A drizzle today and more coming. The Sabinal is still over the dam at the park, but Little Creek is still not running. We could use this for months!

Susan’s black-and-white paint named Doc, Susan and Megan (the wildlife biologist for the Forest Service) starting in on supper. We ate very well on that trip! So good to have Megan there, she could identify every birdsong, every plant.

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This is my dad, Seaman First Class Robert Leonard Jiles, of the Pacific Fleet, 1944-45. He was at the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and did escort duty on his ship, a DE named the USS Finnegan. He was one of the famous ‘tin can sailors’. He told us his DE (destroyer escort) was called a ‘tin can’ long before I knew the history of these little ships. He said, ‘our purpose was to draw fire, so the big ones could go on’. I thought he was joking.

The Finnegan also did escort duty for the fleet to Saipan and through the Marianas.

About Iwo Jima, he said the ships were lined up all around the island and pounded it without cease for a week to soften it up for the Marines. It didn’t do much good. He said he saw a ship to port get hit in the bow and catch fire and go down. He said you could see sailors streaming over the sides and into the water like ants. The Finnegan ordered nets thrown over the side and my dad went down the nets to help haul sailors out of the sea.

I can’t identify any ships in this old photo of the invasion of Iwo, but that is Mount Suribachi on the left, and enormous amounts of explosion debris.

They also had a kamikaze come at them but it was shot to pieces before it could hit them. My dad was at his post loading a gun and he said flaming pieces of debris were falling all around them. He just kept on loading ammunition.

To tell you the truth I think it was the best time of his life. The Navy doesn’t allow seamen to become alcoholics.

In one of his letters he wrote that when the news of the surrender of Japan came through you could hear men yelling and screaming with joy all around the fleet. He didn’t say where he was (Navy censors).  He said all the sailors threw their hats in the air “and it was like a skillet of popcorn going off”. He also wrote that where he was in port there were impromptu bands of ‘the Brits’ and others on shore walking up and down playing everything they could remember as loud as they could.

The flag above is, I think, the flag that was rescued during the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was from the USS Shaw; she went down with all hands. The story is that a sailor in a whaleboat looking for survivors (there were none) saw it floating and reached out and drew it in with a boat hook.

There were a lot more stories from my dad, but maybe I will write them down some other time.

Happy Veterans Day to all my loved ones who have served! Jim, Nadine, Daniel, Gary Edwards, my brother, Jim Sr., many cousins.

I must order the above book to see if Giles Becker has been writing his interminable dystopia/post-apocalyptic tomes in vain for the past fourteen years. I suspect not.

Note that The Martian, an absolutely terrific book, received no prizes or awards in the recent conventions of sci-fi/fantasy writers. That would be the Hugo award and the Nebula award.

Blogs where this is al being discussed, argued over and fought about are: (the best) John Wright’s blog at scifiwright.com and Voxpopuli and Madgenius.com. among others.

Giles Becker has strongly urged me to read them nd join in. I read them but have not yet joined in.

We have had splendid rains. Ponds are full, April’s lakes at the camp are full, creeks are running, the Sabinal River is over the dam down at the park, and so I hope and pray this seven-year drought is perhaps over…

Essential for anyone in the arts, in academia, anywhere one might get attacked for not being politically correct. Some areas of life and work are more vulnerable than others. Have read on internet news that Nobel prize-winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt was hounded out of his position at a British University. He has gone to Japan with his wife — she was fired too, apparently, for being his wife. This is dumbfounding. What is needed at the top of this post is a poster from the Cultural Revolution, about 1966, in China, with Mao marching along a country road surrounded by eagerly grinning peasants and workers. I found one. I can’t bear to put it up, it is so depressing.

The peasants and workers are barely human. Their eyes are fixed on Mao with a maniacal intensity. It’s not depressing, it’s frightening.

One certainly needs discussion and advice in this matter. And there is more and more of it. Sir Tim didn’t fight back and made the mistake of apologizing. So there you go.

I’ll make a guess — a wild speculation. Let us say that during the American Civil War ( since I am somewhat acquainted with newspaper headlines from the time) that the opinions carried were logical arguments, or attempts at logical arguments; for and against slavery (!?) or states rights vs. centralization of power in federal hands etc. etc. Columns and columns of print full of arguments.

Then in about 1917, Lenin discovered that logical arguments are boring and what was needed was propaganda with emotional content. You need movies and television for this, of course, a beautiful perilous gift. So then it was on into the new century with flaming Nazi propaganda, heroic figures ascending into political heaven bearing swastikas etc., and show trials in the USSR, social shaming. Which led to the demise of the shamee.

That’s a big change. It has been reflected in many science-fiction scenarios. The screaming, chanting crowds attacking an enemy of the people and so on. A big change.

A new method, a vast change, a burnt century, the camera’s eye fixed, and public communication not communication at all, or even the civil invitation to join in logical arguments but an incessant coarse blaming and urging.

From The Letter of Marque: the balloon ride. This was what Nadia and James were speaking about on the rooftop, Diana’s diamond; Maturin fell out of a tower and was gravely inured and dreams or hallucinates about the balloon ride which Diana promised him;

…and now they were into the pure upper air with that strangely familiar dark blue above and on either hand unless he looked over the edge of the car and down to the fantastic convolutions and the slowly changing geography of the cloud-world below…and he when looked across at Diana the perfection of her cheek fairly caught his breath…but now there was this evil balloon again and now he was living with time in the sense of duration once more, for he knew with dreadful certainty they had been rising for hours on end, that they were now rising faster still. And as they soared toward this absolute purity of sky its imminent threat, half-perceived at first, filled him with a horror beyond anything he had known. Diana was wearing her green coat and she had turned up the collar for now its red underneath made a shocking contrast with the extreme pallor of her face, the pinched white of her nose and the frosted blue of her lips. She held her head down, bowed over her lap, where her hands, loosely clasped, held the diamond, very like a sliver of this brilliant sky itself.

     She was breathing still, but only just, as they floated away always higher and into even more rarefied air…her senses were going, going, her head drooped forward, the diamond fell, and he started up crying ‘No, no, no,’ in an extremity of passionate refusal…  

The perilous, poisonous gift.

Yes, this is one of my photographs. Got it years ago visiting w/ Susan and Mark in Ozarks.

Thanks to everybody who helped on my Oct 8 – 24th journeying abut the nation, Evelyn for all her minding in Denver and June & April for the rides in Parrie-Haynes, Susan and Mark for eight days of riding and good food in the Ozarks and especially Jim and Nadine for the disaster when I finally got home to San Antonio after three really bumpy shaky plane rides to find that the battery in my truck was dead and I was about half dead; they tried to get it started then helped me call for a tow and then Nadine drove me to airport to rent a car to get home and then rented it for me and then drove truck here next day and drove rental car back.

That’s a lot of helping.

Thank you all! Happy Hallowe’en!

http://www.brendonmarotta.com/476/is-trump-a-likable-character-by-screenplay-standards/

this is for writers and people who like to figure out the shenanigans of image-technicians and so on….

(above: maple leaves in the Ozarks)

Just back from riding in the Ozarks with cousin, visiting family. Above is a leaf among all the color of the hills. Took a long time to learn that digital camera but I got some good shots.

A special and beautiful thing to be back there with family.

Just read a very interesting article on ‘the five things that make a character likeable’ on a blog written by a man who does scriptwriting. Will try to link it. It tests out well on presidential candidates as well as characters in novels, TV or movies. Try it on your friends!

This isn’t it. It is a shot of the moon I got about three months ago. But it’s pretty red! It was cloudy last night and we missed it. We — I mean I was riding with friends Mark and Nancy and June, and afterwards we had wine and other great stuff at June and Wayne’s place, God what a sybaritic life I lead. Good wine good friends and stories about Wayne’s family which I could listen to forever. We rode on June and Wayne’s neighbor’s place, also named Chism but I think with a U — Chisum. Strange to think that name and all spellings of the name come from the English place-name ‘Cheeseholm’. ‘The valley where they make cheeses’.

Waiting anxiously for rain and cold weather.

October 8th I fly to Denver for a convention of the Mountain and Plains Independent Bookstores people — to plug ‘News Of The World’. Evelyn O’Hara flying with me, to visit her daughter near Denver. So good to have a traveling companion.

The Grady Cat will stay in the house by himself for three days, won’t kill him. Since I lost Rita have to think about getting another dog in November sometime. For an early-warning system if nothing else. Grady has ruled his little kingdom here all by himself now for months, don’t now how he’ll take it.

Friend April Baxter treated me and June Chism to a trip to San Antonio to see this movie. It’s a documentary, of four guys who traveled 3,000 miles on horseback from the border of Mexico/Arizona to the Canadian border in 2013.  It is beyond compare. The cameraman shot 500 hours of film and produced this. So incredibly good. It is the first movie I have seen in at least three years or more.

The four are recent graduates of Texas A&M, all about 21-23 years old, full of strength, hope ideals, energy, resilience. Lots of accidents and horrifying moments caught on film, as when a horse rolls backwards down a steep rocky slope, guys are bucked off (these are recently gentled mustangs) and other spoilers which I will not repeat in order to save the great moments for you. And some of the moments are heartbreaking.

At one point they have to go through a tunnel cut through a mountain, the cameraman is directly behind one of the boys leading a packhorse through, the packhorse suddenly balks, (No tunnel shit for me!) the horse starts to run backward right into the lens, the camera turns upside down and all goes black for a moment. Well-cut, brave cameraman.

The four speak directly to the camera at various points. The cutting is not sentimental, or overly gorgeous. The cameraman and the editor have, let us say, an unsentimental eye but on the other hand the country they pass through, from the Arizona desert to Glacier National Park on the Canadian border it would take a heart of stone not to open the heart of the eye to it. The rapid cutting when they reach a town and get happily and publicly drunk, get a shave, a bath — this is a cliché that could have been heavy and dragging but it was cut very very fast, and was quite funny.

Inside the daily grind and the accidents and the joking is a subtle theme of conflict and betrayal. You will have to see it for yourself. But one of the guys pulls a dirty little backstab at the very end. And I thought, ‘you bastard’. He rode all that way just to get in his petty revenge against the leader. But this only made it a true drama.

It is everything I said in a earlier post about the universal and ancient theme of ‘the band of brothers’. The guys are all photogenic (but who is not when one is young and fit?) and they grow to know and love every horse they have and finally make it. So go see it.