Blackthorn (2011)

There is a list of people whose deaths remain "unresolved." Jimmy Hoffa. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Amelia Earhart. People who disappeared and were never quite found.  They all must be dead by now anyway, but we have a need for closure. Such cases also provide an excellent inspiration for movies.
Sam Shepherd play James Blackthorn, an alias assumed by Butch Cassidy after his alleged death in a shoot out in Bolivia.  He has settled in the mountains and lives among the people.  The scenery in the movie, and the native weavings and clothing are spot on from my visit there in the the early 1980's.  That and the brief time filming the Bolivian Salt Flats high between the Andes ranges is definitively the best part of the movie.  The plot is on the thin side--Butch decides to go back to the United States to help with a child he has left behind, and a lot of mishaps fall into his path.  

The Dictionary Wars by Peter Martin

He who creates the dictionary, so follows the language.  I never thought about it before, but it is a fascinating avenue of great influence.
This book recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. What began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into a battle scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy.
The overwhelming questions in the dictionary wars involved which and whose English was truly American and whether a dictionary of English should attempt to be independent from Britain. There was an intense rivalry between America’s first lexicographers, Noah Webster and Joseph Emerson Worcester, who fought over who could best represent the soul and identity of American culture. Webster believed an American dictionary, like the American language, ought to be informed by the nation’s republican principles, but Worcester thought that such language reforms were reckless and went too far. Their conflict continued beyond Webster’s death, when the ambitious Merriam brothers acquired publishing rights to Webster’s American Dictionary and launched their own language wars. From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the Civil War, the dictionary wars also engaged America’s colleges, libraries, newspapers, religious groups, and state legislatures at a pivotal historical moment that coincided with rising literacy and the print revolution.

All Hail to the Immigrants

Toni Morrison died this week.  A lioness of literature, who we should mourn by reading the works she wrote that we have yet to open.  She is painful to hear at times, but always beautifully put together and eye opening.
The current rage against immigrants really baffles me on a number of levels.  The thing I love about the United States, a country that my family came to in the 1600's in order to escape persecution at home (sound familiar) with a vision of a more perfect union.  A city on the hill, where the needs of the many are more important than the wealth of the few.  Of course, that vision was a bit distorted to begin with, but our nation has grown, in size and stature, through the richness that diverse cultures bring to us.  So putting people in cages at the border is not only inhumane and cruel, it also weakens us as a nation in every way.  We are becoming the people we historically loathed.  The terrorists on our soil that I fear the most are angry white men and we are doing nothing to stop them.

Riding Giants (2004)

The thing that is driven home in this documentary about surfing is that in no way do I get this obsession, but it is just that.
The movie is about altogether another reality. The overarching fact about these surfers is the degree of their obsession. They live to ride, and grow depressed when there are no waves. They haunt the edge of the sea and are like the modern day mariners Melville describes on the first pages of Moby Dick. They seek the rush of those moments when they balance on top of a wave's fury and feel themselves in precarious harmony with the ungovernable force of the ocean. They are cold and tired, battered by waves, thrown against rocks, visited by sharks, held under so long they believe they are drowning -- and over and over, year after year, they go back into the sea to do it again.  From the early surfers of the 1950's, who camped on the beaches of Hawaii for weeks on end, living primitive existences in order to catch the next big wave, to the Laird Hamilton's of today, who take a jet ski to get toed into monster waves to ride, they have the bug and they have it bad.  Really fascinating.

The City State of Boston by Mark Peterson

I read about this book in the New Yorker, and for some reason, while I read almost entirely fiction, I feel like I have a non-fiction book a week within my reach for the time being.  This was a rough way to start, though, because it is an almost 700 page book that is even denser to read than it is to lift. 
Drawing from vast archives, and featuring unfamiliar figures alongside well-known ones, such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and John Adams, Peterson explores Boston’s origins in sixteenth-century utopian ideals, its founding and expansion into the hinterland of New England, and the growth of its distinctive political economy, with ties to the West Indies and southern Europe. The most interesting and unknown to me part was the 1600's when Boston rose to a powerful and rich city-state through Atlantic trade.  They even had their own silver currency!
By the 1700s, Boston was at full strength, with wide Atlantic trading circuits and cultural ties, both within and beyond Britain’s empire. After the cataclysmic Revolutionary War, the city aimed to negotiate a relationship with the American confederation, but through the next century, the new United States unraveled Boston’s regional reign. The fateful decision to ratify the Constitution undercut its power, as Southern planters and slave owners dominated national politics and corroded the city-state’s vision of a common good for all.  A situation that we are still emerging from as a nation.

Peach Cobbler

Here is the before and after picture of this recipe, which we made for my two year old granddaughter's second birthday party.  I lean towards cakey rather than biscuity cobbler, so this method, where the batter goes on the bottom and the fruit on the top, and then switch in the cooking avoids the dryness that cobbler can sometimes have.  Yum!

• 5 peaches , peeled, cored and sliced (about 4 cups)
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

For the batter:

• 6 Tablespoons butter
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup milk
• ground cinnamon

• Add the sliced peaches, sugar and salt to a saucepan and stir to combine. 
*(If using canned peaches, skip to step 3) 
• Cook on medium heat for just a few minutes, until the sugar is dissolved and helps to bring out juices from the peaches. Remove from heat and set aside. 
• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Slice butter into pieces and add to a 9x13 inch baking dish. Place the pan in the oven while it preheats, to allow the butter to melt. Once melted, remove the pan from the oven.
• In a large bowl mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Stir in the milk, just until combined. Pour the mixture into the pan, over the melted butter and smooth it into an even layer. 
• Spoon the peaches and juice (or canned peaches, if using) over the batter. Sprinkle cinnamon generously over the top.
• Bake at 350 degrees for about 40-45 minutes, until some brownness and carmelization occurs. Serve warm, with a scoop of ice cream, if desired.

Colette (2018)

This is yet another movie about a man taking credit for a woman's work, then trying to force her to produce more because of the large amount of money her work generates, and all the while never giving her credit, neither publicly not privately.
The film is based on the life of the foremost female French novelist Colette ,and the gorgeous cinematography of it all allows us into the lush, candle-lit world of late 19th century France.  There are  contrasting the thick greenery outdoors of the countryside with the highly decorated interiors of Paris. Both locations are seductively lavish, not in terms of the money spent by the people who live there, but in the wealth of lived-in detail bathed in soft, golden light. Colette herself is in increasingly stark contrast to both settings, too curious and independent-minded for the quiet life of the country, too honest and unconfined for the conventions of the city.  Her husband, whom she adored as a much younger than he girl, is increasingly disillusioned with him after the book she writes and he publishes under his name becomes a raging success.  She wants to be her, and he wants her locked up writing so he can make money.  Beautifully filmed and told story.

Traitor in Chief

There is something very odd going on, whereby people who really do seem like they could be decent people are not only defending the current administration and it's assault on people of color in general and immigrants in general.  I mean for gosh sake, a white dude with a gun just drove to a Texas border town with the explicit mission of shooting people of color, and yet, cloaked in the office he holds rather than the man he is, the actions of the president, a man who chuckled when at a campaign rally when the shooting of immigrants was brought up, continues to not just be defended.  No, that is not the limit of the amorality afoot here.  They are telling those who protest it that we are the problem, that we do not revere the office the way they do.  These same people were calling Obama a Muslim and calling his presidency illegitimate because he was from Kenya.  They want the country to be white, and they will close their eyes to the atrocities around them as we slip into a country that perpetrates and continues to perpetrate state sanctioned evil.  More on this later.

Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

It took me a very long time to get through this book.  The hardest part was getting started.  My local library will allow you to have a book out for up to 9 weeks at a time if nobody else wants the book.  I did that five times before I even cracked the book open.  Then a couple more times before I got to around page 50 and the whole thing started to make more sense and get into the weeds of why rural southern communities are really different and challenged in the 21st century.
This is one of the most recommended books for those who want to try to understand people who vote against their self interests.  I would say that there is a bit of that here, but it is really a clear look at what people who grow up in poverty see and so not see about the world around them.  The main problem for me is that it recycled old tropes about how people are responsible for their own actions, and doesn't acknowledge the things that industry have foisted upon the region.  It is written by a Republican would be my guess.
Be that as it may, the short answer is that there are no short solutions, it is much more food for thought than a blue print out, and maybe it isn't even that.  It wasn't as good as I hoped, but better than I feared.

The End of the Tour (2015)

My youngest son and I are on a streak of watching movies that are very good, but ultimately painful in the truths that they reveal.  This is a movie based almost exclusively on an interview that Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (played by Jesse Einstein) had with David Foster Wallace (played by Jason Segal).  The setting is this.  Lipsky is a want to be author, having just published a book himself, who is almost incensed when he reads a review of Infinite Jest, Wallace's then current book.  He is railing against it to the point where his exasperated girlfriend says that he should just shut up and read it.  He does, and then he is like those who used to smoke but no longer do.  He is an evangelical when it comes to Wallace, and he convinces his editor to send him on a five day end of the book tour meeting with Wallace and write an article about it for the magazine.   The script for the movie comes almost entirely from those tapes, which never made it into an article, but after Wallace's suicide, did become a book, upon which this movie is based.  A glimpse at the angst of genius. You leave convinced it was hard to live within his psyche, and he left us with what he could.