Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
Like, since the items that are considered suitable and appropriate to make up a List of Ten Things of Thankful, are defined, first, by how I feel about them and only then, (in theory) are vetted for inclusion into the List. So, anything that happens (in the last week or so) that elicits a, ‘hey! glad I saw that!’ or ‘man, good thing I was paying attention’ or even, ‘that was cool! can’t wait to include it on the List of this week’s TToT!’ is valid (for inclusion on a/the List). I’ll presume to know the mind, (and heart and intentions). of our Founderinae, L. Lewis (still no relation to CS Lewis! damn…. hey! wait just a minute… there’s item 1). and base my List this week on some things that simply made me respond.
1) Books that I’m grateful for reading accidentally as a child/young clark:
- Out of the Silent Planet Trilogy (Lizzi’s Uncle) (7th…maybe 8th grade)
- A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle)
- Tom Swift and …. (series of what we call YA books, nowadays) ‘Victor Appleton II’ (around 6th grade)
- Bullfinch’s Mythology …. around 6th grade
2) Speaking of books and the Wakefield Doctrine! So, I was driving around today and listening to one of the two college radio stations I have on presets …. ok! college radio, having 2 stations in the area that I can listen to when I’m tired of playing, ‘I can name that song in 1 note’ while listening to the two dinosaur rock station,
3) So, back to today. What I’m grateful for was listening to a radio program about the life of Harriet Tubman, and the narrator mentions some connection between Tubman and Frederick Douglass and he says, “Douglass makes that clear, in his third autobiography.” third. autobiography. I laughed out loud* in my car and said. (to no-one, being along and all) ‘what a roger!’
4) that Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers), it’s not only a useful tool for understanding the people in my life, but it’s fun.
5) Gots to mention Una. Simply my role model.
6) The Gravity Challenge. We’re still going strong, a year later… Val, Joy, Lisa, Sarah, Kristi and Christine… been a very good thing
7) zoe’s Six Sentence Story… because it’s a challenge every week and fun (and educational), to watch the others create whole stories, (complete with engaging characters, suspense and humour), all in less sentences than…well, less than a Seven Sentence Story
8) Phyllis. First Reader of the Chapters-that-must-be-written each weekend. From the first chapter of ‘Blogdominion’, right through to this week’s Chapter 13 of ‘Almira’
9) Almira this week, in Chapter 13: we get back to Circe, Kansas and join Dorothy and Becky Stilwell engaged in conversation, (in the Town Square on one of the wrought-iron benches that encircle the Fountain (that never has any water)… in any event, we get some insight into how it came to be that Dorothy enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College (Hint: Aunt Em had two uncles, both of who stayed behind in Philadelphia when the Sauvages emigrated to this country. They stayed, Emily’s father didn’t, preferring to move west. They got wealthy and Dorothy’s grandfather didn’t) and, I have it on good authority that a) Dorothy is going to visit the Charity Ward at St Mary’s and 2) Becky Stillworth has a crush on Hunk Dietrich
10) SR 1.3 (ten four, Eleanor, ten four)
*lol
Your hosts
Join the Ten Things of Thankful Facebook Group
About clarkscottroger
Frist?
damn! totally FRIST!
lol in fact, you’re probably reading it before me!! (my final edit read-through happens, like, after I post everywhere)
And i read it frist too! Una looks so happy up there! I loved “a wrinkle in time.” Sci-fi conf. This weekend…. liable to be lots o posts….
Not FRIST but THRID.
Anyways…
A Wrinkle in Time. Read that in 4th grade. Loved it…after getting off to a slow start. LOL.
But, I did love “The Island” and “Dear Mr. Henshaw” and “Daddy Long Legs” oh and “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.”
Una. Yeah, makes me think of Vinny. He’s a mess, but insanely loyal and sweet. To me. To others? Especially nervous types? Forget it. LOL.
Congrats on moving forward with Almira!
And…ten four, Eleanor? LOL. I tried to teach the college kids how to use walkie talkies. Oy vey. They’d be like “ok. Over and out…er…thank you. Done.” Shaking my head. Hehe.
Have a great weekend! Don’t know if I will get a chance to call in tonight. If not, I’ll try to call from the road next Saturday! :)
ok… I’ll complete this comment, but but!! I found all, all the Firesign Theatre albums…. (source of the ‘ten four, Eleanor’ a line from one their albums)…. here’s a whole one
Becky Stillworth’s attraction to Hunk was easy. How many times is Dorothy going to that hospital and when will Almira wake up. Patience leads me to ponder different outcomes like the endings of Wayne’s World. Write on, Maestro.
Val
I wish I knew… serially!
I’ve said as much to others, but there’s a difference between ‘Blogdominion’ and ‘Almira’ that I’m feeling the effects of more and more, and that’s how communicable* the characters are, which is significant because they’re the ones who are ‘telling the story’ In Blogdominion I created all the characters ‘from whole cloth’, not so with Almira. Both the charm and challenge to ‘Almira’ is in coming to know characters who, in a certain sense, already existed before my ‘getting involved’.
Some aspects (of the story) are, as you say, obvious, Hunk and Becky, for example. Both intelligent people, with the kind of intelligence that demands expression and both are very much victims of circumstance (and gender), to grab a line from modern times (and mangle it a bit) ‘it’s not easy being an extremely intelligent farmhand or teenage girl (with large breasts) in Circe in 1939!’
In a sense, the young Almira could not avoid a similar challenge, back in 1912, although she has the advantage of having people around her who recognize what she’s going through and are willing to help. While you might argue that the times in Lawrence Massachusetts made it more difficult for young Almira Ristani to develop and express her potential, I would submit that, ‘sure, but at least it’s not a town full of people who consider everyone else a competitor or a threat, like they seem to in Circe, Kansas’
I guess Dorothy has to go to the hospital as often and for as long as it takes for her to either accept her life as she wants to remember it or accept her life as others want her to remember it. While I don’t doubt that our silent woman, in the bed in the Charity Ward of the hospital, could say much to our young Dorothy, does Dorothy really know what it is she wants to know?
thanks for the question/comment. it helps me to get some perspective on our little story!
*rogerian expression, couldn’t resist
Love the book list. And love autobiography, biography, any story of one’s life and lived experience. I’m all caught up with Almira now and eagerly awaiting the next instalment.
Kerry
I get what you say, for me, the coolest thing about this virtual world is being able to learn and share in, as you so succinctly put it, ‘lived experience’. The most mundane of lives, witnessed (as we’re allowed) has so much more to share than the most crafted of fiction.
A Wrinkle In Time is one of my all-time favorite books.
We have lousy radio stations here, so I’m thoroughly enjoying the XM radio in my dad’s car and will be sad when he finally asks for his car back, which shouldn’t be too far in the future. Sigh.
I’m behind on my Almira reading. Must. Get. Busy.
Dyanne
hey, (though I haven’t figured it out on mine), your phone should allow access (albeit) through earphones access to them stations.
so, Cliff Notes on Almira*
Dorothy Gale returns from her First Year at Sarah Lawrence College determined to learn why the woman she hated, (with the encouragement of her family), is held in high regard, (by portions of the community). Unfortunately the one person who should be able to answer her questions is in a coma and in the Charity Ward of the Circe Kansas hospital. There is a nurse who seems determined to correct Dorothy’s misunderstandings, but she’s a bit strange and impossible to pin down.
Dorothy’s adoptive parents are ambitiously successful farmers and landowners (at least Aunt Emily is) and they have their eye on the Hardesty Farm, which is hanging on by a thread, dues to emotional and economic calamity. Tom Hardesty, son of the owner of this farm, went to High School with Dorothy and was her first experience at, …experiencing life beyond a dusty Small Town. Dorothy is totally over Tom, Tom not so much.
Of the three farmhands we knew, one remains, Hunk Dietrich. Hunk saw Dorothy’s going off to college as a sign that he should try to become more, and is quietly enrolled correspondence college courses (the famous ICS).
As the woman in the bed in the Charity Ward (Mrs Almira Gulch) silently sleeps, we come to know about her as a young Almira Ristani, growing up in Lawrence Massachusetts in 1912. Lawrence is the first of the modern planned industrial cities, aka a Mill Town. Created and run by the wealthy and powerful, it’s difficult life is, nevertheless, a beacon for workers from across the Atlantic and they come to Lawrence, to the extent that, at it’s height 65% of the population of 85,000 were foreign born. Almira is a remarkably intelligent and perceptive girl and finds a friend in Annie LoPizzo, an organizer and active member of a start-up Workers Union. The Corporation that built and runs Lawrence is not asleep at the switch and hires an ambitious and aggressive member of the nouveau rich to make sure the Mills produce the return on investment that they want.
Back in 1939 in Circe, we learn the homestead that Almira built is a way station and refuge for the increasing numbers of itinerant and new-poor workers, fleeing the Dust Bowl and the grind of modern society, heading West to the land of opportunity. In fact, it’s know in the train yards and the dusty highways as ‘Almira’s Keep’ and road weary travelers know there’s always a meal and clean bed waiting, when the road to the Promised Land wears them down.
(Also we get to know Becky Stillworth, an ambitious smalltown girl with ambitions to become a doctor and a heart-sized crush on Hunk Dietrich. Eliza Thornberg, Dorothy’s roommate at Sarah Lawrence and only daughter of a wealthy founder of a Philadelphia publishing company, who is bored with life at home from college, although things get interesting when she meets an up and coming Hollywood director at one of her stepmother’s parties and gets herself invited to go to the West Coast for a visit.)
we left off with the young Almira being seriously knocked across the room after showing us a side that I, for one, was kind of shocked to find out she had in her… Dorothy realizes that, 2 weeks into being back ‘home’ she is really sick of the whole rural farm life…
that’s where the story is at for now
*this is actually a serious and beneficial exercise for me today, as I’m kind of mired in the story, mostly because my characters are either not being exciting or just not telling me the exciting parts!
I can’t imagine anyone reading one auto-biography of my life, and yet someone actually went and wrote three of them about his life.
Now my boys on the other hand, it would take three to properly explore some of their shenanigans.
yeah, I know! (about the ‘omg-I’m-so-interesting-it-takes-three-separate-books!’)
I’m another vote for the greatness of A Wrinkle in Time.
It’s unanimous! A Wrinkle in Time for the win!
I don’t read many autobiographies. I always take them with a grain of salt. I know if my brother were to write an autobiography, the rest of my family and I would read it and loudly proclaim that so much of what he wrote didn’t happen. But, there have been a few folks whose autobiographies I enjoyed. One person even wrote 2. Three seems a bit much. :)
what an accomplishment, (to write a book) that people are glad they read at any and all ages!
I didn’t come to A Wrinkle In Time until a couple of years ago, but I LOVED it.
I wonder if it really takes knowing who you are, to write an autobiography. Stories of their life, however, are much more fascinating by clarks, I think, who might be several different people within any given timeframe.
good point…. in fact, good point, I’d bet you would know a person’s world view within the first 3 pages of their autobiography (sounds like a Post topic! thanks!)