Bertolt Brecht

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them?
--excerpted from "Questions From a Worker Who Reads" by Bertolt Brecht

Ken Laundry

When we leave this earth,

our spirit fills the places
we leave behind.
The spirit dwells in the small things...
and the large...

(You can click on any photo for a larger view.)

Reading at Sullivan's Pub

After a week of pneumonia, of sounding like my own death rattle, I miraculously recovered today at least enough to go to Sullivan's for their second monthly reading event. Again there was a warm room and a warm crowd. Several new readers presented themselves. We heard haiku, short stories, and even sang along to William Blake.

I read two passages from Clear Heart: Abe's first day of work, and then FrogGirl's. I was then tempted to skip to the end and read Eric's first day, but it would have given away too much.

Next month, the reading event will fall on April Fools Day. I'll be there, reading again. Come on down. There's beer on tap, a wood-burning stove, a friendly crowd. A great La Honda tradition, open to anyone.

(Drawing by Shirley Bortoli from my book Son of a Poet)

My Top Ten (or Five, actually, or maybe Six...): With Our Hands

Here's one you probably haven't heard of - With Our Hands: The Story of Carpenters in Massachusetts. Mark Erlich, the author, combines the scholarship of an historian with the cred of a working carpenter, member of Carpenters Local 40.

A lot of the book is based on an oral history project, so we hear the voices of carpenters whose memories go back to the (first) Great Depression, and even beyond to the stories they heard from their fathers and grandfathers.

It's a story of pride, hardship, and conflict. From the very beginning in the colonies there was conflict: "In 1633 the court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony set a ceiling of two shillings a day on carpenters' wages. According to John Winthrop, first governor of the colony, the court was forced to take this action because 'the scarcity of workmen had caused them to raise their wages to an excessive rate... They could get as much in four days as would keep them a week.' "

It's been a battle ever since. Mark Erlich is a union man, and the book is union-sponsored, so a bias is evident. To his credit, Erlich examines the unfortunate union history of discriminating (to put it mildly) against people of color and against women in the trades.

The oral history is great. Mary Ann Williams says: "I was harassed from the super all the way down. They told me to get my lumber out of what turned out to be the junk pile. The sent me over to dig out wood to make small footing forms. By the end of the day I had a rash all over - it was a mean little trick they played on me because that was where all the poison oak was."

Nazadeen Arkil, a black woman, says: "One day after payday, I told the guys that I was buying the coffee. My boss looked at me straight in my face and said to me, 'What did you do, hit the nigger pool?' And everybody went, 'Whoa.' The whole job just held their breaths. I turned to him and said, 'Does that mean you don't consider me a nigger?' He apologized and said, 'You know, I'm just so used to you.' But I said to him, 'That word just rolled off your tongue a little bit too easy for me.' You gotta find the gray areas between black and white without losing your own identity, because if you're black and proud on a construction job, you might be black and dead. The attitude is 'we let you in here, what the hell else do you want.' " And this was in the 1980s.

The adaptations to new materials and tools is a constant theme: "'On the big jobs, they had standard mixers for concrete. A truck would come with two batches of sand and stone. Then you'd throw in your cement bags - six of them. You put in the water, mix it up, and you'd have a yard of concrete. You'd start at seven in the morning and sometimes it was ten or eleven at night before you'd get home on a 100-yard pour. The old-timers used to mix it all by shovel and hand.' In the late 1930s, trucks began carrying premixed concrete to the job, ending the fourteen-hour days of hand mixing. The trucks were small, handling 2, 3, 4, or 5 cubic yards..."

Or there was that new-fangled machine, the Skilsaw: "One guy took the Skilsaw on the roof of the building and threw it off. He said, 'The saw's too fast, I'm going to cut by hand.' The Skilsaw symbolized a loss of control and a new order, but it brought external changes as well. The traditional image of the nattily dressed carpenter whose white shirt and bow tie were covered by a pair of white overalls gradually disappeared. The overalls had served a dual purpose: they protected the layer of clothes underneath and held an astonishing array of hand tools in dozens of pockets and openings. The power tools made some of the hand tools obsolete or redundant, and the modern carpenter found he could carry all the tools and nails he needed in a simple apron or pouch..."

There are about a hundred photos, and they are the best part, starting with that marvelous image on the cover. You get a sense of what's changed, and what hasn't. Other than the clothing, can you tell that this photo was taken in 1926?
It's out of print, but used copies can be found on the internet. Buy it. It's good.

My Top Ten (or Five, actually, or maybe Six...): Mike Rose

People assume that plumbers are stupid. Also carpenters, drywallers, backhoe operators. It drives me nuts.

It drives Mike Rose nuts, too. Fortunately, he's written a very smart book, The Mind at Work. Here's what he says on the first page: "I grew up a witness to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line. This, then, is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work."

Mike Rose's mother was a waitress. His uncle Frank was a welder for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Mike is an educator with a special interest in so-called "vocational" education and "at-risk" students. He's battling against a deeply ingrained prejudice in our culture, a prejudice that has been around since Classical Greece: "Plato mocks the craftsman who would pursue philosophy, for his soul is 'warped and maimed' by his work; such men are 'incapable of culture.' And Aristotle notes that 'there is no element of virtue in any of the occupations in which the multitude of artisans and market-people and the wage-earning class take part.' "

Mike isn't calling all craftspeople geniuses, but he sure is calling for some respect, especially among the teachers who are supposed to be educating them and the public at large who benefit from their skills.

In the first two chapters he analyzes the complexity and creativity demanded from seemingly simple jobs, those of a waitress and a hair stylist. Then he moves on to plumbing, carpentry, electrical, and welding. In each chapter he analyzes and appreciates the values, skills, and aesthetics that must be learned and built.

Aesthetics. That's an important word, and not just for Art Appreciation 101. It's for the electrician admiring the orderly braid of wires hidden inside a wall. Mike explains why the aesthetic matters and how an electrician, even if he's never heard the word, evaluates the professionalism of another electrician's workmanship on an aesthetic scale: "An experienced electrician I visited had removed a section of drywall and was commenting on a cluster of wires running along the frame. The braid was perfect, he said approvingly. That makes it easier, he explained, to single out a particular wire - the functional value - but also, it just looks good. The previous electrician's signature is woven into the braid, but anonymously so, and completely out of sight, seen, if at all, by another electrician, carpenter, or plumber over the life of the house." And then there is the aesthetic of simply not being seen: "We try hard not to show our straps. We want to show as little evidence of the electrician's being here as possible."

The best craftspeople make it look easy. The proof, in fact, is often the fact that you don't even notice the craft at all. You don't notice the waitress, but your coffee is always full. You don't notice the carpenter, but that door closes snug and easy.

Here's what Studs Terkel had to say: "Mike Rose cites chapter and verse in revealing the skills and intelligence of those we tend to dismiss as 'blue collar.' It knocked me out. It makes mincemeat out of our traditional IQ tests."

I totally agree. No, this book isn't about woodworking or hardware or how to build anything. It's about one particular tool: the mind. The mind connected to the hand. The wisdom embedded in physical, hands-on work.

Mail Call

Dear Mr. Cottonwood,

Before i read you book, i hated reading. I hated everything about it.
Than i saw this book in the library and discided to give it a try. I
read it and in 2 days i was done. I loved your writing. You inspired me
to start reading! I just wanted to thank you for writing the book
Babcock.

Ross

Babcock was published 13 years ago and has been out of print for many years. The book got good reviews and was on a lot of best-of-the-year lists, but it was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 5000 copies. Most of those copies went to libraries, however, and so the book is still in circulation and, from the evidence of this and other letters, still being read.

I'm in the middle of preparing a podcast of Babcock. It's a post-Obama novel, written before anybody (including myself) had ever heard of the man. I guess I was ahead of my time. You'll see what I mean when the podcast comes out in a few months.

Be nice to somebody today. Maybe they had a sad weekend. Pay them a compliment they didn't expect. It'll make their day, and it'll improve your own feelings, too.

Thank you, Ross, for making my day.

Another Death in the Family

Ken Laundry passed away today at Plattsburgh hospital.

He was just a few days short of his 95th birthday.

He was a man of the mountains and a mountain of a man.

He lived a simple and hardworking life, but anyone who talked to him was impressed by the subtlety and breadth of his mind and the warmth of his humor.

I started writing about Ken here at this link.

A complete collection of my writings about Ken can be found be clicking on the link in the left-hand column of this blog, under "Labels," where it says Ken Laundry (40).

The photo on the right is from the last time I saw Ken.

His spirit fills us all.