booklover — Yeats. Al Writers. The Second Coming

Column Editor: Donna Jacobs (Retired, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC 29425) <donna.jacobs55@gmail.com>

For over the last ten plus years the Against the Grain editorial staff has graciously indulged a bucket list item of mine that entails reading one piece of work by every author who has ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature and sharing that experience with you through the Booklover column. The choice of author is random during the year, except when the newest laureate is announced and I feature a work by the newly awarded author. A recent article that appeared in the Review section of the Saturday/Sunday August 2223, 2020 edition of the Wall Street Journal got me curious. With the title “An AI Breaks the Writing Barrier,” I can only wonder will an AI author become part of the elite list that I am working my way through? It creates a huge space for thought and conversation. Stay tuned; maybe this is closer than we think.

In the meantime, William Butler Yeats, Ireland’s greatest poet, will be entertaining me with a short story: “The Crucifixion of

the Outcast.”

William Butler Yeats was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” Born in Sandymount County, Dublin, Ireland in 1865 to a family with an artistic pedigree, Yeats found himself influenced by a brief period of time living in London at a young age; by a mother who peppered her homeschooling with Irish folktales; by a father in whose studio he rubbed shoulders with Dublin’s artists and writers; by the Catholic/ Protestant conflict of his home country; by an interest in mysticism, spiritualism, and the occult; and by an obsessive infatuation with an outspoken beauty named Maud Gonne. By the age of 20 his first poems were published in the Dublin University Review and he was on his way to being regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century.

“The Crucifixion of the Outcast” is featured in: Great Stories by Nobel Prize Winners edited by Leo Hamalian and Edmond L. Volpe. Before each story is a short paragraph with some biographical information on the featured Nobel Laureate. The paragraph before Yeats’ story ends with an intriguing sentence: “The following story, the product of his left hand, Oscar Wilde regarded as the best thing to come from the pen of young Yeats.” The “best thing” begins simply: “A man, with thin brown hair and a pale face, half ran, half walked, along the road that wound from the south to the town of Sligo.” The story continues with the man observing crucifixions outside of the town as he continues to the Abbey to seek comfort from his travels. The story takes a dark turn, but the lyrically, humorous way that Yeats weaves this somewhat gruesome tale is truly a treasure to read.

Before I left my exploration of Yeats’ work, I googled “best poem of Yeats” and “The Second Coming” was listed as Yeats’ greatest work. Digging a bit deeper I found an article in The Irish Times about this 100-year-old poem. The author bestowed the accolade of “probably the most quoted poem of the past century” to this work. Check out his analysis: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/coming-to-stay-wb-yeats-s-most-famous-poem-turns-100-1.3751539.

And maybe pondering your own interprtation after you embrace Yeats’ words.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Op Ed — Random Ramblings

from page 32

I, for example, believe that I could provide useful input for many collection development surveys from years of teaching and writing on this subject. On the negative side for researchers, results of ALA surveys are often given as solid evidence of what librarians think though this statement may not be completely accurate since some respondents may not be librarians.

ALA should also recognize the benefits that the non-librarian groups provide. Who can organize and give better programs on vendors than members of the Exhibit Round Table? United for Libraries can help librarians have better relationships with their trustees and friends groups by giving the view from the other side. Perhaps the Retired Members Roundtable could provide valuable advice to those considering retirement.

Finally, ALA might sponsor or encourage research on the role of non-librarians in ALA, how to tempt them to join, what will inspire them to be active participants, and what special contributions they could make to the organization.

To conclude, I consider myself to be a librarian though I’ve spent half my career not being one. When I became a professor, I had to decide whether ALISE or ALA would be my principal professional organization since I didn’t feel that I had enough time, funding, or energy to do both. I quickly chose ALA because of my long history as a librarian and ALA’s focus on practical matters that undergirded my research. I have never regretted this decision.

Column Editor: Thomas W. Leonhardt (Retired, Eugene, OR 97404) <oskibear70@gmail.com>

After reading Michael Vinson’s Bluffing Texas Style twice and skimming it once, I am still baffled. Part of my confusion lies in the book’s structure; it begins at the end and then switches between times and places at the expense of a flowing, chronological narrative that might have better served the story of John Holmes Jenkins, III. As a biography, the book comes up wanting but as a mystery, it kept me turning the pages. To be fair, Vinson is a Santa Fe, New Mexico based rare books dealer and writing is an avocation, not a calling.

“John Holmes Jenkins III was an American historian, antiquarian bookseller, publisher, and poker player. Jenkins published his first book Recollections of Early Texas

History the year he graduated from high school. He went on to become a well-known dealer in antiquarian books and documents, primarily of Texas history.” — Wikipedia

That Wikipedia paragraph is a study in understatement. There is so much more, or, to borrow from radio’s Paul Harvey, there is “the rest of the story” and it’s far more interesting, dramatic, ironic, puzzling, contradicting, sad, funny, and truly Texan in the best and true sense of the word — in other words, larger than life. And the rest of the story seems to contain both the truth and speculation and hearsay, sometimes mixed so thoroughly that the reader is left to decide which is which.

When I began reading Bluffing Texas Style: The Arsons, Forgeries, and High-Stakes Poker Capers or Rare Book Dealer Johnny Jenkins, I expected the typical bookseller tale of the ones that got away, the steals (not literal), the associations, auctions, deals, victories, and disappointments such a reader finds in autobiographical accounts by book people such as A. Edward Newton, David Randall, Leona Rostenberg & Madeleine B. Stern, or Larry McMurtry. There are a few tales of large purchases and rich customers, but I wish that Vinson had told us more about “great works and archives of literature related to such well-known writers as Jane Austen, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain,” and about the 7,000 appraisals that Jenkins did for tax and insurance documentation. Vinson was able, through Jenkins’s papers and interviews with associates, family, and friends, to report on trivial details about Jenkins’s life; surely there must be some record of the purely bookman, if there really was one. I say this because it seems, on the evidence presented in this story, that Jenkins cared more for the deals than the books themselves. Vinson himself hints at this.

Jenkins never developed the skills and knowledge needed by rare booksellers, so he was uncomfortable buying rare

Americana. Despite his own knowledge of Texama, by and large he did not spend his time looking for rare books to purchase from other dealers.” P. 112

Jenkins acquired most, it seems, of his rare book stock through large deals involving collections that other dealers were selling. The two such collections mentioned: Edward Eberstadt and Sons, and William H. Lowdermilk, the former part of one of the largest rare book sales ever and the latter, a collection bought at auction with insider knowledge of the richness of the stock.

I still wish, despite reservations about Jenkins’s commitment to books rare and common, that there had been more about books and less about poker, but this story would not run its course if it hadn’t been for poker, high stakes poker involving months at a time when Jenkins left Texas to live in the complimentary hotel rooms in Nevada.

The reader learns that Jenkins collected and sold coins as a boy, that he liked to sing in the shower, and was fun at the parties and poker games that he hosted in a cabin given to him by his doting parents. But was that all? What about his wife who, early on, helped him run a coin shop in Austin? Where was she when he was in Nevada? Was he a good husband and father? Was he charitable, a good citizen of the state he loved, apart from his short dealings, forgeries, arsons, and thefts?

In March 2020, soon after the Vinson book appeared, The Texas Observer published a piece by Chris O’Connell, “The Legend of John Holmes Jenkins.” We learn of a young man with so much promise: publishing a scholarly book, Recollections of Early Texas (University of Texas Press) just before graduating from high school, beginning college (UT Austin) with a leg up on his fellow freshmen, and getting into law school (he didn’t finish) despite poor grades.

Calvin Trillin, following up on the mysterious death of Jenkins in 1989, wrote a piece for The New Yorker (October 30, 1989, 79-97) that adds to what Vinson and O’Connell have to say about Jenkins but the total words that they produced still leave me wanting more, wanting an answer that has not been answered for me: “What was he really like?”

Towards the end of one of my favorite westerns, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,” Maxwell Scott (the newspaper reporter played by Carleton Young) says about the story he is about to print, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. John Holmes Jenkins, III, turned the notion around and would ask friends, “Do you want the story or the truth?”

Michael Vinson: Print the legend.

Rumors

from page 12

It is definitely hard to keep up with Stephen Rhind-Tutt. Coherent Digital LLC has just launched Mindscape Commons, the first database of virtual-reality experiences for libraries. Mindscape Commons details nearly 200 immersive and interactive experiences in social work, counseling, and psychology from over 100 colleges and 60 commercial organizations. Mindscape Commons allows faculty, librarians, students, and practitioners to discover, upload, preserve, and share a wide range of virtual-reality experiences to deliver substantially better teaching, learning, and treatment. Many of the experiences need no more than a continued on page 55