Sherry Chandler

From this morning’s NYTimes :

ROCK FALLS, Ill. — Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid.

So instead of heading to work, Mr. Beggerow, now 53, fills his days with diversions: playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, writing unpublished Western potboilers in the Louis L’Amour style — all activities once relegated to spare time. He often stays up late and sleeps until 11 a.m.

“I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” he said.

…

Alan Beggerow has not worked regularly in the five years since the steel mill that employed him for three decades closed. He and his wife, Cathleen, 47, cannot really afford to live without his paycheck. Yet with her sometimes reluctant blessing, Mr. Beggerow persists in constructing a way of life that he finds as satisfying as the work he did only in the last three years of his 30-year career at the mill. The trappings of this new life surround Mr. Beggerow in the cluttered living room of his one-story bungalow-style home in this half-rural, half-industrial prairie town west of Chicago. A bookcase covers an entire wall, and the books that Mr. Beggerow is reading are stacked on a glass coffee table in front of a comfortable sofa where he reads late into the night — consuming two or three books a week — many more than in his working years.

…

Always on the coffee table is a thick reference work, “Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire” by Maurice Hinson. Mr. Beggerow is a serious pianist now that he has the time to practice, sometimes two or three hours at a stretch. He does so on an old upright in a corner of the living room, a piano he purchased as a young steelworker, when he first took lessons.

Is this some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome or a social/philosophical breakthrough? Mr. Beggerow’s life sounds like the kind of idyll described by very famous literary figures, men such as Samuel Johnson, Henry David Thoreau, George Bernard Shaw, as described in Tom Lutz’s book Doing Nothing. (And who’s to say potboiler westerns are not sufficiently literary to justify this kind of life?)

Men like Mr. Beggerow, neither working nor looking for a job, also have become more common in the popular culture, making the phenomenon more acceptable. On the television show “Seinfeld,” Cosmo Kramer, who did not work, and George Costanza, who regularly lost jobs, were beloved figures. Personal-finance magazines whose circulations have grown rapidly over the last 25 years also encourage not working — by telling readers how to afford retirement at 50 and by painting not working as the good life, which it apparently is for a small number of wealthy men. About 8 percent of non-working men between 30 and 54 lived in households that had more than $100,000 of income in 2004.

“Men don’t feel a need to be in a career, not as much as they once did,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Nor do men have the incentive they once had to pursue a career, not when employers are no longer committed to them.”

And yet, it takes a certain toll. Mr. Beggerow’s wife is sticking with him even though they don’t have enough money to cover expenses . Other men in this position had less compliant wives and so they are divorced; 60% of these men live alone for some reason. According to this Times article, about 13% of American men 30-55 years old are not working. They are not looking for work and so they don’t show up in our low 4.6% unemployment rate. About two million of these men have felony records, mostly from drug convictions in the 1980s and 90s. Coming out of jail now, in their thirties, guess what? They can’t find work.

But these ex-prisoners are in the minority. Most of these men could find work of some kind but, like “Bartleby the Scrivener,” they prefer not to. Here’s Mr. Beggerow’s reason:

Mr. Beggerow will not take a lesser job, he says, because of his bitter memories of earlier years at Northwestern Wire, particularly the 1980’s, when the industry was in turmoil. A powerful man, over 6 feet and 200 pounds, he worked then as a warehouseman.

What got to him was not the work. It was the frequent furloughs, the uncertainty whether he would be recalled, the mandatory overtime and 50-hour weeks often imposed when he did return, the schedules that forced him to work every holiday except Christmas, and then, as rising seniority finally gave him some protection, a six-month strike in 1983 followed by a wage cut. His pay shrank to $13 an hour from $17, a loss he did not fully recover until those last three years.

“I was always thinking if there was some way I could get out of this, do something else,” Mr. Beggerow said. “What made me so upset was the insecurity of it all and the humiliation. I don’t want to take a job that would put me through that again.”

If I remember correctly (I don’t have to book at hand), Lutz theorizes that slackers emerge in times of change, when an old way of life is disappearing and a new one is not yet established. Guess that’s where we are.

“Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”

David Snell sends news:

The Paper Journey Press is pleased to announce that David H. Snell’s story, “Nocturnal Omission,” has been included in Blink: Flash Fiction Before You Can Bat an Eye, ISBN 09773156-4-9. Blink is available through Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com and all independent bookstores.
Blink is a delightful collection of stories by writers from around the country as well as, Great Britain and Canada.

Paper Journey Editor Wanda Wade Mukherjee says “While these stories were written by authors from opposite sides of the country and from around the globe, they appear to be tightly woven together as if by some mysterious glue–a mystical reunion of kindred spirits, so to speak.”

Delightfully funny, sometimes sinful, occasionally mournful–this collection of flash fiction tells the stories of every day folks at various crossroads, whose lives intermingle in brief, transitory moments magically intersecting at times.

“Readers can easily read Blink in one sitting in the sand at the beach or better yet, while on a train ride or while waiting for a flight,” says Mukherjee. “The stories are great fun, but some are quite serious in their thirst to discover fate within the concept of time and that space between when anything can happen but usually doesn’t.”

Snell’s other stories have appeared in Original Sin: The Seven Deadlies Come Home to Roost. His poetry can be found in Kudzu and Pegasus.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

These are the words of the Reverend Gregory A. Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills megachurch outside St. Paul, as quoted today in a NYTimes profile. He also said these things:

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

The Times features Mr. Boyd as one of a small number of evangelicals rebelling against the currently mandated lock step with the Republican Party and the far right. Just as some denominational colleges are rebelling, so are some evangelical mega-churches (a term I still consider oxymoronic).

Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.

At least six books on this theme have been published recently, some by Christian publishing houses. Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Barnard College and an evangelical, has written “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — an Evangelical’s Lament.”

And Mr. Boyd has a new book out, “The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church,” which is based on his sermons.

“There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church,” which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.

Cause for hope, yes. But in some ways this article left me more appalled than ever about what is going on in the evangelical church. Look at this passage:

[Mr. Boyd] said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.

Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a “freedom celebration.” Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending “your hard-earned money” on good causes.

Mr. Boyd paid a price for his rebellion. He lost about 1,000 of his 5,000 members, most of them white, middle-class, and suburban. He lost millions in contributions and had to lay off staff. He lost volunteers:

“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’ ” [family pastor Mary Van Sickle] said. “It was some of my best volunteers.”

Did you know it was “Truth, Justice, and the Republican way?”

I didn’t.

Deadline for submitting to the 2006 Green River Writers Contest is September 30, 2006.

Entry fees are $8 for the Grande categories, $3 each for all other categories.

Guidelines here.

List of contest categories here.

Thirty categories this year in poetry and fiction.

Caption on an above-the-fold photograph in the July 26 edition of the local paper, The Bourbon County Citizen:

Paris City employees begin cleaning up brush that will be the home of the Paris Dog Park in the future.

I leave you to apply your own punch line to that statement.

The Citizen assures us that our wonderful new Wal-Mart Supercenter will be operational by January 2007. Construction certainly seems to be moving rapidly, which is more than I can say for commuter traffic. That is being stopped by a flagger so that big earth movers can take dirt from one side of the by-pass and dump it on the other. All the traffic islands are torn up so the road can be reworked to accommodate the shopping center entrance. Who knew traffic islands went down two or three feet.

I go to work through town now.

We were promised a bigger better box, with a colonial façade to blend in with the rest of our pseudo-colonial architecture in that area (Bo Co High School being the prime example), but all I see at this point is a big box covered with brick veneer. I’ll admit that I’m a hostile witness.

Companion stores leasing in so far include a discount gas station, a Dairy Queen, and a Starbucks.

Yessirree Bob. Pretty soon Paris, Kentucky will have a Super Wal-Mart, a Starbuck’s, and some nice controlled green space with clean brush for walking our dogs. We’ll look like every other town in America and we’ll be happy. Don’t pay any attention to the empty storefronts downtown. And the jobs! Now our children can aspire to a career as a barrista without leaving home.

For further rants about the biggest box of all, I refer you to Have Coffee Will Write here and here.

Because it’s been a hard week and I feel lazy and besides, these things are endlessly funny.

Donna sends the link to this Treehugger post about this attempt by Dalhousie architecture students to find a way to walk barefoot in the grass wherever you may go.

Their contraption is a way to “take the park with you” …”We’re looking at the idea of green space in the city,” said grad student Kevin James. “Even in the Public Gardens [in Halifax, NS], you’re not allowed to walk on the grass.” People who were curious enough to ask one of the students what it was all about got slips of paper explaining the students’ ideals.”They’re just really curious about it,” said James. “And we get a lot of hamster jokes.”

Treehugger looks like a pretty neat blog to read if you’re trying to live green.

Okay — so you thought that double-crochet stitch was just for boring old afghans. Think again.

Elaine Bradford reconceives the double-crochet stitch.

This link is also courtesy of Donna Rhae Marder, who has done things with teabags that I would not have thought of in a million years.

Tank cosies and tree sweaters. I think I see a theme…

Charlie Hughes sends a link to this YouTube video:

I find the minimalist animation of this short film very disquieting, moving in a way that the slicker computer animation could never be. Or at least never is.

Donna Rhae Marder sent me a link to this cosy protest by Marianne Jorgensen that was displayed in Copenhagen (I’m not sure just when). From the artist’s statement about the project:

A combat tank which was used in World War II was the setting for this work of art. As a protest against the Danish (USA´s, UK´s) involvement in the war in Iraq the tank was covered from the canon to the caterpillar tracks with knitted and crocheted squares made with pink yarn The 15 x 15 cm squares in pink yarn/thread, were knitted by many people from many European countries and USA. The process of covering the tank was documented with a video and this video is shown in ”Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center“ (Copenhagen, Denmark) as part of the exhibition “TIME” from April 27 - June 4 .

…

The possibility of “knitting your opinions” gives the project an aspect that I think is important. The common element in the project gives importance beyond words. Most people can knit or crochet a square of 15×15 centimeters, and most people have some pink yarn to spare, and a lot of people are willing to use the time it takes to knit a patch that size and to support the project with the money it costs to mail the patch. I am thankful that people of many age groups, both sexes and several nationalities have been willing to use their time to support the project and I am hopeful.

Unsimilar to a war, knitting signals home, care, closeness and time for reflection…

For me, the tank is a symbol of stepping over other people’s borders. When it is covered in pink, it becomes completely unarmed and it loses it’s authority. Pink becomes a contrast in both material and color when combined with the tank

If you would like to have documentation of this project you can send an email to me at the following address: joergensen.marianne@gmail.com