Dark Tabby (DT) sits and looks out over the valley for long periods of time everyday, I have no idea what he sees or what he looks for.

He is the Number One Son of the little stray I took in more than two years ago, who came to be named Sooty. He’s about a year and a half old and probably has many adventures, and every morning trots away from the house expecting more.

The trailer is out for News of the World, and it looks great. Many people have been calling me with congratulations. Had to cancel my usual yearly trip to Missouri because of Covid complications — my cousin’s husband was exposed and although not showing any symptoms, must quarantine for two weeks. The people to whom he was exposed aren’t showing any symptoms either but tested positive. So it goes. I will miss it! I miss the smell of the Missouri forests, and the tree colors, especially the sweet gums, and Susan was going to help me on research for the new book I am working on. However, myself, June, April and Evelyn are going to haul to north Texas the last of October for a Halloween trip to a ranch near Waco.

I see from my last blog post I said I would post the next day, ha ha so much for that.

News of the music group:

(Tom, Kim and Mark)

This was at the O.A. Fisher camp last night, it was outdoors so no worry about Covid. Tom was playing a viola, he was so happy with it, a new fun toy! It sounded terrific, lower and richer than the fiddle and it has a different tuning, actually just loses the high string and then adds a bass string in C which sounds like a bagpipe drone. And double stopping with it is just amazing, sonorous. Kim has a crystal-clear voice, Mark a great bass. Kim and Mark are very studious about their guitar chording, and work hard to get it just right. I tootled along when appropriate.

Chuck did a spiritual blues number, as a solo, he has a great blues voice. We did Amazing Grace a capella, Tom opened it with one verse on the viola, then we all picked it up a capella.

Last week we played for Jim Willis’ funeral, playing under a great live oak in the Jones Cemetery where all the Fishers are buried. Jim was employed by Bethlehem Steel for many years and retired here with his wife who was a Fisher.  A lovely man. So we stood among the gravestones and played. Reminded me of that scene in The Old Curiosity Shop where Little Nell and her grandfather come upon the actors/players/comics and the stilt man in the graveyard, where they rest their props and baggage on the graves.

Diane with her hammer dulcimer, she gets a very good full sound out of it, it must be hard to play as none of the strings are numbered or lettered and they all look alike!

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And this is the wonderful Daphne Murray, my Australian correspondent, with her new grandson, 10 days before she died. She was in her mid-nineties. Her daughter Paula sent this photo to Harper Collins as she didn’t have my address, and my editor Jennifer Brehl sent it on to me, so including it here. Will write Paula today so she has my address, Jennifer commented, ‘this is so sweet’. And so it is!

And I should have a better post up here by tomorrow, I have shamefully neglected this blog. It is inexcusable! I am properly abashed. It’s just that it has been been 102, 103 F. here and I have been working on a new novel and re-reading some of my favorite books about polar travel, where explorers languish in -45 F. which I have experienced. I have at this point actually fond memories of -60 F. A re-reading Worst Journey In The World. For fun.

(Above: one of Herbert Ponting’s photos of the Antarctic when on Scott’s expedition 1911)

I have been trying to save trees, dragging hoses here and there, and researching the old French settlements south of St. Louis. Trying to get documents in that archaic French so I can use the language. I have an ancestor who was from the old French settlements, Francois Bouyer, looking for him too.

So tomorrow!

Ste. Genevieve, Mo. on the Mississippi, founded 1735. Research; for work.

She was such a great correspondent, in her nineties, in Australia. We wrote one another for years, I don’t know how many. A very distinguished, lively gossipy lady, wife (widowed) of a former governor of New South Wales, born in England with many memories of World War II, a Land Girl on one of the King’s tenant farms and therefore knew many people in the inner royal circle, had something funny and lively to say about absolutely everything, from dinner with Queen Elizabeth to dogs to brown snakes, to the fires in the Australian bush, to how much she hated ironing (“I would rather cut my throat”) to memories of the D-Day invasion and a young pilot who waggled his wings flying over, just for her.

Her last letter came in April, and we tended to write one another once a month but then somehow I delayed….I just felt something had gone amiss. Several days ago came a letter from her daughter Paula and as soon as I saw Paula’s name on the return address I knew she had passed.  Paula said she had passed away suddenly and peacefully just after she wrote that letter. Paula had written me soon after but her letter seems to have gone astray.

How I will miss her.

She initially wrote because she had read Enemy Women and loved it and from then on we just kept on writing. She was so funny, so acerbic! She was utterly fearless and said whatever she thought. She met Glenn Armstrong somewhere in South America when she and her husband were traveling on some sort of commercial trip. She had stories about her girl’s school in London, the Vietnam Vet the next farm over who came and shot a brown snake for them, about the new pup, about her quilting club.

I better stop. Rest in peace, a unique voice is gone, a lively observer of the 20th century, a kind and deeply good person. I was so privileged to have her as a writing friend. I don’t even know what she looked like.

A good little book on how messed up Oklahoma law enforcement can be.

Relates also to the race riots of 1921 — the chief of police of Tulsa was an outright criminal and provided no leadership or control during those riots. Look it up on Wikipedia.

I am sure there are many dedicated policemen in Oklahoma and mean no denigration of the present police forces, especially since one has just been killed in the line of duty, but I am starting on a new work that takes place largely in Oklahoma in 1870 and it started as a lawless territory and sometimes these beginnings are hard to overcome.

The guy holding the flag has eyeglasses. And what’s with the sword? Anyway, they captured the flag. Thanks, guys.

Big party and book-signing here in town, it was crowded and sold over 70 books, more on order, musicians came and played — Tom, Kim, Chuck, and when I didn’t have any books to sign I went and played with them, it was a great party and community event, thanks to Wanda and Diane and Auriel, so many people came! Much gratitude for the arraignments, food, drink and good cheer!

I discovered Benjamin in college more than thirty years ago, lost my copy of Illuminations, and then rediscovered it recently on Amazon. His essay, ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ I found riveting. Only recently have I learned of Hannah Arendt’s heroic escape with his manuscripts, his death on the Spanish border.

I inadvertently cut off the bottom in this scan, it says ‘Edited by Hannah Arendt’.

When France was taken over by the Nazis, Benjamin made it to the southern ‘safe zone’, along with other Jews, but the Nazis were soon closing in. Hannah Arendt and her husband got passports and managed to get across the border into Spain, and Benjamin sent his manuscripts along with her in case he didn’t make it. He was actually at the border there in the Pyrenees, with a proper passport, when some obscure rule changed and the Spanish would not let him through, nor any of the group of four he was traveling with.

He would have been turned over to the Nazis the next day. He committed suicide that night. The Spanish official was so shaken and moved by Benjamin’s suicide that he broke his own (brand-new) rules and let the other four through into Spain.

That’s why these essays are such treasures, aside from their wonderful insights. They were rescued at a great and terrible price.

I re-read ‘Art in the Age…’ again, but this has repeatedly been addressed, recently, and all his doubts have been shown to be very prescient.

What now interests me is ‘The Storyteller’, which I find I did not read with enough attention at the time and it bears re-reading and quoting which I will do tomorrow.

Benjamin paid little attention to the intellectual fashions of his time, either in phrasing or concerns, which is why he seems ever fresh and new. Here’s to his courage and his memory.

Naomi Nye highly recommended this to me and I read it in two sittings, enjoyed it.

“In the early days of our (families’) digital life, I had been the doomsday old crone in a twenty-year-old’s body, rolling my eyes at the new code of behavior I witnessed online.” But she realized she was “staring into glowing screens of all sizes for more and more of each day.”

Nice to find somebody who has come to some of the same conclusions I have, and one of the most rewarding things about this book is that it is also a compendium of many other books and studies that investigate this social behavior and its problems.

Although I don’t personally know anybody who has had their life taken over by social media or their phones to the extent that Casey Schwartz claims hers was, I still find the amount of hours spent watching television to be worthy of some thought. Never happened before in human history. Never.

Much of this book is autobiographical in the most intimate way but like all autobiographies the author must select and emphasize, even exaggerate, to make a point. From beginning to end she tells of her addition to Instagram and other social media, taking her phone out of her pocket many times a day to check the latest. I imagine it can’t have been that bad, but her point is not only Attention, as given, as a gift, but her addiction to Adderall as well as glowing screens.

Along the way she quotes Silicon Valley studies and many other writers who have addressed the problem of focus and attention. You will be interested to learn what “variable ratio reinforcement” is. The book is a resource work as well as a confessional and extremely useful. I will quote some of her quotes;

“Sean Parker, Facebook’s former president, admitted to being afraid of what social media is ‘doing to our children’s brains’  (And) Just as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had both strictly limited their children’s access to their devices, by 2017, it had become increasingly popular for the Technorati to send their own kids to tech-free schools, to want for them not shiny iPad screens but old-fashioned tactile finger paints, wooden blocks and paper books. It is only outside of Silicon Valley that we turn such a blind eye to the effects of unmitigated technology on developing brains,”

James Williams, a former Google employee; “I felt…distracted. But it was more than just “distraction”—this was some new mode of deep distraction I didn’t have words for…I felt the story of my life being compromised in some fuzzy way I couldn’t articulate..”

This is from his book Stand Out of Our Light.

What I see as the real discussion is focus and long-term concentration. To own or possess private aims, apart from social approval, and set out to do these things even if it is only (!) embroidery or a garden plot or woodwork. Which is not an “only” as the Zen masters have repeatedly said.

All my friends and relatives are on some kind of social media and they like it and they don’t seem to have had their souls stolen by it. As for me I just blog about it and since this little blog has only about 2500 readers, I remain The Shadowy Griper.

A great many useful books mentioned and a cautionary life story of addiction, the search for deep focus, and love. Love wins.