Jamie Bishop

One of the slain in the Virginia Tech massacre this week was teacher and artist Christopher James "Jamie" Bishop, son of our friends Michael and Jeri Bishop, who was teaching a German class when he died.

His colleagues have set up a scholarship in his name for Virginia Tech students studying German. "Anyone who wishes to do something in memory of our son," Michael writes, "could give any amount to this fund." The address is:

Jamie Bishop Scholarship
Virginia Tech Foundation
University Development
902 Prices Fork Road
Blacksburg, Va. 24061

Already there have been standing-room-only memorial services for Jamie at home in Georgia -- one at LaGrange College, where Michael has taught for years, and one at the family's church, First United Methodist in Pine Mountain. Funeral arrangements in Georgia will be posted by the church as they are known.

The Ledger-Enquirer of Columbus, Ga., covered the church memorial service, at which the pastor read aloud the sermon that Jamie himself had written and delivered from the pulpit as a teenager in 1989, on "one of those Sundays a pastor turns his pulpit over to a teenager," in reporter Richard Hyatt's words. The excerpts Hyatt quoted were:

Be alert. Death comes without warning, any day, any time. ... Never give up. Don't think of turning back.

Of the many profiles of Jamie that have been published this week, one of the best was in Tech's excellent local paper, The Roanoke Times. The one in the Los Angeles Times was the first I saw. Here's the one in Time. NPR has done a couple of segments on Jamie as well.

Paul Di Filippo has posted an excerpt from Michael Bishop's essay "A Reverie for Mister Ray," about the experience of reading Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine aloud to Jamie, who then was 9:

I especially admired Jamie's outrage and indignation when three children in the first third of the novel tell seventy-two-year-old Helen Bentley that she was never young, never pretty, never blessed with a first name. Jamie could not comprehend these children's stupidity and rudeness ...

Here's more of Jamie in his own words and images, at his website.

"A fleecing of taxpayer dollars"

A reader who identifies herself as Anne writes:

Thank you for posting your experience by the Meyersdale wind farm that has driven many people from their homes which were unsalable and some sold for under 80% less than their fair market value. Also, bear in mind that the turbines they are trying to erect in PA, MD, WV, and NY are between 393' and 600' tall....closer to peoples homes. It is simply a fleecing of taxpayer dollars to ruin taxpayer's quality of life.

Anne, do you mean that homeowners were displaced when the wind farm took their land, or that people left because they didn't want to live near a wind farm, or both? And do you know how many households were involved? The area we drove through was mostly wooded hunting land interspersed with pastures, but the few houses we passed weren't vacant.

Also, if one must live near a power plant, doesn't a wind farm make a better neighbor than a coal-burning plant or a nuclear plant? And doesn't a wind farm displace far fewer people, with far less environmental impact, than a hydroelectric dam? Which form of electric power generation do you prefer?

I readily grant you that using taxpayer money to lure new businesses -- including new businesses that compete with existing businesses, or drive existing taxpayers from their land -- can be problematic, and at best is a difficult judgment call. Were such incentives offered the wind-farm company? Do you know how much money was involved?

Thanks for writing.

Another harsh truth

Paulina Porizkova tells People magazine about her first novel, A Model Summer:

I'm way too old and fat to model now. But for a writer, I'm pretty damn young and hot!

More on the Heimlich-performing golden retriever

The Maryland woman who says her golden retriever, Toby, saved her life -- by performing the Heimlich maneuver -- now is in the April 16 issue of People magazine, posing with the happy dog, of course.

Scott Goss of the Cecil Whig, which broke the story, has an interesting post on the media frenzy:

I’ve fielded literally dozens of phone calls and e-mails this week from nationally televised programs, radio stations and local news programs eager to declare Toby a hero. ... But somehow it seems like a shame that no one from "The Oprah Winfrey Show" or "Good Morning America" has ever called to ask about the paramedics, firefighters or police officers who risk their lives to help people every day. I can say with certainty that those heroes know exactly what they’re doing.

A union turns to Jeremiah

I was pleased to read that the newest United Steelworkers local is No. 2911, a reference to Jeremiah 29:11. In Today's New International translation, the verse reads:

"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

The International Club

The International Club at Garrett College in McHenry, Md., sent the Times-News this photo to publicize this year's International Dinner. I thought it was a hoot, far superior to the usual line-'em-up-and-shoot-'em photo, but the newspaper hasn't made it available on the website yet, so club adviser Judy Carbone was kind enough to send me this copy for posting here.

In front are Lasma Kanele, from Latvia; Breanna Eckley, from the United States; Sharon Sarowa, from Papua New Guinea; Unathi Mahlati, from South Africa; and Tihitina Gizaw, from Ethiopia. In back are Jerome Jack, from England; Hrvoje Muhek, from Croatia; and Bongani Dlamini, from South Africa.

The dinner is 4-6 p.m. Saturday, April 21. Tickets are $12 in advance or $15 at the door. For more information, e-mail Judy Carbone. Thanks, Judy!

Down on the wind farm

While taking the scenic route recently from Frostburg, Md., to Meyersdale, Pa., for the Pennsylvania Maple Festival, Sydney and I blundered into our nearest wind farm, the Meyersdale Wind Energy Center. Here is Sydney standing near the base of the southernmost windmill, the first of 20 that march along the ridgeline.

If these towers have the same dimensions as those in nearby Somerset, each is 210 feet tall, and their rotors are 231 feet in diameter, so their true height is something like 325 feet. They're visible above the trees from miles away, like Wells' Martian war machines.The morning we drove past, which wasn't windy at ground level, the windmills sounded like the world's largest slowly turning ceiling fans: rrrrWHUP rrrrWHUP rrrrWHUP. It was a weird sound, oddly musical, and not particularly loud, quite easy to talk over. On a really windy day, I'll drive back up there to see how the sound differs.

We discovered on the drive home that the best ground-level view of all 20 towers is from U.S. 219 between Meyersdale to the north and I-68 to the south. Here's a view from midair.

This wind farm is owned by FPL Energy, a sister company of Florida Power & Light, but the 30 megawatts it generates -- enough to power 12,000 homes -- is sold to FirstEnergy of Akron, Ohio.

Sideling Hill

This afternoon, on the drive home from Scott Edelman and Irene Vartanoff's place in West Virginia, we stopped at the Sideling Hill Exhibit Center, between Cumberland and Hagerstown, to get an up-close look at this remarkable artificial canyon where 10 million tons of rock was blasted out of the ridge in the 1980s to make way for I-68. The scree is the incline you drive on, for miles east and west of "the Cut." The rock walls are nearly 900 feet high and, as you can see, quite close to the highway on either side, but on the foggiest days you can drive through the Cut without seeing either one.

The Duncan family connection to Slaughterhouse-Five

My family owns about 80 acres of woodland in Saluda County, S.C., acreage on which -- I grew up being told -- U.S. Army troops performed battlefield maneuvers as part of their training before being shipped overseas in World War II. The cabin used as a command headquarters was still standing in my youth, and we'd stay in it for a week or more each summer.

I thought of this a couple of weeks ago, as I was reading Kurt Vonnegut's brilliant novel Slaughterhouse-Five. (And yes, James Morrow was right to ask me, when he saw it in my hand: "Do you mean you're just now reading Slaughterhouse-Five?") Vonnegut's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is trained as a chaplain's assistant during the war (which is to say, he is wholly untrained during the war), and at one point he is on maneuvers with his unit in South Carolina. This is from Chapter 2, Page 31 of the 1991 Dell paperback edition:

It was Sunday morning. Billy and his chaplain had gathered a congregation of about fifty soldiers on a Carolina hillside. An umpire appeared. There were umpires everywhere, men who said who was winning or losing the theoretical battle, who was alive and who was dead.

The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.

Remembering this incident years later, Billy was struck by what a Trafalmadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time.

It was a Trafalmadorian adventure, of course, because the Trafalmadorians -- the aliens who abduct Billy later on -- experience all events simultaneously: "All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist" (Ch. 2, Page 27). Anyway, I decided, reading this brief scene, that the otherwise unidentified Carolina hillside was on the Duncan farm in Saluda County, S.C. I have no evidence for it, but I'm convinced of it all the same.

The politics of justice

Paul Akers, editorial page editor of The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., has a fine column about the news that Circuit City is laying off thousands of senior store workers so they can be replaced with cheaper, less experienced, less loyal hires. It concludes:

The politics of envy have little appeal to me. But, I swear, I wouldn't mind seeing more of the politics of justice.

No choke

Debbie Parkhurst of Calvert, Md., tells her beautifully named local newspaper, the Cecil Whig, that her golden retriever, Toby, saved her life -- by performing the Heimlich maneuver.

Woody lives

I am pleased to read in today's Cumberland Times-News that first-place winners in this year's Allegany County History Day competition included Allegany High School students Derek O'Neal and Emily Schadt as Woody Guthrie and his radio partner Maxine "Lefty Lou" Crissman.

Drop whatever you are doing,
Stop your work and worry, too;
Sit right down and take it easy,
Here comes Woody and Lefty Lou.

O'Neal and Schadt performed "This Land Is Your Land," which Woody wrote, and "Lonesome Road Blues," which he inherited, as did we all: Woody sang it as "Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad" and, to fit the omnipresent wind motif of Dust Bowl Ballads, as "Blowin' Down the Road."

Nothing fina than West Virgina

The company that printed the misspelled "West Virgina" T-shirts that the NIT champions wore in Madison Square Garden after Thursday's game has published a funny apology on its website. It concludes:

For information about how we can leave a letter off of YOUR tee shirts and increase your website traffic 10-fold, just give us a call.

Oh, baby, make it shine!

In a recent news release about the Make It Shine cleanup programs, the state of West Virginia printed not the Make It Shine number, but the number of a 900 sex line. As The Associated Press put it:

Callers trying to reach someone who could answer questions about the state's Adopt-A-Highway program, an upcoming spring cleanup or reports on illegal dumps, were instead greeted by a woman moaning in ecstasy.

Lily and Arlo

My role in Dorothy's downfall

Sydney's paper at this year's International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was titled "Lost Girl: The Diminution of Dorothy Gale," and it addressed what folks since L. Frank Baum have done to his magical, powerful little-girl hero -- aging her and/or sexualizing her and/or ridding her of magic and/or power (Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's new graphic novel Lost Girls, Sydney argues, has the dubious honor of accomplishing all of the above) or simply omitting her entirely, as in the Wicked industry. In the weeks that Sydney worked on this paper, and the hours I spent helping her assemble a slideshow of images, neither of us remembered that a major text was right under our noses. Not until today, when our older and more ornery cat, Hillary, knocked it off the shelf, did I remember this Wizard of Oz plate that I drew for my mother when I was in third grade.Drawing from memory, I put in all my favorite ingredients from the movie: Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, Lion, steam issuing from the Woodsman's tin hat, witch, witch's castle, sign pointing the way to the witch's castle, Yellow Brick Road, grumpy trees and lots of winged monkeys. I was too young to appreciate the contributions of Frank Morgan (indeed, I probably didn't realize, quite yet, that the same man played all those roles), had no interest in Glinda (and still don't; Billie Burke is delightful in the Topper movies, but in Oz she had nothing to do) or in the Munchkins (which were too much like my fellow third-graders for comfort) -- or, sadly, in poor Dorothy herself. In the movie, the monkeys attack four travelers, including Dorothy, but not in my Oz. Granted, in the movie the witch had buzzed through the sky earlier, and the grumpy tree had been encountered much earlier, but I clearly recall my deletion of Dorothy being deliberate, because when my teacher, Mrs. Owen, asked me why I hadn't included Dorothy, I replied, with some heat: "I can't draw Dorothy!" Paging Dr. Freud ...

The Write Book

I was pleased to see Nick DiChario at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Nick was in the audience to root for Rick Wilber as Rick read their fine new collaborative baseball story. What I did not know was that Nick co-owns an independent bookstore in Honeoye Falls, N.Y., near Rochester: The Write Book and Gift Shop. Here's the website. If you're in that area, please give him your custom.

My fortunes

Fortune cookies frequently criticize me, directly or indirectly. Here's a fortune I got this month in Florida: "Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient in nothing."

The worst was one I got years ago at SWEN in Northport, Ala.: "The only obstacle in your path may be your stupidity."

I write SWEN in all caps because the name of the restaurant -- a hangout that Sydney and I miss dearly -- stands for South West East North, believe it or not.

My most bizarre SWEN fortune read: "Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else's water lily."

The Scottish play in Tlingit

Some Shakespeare plays I've seen three or four times too many and don't care to see again -- The Merchant of Venice comes to mind -- but I'm always up for a new production of the one that superstitious theater folk call "the Scottish play," and I'm especially sorry to have missed the recent Tlingit-language production at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.Seeing the poster reminded me of William Sanders' wonderful story "The Undiscovered," an alternate history in which Shakespeare winds up living among the Cherokees and writing Hamlet just for them.

The museum's production was staged by the Perseverance Theatre of Juneau, Alaska. On a video in the lobby of the museum, director Anita Maynard-Losh explained that whenever the characters are speaking words in harmony with nature and the universe, they speak Tlingit (in a new translation by Johnny Marks), but whenever the characters violate that harmony -- as the chief and his wife do through much of the play, of course -- they speak Shakespeare's English.

This struck me as a beautifully cunning move; the director makes her political point, one guaranteed to make the English-firsters apoplectic with indignation, while rationalizing the inclusion of all that familiar dark English poetry that audiences pay to hear. Who remembers any of Macduff's lines, after all?

The Grant Memorial

In Washington, D.C., on a business trip earlier in March, I explored the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial at the foot of Capitol Hill. The largest equestrian statue in the United States depicts Grant mounted on his horse Cincinnati atop a 22-foot-high pedestal, gazing west toward the Washington Monument. I was more struck by the bronze artillerymen and cavalrymen to either side of Grant, at opposite ends of their shared 252-foot marble platform. The detail in Henry Merwin Shrady's sculptures is remarkable.Shrady, whose father had been one of Grant's doctors, got the commission to sculpt the memorial in 1903 and worked on it for the rest of his life. The artillerymen were finished in 1912, the cavalrymen in 1916, the figure of Grant in 1920. Shrady died just weeks before the dedication in 1922, on the centennial of Grant's birth. The Grant Memorial was dedicated only a month before the dedication of a much better-known D.C. memorial -- to Gen. Grant's commander in chief.