The place where I write is surrounded with books. There are more books in the next room, in boxes and piled on tables. There are shelves of books in the garage. There are documents going back to the 1950s. There are also boxes of artifacts. What is all this stuff?
To call it a library is not quite accurate. It is a collection of things, yet only in the loosest sense of the word. I set up my desk when we moved in, the same place it is today, before electricity was connected to the structure. Things collected here the way flotsam washes to shore. There is little agency in the word “collection” as applied to my place.
“Archives” doesn’t get it right either. In a corner is a tree trunk from the pine tree that grew outside my window during the 1960s. On top of it I pile each bill as it comes in and is paid. The stack of papers is 16 inches tall. When someone wants a document, I say it is filed on the stump. A stump is not a filing system, they say. I don’t argue the point.
As a newly minted septuagenarian I’m concerned with a couple of things.
When I die, I want people to be able to find relevant things, such as my will, whether I paid the last electricity bill, the title to the automobile, and a list of my computer passwords: an archive of the exigency of now. This is a given, it exists, and can be improved upon.
There are too many books to read or to pass on to someone else to sort through. A sorting has begun. A library is a place to find something specific. As needs change, so should the contents. Getting rid of many books and papers is common courtesy to my survivors. I try to be courteous. It is difficult to find things if I’ve forgotten what I have. This can be a problem when considering what I leave behind.
Mainly I want quick access to books and papers I need for my writing. Egads! I’m not there and time’s a wasting! Archival materials would describe this if I had taken time to archive everything, which I have not. I’d like to get the collection to a manageable size, one that would fit in a single room. Once I get there I may call it a home library and be justified in doing so. For the time being, it is what it is and the word “library” is not an accurate fit.
It is a place to work. A place of my own. That will have to suffice for now.
Governor Kim Reynolds mentioned carbon-capture in her condition of the state address during a segment on renewable energy.
I am introducing new legislation that will improve access to E15 and B20 and upgrade Iowa’s fuel infrastructure to offer higher blends. And I’m proposing that we invest in carbon-capture solutions to sustain and build on our leadership position in renewable energy.
Governor Kim Reynolds Condition of the State Address, Jan. 11, 2022.
To be clear, the governor supports carbon-capture to protect Iowa’s investments in ethanol and bio-fuels. It has nothing to do with addressing the climate crisis, and everything to do with continuing to grow corn for ethanol. We are not sure if carbon-capture even works.
“The U.S. Department of Energy invested $684 million in unsuccessful carbon capture and storage demonstration projects at coal plants under the 2009 stimulus package, a U.S. Government Accountability Office audit found,” according to Karin Rives at S&P Global. “This time, the DOE has close to $1 billion from the 2021 infrastructure law earmarked for large-scale carbon capture pilot projects, as well as $2.5 billion for carbon capture demonstrations.”
If DOE spent $684 million on carbon capture and it failed to capture carbon, why would our government increase the amount to be spent? To address the climate crisis, ethanol and bio-fuels need to go out of business. Society should develop true alternative fuels that free farmer fields to grow food crops and don’t rely on release of carbon dioxide to produce ethanol.
Fool me once on carbon capture, shame on you. Fool me a second time, shame on me.
Read all of my posts on carbon-capture at this link.
I discarded worn hats and pulled these out. Spring styling has begun.
It was a good week for my autobiography.
I made steady progress on re-writing the first four chapters. The time was about ten to one editing over writing. The most difficult challenge is getting the narrative right so it is honest and understandable. I located key documents I’d forgotten. I also created one empty banker’s box. That last part is particularly rewarding for a retiree with too much stuff.
There was a file with old resumes in it, including a Statement of Personal History (DD Form 398) I completed in 1982 or 1983. It includes every job I held and every address I had from birth. That will be useful in creating a time line. A quick glance revealed a number of inaccuracies. I know more now about my life than I did when I was living it, which seems normal.
Importantly, I located the family history documents Mother provided about my paternal line. It is a set of genealogy forms with a lot of information completed. This makes the process easier. Like with every documentation, there are some mistakes and omissions. I can fill in the blanks if I choose. I debate whether to tamper with the originals and have thus far mostly left them as is.
In 1983, we made a long automobile trip from Iowa City to Saint Louis; Evansville, Indiana; Wise County, Virginia; and then to Philadelphia to visit friends and relatives. It was a sort of second wedding trip after our first one to Chicago in December 1982. I located my journal entries from the trip, in which I recorded the interaction with my Uncle Gene when he traveled from Florida to Wise County to be with us. He explained his family life in and around Glamorgan, Virginia where he and Father were born. The journal will help. I may quote most of it directly as it tells the story as well as anything I could write now.
Uncle Gene also took us to some of the home places, including a parcel of land described as “lying and being in Wise County, Virginia on the waters of Guests River in the Rocky Fork section of the Gladewell Magisterial District.” This property, called Rocky Fork by family, goes way back. We explored it during the visit.
I spent considerable time thinking about the 1920s and 1930s this week. I’m reading a book called Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore. It recounts the history of use of the element radium in manufacturing consumer goods, and the impact of radioactivity on workers. The radium girls literally glowed from toxic radium contamination.
Part of the Radium Girls narrative presents the history of The Radium Dial Company, founded in 1917 in Ottawa, LaSalle County, Illinois. It supported what became the Western Clock Company in 1919, featuring the Westclox brand. Radium Dial Company made watch dials painted by hand with radium so they would glow in the dark. The Westclox manufacturing plant was in Peru, LaSalle County, Illinois.
In the book there are two references to Starved Rock, which is where my maternal grandmother worked when she arrived in LaSalle County from Minnesota about 1925. It was a place for group outings for the radium girls and others. I hadn’t considered the broader context of LaSalle County in my autobiography, but now I am. Reading this book was a breakthrough.
As Moore points out, not everyone had automobiles at that time. Likewise, there was radio but no television. People mainly got news from each other, and from newspapers. For a historian, newspapers make it relatively easy to follow coverage of major stories like the one of the court cases of the radium girls.
This led me to think about how I gather news.
We need news, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, yet always. First priority is news about key family members, which is mostly sourced from networks of family and friends. After that, we seek news about what could impact our daily lives. How we gather news changed since the 1920s and during my lifetime. It will likely continue to change.
Our family tuned the television to watch the Huntley-Brinkley Report for news during my formative years. With theme music from the second movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, it had a weighty feel. News stories were told in direct, clear language. It catered to what passed for adults back then. It went off the air the summer after I graduated high school.
We subscribed to local Davenport newspapers, the Times-Democrat and the Catholic Messenger. In eighth grade we had a project to read and clip newspaper articles into a scrapbook. I got an A on the project. I was a paperboy who delivered the Times-Democrat in our neighborhood yet hardly read it except for a school project.
In graduate school we watched KWWL-TV news when we had a chance. They had opened a news bureau in Cedar Rapids which featured a recent college graduate, Liz Mathis. Mathis is currently running for Congress. I can’t recall when I stopped watching television news. It was long ago.
Today the day begins reading newspapers. I subscribe to online editions of the Washington Post, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Iowa City Press Citizen, and Solon Economist. Each of them informs me from a different part of the community. I’m a member of Practical Farmers of Iowa, the Arms Control Association, and the Climate Reality Project. Each of these sources provides specialized news. I subscribe to the governor’s press releases, to the county supervisors and public health news releases, and to a number of political office holder newsletters, including people who represent me in the Iowa legislature and the Congress. Lastly, I follow news reporters on Twitter. One exercises caution in picking them. I read their biographies and some of their work before following. There are a lot of great people writing relevant news stories about contemporary society if one is lucky enough to find them.
I had a good writing week and felt like sharing. Thanks for reading.
I’ve been reading more obituaries lately, partly because of my main writing project, and partly because as I age, long-time friends and acquaintances are passing. Survivors put the best face on the deceased in an obituary. That is okay. I wrote a draft of my own obituary to make it easier on my survivors. Not everyone does it and that’s okay, too.
As a proof reader at the local weekly newspaper I edited the obituary section. Mostly, they needed work in terms of format, grammar and punctuation. It was easy to tell when a funeral home used a template. I tried to make them grammatically adequate and positive regarding the life of the deceased. It was a minor part of the job yet I enjoyed it. No one ever complained.
An obituary requires specific information and it should all be accurate: birth date, death date, and if married, a wedding date. Survivors are a nice addition, yet we don’t need to read the names of all the great, great grandchildren or pets. Spouse, children, parents, siblings and partners, if any, are enough. The author should mention a career although an obituary is not a resume. What the deceased did in retirement is good if they were lucky enough to live so long. The obituary should make the deceased stand out without portraying them as being too highfalutin or better than everyone else.
Instead of “devoted wife,” I’d like to read how impossible the marriage was because she was a shrew. I’d also like to hear how the husband spent all his time at the bar after work improving the cirrhosis of his liver. I don’t suppose my wishes will be granted.
Military service is typically mentioned, although is not really necessary. Uniformed service is nothing special unless one served in a combat zone. I read this in an obituary about someone I had been with twice. The header was “Another of the ‘Greatest Generation’ has passed.”
How fitting that his death came in alignment with Veteran’s Day, for he was a true patriot. He is a decorated veteran of World War II, having been awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star medals for his actions during combat operations in the Ardennes Forest, known as the Battle of the Bulge. He was an infantryman in the 23rd Armored Infantry Battalion, 7th Armored Division, and fought across Belgium in the winter of 1944-45.
If they had mentioned it while living, I may have thanked them for their service and talked about General Anthony McAuliffe’s negotiations with the Germans in the Ardennes. McAuliffe told them “nuts,” in case you forgot or didn’t know. I might have mentioned my own trip to the Battle of the Bulge site during the 1970s.
Where this ramble is going is whether what people say about each other is real. It is as real as it can be, I believe. At the same time, I read accounts of history in which there is no agreement over simple things. Spelling of the name of a person can vary radically. Dates were not the forte of 19th Century rural communities. Everyone knew at the time when someone was born, yet when a relative made it to the county seat to have the birth recorded, time could pass and with it some of the specifics.
When it comes to public events, vagary is endemic. In the case of the 1927 lynching of Leonard Woods in Pound Gap between Jenkins, Kentucky and Pound, Virginia. There are multiple stories of what happened and depending upon to whom one listens there are many interpretations. What stands out to me is the local sheriffs did not write down a single license plate number of the hundreds of vehicles driven and parked at the site of the lynching. Sometimes people don’t want to say what happened.
Leonard Woods Lynched — Leonard Woods, a black coal miner from Jenkins, Kentucky, was lynched near here on the night of 29-30 Nov. 1927. Officers had arrested Woods for allegedly killing Herschel Deaton, a white man from Coeburn, Virginia, and had taken him to the Whitesburg, Kentucky, jail. On the day of Deaton’s funeral, a white mob numbering in the hundreds broke into the jail and brought Woods close to this spot, where they hanged, shot and burned him. No one was ever arrested. In the aftermath, at the urging of Norfolk editor Louis Jaffé, Norton’s Bruce Crawford, and other journalists, Virginia Gov. Harry F. Byrd worked with the General Assembly early in 1928 to pass the nation’s first law defining lynching as a state crime.
From what I’ve read, these words are true. They are not the whole story and maybe that’s my point. The historical society put the best face on this murder. I want to know the rest of the story.
I unlocked the door to the village well for two technicians. Today’s task was short: they drew raw water samples from the Silurian aquifer for analysis. We didn’t chat much. I stayed outdoors while they worked because the coronavirus is surging.
It has been cold with about six inches of snow on the ground. I stay on paths that have been cleared so I don’t turn an ankle. That means I started a compost bucket in the garage until the path to the composter near the garden is clear. Winter is just beginning. We are heading into a cold spell with subzero temperatures forecast the rest of the week.
There are limits to how long I can work at my writing table. I acquired provisions to last two weeks during a trip to a local commercial center. Maskless minions were everywhere. Luckily, there were few of them out early in the morning and I could avoid them. Bloomberg is reporting the U.S. today exceeded one million COVID infections in 24 hours, doubling the figure from just four days ago and setting a global record.
I appreciate being able to go on walkabout. Even if it is only to visit the village well.
Starting an autobiography is easy. Finishing it… is something else.
I began my autobiography a dozen times over a period of decades, and each time it found no conclusion. Last year, while making substantial progress, I had an epiphany. I had no idea what the process should be. I start 2022 with a work plan to remedy that.
Process became a collection of things.
At first I sat and wrote about whatever came to mind, about 150,000 words in 2021. I merged this writing into a single document (with multiple backups). After all that writing, I determined another, better method was needed to write. Too much of the blogger in me was coming out in my daily writing.
I had to get a better plan written down. I began with 3 x 5 inch index cards in a rough outline of topics, one per card. I made a Word document with a more detailed outline. It included most of what was on the cards and more. Finally, after a year of writing, I wrote a Word document called “big sections” which is a list of the chapter headings. I printed it out and placed it on my white board. The big sections will change going forward, yet I developed a way to add topics as the meaning of them was discovered or developed. It took last year’s writing experience to sort out what I would include in the finished product in the form of chapter headings.
As written on Dec. 16, 2021, I made a shelf of three-ring binders to contain my rough draft. I set aside my 2021 draft document and began a new rough draft which I expect to print and place in the binders. The binders have become a storage place for documents and writing I find along the way. As I write the 2022 draft, documents in the binders will be used as reference. I expect the number of binders to increase as writing proceeds, with the printed draft in front of each chapter heading and source documents behind it.
A main challenge is to follow Robert Caro’s advice to turn every page. At present I don’t know where all those pages reside. I organized my collection of personal journals beginning with school work in 1966. I have a shelf of books which contains my blog writing since 2007. I also placed the letters written to Mother from her estate in three-ring binders. There is a significant trove of emails in electronic form dating to 1999. In a pile on a table are stacks of clippings of opinion pieces, letters written to the editor, and articles I wrote as a freelance journalist. These documents alone are a lot.
What is more challenging is the many boxes of documents and artifacts stored throughout the house. I haven’t counted, yet there are scores of them. They settled in beginning when we moved here in 1993, and I can’t say what is in them with specificity. The way they exist is not in usable form, so I’ll have to open and go through them.
I developed a discovery process to interface with source material. The idea is to methodically go through everything to decide whether it goes in the autobiography, will be stored elsewhere, or discarded. If a particular container is useful to the autobiography, I’ll write about what is in it.
The format will be what I call “rushes,” a name taken from daily rushes in the film days of motion picture making. I’ll encounter an artifact and if applicable, will write a rush, and then edit and place the rushes into the main autobiographical document. I’ve been writing rushes since the beginning of last year. This formalizes what I’ve already been doing.
Along the way, I will edit the main draft of the autobiography for continuity, grammar, spelling, and better word choices. Once the whole document is done, and I’ve examined all the artifacts, true editing will begin. This will lead to eventual publication of the work in an undetermined format, although it likely will be both on paper and in electronic format.
The first year of writing my autobiography felt productive. What I learned makes me optimistic about progress this year. I don’t know if I’ll finish the first draft this year. I know it will be better than the draft I produced in 2021. There is clarity about process, better than there was. Like any process, it will be subject to improvement as I write and learn.
When I write my best I think of Joan Didion. She died of Parkinson’s Disease on Dec. 23, 2021 in Manhattan at age 87.
I will continue to think of her while I’m writing.
The reason her writing has such influence is she has been in and on my mind since high school. I thought, if I could write like Didion it would be the pinnacle. I won’t ever be as good as she was at her worst.
I was thrilled when I found South and West: From a Notebook and Let Me Tell You What I Mean this year. I wolfed them down, starved for what she brings to writing. While she studied Hemingway and Conrad, she did not write like them. She had her own lean, assertive simplicity to make her points. I was enraptured.
I didn’t understand California after a half dozen trips there. While Didion’s stories are her unique, single perspective, they are believable and seem probable. They informed my understanding that California was more than what we witnessed through media combined with ocean, desert, farmland, and what seemed like an unlimited number of highways. She exposed a side of it I wouldn’t have known. There is value in that.
In college I struggled to find a path. I was on a trajectory supercharged by the death of Father in 1969. Didion’s writing was something I could look to and see myself. Although being a successful writer wasn’t meant to be my career, Didion gave me hope in dark times.
We’ve known the end was coming for a while. Now that she passed there are no surprises, just a feeling of desolation, restlessness and sensibility characteristic of her work.
Her writing will persist, as will memories of her frail frame on talk shows as she headed home.
The Mill on Burlington Street, Iowa City, Iowa. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Someone posted a notice on social media that a demolition permit was issued to tear down the building where The Mill operated. They had been in business since 1962. I’ve forgotten more than I remember about The Mill. Time for demolition? So it goes, Kurt Vonnegut may have said. He wrote Slaughterhouse-Five after he moved to Iowa City in 1965.
Who knows if Vonnegut drank at The Mill during his two-year stay in the future UNESCO City of Literature? We do know he was fond of Donnelly’s. There were only so many bars within walking distance of his home at 800 North Van Buren. Given random associations between Vonnegut’s two years in Iowa City and a finite set of bars, it seems likely he did.
So it goes.
What I recall of The Mill is spending time with friends in graduate school. I listened to Joe Pratt, who dragged his new wife with him to Iowa from California for the American Studies Program. He played Stan Rogers songs on Open Mike nights at The Mill. Our writers for Blog for Iowa met up there for beverages and food. When I was more active in the Johnson County Democrats there were events at The Mill, or we’d just go to hang out after an event finished elsewhere downtown. It was a serviceable bar, which by the 2000s showed its age.
The Iowa City I knew upon arrival in 1970 is long gone. One more non-historical landmark demolished is no big deal. It would be best if the corporation razing the property built another high rise. More people of means could live near the city center. I don’t know what residents might do with their automobiles yet that never seems to be an issue. Downtown should be built up while there is interest among wealthy people and contractors to do so.
To me the death knell for downtown Iowa City was when Things, Things, Things closed. The department store came out of the turbulent 1960s and found commercial success into the 21st Century. It was administratively dissolved by the Iowa Secretary of State on Aug. 9, 2012 for failure to file a biennial report.
Two corporations plan to install Carbon Capture and Sequestration technology to collect CO2 emissions at about 40 ethanol and fertilizer plants spread across Iowa. Next, they plan to permanently bury the resulting liquefied CO2 in deep rock formations in North Dakota and Illinois. I don’t know who is swallowing this malarkey. Almost no one is.
The CO2 pipeline is planned to cross Karmen McShane’s family land in Linn County.
“It’s heartbreaking,” McShane told Gannett’s Donnelle Eller for a story. “My dad is 77. My mom needs care. And he feels powerless (to fight the pipeline).”
There is a lot of that going around.
The pace of news articles on CCS is increasing. Eller wrote about it in Monday’s Iowa City Press Citizen and followed it with another article in Tuesday’s newspaper. Erin Jordan of the Cedar Rapids Gazette has been covering CCS as well. When the regular news coverage is frequent, we should read what paid media writers have to say. That’s what I’ll be doing to see how the process unfolds over the end of year holidays. This is my seventh post on CCS.
The Iowa oligarchy of agriculture decided to do this thing, so resistance may be futile unless more people than have become engaged. If McShane is typical, the train left the station and once ground is broken for the pipeline, there will be no stopping it.
As long as Iowa focuses on ethanol, industrial agriculture using manufactured fertilizers, and monoculture row crops and livestock, the environment will get worse. It is pretty bad already if one looks at water and air quality. Implementing CCS does not address any of this and is a distraction from needed action to address Iowa’s water and air quality.
CCS is premised on a vague statement that we must decarbonize the economy. People have written books on this, and just because two companies are spending big bucks on the project, the one-off process in Iowa does not address broader concerns about reducing the amount of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere as if it were an open sewer. As far as I can tell, the sole reason for the project is to protect agricultural oligarchs’ two children: corn ethanol production and fertilizer manufacturing.
To read the rest of my coverage of carbon capture and sequestration in Iowa, click here.
Every village has a well. I began helping manage ours in 1995 when I joined the association board for our village of 85 homes. It has been an interesting project. We don’t really call it a village, yet the size is right.
I used this morning’s walkabout to head up the hill to meet with a contractor about a maintenance job. Ever since our main contractor died it has been a challenge to find technicians to work on our specialized equipment.
We met and they explored the well house, took photographs and asked questions. Like those before them they would not commit to bidding on the job. Fingers crossed they do bid.
We have had issues with our mostly volunteer managed well. At one point we bought the generator in the photo so an outage wouldn’t cause us to lose water pressure. When we lose pressure for a period of time the Iowa Department of Natural Resources requires a testing protocol, which is a bit of a pain. We have enough volunteers so whenever electrical power is lost, someone runs up the hill and starts the generator so it’s back on line before running out of water.
Water is life. Every village has a well. While mostly unseen behind the tall pine trees the village well is at the center of our lives.
Journey Home 
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