Books: Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874

I was hoping that Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 would be a breathless page-turner about the human dramas of conflagrant destruction, abject suffering and triumph over adversity peppered with tantalizing details about old Chicago buildings and neighborhoods that I recognize. Instead it’s a hyperwonkish examination of class inequality, political grandstanding, religious imperialism (particularly the emergence of “scientific” relief that favored distributing blankets, food and financial aid to the religious and the “worthy” newly homeless rich over assisting the chronically poor and the working class who were technically able to support themselves despite the fact that there was little to no work available in the months after the fire) and the simmering intolerance toward (particularly German) immigrants in the fire’s aftermath. 

It does draw some perennial parallels to Republicans' straw-man obsession with “big” government in its discussions of Chicago’s post-fire laws against rebuilding with wood (which made rebuilding almost financially impossible for low- and middle-class fire victims) and its curiously detailed recounting of virulently sabbatical opposition to German-immigrant beer gardens serving alcohol on Sundays, which temporarily drove the mostly single-issue People’s Party into power over the status-quo Law and Order party of native-born religious privilege. 

The book does frequently refer to one concept that will amuse modern Chicago residents, though: the idea that fire victims “fled the city” northward to the neighboring community of Lake View.

Today is the anniversary of the 1871 Chicago Fire, which historians are not opposed to believing actually could have been started by a cow kicking over a lantern in Mrs. O'Leary's barn—though, to be fair, there are many other credible, though less historically charming, theories as to how the fire started. 

During the 15 years I lived in Chicago, I saw it as my civic duty to read and learn as much as I could about my city and its history. I was excited to start reading this book when I found it, but—as the above review I'd initially posted about it says—it turned out to be more of a lengthy essay on the cultural and sociopolitical Zeitgeist that framed the fire than on the timeline and geography of the unfolding inferno and the human-level experience of surviving it, which I would have found far more meaningful.

In any case, upwards of 300 people died and thousands were left homeless and impoverished 154 years ago today and tomorrow. I mark this day on my calendar every year so I'm reminded to think about who they might have been and the horrors they most certainly endured. And I encourage you to a moment today in their memory to celebrate what you have while you still have it.

Art: September

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter developed an instantly recognizable visual vocabulary of photorealistic images obscured to varying degrees in scrapes, blurs, flecks, and pulls of wet and dry paint. Evoking at once powerful movement and misty tranquility, his works require a commitment of effort and time to absorb.

His September (2005) utilizes this technique to stunning effect. Two silvery twin towers, the tops of which disappear into monumental clouds of opaque browns and blacks, stand defiantly against horizontal winds of scrapes and streaks and blurs. The painting captures a moment of enormity with grace and respect and breathtaking radiance.

Both abstract and immediately recognizable, it embraces a world of personal perspectives where the candid observations of press photography meet the chaotic energy of Richter's visual signatures.

An original draft of the painting had bright, colorful flames exploding from the left building, but Richter eventually chose to mute the palette, render the enormity in pale, windy smears and create a more meditative experience for viewers.

The painting is in the New York Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, where it tells stories and reflects on histories with the giants of contemporary art while occupying the same island ground where its subjects, memories and inspiration once stood.

Remembrances: 9/11

Twenty-five years ago this morning I ran a little late and got caught in the rush-hour crowds that prevented me from getting a seat on my EL train. But as I stood there—a relatively new Chicagoan—I was still in awe of the fact that I actually lived in Chicago and rode a train to work and I reveled in the fact that I was one of THEM: my fellow Chicagoans packed in the train car with me, commuting to (or from) our jobs as waiters, insurance brokers, construction workers, actuaries, janitors, bankers, personal trainers, writers, and every other career and purpose in our big, always-moving city.

When I finally arrived at work and got off the elevator, I saw everyone in my office crowded around the TVs in our glass-walled conference room. My first thought was that my colleagues would see I was late. But after joining them—both in front of the TVs and in shared abject horror—and watching the towers burn and fall, seeing the gaping wound in the Pentagon, learning of the disappearance of an entire airplane and its passengers in a fiery pit, I was struck by the fact that my underground commute that morning with my fellow train riders—a microcosm of the city, if not the country—was our last collective moment of innocence before we had access to any news and we suddenly had to face the sickening, horrifying, misanthropic enormity wrought by other human beings on a scale none of us could have ever imagined.

Twenty-five years ago today I never felt closer to colleagues, friends, family members and even strangers as we worked to understand the hatred and comprehend the savagery of perhaps the ugliest tragedy in our lifetimes.

Twenty-five years ago today we lost a certainty in our collective safety but we gained a powerful strength in our ability to care for and protect and even love each other when we needed to ... and even when we didn't.

Twenty-five years ago today, our world changed immeasurably. Our hearts broke irreparably. Our determination grew mightily. Our humanity spread defiantly. Time may erode the intensity of our initial united magnanimity, but we will never forget.

Happy 185th birthday, Antonín Dvořák!

Though a proud native son of Czechoslovakia, Dvořák is perhaps best known for his mighty, highly melodic Symphony No. 9, which is most commonly called "From the New World" due to its early American musical themes and the fact that he wrote almost the entirety of it in the United States—more specifically in Spillville, Iowa, just 100 miles north of Cedar Rapids.

It's the last symphony he composed, and in my opinion its enduring brilliance lies in its endless accessibility. Its dominant six-note theme, often sung to the words of the American folk song "Goin' Home," is never far from the surface no matter how many variations or complex contrapuntal themes he weaves it through.

As a composer, he was rooted firmly among the late Romantics with their heroic storylines, soaring emotions, and confident nods to the nascent but growing fascination with the shimmering textures of the Impressionists and the gorgeous discordances of what would soon be revered around the world as American jazz. And this symphony sits right at the confluence of all that history, all that emotion, all that foresight and all that promise.

 
It's a gorgeous, centuries- and continents-spanning legacy ... built on a mere six-note theme he encountered on an 1893 stay in the humble American Midwest.

The 2020 Iowa hurricane

Six years ago today, a massive derecho—a Category 4 inland hurricane defined by its straight-line winds, which exceeded 140 miles an hour here—appeared out of nowhere and with less than 30 minutes’ notice pummeled Cedar Rapids for almost an hour. The National Weather Service literally called it unprecedented.

Roofs were ripped off; buildings were destroyed by hurricane-force winds, high-velocity debris and crashing trees; sewers were overwhelmed and flooded streets, yards and houses; literally all electricity, cell service and light disappeared for over a week … it was a war zone nobody had time to prepare for, and nobody could fully comprehend when it was over.

And our trees. Our beautiful trees. By most estimates, we lost almost 75% of our trees. Many of them were centuries old. They provided essential shade for us and fertile ecosystems for our wildlife and insects. With no place to nest, our birds all but disappeared for weeks and weeks.

My niece—who’d just lost half of her senior year of high school to covid—also lost the young tulip tree she’d chosen and we’d just planted to celebrate her graduation.

And—shockingly ... infuriatingly ... heartbreakingly—people outside of Cedar Rapids had no idea what had happened. Without electricity or cell service, nobody here had any idea what was going on even a block away unless we could get there on our own—and with roads buried under light and electricity poles and massive debris, that was often literally impossible. With virtually zero coverage on the national news, my colleagues on the West Coast had no idea why we’d all gone radio-silent for days. I’d assumed reporters from every national news source had descended on what was left of our city to cover the carnage, interview our citizens and raise national awareness of what had happened. But without cell or TV service, I had no idea that wasn’t the case. Nobody came.

We felt so alone. We had no idea how or where to start cleaning up. People were left homeless and immediately needed covid-safe places to stay. Some of those people were still living in technically uninhabitable housing a full year later.

Gas stations were knocked out without power, and people with low gas in their cars were pretty much screwed. My neighbor and I had to drive almost 45 minutes to find a gas station that actually had gas—and even then we had to wait at least 30 minutes in a line while a gas truck filled the underground tanks as desperate Cedar Rapidians filled their own tanks and as many gas cans as they could find.

Stores had no electricity to run cash registers to sell things. Produce and meat spoiled. Generators were impossible to find.

Three people died.

People and cities in hurricane zones have the benefit of buildings built to withstand hurricanes; protocols in place to manage the preparations, durations and aftermaths of hurricanes; well-publicized warnings that give everyone many days to prepare their homes and businesses, stock up on gas and water and groceries and survival supplies, and get out of town if needed for safety; and the benefits of the aforementioned publicity to generate after-the-carnage relief efforts across the country.

We had none of that. NONE.

And many of us talk about how we’re still kind of resentful when we see other disasters that get lots of warnings, national coverage and organized help.

But we immediately started our slow recovery here. People mobilized to help each other day after day after day. They set up free food trucks and gathered clothing and supplies and bottled water for people who suddenly had none. Churches and other organizations dispatched teams of volunteers to provide all kinds of assistance to all kinds of people. I randomly had just purchased a sharp, really awesome collapsible hand saw, and I found people who needed help chopping up and hauling trees every day and every night after I was back at work and every weekend for months. And I was far from alone.

The city chipped the massive amount of downed trees and made it available to everyone as free mulch. There was so much of it that people were still using it two years later to cover new plantings in newly sunny gardens and yards. Two years later, buildings were slowly being repaired or torn down and rebuilt entirely—though most insurance windows expired two years to the day after the derecho with many repairs still not even started as the backlog of demand slowly cleared. I had very low expectations for seeing foliage the next spring, but even the most stripped tree trunks and stumps were blooming with tufts of green leaves and came back back surprisingly stronger—even though they bloomed in weird ways that are still hard to picture what they’ll look like in the long term.

I'd randomly taken the first of the above three photos of my sister's street on July 4 the year before the derecho because it had looked so lush and beautiful. I found it in a folder on my phone after the derecho and took the next two from the same spot the year after the derecho to show just how devastating the change in our tree canopy had been.

We've planted so many young trees along streets and in boulevards that they've made me extremely contemplative about how trees are gifts from the past to the future. We'd been enjoying trees planted a century ago by our long-forgotten Cedar Rapids forebears, and when our young trees mature we'll be the long-forgotten forebears who've gone to our graves content in the knowledge we'd managed to perpetuate the cycle as we all rose from the ashes.

The world may not have known what happened to us in the days and weeks after the derecho, but I did hear national reports about the one-year anniversary on NPR last year.

So we’ll be recovering for years and maybe even decades, but we relatively quickly got well ahead of what I'd initially expected. 

And we all have LOTS of pictures.

Books: The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria

I tend to be obsessed with novels and documentaries about epic disasters—partly, like many people, to gawk at the sheer enormity of a catastrophic event, but mostly to find some level of personal, emotional understanding of what the people who were caught in it experienced.

The Andrea Doria was the epitome of Atlantic ocean-liner luxury in the middle of the century ... until this date—July 26—in 1956 when it was broadsided dead-on by the ice-cutting prow of the liner Stockholm in thick fog and then it slowly sank 45 miles south of Nantucket. And while The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria documents in great detail both the mechanics of the catastrophe and the harrowing stories of the passengers and crew, it does so with distracting clumsiness that's in desperate need of an editor.

There's a definite art to creating emotional, memorable relationships between a reader and even a handful of key players among the 1,100+ passengers on an ocean liner. Erik Larson (who wrote Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania and is perhaps best known for writing Devil in the White City) sets the bar high with deftness, poetry and a smartly curated understanding of the human experience. Unfortunately, The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria struggles and fails to reach that bar. To wit: Chapter 2 is little more than paragraph after relentless paragraph describing the lives and backgrounds and travel purposes of 100+ people. The paragraphs are all well-researched and filled with interesting information—but they're overwhelming, and they contain so many superfluous details and tertiary names that they become a numbing blur by the time they finish plodding by.

It's this clumsy, belabored lack of editing that makes the entire book feel somewhat like a high-school paper that's padded to reach a minimum number of pages. In perhaps the most egregious example, there's a paragraph that all but dominates page 72 with an excruciatingly detailed litany of 47 foods that may or may not appear on an evening's dinner menu. Honestly, does ANYONE find useful narrative value in knowing that First Class passengers "could choose from a variety of vegetables, including potatoes (mashed, boiled, roasted, or fried), cauliflower, roasted tomatoes, or sauteéd endive"? And for all the breathless descriptions of the ship's Mid-century Italian-chic décor, there isn't a single photo of its magnificent interior among the 16 pages of photos ... two of which are just full-page stylized print ads about the ship.

All that said, if you train your eyes and brain to skim past ponderous lists of beverages and games available in First Class—and, curiously, the names of the two helicopter pilots who eventually helped rescue the passengers—this is a gripping, detailed (though again: way too detailed in places), incredibly good read. It fully delivers in telling why-and-how details of the physical destruction of the collision and the passengers' and crew members' stories of terror, survival, heroism, cowardice and every attendant emotion in between—though because of the staggering volume of character introductions in Chapter 2 it's nearly impossible to remember who people are when they meet their fates on the sinking ship.

The Andrea Doria and its sinking were the last gasps of high-style ocean travel as passenger airplanes (literally) appeared on the horizon and dramatically cut transcontinental travel time and expense. To underscore this historical importance, The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria nicely frames its narrative around the publication of A Night to Remember, which documented the sinking of the Titanic 40+ years before the Andrea Doria joined it at the bottom of the Atlantic. It's a clever, efficient way to compare and contrast both sinkings, offer historical and cultural perspective, and incorporate details of yet another epic catastrophe to keep me enthralled.

#Pride101: What the hell do LGBTQ+ people have to be proud of?

We’re proud because despite decades and decades of relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes they try to disguise as so-called “religious liberty,” when the entire Republican party perpetually enshrines a pledge to strip us of our legal equalities in its national platform, when communities and cities and entire states keep trying to codify our families into second-class citizenship, when small-importance bakers with the backing of the big-money hate industry take their unhinged loathing of us all the way to the Supreme Court, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.

We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what systemic bigotry and the ugliest sides of organized religion work so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay.

We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly sometimes to the point of being defiantly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on social media … and even on national television.

We're proud because we've worked tirelessly to achieve legal equality in marriage, adoption, parental rights and many other ways that make our families recognized as Families in our states and across our country. And though we have much more to accomplish—and though bigotry disguised as morality and religion and the supposed mandates of constituents work and sometimes succeed at eroding our newfound equalities—we have the momentum and intelligence and motivation and humanity and ability to keep driving back the hate as we continue to drive forward with both our newfound and future equalities.

We’re proud because in just the last few years an openly gay married man was a long-viable, highly qualified, unquestionably respected candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries—something most of us never even considered would EVER happen—and not only does he continue to enjoy enthusiastic support across the Democratic party, but leading Republicans seem to have learned that while they can attack him for reasons they’d attack any other candidate, attacking him for being gay is completely unacceptable.

We’re proud because through our tireless work and the prevailing powers of common sense and compassion, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Proposition Hate and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act long ago collapsed onto their illogical, immoral, meritless foundations … and new legislative attempts to dehumanize us—especially during election cycles—gain little to no traction or visibility and soon die on the trash heap as well.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and careers and relationships and the way we live our lives—and by using our lives as examples of success and humanity and love that other gay people can see and respect and emulate and achieve more and more easily.

We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world increasingly continues to notice and respect us and enthusiastically appropriate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.

We’re proud because more and more often and in more and more contexts our country and our culture see the fact that we’re gay as unthreatening and commonplace and frankly boring.

We’re proud because our tireless efforts to be seen have engendered (which is the perfect verb in this context) massive visible support for us with rainbows and Pride messages on everything from clothing to flags to television commercials—and while we can legitimately be worried that companies are merely riding the Pride wave for profit, we can also celebrate that the explosions of these rainbows on our apparel and flags and televisions overwhelmingly normalizes the understanding that we have a place at the table and a presence in our communities.

We’re proud because especially during this past Pride month and always all year we’re celebrating with parties and street fairs and parades—all mostly virtual in 2020 and 2021—that are overflowing with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, dad-bod queens, glitter queens, nonbinary queens, you’d-never-know-they-were-queens queens, people who prefer not to be called queens and even straight-but-honorary-queens-for-a-day queens, and together we can see beyond the pride in the parades of our lives and together celebrate the underlying Pride in the parades of our lives.

We’re proud because 57 years ago a small crowd in a bar in New York City reached the tipping point in putting up with endless harassment and oppression and instigated a violent retaliation to a police raid that escalated to a week of riots and then to a march for equality that grew unstoppably to a national movement for equality and respect that continues proudly to this day.

Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so incredibly much to be proud of.

#Pride101: The Stonewall Uprising

Fifty-seven years ago today, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn—a mob-controlled gay bar in Greenwich Village that catered mostly to drag queens—in an ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation specifically targeted at people wearing clothing that didn’t conform to the conventions of what the laws called their “assigned gender.” These arrests usually led to people’s names, photographs and home addresses being published in the newspapers … which carried the high risk of further targeting, job loss, eviction, and family ostracism.

Usually the bar patrons submissively complied as they were being arrested. But this night—clearly fed up past their breaking points—they fought back. When an officer clubbed a Black lesbian named Stormé DeLarverie over the head for complaining that her handcuffs were too tight, the crowd that had gathered outside the club had had enough. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black drag queen and beloved heart of the community, and Sylvia Rivera, a popular Latinx queen, were two of the first to actively resist the police that night, and their fellow queens joined them in throwing bricks, bottles and shot glasses at officers and effectively shutting down the raid. I’m including these people’s ethnicities and orientations here to give credit to the non-white, non-cis-presenting people who showed the courage and gumption to initiate the fight back and start what ended up being six days of riots in the neighborhood surrounding the Stonewall Inn that finally ignited a national fight for the rights and equalities that *everyone* under the LGBTQ+ rainbow enjoys today.

Stonewall wasn’t the first riot in defiance of police raids and harassments; in 1959 angry gays fought police after a raid of Cooper’s Do-Nuts—a gay-friendly diner—in Los Angeles, and in 1966 a trans woman threw a cup of hot coffee in a police officer’s face in a raid at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, sparking a riot that inspired the city to acknowledge the trans community and develop a network of trans-specific social, mental-health and medical services.

But Stonewall was the emotional—and ultimately cultural—turning point. The police raid there quickly drew a large mob whose collective lifetimes of oppression and discrimination boiled over into a violent revolt that trapped police in the bar until the NYC Tactical Patrol Force was dispatched to rescue them. Riots erupted the next night and through the week in the Christopher Street and other nearby gay neighborhoods, including one mob that threatened to burn down the offices of The Village Voice for mocking the gay rioters and describing the riots as "forces of faggotry" and "Sunday fag follies." The next year, an organization called Chicago Gay Liberation organized a parade on the anniversary of the Stonewall riot, and the city has staged a parade on the last Sunday in June ever since—with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic causing the first exception.

Now, every major metropolis and many smaller cities have Pride parades and events—though in 2020 and 2021 they were mostly held virtually—and many of them usually spill beyond the last week of June to pop up in celebrations all month and all year.

But June is officially Pride month in the hearts and minds of LGBTQ+ people—and an exploding population of straight people and businesses large and small—and we owe it all to the brave LGBTQ+ people—more specifically, the extremely marginalized drag queens and people of color—who had had enough and fought back at great risk to themselves and even to our community and started our slow march toward equality fifty-seven years ago today.

THIS IS WHY WE CELEBRATE PRIDE.

Books: Unsheltered

I love novels where the past meets the present—especially if they involve a touch of mystery, scandal or even the supernatural—so I was eagerly looking forward to reading this one when it was recommended online based on my obsessions.

And while it definitely features the past meeting the present, it's all in the context of historical curiosity about a property occupied by a family in the later 1800s and then one in the 2010s. I was disappointed by the lack of juiciness as I read, but once I shifted my focus to the author’s exploration of relationships linking the characters, their families, their changing circumstances and the shared spaces they occupy in separate centuries, I guess I did settle in and enjoy it.

That said, the novel contains a lot—as in A LOT a lot—of gratuitously chatty dialogue and even a mind-numbingly endless dinner scene where an entire family debates the merits and shortfallings of a wide range of economic models and policies. (We get it Barbara: You did tons of research that you didn't want to go to waste as you cemented characters into their archetypal molds. But sheesh.)

It's also a work of historical fiction involving people and municipalities that have been largely forgotten, a fact I wish I'd known before it was mentioned in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. Because the historical characters are fascinating, and the free-thinking "utopian" community where they lived was anythying but and created a dramatic dichomoty of religious dogma vs scientific discovery and the covert subterfuge of Victorian mores as a backdrop for the narrative.

 
The title of the novel clearly stems from ongoing themes of crumbling houses, dire economic circumstances, social acceptance vs social ostracism, and the political abandonment of the citizenry by a Presidential candidate who shall not be named here and is not named in the book but is very indelibly described and pilloried.

 
I finished the novel with an overall feeling of meh, but I realized my mind never strayed as I read it. So I was clearly invested. Barbara Kingslover knows how to weave a compelling narrative (or two in this case), but she sure likes to dwell and dwell and dwell in the weeds when her characters have conversations.

 
If any of this sounds interesting to you, by all means read it. But if you found my observations here bland and uninspiring, you'll find those same reactions tenfold in the book.

Happy Juneteenth!

Today is Juneteenth—also known as Freedom Day—a portmanteau of June and nineteenth and the anniversary of the 1865 emancipation of the last remaining enslaved African-Americans in the Confederacy.

Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. But it was largely unenforceable in Confederate states and Confederate-controlled remote areas, so the last of the enslaved people there didn't know they'd been free for more than two and a half years.

But on June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and read General Orders No. 3, announcing with full Union enforcement that all enslaved people were legally free, releasing more than 250,000 people who didn't know their liberated status had been deliberately withheld from them for a cruelly inordinate amount of time.

I first learned about Juneteenth in a high-school history class, and I’d often wondered since then why it’s never really been a massive national holiday. And now—despite the ongoing, pervasive racism that's finally brought it to the country’s attention—I’m thrilled it’s officially become a national holiday … and an integral part of our larger dialogue about race.

The national-holiday designation came quickly and largely unexpectedly in 2021—especially given what little awareness Juneteenth had up until then—so federal agencies and even private companies didn't have a lot of time to plan and coordinate procedures for proper celebrations and shut-downs that first year.

But many found a way, and they've continued to close their doors and encourage their employees to take the day off to celebrate the milestone … the freedoms … the progress … and the hope for continued communion in the march toward equality in our country’s minds, our hearts and our shared American culture.

CedaRound: The Drowning

Though I was living in Chicago at the time, I was in Cedar Rapids 18 years ago today to visit my folks for their June 14 anniversary. My boyfriend at the time and I had heard stories of looming flooding, and even though the rains and the swollen rivers diverted us north from highway 30 at Mt. Vernon and sent us into Cedar Rapids on Mt. Vernon Road, we still never believed Cedar Rapids could have serious flooding. I mean, it's CEDAR RAPIDS. I grew up here. How could anything bad happen?

By the time we finally got to my folks' house late on the 13th though, the flooding had become serious enough that the city's last intact water pumping station was in such danger of being breached that the urgent call went out on the news for volunteers to sandbag it. Though we'd had a 5-hour drive, we wanted to go out and help, but by the time we had a quick bathroom break before heading for the door, the news announced that they'd already gotten all the sandbaggers they needed. Which was a clear harbinger of the resilience our city would soon show. But at the time it was dark and late and we were 32 blocks from the river so all we could do was go to bed and wait.

The next morning, the footage on the news was devastating. The river had crested at 31.12 feet—19 feet over flood stage—and our entire downtown was drowning, as were 1,300 blocks of the city on either side of the river. Office buildings and banks and stores and my beloved theaters were almost up to the tops of their doors in water. All three bridges that cross May's Island to connect the east and west sides of the city were completely submerged. The Time Check and Czech Village neighborhoods were annihilated, with many houses underwater to their roof lines. The highly elevated I-380 was the only way to get across town, though all of the entrance and exit ramps in the flood zone were submerged. We—like seemingly everyone else in the city—drove slowly along the highway and peered out our windows to survey the devastation as the flood waters rippled mere feet beneath us.

As the water slowly receded, the city reeled over the destruction of homes, the closing of businesses, the undermining of infrastructure ... but never the loss of spirit. The city leaped almost immediately into action to tear down what was unsalvageable, repair what was repairable, clean up what was messy and dangerous, reimagine new life and purpose for what was destroyed, and start to recover and relocate and rebuild ourselves into a newer and better and more thoughtfully redesigned shining city on the river. We now have our vibrant and ever-expanding NewBo district and its neighboring Czech Village restoration, we've literally picked up and moved an entire museum to higher ground, we've creatively and beautifully incorporated new levees and berms into inviting public spaces, we've used the opportunity to upgrade and restore historic buildings, we've turned our once-desolate-after-5:00 downtown into a destination area bustling with restaurants and entertainment (well, before covid hit—but it bounced back as soon as returning was safe) ... and we've salvaged and restored and improved and polished up my beloved Paramount and Iowa (home of Theatre Cedar Rapids) theaters.

The flood was awful and heartwrenching and devastating. Many businesses never recovered. Many homes and families and lives have been forever changed. And our renaissance is perpetually ongoing and far from complete; in the last decade-plus, we've brought to life a towering modern addition to the stately Chicago-school American Building, built an expanding Habitrail of downtown skywalks, converted all the downtown one-way streets into two-way to feel more like friendly streets than impersonal expressways, incorporated towering, visually referential berms into the natural features along the river lowlands, and built many massive, architecturally interesting mixed-use buildings in the vibrantly revitalized Kingston Village neighborhood.

There was one sliver lining linking the 2008 flood that destroyed the center of the city to the 2020 land-hurricane derecho that destroyed enormous amounts of the entire city: The blocks and blocks of still-empty land in what was left of the flood-destroyed Time Check neighborhood became the primary dumping ground for the thousands and thousands of derecho-felled trees that the city slowly hauled away from everyone's property. It was centrally located, it offered a LOT of land and it made a mighty monument to the destruction the city endured. Driving by it was both breathtaking and heartbreaking. But also reassuring in that it provided a useful place for the city to dump the trees it collected and get back out to collect more as efficiently as possible.

Aside from the before-and-after photos of my dad's office, where he thought two levels of concrete blocks would protect his antique roll-top desk from the floodwaters that eventually submerged his entire office past its ceiling, the pictures I'm posting here aren't mine. But they show the depth and breadth of the destruction we all faced and make a great reminder of how amazingly far we have come in the last ten years.

So happy floodiversary, Cedar Rapids! May we keep our recovery and flood-protection development speeding along forevermore. (And don't forget to wish my folks a happy 61st anniversary tomorrow.)

Third Street looking south from First Avenue. You can see the old Theatre Cedar Rapids marquee on the left.

Theatre Cedar Rapids. All the First Avenue storefronts on the left were shut down after the flood, and the space became the awesome new Linge Lounge.

Dad’s office—and beautiful oak roll-top desk—before and after the flood. The desk was unsalvageable, and everything in it got ripped out and carried away by the floodwaters.

1,300 blocks on both sides of the river were submerged—some under more than 10 feet of water.

Those ghostly lines in the water are the totally submerged bridges that cross May’s Island as they connect the east and west sides of the city.

That’s normally-high-in-the-sky I-380 snaking through downtown with floodwater submerging its ramps and lapping at its floors.

The massive crown-jewel National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library building on the lower right was actually lifted and relocated to higher ground after the flood.


We parked this string of train cars on this essential train bridge before the flood to weigh it down so the floodwaters wouldn’t wash it away.


We parked this string of train cars on this essential train bridge before the flood to weigh it down so the floodwaters wouldn’t wash it away.


Entire neighborhoods. Families’ lives. Wiped out. No words.


The floodwaters floated the Mighty Wurlitzer organ console two stories from the bottom of the Paramount Theater orchestra pit to above the stage, where they dumped it like a dirty carcass.

Pride 101: Pride Month begins

Before the 1969 Stonewall riots, virtually every aspect of the lives of gay people was illegal to varying degrees in America: being openly gay, showing public affection, having sex, marriage, adoption, assembly in public, assembly in private, going to gay bars … even owning bars with any form of gay designation.

The only gay bars that existed were owned by crime syndicates, who definitely weren’t at the vanguard of fighting for gay liberation; they saw in the gay population a steady and highly dependent form of revenue that the mobs could protect via their considerable influence over law enforcement. Gay people were exploited for our desperate need to find each other and for the money we were willing to pay to feel like we weren’t alone. We paid exorbitant prices for watered-down, bottom-shelf liquor. We gathered in buildings that were unclean, unsafe and unimportant to society. We entered those bars carrying cash for bail with the clear expectation that we might need it.

The subtexts were shame, risk, secrecy, and arrest and public humiliation—and the very likely loss of our families, jobs and homes—if we were caught entering or exiting these bars.

But in the gathering momentum of our achievements in equality over the last half century, our forebears demanded—and slowly, surely got—our growing equality and our freedom to live our lives openly and safely and without imposed shame and exploitation.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Dead ahead

The RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and started sinking 114 years ago today at 10:40 pm Central Time. (This exact time is actually hotly debated; Titanic's constantly moving Ship's Time doesn't translate hour-for-hour/minute-for-minute with the fixed time zones on land, and there were conflicting timelines for the collision and sinking reported by the survivors. Also: Daylight Savings Time wasn't established in the US until 1918 [time zones themselves were established in 1883, just FYI], so whatever the exact Ship's Time was, it does translate to true Central Time here.)

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the tragedy—mostly from the perspective of wanting to know what it was like to be on such a grand ship ... and then to have it slowly, terrifyingly disappear under my feet. I’ve recorded the sinking as an annual event on my google calendar so I get a pop-up reminder every year to take a moment to think about the people who died and the horrors they and the survivors endured.

 
We’re 114 years later still in the murky waters of a seemingly endless Titanic metaphor: Things we’d taken for granted as unsinkable—from industries and economies to legal equalities and merely going out in public and hugging our friends—have sunk beneath dark waves that have lapped at our feet for years. Political wars, cultural wars and actual wars never stop rising to the sky and crashing down around us. Gun violence has gotten so commonplace that it’s become almost unremarkable. Class divisions and the desperation of the poor keep being more and more impossible not to see. And the defiant stupidities and sexual depravities of our elected officials and the people in their orbits continue to leave us all in profound shock.

 
It’s terrifying, it’s sobering and it’s devastating—and I’ve found that living amid the social terror and existential exhaustion wrought by all of this has profoundly underscored whatever emotional connection I’ve given myself to the Titanic passengers and crew I technically know nothing about but still mourn.
Unlike those Titanic passengers and crew, we're lucky that we're able to keep solid ground reliably under our feet. And I urge you to consciously maximize the benefits of that advantage. Don’t wait for an annual reminder of a century-plus-old tragedy. Don’t wait for the next devastating blow of the current tragedy. Take a moment—take MANY moments—every day to be thankful for the people you love in your life while you can.

Happy 135th birthday, Grant Wood!

Grant Wood, best known for his iconic American Gothic, lived and worked most of his life in and around Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His legacy in the area—in addition to an exhaustive collection of his work in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art permanent collection—includes an annual art festival, a grade school (my alma mater!) and even the entire region’s public education agency—all in his name.

Of course, no Cedar Rapids student’s education is complete without thorough coverage of Wood’s stylized, iconoclastic, humorous and sometimes political oeuvre. And this Cedar Rapids student came away with a lifelong love of his work.

Grant Wood was a pioneer in a loosely coordinated artistic movement called Regionalism, which eschewed modernist, abstract trends like Impressionism and Cubism in favor of stylistic, romanticized views of everyday rural life in the 1930s. The Regionalists were less concerned with the trendy politics of 1930s Social Realists than with renouncing the hegemony of popular European art and culture and celebrating the honest work ethic and modest demeanor of the Midwest.

In 1928, Wood received a commission to create a giant stained-glass window for the American Legion in Cedar Rapids. In preparation, he traveled to Munich to study ancient stained-glass techniques under Germany’s famed master craftsmen. The window he created, featuring a 16-foot Lady of Peace standing over six life-size soldiers representing the Revolutionary War through World War I, was a masterpiece of technique, form and color. Though as far as Google and every search term I can think of are concerned, it never had a name. But you can see it in all its shimmery namelessness here:

Fun fact: The model for the Lady of Peace figure was his sister, Nan Wood Graham, who was also the model for the female figure in "American Gothic."

Despite the window's unmistakable American themes, it drew fire from misguided patriots who criticized Wood for studying with the Germans—the enemy!—so soon after the Great War. One of the most vocal groups was the local chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution.

Wood’s elegant response: Daughters of Revolution, a satirical painting showing three dour spinstresses standing self-righteously—one, pinky extended in haughty indignation, holding a teacup in my grandmother’s china pattern—in front of Emmanuel Leutz’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Wood’s point, lost completely on the knee-jerk reactionaries the painting so elegantly mocked, lies in the fact that Washington Crossing the Delaware—that beloved icon of American patriotism—was painted by a German.

I loved this painting before I even knew its story. The delightfully smug women drew me in because their spiritual progeny hung just a few branches over on my family tree. The Blue Willow teacup fascinated me because its cousins served as my grandmother’s everyday dishes. (Have you ever eaten green Jell-O from a blue plate? It looks very-not-deliciously brown.) And that shape—that relentless horizontalness—made the painting such a challenge to display in any setting ... like right here on my blog.

My relentlessly horizontal framed print of Daughters of Revolution—which has followed me through six houses, apartments and condos in Cedar Rapids and Chicago—now hangs in our relentlessly long Grant Wood Alley front hallway, and one of my grandmother's Blue Willow teacups sits safely on a tastefully underlit shelf with a small collection of other blue-and-white ceramicware in my bedroom. They are quite literally among my favorite possessions. 

And I am proudly and dutifully as a Cedar Rapidian sharing these works and their stories here so you can enjoy their oft-overlooked brilliance and awesomeness in celebration of Grant Wood's birthday.

ChicagoRound: 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire

Chicago emerged from its devastating Great Fire on October 10, 1871, after a two-day conflagration that destroyed 17,500 buildings over four square miles, left 90,000 of the city’s 300,000 inhabitants homeless and killed an impossible-to-quantify-accurately 200–300 people.

And the city immediately began rebuilding.

Thirty-two years and two months later, after rising both literally and proverbially from its ashes to reclaim its place as one of America’s most populous and vital cities, Chicago was devastated by another fire … this time in the month-old, state-of-the-art, “fireproof” Iroquois Theatre.

When it opened on November 23, 1903, the Iroquois Theatre was hailed as an architectural masterpiece and a jewel in the crown of Chicago’s theater scene. Designed in the highly ornate French baroque style, it featured grand staircases, gilded ornamentation, lush velvet curtains and a 6,300-square-foot domed auditorium with a dropped stage to improve the sightlines from every seat in the house. And though it was billed confidently as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois contained almost no fire-safety features. No fire alarm. No backstage telephone. No labeled fire exits (most exits were hidden behind velvet curtains by theater managers who didn't want them to look ugly). Even its supposedly fireproof asbestos curtain was made of a highly flammable wood pulp. (Fewer than ten years later, the “unsinkable” Titanic would succumb to a similarly overconfident hubris.)

The theater’s opening production was a touring musical pastiche called Mr. Bluebeard, which featured a 400-person cast and starred popular Vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy. It had enjoyed critical and popular success for over a month when its December 30 audience filed in on a freezing Wednesday afternoon during the break between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Since the theater’s opening had been delayed repeatedly, its owners were desperate to make up for lost revenue, so they habitually oversold the house, seating extra patrons up and down the aisles in the orchestra and balconies.

The fire started at the top of Act II when an overhead stage light shorted and sent sparks leaping to a nearby curtain. As the fire spread through the flylines and burning bits of scenery rained down on the stage, the actors continued soldiering through their performance, confident in their understanding that the theater was fireproof. A handful of people in the audience got nervous enough to leave, but many chose to stay in their seats (or aisles) until it became obvious the fire was not going to be contained.

And then panic set in.

The ensuing stampede up overcrowded aisles through an unfamiliar theater with hidden exits left trampled bodies everywhere. And since most of the Iroquois exit doors opened inward, the bodies piled up in front of the doors, leaving no hope of escape.

The actors, too, created their own stampede to find exits. And when they finally pried open the giant freight door on the north end of the stage, the arctic winter blast that blew into the building combined with the fiery gases above the stage to create a superheated fireball that exploded into the auditorium and incinerated everything in its path, including hundreds of people still in their seats.

Many of the people who did manage to get out of the building found themselves trapped high in the air on unfinished fire escapes. As these fire escapes got more and more crowded, people begin to fall (or jump) to their deaths in the alley below. By the time the fire was over, bodies were piled 10 deep in what is still called to this day Death Alley.

Though it was contained to one building and it burned less than an hour, the fire killed over 600 people (twice the number killed in the two-day Great Fire of 1871), shut down theaters around the world out of fire-safety concerns (leaving thousands of actors and theater employees unemployed), generated worldwide outpourings of sympathy, exposed yet another Chicago corruption scandal in the years of ensuing lawsuits, and ultimately brought about great changes in the way we respond to massive disasters and catalogue and identify disaster victims. It even inspired an Indianapolis hardware salesman named Carl Prinzler, who randomly had to miss the deadly performance, to invent what he called the Self Releasing Fire Exit Bolt once he learned that a disproportionate number of victims had died in desperate piles in front of the inward-opening exit doors with confusing European-style bascule locks. Known today as the “panic bar,” his invention—along with outward-opening exit doors—are perhaps the biggest public-safety legacy of the Iroquois disaster.

Today, the stunning Asian-baroque James M. Nederlander Theatre (built in 1926 as the Oriental Theatre until its name was changed in 2019) sits pretty much on the exact footprint of the Iroquois Theatre. A thriving part of the Broadway in Chicago theater collective, it features touring productions that play year-round to thousands upon thousands of theater patrons who largely have no idea that they’re sitting on a historic graveyard of sorts. To my knowledge there isn’t even a memorial on the property commemorating the fire.

There is a memorial about three blocks away, in Chicago’s classical-revival City Hall building. Designed by Chicago sculptor Laredo Taft, the bas-relief plaque currently sits above a glass column that houses a revolving door, so it’s both hard to see up close and hard to photograph, especially with an iPhone.

Thankfully, it’s accompanied by an eye-level plaque that explains it context and memorializes the 600 lives lost on December 30, 1903, in one of the worst theater disasters in history.

Thirty-seven years ago today ...

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different ... something so random and so unexpected that the shock of the words literally didn't make sense to me: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the 1988 autumn semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and what ended up being a definitive revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away. Dimly seeing what we could of it and haltingly learning more and more about it over the next hours was at once horrifying and comforting, filling us with both hopefulness and helplessness.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the murdered Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last thirty-five years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I learn the details of catastrophic tragedies like the 9/11 attacks and daily mass shootings and our catastrophic global pandemic ... though I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Christmas cookie commercials.

Thirty-seven years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Thirty-seven years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Thirty-seven years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions.

I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour news cycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are robbing you of a personal and very limited possession, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak both do and don't make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should work to find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Thirty-seven years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for nine presidential elections and five new Sondheim musicals. (Seven, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through five cars and eight houses and eight jobs and three cities as he grows into a successful (more or less), confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, even though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves ... and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you experience when you finally see images of the bloodied, abused corpse of Moammar Gadhafi—who denied to his last hopefully excruciating, terrified breath every credible report that he'd ordered the Pan Am bombing—feels powerfully good.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Tony-winning actor? International journalist? Have-it-all mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother recently published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m the only one in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and befriended her kids on Facebook and marched in pink hats with her in Washington and lost countless hours texting ridiculous cat memes back and forth with her.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Thirty-seven years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken—and strengthened—my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular.

It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

Books: Let the Great World Spin

In the weeks and months after author Colum McCann’s father-in-law returned from his harrowing ordeal escaping one of the Twin Towers and finding his way north from the destruction and rubble of the 9/11 attacks, McCann was struck by the sheer volume of personal stories and larger narratives intertwined in the events immediately before, during and after that day.

As he looked for a way he could possibly isolate and do justice to any of those stories to help make sense of the attacks and destruction, it struck him that there were just as many stories unfolding years and decades beforehand that could build a larger, deeper, more profound context illustrating the interconnectedness of lives and how they together collectively become the past that keeps the world spinning ever forward.

Soon after the Twin Towers were completed in the early 1970s, an aerialist named Philippe Petit managed the impossible feat of stringing a tightrope between the tops of the buildings in the dead of night and walking across it one morning, capturing the attention and fascination of every New Yorker on the ground below him. McCann uses this true-life event as the cultural linchpin for anchoring the fictional characters he brings to life in and around 1974, the year of Petit’s iconic stunt.

Each chapter in Let the Great World Spin is a stand-alone short story introducing a character, a friendship, a family, or an event that may be big or small: the childhoods of two Irish brothers who eventually emigrate to America, a woman regretting that she let her daughter follow her into a life of prostitution, a wealthy housewife in a grief support group, two relapsed addicts involved in a catastrophic car accident.

Some stories interact directly. Some characters pass by each other tangentially. Almost every character makes an appearance on the day of Petit’s walk.

Two characters over time establish themselves as the metaphoric twin towers linking all these lives … and when they eventually fall, they bring the lives and stories into an even more intricate orbit.

New York City itself is both a setting and a character driving these narratives through its distinct neighborhoods, segregated socioeconomics and vibrant melting-pot identity. The New Yorkers McCann creates and the lives (and occasional deaths) he guides them through are as disparate as they are fundamentally relatable, and through them—and the moments in history they occupy—he keeps their (and by extension our) worlds living, breathing, halting, progressing, collapsing, and always spinning from the past through the present and toward our collective uncertain future.

Books: Slaughterhouse-Five

On its surface, Slaughterhouse-Five (actual full name: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death) is a profoundly disjointed narrative of author Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences as a World War II prisoner of war told through the eyes and experiences of his fictional proxy Billy Pilgrim.

Vonnegut occasionally inserts himself into the narrative or acknowledges that the work you’re reading is autobiographical historical fiction, creating a meta universe that both draws you in and sets you outside the characters and plot.

Billy’s adventures unfold in short, jarring sentences and jump through time and literal space—which are key aspects of the novel’s postmodernist structure and spirit. Postmodernism in literature (which thrived in the second half of the 20th century, with this novel being written in 1969) broke away from linear, plausible storytelling to embrace logical impossibilities, ponder questions about existence, and often create imperfect character and story arcs that never get resolved.

It’s through this everything-at-once literary lens that poor, beleaguered Billy Pilgrim jumps randomly from surviving the cruelties of war and the (historically true) bombing of Dresden to wetting his pants in childhood fear at the top of the Grand Canyon to losing his wife in a string of bizarre circumstances after he survives a plane crash to being abducted by aliens, ensconced in an interstellar zoo, and mating with a fellow earthling and adult performer with the delightful name Montana Wildhack.

And it’s through this structure that Vonnegut processes the horrors he experienced in war and illustrates the disassociative struggles of living with PTSD.

The story is by its very nature absurd and peppered with droll humor and truly singular characters (many of whom appear in other Vonnegut works) with names like Kilgore Trout and Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. This being a novel centered around war, the frivolity is heavily balanced with often nonchalant accounts of death … always followed by Vonnegut’s “And so it goes” expression of existential futility.

The novel’s other recurring expression—”unstuck in time”—provides succinct, efficient shorthand for not only Vonnegut’s narrative structure but for the scattered aftershocks he continues to experience from of war itself, the upheaval it creates, the lives it redirects and the metaphorical slaughter it wields on his psyche … and by extension the world’s.

Books: North Woods

If I were going to assemble my favoite literary themes and tropes into a novel like it was a Build-A-Bear at the mall, North Woods by Daniel Mason would tick all the boxes on my checklist: an ancient house with generations of occupants and fascinating stories, ghosts from that rich past lingering to make sure their stories get told and their lives don't end up forgotten, nods to historical events both to establish context and to celebrate our shared experiences, richly drawn (and inherently messy) characters who on some levels end up feeling like your favorite friends, a trust from the author that you'll connect the dots and follow along when you're given only scraps of tantalizing information, bread crumbs and Easter eggs that follow the house and the characters through literal centuries, nerd-grade information about very specific topics you find yourself wanting to learn more about, metaphors large and small that weave through the narrative without smacking you on the head ... and sentence after sentence after sentence of evocative, lovingly crafted prose that sometimes makes you stop and catch your breath because it's just so brilliantly gorgeous.

And if THAT'S not enough to tell you how much I love this book, try this: I read it in September and it's stuck with me so much that I just re-read it in the space of five days.

It's hard to fully describe what the book is about. On its surface, it follows the centuries-long story of a tiny stone hut built in the 1600s in Western Massachusetts as generations of people come and go through its doors and build onto it almost as if to create enough room to hold its ever-expanding history and the stories that echo through it.

The people who come and go are sometimes generations of families and sometimes unrelated buyers and sellers. Some of the stories exist in their own time and reach their logical conclusions and some echo through the centuries and continue to drive the various narratives. Some of the stories are told by an omniscient narrator. Some are first-person accounts. Some are heartfelt letters. Some are even metaphor-laden poems with sing-song rhythms and dark Victorian themes.

One chapter is a graphic, turgid description of lust and wanton, depraved sex between two beetles. (You will need smelling salts and a cigarette after you finish reading it, so be prepared.)

I can't recall ever reading a book twice in the space of a few months, but I'm so glad I did with this one; since I already knew the basic plot points, I could spend my second reading focusing on the gorgeous prose, the larger themes and the tiny details—a lost button, a rusty axe head, a forgotten note tucked in a family Bible, buried bones, the catamount (an old name for a large wild cat) sitting placidly on the book's cover—that trickle through the narrative, sometimes just for fun and sometimes with deeper meaning.

The novel is so packed with characters and moments and delicious coincidences that it's impossible to focus on just one thing to love ... or to worry about possibly giving away as a spoiler. There are twin spinsters I want to be best friends with. There's an unrequited love story that just breaks my heart. There are satisfying, well-justified murders. There's an exploration of worldly insights hiding in a schitzophrenic mind.

Above all, there's an underlying theme that time and nature and humanity are interconnected in both obvious and clandestine ways, that we're all part of a larger, beautifully messy narrative, that small details can tumble quietly through time and space until they snowball into overwhelming influences ... and that reading a beloved novel more than once can fill you with even more joy and wonder than you'd experienced before.

Books: All the Light we Cannot See

The masterful novel All the Light we Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is, on its surface, a story about two pre-teens—one an orphaned German boy with a self-taught gift for building radios and one a blind French girl with a fascination for science and adventure and access to an entire museum of discoveries thanks to her father's job—whose separate worlds slowly collapse around them (and occasionally, tangentially intersect) in the early years of World War II.

The book is filled with imagery and metaphors and cultural references subtle enough that you don't have to get them to be engrossed in the narrative and beautifully relevant enough that they bring deeper meaning—sometimes profound, sometimes merely observational—to the lives of the characters, their changing circumstances, their collapsing worlds, and their dawning understanding of the cruelties and horrors of war.

Those cruelties and horrors of course extend to the Holocaust, which Doerr acknowledges with the most deft touches; Jewish characters pass in and out of scenes long enough to leave an impression and then sometimes disappear many chapters later with a dreadful understanding told in a few sobering, artfully constructed phrases.

The allusions to Light and Seeing in the book's title filter through the narrative in obvious ways (young Marie-Laure's blindness) and in ways that slowly dawn on you (the invisibilities and abstractions of radio signals that engross young Werner). And the metaphor of light—or lack thereof—lingers in the hushed, unspoken evils of Fascism, the sudden disappearances of beloved characters, and the illuminating discoveries of both children on their individual and tacitly shared journeys.

Doerr has a gift for creating characters you find yourself knowing intimately and caring about deeply ... and since they live in the crosshairs of a brutal war, some of their fates will break your heart.

He also trusts his readers to connect the dots between offhand comments, minor characters, historical references and other pieces of ephemera that slowly coalesce into richer understandings of the characters, the themes, the contexts and the worlds they occupy.

The novel is not new and it's been adapted into a Netflix miniseries so you may already be familiar with its general narrative, but I don't want to reveal any more plot details than what I've said here. The first three or four times someone recommended the book to me, the plot summaries they gave honestly didn't grab me. But I'm truly glad I finally listened. I was instantly engrossed in the book, and now that I've finished it I'm finding I miss the characters as though they were friends and family in a long-ago life in a terrifying chapter of our shared history.