out as an elitist classist ass who thinks getting shot at by the Taliban is a chore reserved for the low-income kids from the sketchy neighborhoods.

Pulitzer Project: A Twofer, Rabbit is Rich and The Color Purple

I figured I might as well lump these two together because I couldn't make it through either one.

Technically John Updike's Rabbit is Rich is more readable than Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Updike could string words together in a way that didn't insult the reader. It's too bad the actual storyline was so repellent.

Rabbit is Rich is part of a series of novels Updike penned about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. In this novel, Harry has hit the dangerous mid-life crisis years -- he's described as having been born in 1933, and it's the Carter administration in the novel so he's got to be somewhere not far past 45 or 46. And he is so skeezy it makes a reader's head spin, the classic misogynistic sexist pig in a polyester suit. A young couple comes in to the Toyota dealership Angstrom owns and Angstrom is more focused on plotting how to get close to the girl (who's probably close to 30 years younger than he is) than he is on actually selling them a car. His college age son brings a young woman friend home and Angstrom is immediately thinking he'd keep her happier in bed than his kid can. He and his wife go to the country club for an afternoon and Angstrom is ogling every woman in the pool and visualizing what they might be like in the sack. Everyone knows that men tend to think about sex a lot more than women usually do, but most writers don't manage to make that obsession seem quite so sleazy and off-putting. Is there a word to describe the opposite of erotica? Smut that turns you off instead of on? If not, there should be.

Maybe if Updike had stuck to Angstrom's fantasies it wouldn't have been so bad, but it did not help at all that Updike managed to write an explicit sex scene -- Angstrom and spouse in bed -- that on the "ewww really gross scale" probably scored an 11. A younger reader could read that sex scene and think, "omigod, if that's what sex is like when you're pushing 50 celibacy is looking good."

It was actually a little bizarre just how badly dated this book is. Were the late 1970s really that horrible? The only thing missing (at least in the section I got through) was members of the Rotary swapping motel room keys. Didn't Updike see "Oh Calcutta"? Anyway, between the racist language and the protagonist's fixation on assessing all the women he sees (except possibly his elderly mother-in-law) in terms of their fuckability a reader finds herself hoping the book really isn't too heavily biographical. I'd hate to think that Updike himself was as much of a pig as his protagonist/ I do know that Updike modeled his mythical town in his novels on his home town in Pennsylvania so maybe he was, but it is a tad depressing to be reminded of just how disgusting middle class middle-aged men can be.

In any case, I gave up about a third of the way into the book. When you start hoping that the "hero" is going to drop dead of a cardiac event on the next page and you've barely hit page 100 in a 400+ page book you know it's time to cut your losses and move on.

Unfortunately, the move on was to The Color Purple. This is ticks all the boxes on my list of things I hate: epistolary writing, overuse of dialect, murky character development. Once again I found myself wondering just why on earth the prize committee felt the need to award the prize to this particular book. It also really had me wondering just why Oprah Winfrey thought the book was so great.

Granted, Oprah was sexually abused by a trusted family when she was young, and The Color Purple starts off with the narrator telling us she's been raped repeatedly by her father, but. . .  the book sucks. It really, truly sucks. The plotline might have made a good screen play (and I'm assuming it did, although I've never seen the movie) but the book reads like something an undergraduate would churn out in a creative writing course. It's clunky, it's riddled with contradictions (the narrator is supposedly the smart kid in the family but she doesn't know how to spell? And she writes her letters in dialect? I might have a Yooper accent, but when I write a letter I'm going to say "them," not "dem" and when I describe going someplace it'll be "We went to Green Bay" not "We go Green Bay."), and it makes it seem like the protagonist exists in a vacuum. There is zero context. Nada. Zip.

Still, I think I got as far as page 50. Then I decided life is too short to waste on bad books.

As for the hype around it, there are two ways to sell books. One is to have a book that is just really, really good, something that grabs the reader and sales take off based on word of mouth. The other is through publicity about how wonderful the book is, how it's this masterpiece by (dramatic pause) an African American woman, and people start thinking they have to buy it. And then if you say, wow, this really sucks, it's like you're wrong, it can't suck, all the critics love it, eventually you just stop saying this book is awful, quietly set it aside, and let it gather dust on the bookcase. I have a strong hunch The Color Purple has slid into the same category as books like Ulysses and Their Eyes Were Watching God. People will claim they've read it, loved it, and will never admit they gave up on The Color Purple right about the time the protagonist's father gives her to a local widower, a dude who's willing to take her as a replacement wife/housekeeper as long as her father tosses in a cow with her to seal the deal.

I totally fail to see why this book got hailed as this amazing piece of African American fiction because it spends most of the book perpetuating every racist stereotype every cracker has ever held about blacks: the men are brutish animals who abuse their women and children, their women aren't particularly smart (after all, they put up with the brutish men), and they're all okay with living in squalor.

For what it's worth, I am perfectly willing to read some remarkably grim material if it's reasonably well written. After all, I read The Road cover to cover, roasted baby on a spit and all.

Recommendations? Skip both of these turkeys. On the usual sliding scale, they're both in the basement.

Up next:  Ironweed by William Kennedy. I know nothing about the book, nothing about the author, so maybe this is a good sign. Maybe I'll actually be able to read it.