Author: Paul Deaton

Categories
Writing

To Be Read Stack

The author’s official, partial to be read stack.

I threw in with a group of readers, writers, artists, and photographers when I joined Threads to replace my X account. There is a lot of discussion about books to be read stacks. You know what I mean: that pile of acquired books that grows and eventually might be read. What is the right number to have? 100? 200? More? Less? There is not a right answer. I have a completely full bookcase in one of the passageways leading to my writing room. When it’s time for the next book, I browse it like I am in a personal book store. To be read stacks got me thinking about how to select the next book.

Book selection is a hodge-podge process in my world. I diligently read at least 25 pages per day. When it’s time for the next book, sometimes I know what to pick up ahead of time and sometimes I don’t. I can be like a dog chasing a squirrel. There is little interest in being disciplined here. Less than there should be. I tend to pick recently acquired books for next.

At the same time, there are books I own I want to get to. For example, I’m building a collection of books about Florida, Virginia, Minnesota and other places important to my family history. Those are maybe 50 books organized on shelves for easy grabbing for research. Somehow those need to be worked into the rotation.

Referrals are the most important part of the process: referrals from friends, social media (Threads and Facebook mainly), from the footnotes of other books, and from what my pals on Goodreads are reading. I used to just buy those books and find a spot for them.

While I have more than a thousand books in my library to be read (maybe two thousand, who’s counting?), I slowed the purchasing process. When I find a book to read from any source, I put it in my Amazon shopping cart and remove it to save for later. That builds a reading list without buying a book. In the past, when I filled my cart, I used to just place the order. No more.

I have a Goodreads account with a few friends. The Goodreads to be read list exists yet I don’t find it as useful as the Amazon list. I use them both when I’m stumped.

When the next book is up, from any source, and I don’t have a copy, I check availability on the online catalogue at the public library. This is a new process. We are in a small community so sometimes they have it and sometimes they don’t. If they have it, I place a hold and pick it up on the next trip to town.

I keep nine shelves of more than 400 books of poetry. I use them to palate cleanse or for inspiration. There are so many unread poems they could keep me busy for a long time.

In terms of filling my life with reading, I would never have to leave the house for the 14 years left according to government life expectancy tables. Nonetheless, I want to stay current and as an avid reader of online publications I frequently encounter a new book I should read.

My bottom line is I like the hodge-podge of my to be read stack and its extensions online. With so many good books in the world, I don’t want to miss many. I don’t have enough perspective to know whether I have and a to be read stack is no answer to that problem.

Categories
Writing

Weekly Journal 2024-03-10

Garlic on March 5, 2024.

Garlic is up in the garden: yield looks pretty good. Somehow building a brush pile escaped me this week so I need to get cracking on that. Many robins and other birds have arrived. Lilacs are beginning to bud. All signs are present for an early spring.

Class reunion

Nothing can sober a person like figuring out who died from one’s high school class. For my class of 1970, our research shows 42 of about 260 classmates have died. That is in line with what insurance company actuarial tables suggest should be our experience. It doesn’t make dealing with those deaths any easier. “Who died?” was the most frequently asked question at our 40th reunion in 2010 so the planning committee is front loading work to have a better answer this time.

When I work on the organizing committee for a reunion I’m more likely to attend. My main interests are finding out what people have been doing during the years since we graduated, planning the event, and catching up on news. I would not likely attend if I wasn’t on the planning committee. The event is in July, dubbed the 50th Reunion (Delayed) because we canceled during the coronavirus pandemic when our 50th would have been.

Charlatan

I finished reading Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock this week. It is a well-researched and easy to read book about early 20th Century medical practices and associated quackery. Dr. John Binkley, the charlatan, is reminiscent of B.J. Palmer, son of the discoverer of the chiropractic principle, who lived in Davenport. Palmer started the first radio stations west of the Mississippi River in Davenport and Des Moines, paraded elephants through the city streets to advertise the chiropractic principle, and had a museum called Little Bit O’Heaven at his chiropractic school. The museum had artifacts collected during his global travels. While chiropractic thrives into the 21st Century as a respected medical profession, its trajectory in the early years is tied to that of the goat-gland charlatan depicted in this book. Worth reading for this and other reasons.

State of the Union

I viewed video of the entire State of the Union Address. It took me multiple segments to get through it. Biden did an excellent job, of the kind I expect from a Democratic president. I also viewed video of the Alabama housewife (and U.S. Senator) who delivered the Republican response. They have nothing! Seriously, Biden got criticized for having a campaign TikTok account. Do Republicans not know about the numerous objections among users to federal attempts to regulate TikTok? OMG! Governor Kim Reynolds made a press release reacting to the State of the Union with a tepid response. Why did she even bother if she had nothing to say? Republicans really do want to take the country backward.

Hope your week went as well. Cheers!

Categories
Sustainability

Meaty Issues In Late Stage Republicanism

Beef Cattle. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Another week and Republican state legislators stuck in my craw. Why do they hate plant-based food? In the end, all our food is based on plant life, including beef, hogs, and sheep which all eat plants.

Ty Rushing of Iowa Starting Line reported the following from Republican Rep. Mike Sexton: “If it was up to me, I believe I would outlaw fake meat in the state of Iowa, and I would make it illegal to transport it across the state of Iowa.” Perhaps someone should inform Rep. Sexton many fake meats are made from soybeans, which is a major Iowa crop. Sexton is like the guy in a bar, who two hours after the game finished is telling wait staff clearing tables his opinion about a long past and obscure referee call. Legislators are not serious people when they raise issues like this.

Diners who converted to a plant-based diet sometimes want the home-cooked flavor of a burger like those offered by Morningstar Farms and Beyond Meat. People with common sense know processed food is not particularly good for us. If the choice is eating a fast food meal or going hungry, there is no choice: stave off hunger until we can improve our diet. The traditional wisdom is “all things in moderation.” We should take it easy on processed food.

The point missing in this excerpt from life in late stage Republicanism is we, as a society, should be cutting the size of our livestock herds. In her book Not the End of the World, author Hannah Ritchie explains her beef with beef and other livestock.

Raising cattle is a very resource-intensive way to make food. Cows need a lot of food, water, emit a lot of greenhouse gases, and need a lot of land. When it comes to how much land is needed to produce a kilogram of food, beef and lamb are miles ahead of any other food.

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie.

Globally, we don’t need to use so much land for food production, Ritchie asserts. While not impacting overall food availability, reducing livestock herds could significantly reduce the amount of agricultural production needed to feed everyone on the planet. Take away livestock, and more soy produced as animal feed could be converted to human foodstuffs. We could reduce deforestation and let some land used for livestock grazing revert to forest, grassland or other wilderness. We would all be better for this.

The thing about late stage Republicanism is it is not about logic and common sense. This is about the GOP Culture Wars. I visited our public library last week and there is an entire 30-foot row of shelves containing books about health, diet and cooking in a city of 3,000 people. The culture of food is all around us. When it becomes politicized, like Sexton made it, there are no winners. What? You want me to make my own fake meat burgers? Well fine. They will be better than tolerating the sh*t show Republicans put on every day as their party is grasping at straws. Democrats are on the cusp of something big when drones like Sexton have their say.

If you want to learn about the bigger picture of sustainability, I recommend Hannah Ritchie’s new book, which can be found here. In the meanwhile, the dithering Republicans in the State House haven’t banned your recipe crumbles… yet.

Categories
Living in Society

New Work Ahead – Re-elect Joe Biden

On Super Tuesday, March 5, the Iowa Democratic Party released the results of their mail-in presidential preference “caucus” that replaced first in the nation. Most news outlets did not recognize this was a thing to watch before it happened. After four attempts, Biden won Iowa, securing all 46 delegates to the national convention. I don’t recall him visiting the Hawkeye State to campaign this cycle. I’d wager he had already shaken many of the Democratic hands that marked the oval next to his name.

At the public library used book sale last weekend I bought a copy of Pete Souza’s Obama: An Intimate Portrait for a free will donation. Souza was chief official White House photographer for all eight years of the administration. Many of the photos in this 352-page book have been widely published. After returning home from the library I started reading it and couldn’t stop until I had turned every page. We are hungry for the kind of presidency Obama had. It is incomprehensible to me the country followed Obama with Trump.

Why does the Obama administration pull on my heartstrings? It’s because almost everyone I know had some connection to what they did. Friends traveled to D.C. for the inauguration. Members of my groups reported on high level meetings they attended. Nearly every Democrat I knew worked on his campaign. Combine that with the fact I met the guy in 2006, before he ran for president, and had a comfortable, personal conversation with him. Obama was as real as a politician can be. That means something and I miss it.

Obama ran into an obstacle when Republicans took the U.S. House majority in 2010. It was as if the electorate said, “Whoa Nellie,” and backed off from the work Obama was doing. I found it frustrating, as did he. Obama navigated through it as best he could. Another obstacle appeared in 2014 when Republicans took control of both the House and Senate during the midterms. In Souza’s book there is a photo of Obama and Biden working on Biden’s announcement he would not run for president in 2016.

Few Democrats I know caucused for Biden during the three times he competed when Iowa was first in the nation. When he defeated Trump in 2020, he became the kind of Democrat we missed. With his long experience in the U.S. Senate, and as Vice President, he learned how to get bills passed, and he did. He doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. As I wrote previously, “(under Biden) it is government acting as it should be and therefore if nothing seems broken, no worries. No credit for elected officials either.”

Those of us with living memory of LBJ know what it means to hit the ball out of the park in an election. When I was a kid, I expected all elections could be like the 1964 Democratic landslide. Biden hasn’t come close to what Johnson did in his first three years in office. Like with Obama, Biden’s first two years with a Democratic House and Senate were his best. We could return to that if Democrats do well in 2024. A lot depends on every Democrat activating during the fall campaign, recapturing some of the Obama essence. It seem there will be no more Democratic landslides for the time being.

Having Obama and Joe Biden as presidents has been positive. I also recognize how quickly the past fades.

I put the Obama book on the table in the living room so my spouse could spend time with it. Eventually it will go on my bookshelves until I’m ready to reflect again on those years. Despite the challenges, they were good years. There is new work ahead that requires focus. Re-electing Biden will be a formidable task. It will be worth the work if we can get it done.

Editor’s Note: If you are on social media looking to get involved in a campaign, I recommend following Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin and Resistance Live. She is on Threads and YouTube. She will get your energy level UP!

Categories
Living in Society

Super Tuesday 2024

The Iowa Democratic Party reported unofficial results of our mail-in caucus. Joe Biden won with 11,083 votes out of 12,193 tallied (91 percent). Since no other candidate got 15 percent of the vote, Biden receives all 46 Iowa delegates to the Democratic National Convention. The convention process kicks off with our county convention on March 23, 2024. I am a delegate from my precinct.

Among the races to watch last night was the North Carolina Republican primary where election denier/holocaust denier/Trump supporter Mark Robinson won and will face Democrat Josh Stein in the general election. In the California race to replace U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey advanced to the general election.

There were 16 state results, plus American Samoa. Biden and Trump dominated their parties and are expected to win the nominations. This sentence could have been written before Super Tuesday. Unless your state was voting/caucusing, there was little reason to pay attention to the results. Once Iowa was called, I went to bed and read the rest of the results in the morning.

This week Greg Sargent wrote about the results of a Democratic poll which showed a small percentage of voters surveyed are familiar with Trump’s most overt authoritarian outbursts. One hopes Democrats will tune in and soon. The article suggests the electorate is tuned out at the moment.

A lot depends on the results of the general election.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Not Gardening Weather

About 200 cell blocks with broccoli, kale, chard, collards, celery, herbs and more on March 2, 2024.

Yesterday a large flock of pelicans arrived on the lake. It’s a sign spring is coming.

While checking the mail, someone I’ve known since we moved here in 1993 was walking their dog. We had a discussion about the weather and about my garden which is one of the largest in the area. Our consensus of two was it is going to freeze again. It is too early to start digging garden plots.

In my fourth week of indoor seed planting, things seem to be going well. Most seeds have sprouted on schedule, and despite growing indoors, are developing in a way that will make for sound seedlings. Soon it will be time to assemble the portable greenhouse and move some outside.

There was a Red Flag Warning on Sunday, which means a risk of wildfires. I will delay brush burning until the warning ends.

I got these on Saturday at the Solon Public Library Annual Used Book Sale for a free will donation.

On Saturday I went to the public library and bought three books at their used book sale. I began reading the Pete Souza book as soon as I got home and couldn’t put it down until I turned all the pages. It is incomprehensible we went from Obama as depicted in these photos to Trump. I began to tear up a couple times while reading it. I am usually more reserved.

This led me to thinking about the presidents during my lifetime and this brief rating:

  • Truman: Don’t recall as president.
  • Eisenhower: Okay for a Republican/Interstate Highway System
  • Kennedy: Favorable
  • LBJ: Vietnam/Voting rights/Medicare
  • Nixon: OMG!
  • Ford: Not Nixon
  • Carter: Malaise/Camp Davis Accords
  • Reagan: JFC!
  • George Bush: Reagan-lite
  • Clinton: +/- Neocon
  • George W. Bush: Bad, very bad
  • Obama: My president
  • Trump: Nightmare/insurrectionist
  • Biden: What I expect from a Democrat

Spring is two weeks away and the days tick by much faster than I’d like. By my count, I can expect 14 more springs during my lifetime. I plan to find enjoyment in each of them. Hopefully pelicans will be a part of them.

Categories
Writing

Weekly Journal 2024-03-03

Morning coffee.

The week started with days where the ambient temperature reached a high in the 70s, dipped on Wednesday to the teens, then rose again the rest of the week. The expectation for first week in March is highs in the 30s and 40s, so it seems unseasonably warm.

Creamed crumbles on toast

I don’t have many meals derived from Mother’s cooking. As important as cooking has become to me, I can count on one hand the number of dishes I now make that she did, too. One of those is variously called chipped beef on toast or creamed beef on toast. Mother made this for Father as a reminiscence of Southern cooking in which he came up. I don’t use beef in our kitchen, yet I made this for breakfast one day. I use vegetarian recipe crumbles as a meat substitute.

Saute half cup of finely diced onions in two tablespoons of butter and add one finely chopped clove of garlic. Season with salt and pepper. Add dried home made hot pepper powder. Add a cup of recipe crumbles and cook until thawed from the freezer. Add two tablespoons of all purpose flour and combine everything while on medium low heat. Add one cup of milk (cow milk or oat milk, whatever is the kitchen standard) and combine. Lower the heat and cook until the mixture thickens. Toast and cut into 3/4-inch squares two slices of bread. Pour the creamed crumble mixture evenly over the toast and enjoy.

Tracking writing

I edited the first ten chapters of my book. I created a spreadsheet to track what I did and how the daily word count changed. The fact that I am now including numbered chapters is a revelation. It helps organize topics in a way I hadn’t considered. I now gather topics from different places in the narrative over a span of years under a single header. It helps reduce the amount of duplication that plagued me from the cut and paste method of composition with which I began. I am satisfied I made progress last week.

Email rabbit hole

I have email files beginning in 1999. There are hundreds of thousands of stored emails and I don’t plan to read them all. When I begin a session of email reading, I become lost for hours in a rabbit hole of forking paths. For example, the emails I wrote and received about updating the county plan for dealing with a contagious disease epidemic seem prescient in light of the coronavirus pandemic ten years later. This research will yield a paragraph, maybe two in my chapter about the coronavirus pandemic which closes the book.

What I seek the most is emails from friends and family to use in other parts of the narrative. Facts are recorded with dates attached to them and they help evoke memories of that time. The trouble I see is advancing technology may render some of those files obsolete. For now, the current version of Microsoft Outlook opens all the saved files, yet I’m anxious to go through them even if it would be better to wait until I’m writing those parts of the narrative.

Publication

I decided to publish Part I of the autobiography first. The narrative goes through finishing graduate school and taking work at the university where my spouse and I met. I was 30 years old on our wedding day: a clean breaking point for the narrative. The second part of the book will be more difficult to write because there is so much material to condense. I delay that challenge by deciding to finish part I this year, God willing.

Summary

It was a good week. Hopefully increased garden tasks can be added to my life without compromising the writing. March brings the pressure of spring and I am ready for it. On Friday, March 1, we saw the first Robin in our yard, along with another flock of smaller birds. Spring is definitely coming.

Categories
Living in Society

Sunday Grab Bag 2024-03-03

Rural Polling Place

The machinery of our politics has so many moving parts it is hard to keep up. Important things are pushed from sight just because so much attention is paid to the distractions of Republicans. Here are some items that merit our attention.

Iowa Legislature

Democrats in the legislature are doing a great job of communicating Democratic policy even if Republicans have been dominant. It seems easier to track Democrats and that is attributable to their improved messaging this year compared to previous ones. We are in the minority and Democratic legislators need our support to hold the line. They need our encouragement more than ever. Thank you Democratic senators and representatives.

Godly Iowa?

It is history 101 that two primary traditions in white America, the denominational biblical tradition and enlightenment utilitarianism, worked together to contribute to the American Revolution. In doing so the civil belief system which marks American culture today was created. Do the United States operate on God’s law or man’s law? Whatever answer one asserts, it doesn’t matter to how the country was formed and has been operating since the Declaration of Independence. My State Representative, Brad Sherman, believes otherwise.

The decline in our culture is disturbing to all who understand that the foundations of freedom are based in compliance to the laws of God.  We know that it will take the power of God to restore America to the godly principles and moral values that are so badly needed. But because God always uses people, we have a part to play. There are many avenues where God uses people, but one is in the laws we pass. Good government will always reflect God’s values because God is good.

Rep. Brad Sherman, God’s Law Versus Man’s Law, Jan. 19, 2024.

Sherman asserts, “The Declaration of Independence tells us that rights come from our Creator and the purpose of government is to secure those rights.” Here is the mention of God in the Declaration of Independence to which he refers:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Declaration of Independence, John Hancock, et. al. July 4, 1886.

Call me heathen but I can’t connect these dots. To make matters worse, this is from a man who, with all the pressing problems in the state, focused his efforts on a bill that would prohibit Satanic displays on government-owned property. Luckily for us all that bill didn’t make the first funnel, saving us time and distraction from other, more pressing problems.

Imagine my surprise when Thursday night, a press release from the governor arrived with this statement: “The right of religious freedom is endowed upon us by our creator – not government. Our founders recognized this principle, and today the Iowa House took a step forward to protect it. Twenty-three states around the country, with both Republican and Democrat governors, have passed similar laws. Now, it’s Iowa’s turn.” Republicans are out of touch with Iowans on the role of government in religious freedom.

Kids Online Safety Act (S.1409)

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which sets out requirements to protect minors from online harms, has strong bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate. Why, then, does the LGBTQIA+ community have trouble swallowing it? They, like most everyone, believe protecting minors on the internet is important. What they don’t like is they believe KOSA as it stands would inadvertently block LGBTQIA+ and other youth from accessing valuable digital content and supportive online communities.

More specifically, they note KOSA’s “duty of care” obligation, which could cause online platforms to inadvertently remove legitimate and vital content to avoid violating the law. This risk is particularly concerning in states with policies already hostile to the LGBTQIA+ community, where political actors could exploit KOSA to further their anti-LGBTQIA+ agenda.

The group LGBT Tech petitioned the U.S. Senate to amend the bill. To read the letter they and more than 70 other LGBTQIA+ groups sent to the Hill, click here.

It is hard to disagree that “striking a balance between protecting minors and safeguarding fundamental rights of expression and privacy is of the utmost importance in our digital world.” KOSA, as it stands, requires modification to do so.

Elect Democrats

A positive thing is when the Iowa Democratic Party puts people before politics, we gain supporters. Our numbers increase in a way to empower us to take back control of the state government. By focusing on how to help Democrats win elections in November we may miss a few things, yet have the big picture right. If you see something I missed, please make a comment on this post.

Categories
Living in Society

Politics Doesn’t Change

Dave Loebsack

Editor’s Note: I was cleaning up old email files and found this April 10, 2005 email from Dave Loebsack announcing to a small group he was exploring a run for the Congress. As we now know, Loebsack beat 30-year incumbent Jim Leach and served until Jan. 3, 2021. His analysis of the direction of the Republican Party seems spot on, not only for 2005, but from a perspective in 2024. It is presented without editing. I hope readers will be inspired to help Christina Bohannan re-take this seat in November.

Recently, I sent a message to a number of listservs in the 2nd congressional district noting that I am beginning an informal “exploration” of a run against Jim Leach in ’06.

Many of you know me as a teacher of political science at Cornell College since 1982 and a long-time Democratic Party activist in Linn and Johnson counties and beyond. I have also worked hard to help the public engage in important issues by serving as a resource person for various civic groups, delivering lectures, facilitating discussion, moderating events, appearing on local television public issues programs, etc.

Why am I considering running at this point?

It is time that we in this district begin to halt George Bush and the hard right of the Republican Party as they try to move America ever farther in their direction. In recent days, we have seen this movement evident by the efforts of Tom DeLay and his allies as they try to capture control of the federal judiciary. Apparently, it is not enough to control the executive and legislature. They want all three branches of government in their grasp.

The simple truth is that Jim Leach remains a Republican who, as Julie Thomas put it in 2002, at a minimum serves as an enabler for the right-wing leadership in the House and the Bush administration. What is needed at this point is a representative who is in touch with the concerns of folks in this congressional district and who is willing to “lead” on issues that matter.

Just one example of Jim Leach’s bad votes makes this point. Recently, he voted for the House version of Bush budget that would significantly scale back if not completely gut many of the programs that are the only sources of support for those who have nowhere else to turn, in many cases just to survive. Indeed, the House budget is even harsher than the Bush budget. The values reflected in this budget, I believe, are not the values of the vast majority of folks in the second district of Iowa. Interestingly, there were a few Republicans in the House had the courage to vote no, but not Jim Leach.

At this point, I invite you to be in touch with me if you have questions about what I stand for, who I am, etc. Also, I am open to all advice and support. If you think I should move forward with this “exploration,” please let me know. If you think you would support me as a volunteer or financially, please let me know. If you think there are others who are more qualified than I and who deserve our unified support, please let me know. I do not plan to do this if I don’t believe the necessary support (perhaps most critically the necessary financial support) will be forthcoming.

No doubt the road ahead will be difficult for any candidate who ultimately takes on Jim Leach in 2006. He is a well-entrenched figure who has been in congress for nearly 30 years and he can self-fund any campaign if need be. Given these realities, any campaign in this district will likely have to build from the ground up. We need to begin NOW to build a true grassroots movement to take back this district as a first step towards taking back America from the right-wing of the Republican Party. This will take some time but it can begin right here in the 2nd district of eastern and southeastern Iowa!

Over the course of the past few weeks since I first sent a version of this message out, support for this “exploration” has been quite humbling. Indeed, I have taken the next step and set up an account where I will deposit any contributions that might be sent for this effort. Should you be so inclined to help, simply make the check out to “Loebsack Exploratory Committee” and send it to the address below.

In the meantime, I urge you to make a pledge that indicates your interest in this campaign and your support for this effort should I move on to the next stage and declare a formal candidacy.

We can take back our country from the right-wing of the Republican Party and we can begin to so do by electing a Democrat in the second congressional district who will lead on the issues that matter to folks in this part of Iowa.

Thanks, and take care.
David Loebsack
Mt. Vernon, Iowa

Help Christina Bohannan replace a MAGA-R in the Congress. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  Check out her campaign website.

Categories
Living in Society

Art Books

Shelf of art books

My relationship with the world of art is tenuous at best. A few high school and university friends practiced the visual arts. They were, and in some cases still are, multidisciplinary artists. I viewed myself as a multi-media creator yet throwing a pot, painting a watercolor, or drawing a sketch are activities in my portfolio that have been lost to exigencies of living a modern life. I have a lot of art books and art memories. It’s a big topic, so I’ll limit myself to three things: books in my library, artists I’ve seen or knew in person, and major shows I attended.

Art books take up too much space. When I built the bookshelves in my library I designed a shelf to accommodate them. Having so many is a function of my interest in certain artists like Picasso, Joan Miró, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, and the like. I saw major retrospectives of each of these artists and usually bought a book to remember the work. I picked up many art books at used book sales. Until I get to the point of running out of space, most of them will stay right where they are in the library.

Among the pantheon of artists who lived during my lifetime, three come to mind: Joan Miró, Louise Nevelson, and Leslie Bell.

I saw a major Miró retrospective in Paris in 1974. I wrote in my journal, “The show of Joan Miró was very complete and what impressed most were the ceramics and weaving. The paintings lacked something in such great numbers, better just a few to contemplate rather than such overdose.” Later, on a 1978 trip through Italy with friends, I saw the artist filming a program for French television at Fondation Maeght in Saint Paul de Vence. While Miró is known as a Catalan painter, the unexpected encounter on the French Riviera cemented him as French to me.

Louise Nevelson came to Iowa City for the installation of Voyage at the University Lindquist Center. I happened to be at the installation site when the artist walked up to have a look at the space. She was scheduled to give a lecture at the Museum of Art later that day. The University describes the work in place:

Voyage was the first sculpture purchased with funds provided by the Art in State Buildings Program, initiated in 1978. With public works such as Voyage, Louise Nevelson creates a visual dialogue using existing scenery and groups of vertical elements, evocative of trees or plant like forms. Nevelson preferred to see her large-scale outdoor sculpture, which she undertook in the last fifteen years of her life, as environmental architecture. Voyage fits this description as it commands attention within the closed-off courtyard of the Lindquist Center. Yet, it does not overwhelm the entire space. The work invites dialogue with the viewer, offering a variety of shapes, forming spatial relationships with both the spectator and the architectural environment.

Iowa Facilities Management website.

One local artist I knew well was Leslie Bell, an art professor at Saint Ambrose University. Les was a couple years ahead of me in high school. I came to know him more as a musician than a visual artist. He was good at whatever he did. I recall picking him up while hitch hiking to a friend’s home. I engaged his band to play at our fifth high school class reunion. He was part of a small group of intellectuals in the Quad Cities. He helped create a film festival around the time I returned from military service. We were not close friends. He was an example of someone successful in making art a career. He influenced many students at Saint Ambrose. I thought about him while I tried to figure out how to live in my home town as an adult in the early 1980s.

I visited so many art museums during my life. During trips to Europe I made a point to see the works of Johannes Vermeer, which are not gathered in a single location. I saw a lot of them. I made a point to see Monet’s work in Paris. I bought a book of Byzantine mosaic images when visiting Ravenna, Italy in 1974. I saw the Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Andy Warhol retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective somewhere. The latter was so much about the artist and not about the location of the retrospective. Seeing art in person is essential and I did my share of it.

How shall I use the couple hundred art books in my library? For reference, of course. There has to be something more than that. I’ve been creating so long, I don’t need many references. As long as I have the space, they can sit on shelves waiting for my attention.