The Injured Deer, Pt. II

/ Tony Gentry / 2 Comments

A little over two years ago, in January, I wrote a covid-adjacent poem about a gimpy deer we’d see from time to time in our backyard. A doe that got along on three legs, her rear left leg dragging, probably from a run-in with a car. I was amazed that she was surviving amidst our maze of streets and our (occasionally) coyote-haunted woods. Here are the last two verses of the poem:

We stood at the window in the ruins of a year
that has left our hearts in tangles and our minds afog.
Out there behind the house all these months
she had limped along, prowling nights
loud with howls and honks, bedding down
in some thicket to drowse the long days. 

And here she stood in the yard after all this time,
so fragile, so resilient, having somehow survived
it all. And here we stood, a little ashamed
at our brittleness, our comforts,
our complaints, in our parallel world
we pretend is the only one.

Well, a couple days ago, taking my end-of-day jog along the streets of the Crestwood neighborhood, I looked up and there she was again! We surprised each other, and both of us stopped in our tracks. She was in a grassy ditch between houses, healthy-looking, though her leg had contracted up close to her body in an S-shape, out of the way when she walked. I took out my phone for this picture.

She allowed that, then after a time began to ease away into the yard, seeming unafraid, just tired of looking at me. And that’s when I saw the most heartening thing. Further back in the yard stood a half dozen other deer, including a couple yearling fawns. She’d found her herd! Adopted by a tribe not put off by her disability. Yes, I’m sentimental. Yes, I hear all the complaints about troublesome deer in the suburbs. But honestly, in this week of the solar eclipse, for me, this was the encounter that dazzled.

A Very Personal Perspective on Poetry Month

/ Tony Gentry / 2 Comments

Nice that they call April Poetry Month (also Autism Month and Occupational Therapy Month among who knows how many other designations). In high school, long ago, I had the good fortune to discover Robert Frost and tried to assemble pithy, rhyming poems in his style (the notebook I scribbled them in was chewed up by mice to make a bed for their brood, which is, when you think about it, a perfectly Frostian fate).

In college, when my classmates were studying economics or biochemistry, I fell hard for poetry. Corny as it seems, it was the stodgy British Victorians who spoke to me, fighting it out with Christianity, as this Southern Baptist-raised son of rural Virginia was doing a hundred years later in my own little life. Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, Hardy: rock stars in their day who are rarely read now, they wrote tellingly about the end of things, tried to figure out how the human heart might survive inside the machine that the modern world was becoming. Worked for me.

It’s funny to write this next bit, not because it was comical to me, but because the very idea that reading a book can be life changing is so old-fashioned and silly. But that’s what happened when our class dipped into the first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It helped that my section advisor fashioned himself a latter-day Whitman. He tried to look like the frontispiece picture, lived large, contained multitudes, and read from the book with gusto. I never went that far into hero worship, but to me Whitman offered a way of seeing the world and living in it that embraced rather than lamented it all. As it has for many lost souls, Leaves of Grass became a sort of bible to me, and to this day I can quote as many of its lines as I can of the Biblical verses learned so devotedly at Vacation Bible School in childhood.

Of course, there were other guideposts and inspirations:  the young Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits (I did try to dress like them, in my thrift store suit and floppy stocking hat), then the gloriously scabrous punks and that wicked old soul Henry Miller. For a semester, I worked as a guard at the Fogg Museum, where all day, every day, one of Van Gogh’s scowling self-portraits dared me to wake up, his mad eyes dogging my every step. Yes, I know. Was there no one in that fancy college who might have grabbed me by the collar and given me a good spank, sending me off on a path to riches and import? Well, I’m sure there were, but to read this you have to register what a spacey romantic I was. The last thing I cared to hear was common sense. (Frankly, I’m still that way.)

That said, when people asked, I said I would be a lawyer. Even took the LSATs (then, that afternoon, went to see a new movie, something called Star Wars). But I never applied to law school, and never regretted that decision. My life has been lived elsewhere, but always with poetry in hand.

I’m picky, though. Just as saccharine pop music irks me, I cringe at the easy lines of famous poets like Mary Oliver or Billy Collins. Give me the gnarly, questioning poems of William Bronk, the bracing zen of Gary Snyder, the piercing pop art of Tony Hoagland, any translation of Du Fu. The folks who understand how limited is language in the face of whatever is, yet tinker as best they can.

It’s Poetry Month again. Across a strip of America this morning solitary souls are sitting with their coffee scratching out words to describe the eclipse, trying other words to somehow express how that odd experience thrilled and mystified. People writing verses that few will ever read. I’m one of them, maybe you are, too. Maybe poetry changed your life, as it did mine. I hope you’re glad about that. I sure am.

Follow-up: Though not my favorite poet, turns out that Mary Oliver had a similar life-changing experience (more productive in her case, ahem) in first reading Whitman. My friend Randy Fertel sent me this quote today from her memoir Upstream, which oh my so beautifully articulates it all: “The Whitman poems stood before me like a model of delivery when I began to write poems myself: I mean the oceanic power and rumble that travels through a Whitman poem – the incantatory syntax, the boundless affirmation. In those years, truth was elusive – as was my own faith that I could recognize and contain it. Whitman kept me from the swamps of a worse uncertainty, and I lived many hours within the lit circle of his certainty, and his bravado. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! And there was the passion which he invested in the poems. The metaphysical curiosity! The oracular tenderness with which he viewed the world – its roughness, its differences, the stars, the spider – nothing was outside the range of his interest. I reveled in the specificity of his words. And his faith – that kept my spirit buoyant surely, though his faith was without a name that I ever heard of. Do you guess that I have some intricate purpose? Well I have. . .for the April rain has, and the mica on the side of the rock has.”

Lagniappe: The New York Times occasionally does these fascinating interactive articles about artists. Here’s their new one reflecting on one of Frank O’Hara’s love poems.

April 1945: My Favorite Photograph

/ Tony Gentry / Leave a comment

Excerpt from my new book WWII Mortarman: My Father’s Service with the 99th Chemical Mortar Battalion – European Theater.

After four months of brutal combat, Lyn’s mortar battalion found themselves in the heart of Germany, where they fought on against dwindling resistance and liberated concentration camps. After the Nazi’s surrendered, there was more work to do.

In April 1945, 2 million German soldiers in tattered uniforms, but still in strict formation, surrendered. Slave laborers from all over eastern Europe, who had been shipped to Germany to serve the Nazi war effort, stumbled along like skeletal zombies in their blue and white striped prison garb (it is estimated that 250,000 were liberated from concentration camps at the end of the war, despite concerted efforts by the Nazi’s to kill them all first). Thousands of urban residents sat stunned in the ruins of their homes.

The seemingly endless tide of refugees on every cart path carried tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria and other diseases. Some died as they marched and were buried in shallow graves in roadside ditches. Those liberated from slave camps sometimes rioted, killing their former guards, plundering houses, burning furniture for campfires, and raiding breweries and grocers with such ferocity that they sometimes died from over-indulging their shrunken stomachs. For the men of the Seventh Army charged with keeping order, it was all too much. News correspondent Eric Severeid tried to sum up his feelings amidst the post-war tumult: “a kind of dull satisfaction, a weary incapacity for further stimulation, a desire to go home and not have to think about it anymore – and a vague wondering whether I could ever cease thinking about it as long as I lived.”[1]

Lice-infested prisoners were dusted with DDT (DDT was the standard de-louser for Allied soldiers throughout the war) and given clothes pulled from the closets of German civilians. Wooden barracks were hastily thrown together to house the refugees. Everyone needed to eat, to have shelter, to find their scattered loved ones and their way home; among them, the millions of Allied soldiers and Soviet Red Army troops now crowding into Germany. This was a tactical and logistical problem no less difficult to solve than the war’s battle plans, and the men of the 99th CMB were tasked with pitching in to support that effort. Which brings me to my favorite photograph in this book:

Please pause a moment to take it in. That’s 24-year old Army private Lyn Gentry, in torn slacks but wearing his cap at a jaunty angle, smiling proudly, in his arms a refugee child, perhaps recently liberated from a concentration camp. Behind them, a barracks kitchen, its screen door open wide to let in the spring breeze, cook pans hung to dry on the clapboard wall. This young soldier had the photograph developed and sent home to a bride he had not seen in nearly three years. Think of what he meant to say with that photograph, what it must have meant to her.

If you may be interested, here’s the Amazon link to purchase the book: https://amzn.to/3P8u7oc. Or email me at tonygentry@me.com for a signed copy.

[1] Atkinson, Rick. The Guns at Last Light, p. 600.

A “Best of”

/ Tony Gentry / 2 Comments

Over the years I’ve been fortunate to find online publication for stories, poems and photographs with the wonderfully diverse and creative publication Mad Swirl. Happy to learn that once again this year one of my poems has achieved a place in their annual “Best of Mad Swirl” collection. Whoot!

Here’s the Amazon link to the collection: Best of Mad Swirl 2024.

And here’s a link to the artist’s archive of my photos on the Mad Swirl website: https://madswirl.com/gallery/gentry-tony/

By the way, if you’re a poet, graphic artist or photographer seeking early exposure, I’d highly recommend submitting to Mad Swirl. They’re always looking for new work, they don’t charge for submissions, and they even hold online readings for any contributor who cares to join in. Fun!

February 26, 1945 – My Father’s 23rd Birthday

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From my new book WWII Mortarman:

After three months of constant combat, living outdoors in one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record Lyn celebrated his 23rd birthday in a muddy foxhole in a cold rain. Over the previous two weeks in Alsace, France, his mortar company had assisted the 63rd Infantry Division in clearing the towns of Kleinbittersdorf, Auersmacher, Bubingen, and the northern edge of the Hinterwald Woods.[1] Some days it seemed that the Germans were retreating, their forces growing weaker; other days they fought back as fiercely as ever. Their artillery shells exploded all about, mined roads blew up tanks, machine guns mowed down American G.I.’s as they ventured forward across open fields, and snipers lurked in steeples of conquered towns, just as they had all winter long. The task now was to clear the Nazi’s out of France, pushing them back across the Rhine River into Germany. The task for the Germans, who could no longer resist that relentless shove all along their border, was to kill as many Allied soldiers as they could along the way.

Allow me to pause for a minute here. My father, as noted, turned 23 on the battlefield. Keep that in mind as you read, perhaps reflecting on your own experience at that age. And remember, he married in the last weeks of his teens, turned 21 in the Texas border country learning how to fire an anti-aircraft cannon, celebrated his 22nd birthday with U-rations cooked over a tin can stove in North Africa, and by his 23rd birthday in an icy trench in France had not seen home in nearly three years.

As testimony to the heavy level of fighting in February, the 99th Chemical Mortar Battalion online narrative lists 9,224 rounds of HE and 13,423 rounds of WP fired, during a month in which the battalion won a Battlefield Unit Citation and the French Croix de Guerre for its key role in breaking the Colmar Pocket, then proceeded without delay to fight entrenched German forces along the Maginot Line. In that short, brutal month, the mortar battalion lost 19 wounded and one killed, while the Seventh Army to which they were attached suffered 7,168 battle and 16,224 nonbattle casualties.[2] The French counted 4,316 battle and 36,540 nonbattle casual­ties in Alsace, and the German Nineteenth Army listed its losses at 22,000 men killed, wounded, or captured.

[1] The other two mortar companies, assigned to the 70th Infantry Division, had driven north through Oeting, half of Forbach, Behren les Forbach, Kerbach, Etzling, Spicheren, Lixing, Grossblitterstroff, Zingzing, Alsting, and held the high ground in the forest of St. Arnual.

[2] From Kennett, L., The American Soldier in WWII: Postwar calculations showed that the most hazardous battlefield roles were combat engineers and medical men, followed by general infantry (264 wounded per thousand per year), then armor, with field artillery trailing considerably (50 wounded per thousand per year).

If you would like to purchase WWII Mortarman, here’s the Amazon link: https://amzn.to/48Z5CS2.

January 23, 1945 – WWII European Theater

/ Tony Gentry / Leave a comment

I’m warm at home in Bon Air today, typing this with a cup of coffee on my table and my pup Buddy sleeping at my feet. Quite cozy. And I must admit that what my father was up to in France on this day 79 years ago has something to do with my good fortune. Here’s that day, excerpted from my new book WWII Mortarman. Have a cuppa and share in my gratitude:

Lyn’s Company A (my father’s chemical mortar company) got caught up in a brutal two-day battle for the Maison Rouge bridge across the Ill River and the nearby town of Holtzwihr. Three regiments of the 3rd Infantry Division, including the 15th Regiment to which Company A was attached, emerged from a forest west of the river on the night of the 23rd, planning to build a tank-capable bridge across the river, which was about 90-feet wide at that point. When they discovered a wooden bridge already there, they tried to run a tank across it, but the bridge shook so badly that they abandoned that plan and set out to build their own bridge after all. The engineers went to work, knowing it would take all the next day to get the job done.

While they hammered, infantrymen were sent across the old bridge on foot, their tanks and armored vehicles idling on the west bank. Their mission was to somehow hold off armored assault by the Germans, without having any armored support themselves, long enough for a tank-capable bridge to be built across the Ill. They couldn’t see far in the blinding snow, but they could hear the grinding gears of approaching Panzer tanks somewhere across the frozen fields. There were problems at the bridge; important sections failed to arrive, and as the snowy day darkened towards nightfall, the first tank to attempt a crossing collapsed the whole thing.

Then all hell broke loose. On the open plain with their backs to the icy river, the G.I.’s were sitting ducks for what hit them, a whole German Panzer tank battalion and the infantry regiments at their flank. They fell back against a wall of 57-mm and machine gun fire, many swimming the river to escape sure death or capture. American tanks on the west bank fired back at the attackers, forcing a stalemate for one night. Eventually, both sides ceased firing. Their soaked clothing freezing to hard shells on their backs, the American G.I.’s shivered in the dark, huddling beneath idling tanks for the warmth given off by their engines. Others fought the cold by frantically scratching shallow foxholes in the frozen earth, knowing what awaited them come sunrise.

As expected, morning brought a fierce artillery exchange across the river. Somehow, a few units of the 3rd Infantry were able to get across to the east bank on a bridge north of the fighting, pressing forward through snowy woods to the town of Riedwihr, a key north-south crossroads that was heavily fortified. At woods edge, the Germans unleashed a cyclone of tank and artillery fire from the village, forcing the men to take what shelter they could find in holes dug by the exploding shells, where they spent another frigid night, under periodic artillery barrage.

By this point in the war, the Germans had devised a deadly system for repelling infantry assault. Sequestered within the stone walls of Alsatian towns, they first launched fusillades from 88-millimeter cannons that were either free-standing or tank-borne. As one G.I. recalled, “the aggressive resonance of the German 88’s ejaculatory sounds was unique, not duplicated, to my knowledge, by any other artillery piece in World War II. It had the hoarseness of a deadly cough, the baritone echo of thunder, and you could hear it coming. Whump. Whump. Whump.”[1]

Typically, the 88s fired in a straight, ladder-like pattern that could cover a 500-yard depth into Allied lines, shells exploding every thirty yards along each step of that ladder, then repeating the pattern backwards, all in less than a minute. The trick, when the firing began, was to dive into a foxhole or fall flat in between the ladder’s rungs, so the shells stepped over you.

When the 88’s stopped, mortar shells began to fall, raining down with a brief whistling sound as if dropped from the heavens, and making craters in a scattershot pattern as far back as a half mile behind the front line. G.I.’s learned that it was no safer to hide than it was to advance, so they moved forward dauntlessly across open farm fields that surrounded fortress towns, just as machine guns began to fire, scanning left to right as they came. The chemical mortar companies, ears still ringing from the preliminary shelling, went to work laying smoke screens on the fields to hide the infantry’s advance.

If the G.I.’s could make it into the town, then they faced door-to-door fighting with rifles, machine guns, bazookas, grenades, and sometimes fists and knives. If they were forced back, then the German Panzer tanks came forward onto the field, flanked by Wehrmacht soldiers, to finish the job. At Riedwihr, the 15th Infantry Regiment and Lyn’s Company A of the 99th CMB faced just such a relentless barrage.

[1] Kotlowitz, Robert. Before their Time: A memoir. Knofpf: New York, 1997.

If you’d like to read more, WWII Mortarman is available on Amazon at this link: https://amzn.to/3HbHP5B. If you’d like a signed copy or high-resolution photos of the pictures in the book, email me at tonygentry@me.com.

RIP: Terry Bisson

/ Tony Gentry / Leave a comment

Boy, this winter’s getting rough. Just learned that another old friend and great soul has passed, the almost famous writer Terry Bisson, whom I’ve known for 40 years. I’ve written about Terry here on my blog, and he was recently profiled in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/…/terry-bissons-history-of…), but now he’s gone, age 81.

If you get a chance, check out his website (http://www.terrybisson.com/), where some of his wry, witty, and jaw-droppingly original writing is available (recommend “They’re Made out of Meat” as a starter). And just to give you an idea of what a cool guy Terry was, note how he requested payment from reader’s of one of his stories. He wrote: “Thank you for your interest in my work. If you enjoyed this little piece, give a dollar to a homeless person.”

Another knockout story is “Bears Discover Fire.” Today I choose to imagine Terry toasting marshmallows with some ursine pals in a better place.

My new book: WWII Mortarman

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This is my dad at age 23 on the Franco-German border in Alsace, hours away from what would become 150 continuous days of battle in the winter of 1944-45. He manned an M2 mortar in the 99th Chemical Mortar Battalion, part of the U.S. Seventh Army, fought in the Vosges Mountains, battled his way across the Rhine River into Germany, and ended his service liberating a subcamp of Dacchau. He made it back home, which is why I’m here, and can tell the tale.

Here’s the Preface to WWII Mortarman, my new book:

Mama always told us not to ask Daddy anything about the War, but growing up in the 1960s, that was not easy. TV shows at the time included Hogan’s Heroes (a comedy improbably set in a Nazi Prisoner of War camp), Combat (a harrowing World War II drama series), 12 O’Clock High (about a B-17 bomber battalion) and my favorite The Rat Patrol (in which a scruffy crew in a machine-gun armed jeep facing off against Panzer tanks in the North African desert).  For years I avidly read the monthly comics Sgt. Rock and Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos (the latter starring Nick Fury, who went on to lead the spy agency SHIELD in middle age), along with the weird GI Combat series, about an American tank crew haunted (and protected by) the ghost of Confederate General W.E.B. Stuart. Wearing our plastic Army helmets and canteen belts, brother Greg and I fired replica Tommy guns in endless neighborhood war games with friends, squirming along the ground on our elbows like the G.I.’s on tv, lobbing stubby corn stalk roots that served for grenades (the Nazi potato masher versions), and boarding the ladders of side-railed coal cars that we imagined to be tanks or landing vessels.  What Daddy thought of our romping about aping an era he surely wished to forget I can’t say.

Our house held tantalizing evidence of his wartime service, a handful of ripple-edged black-and-white photographs from the earliest days of Mama and Daddy’s marriage, she giddy in the blowsy skirt and saddle oxfords women wore in the 1940s, he dashing in his uniform. There were even some shots he’d sent his bride from overseas. These pictures were jumbled among others in a dining room cabinet, where on rainy days we four kids could dig them out and marvel that our parents had once been young. I’ve included all the wartime photos that are left in this book.

We had a pair of relics, too. One was an old ornately carved dueling pistol that Daddy left laying out on the fireplace mantle. Greg and I often used it as a toy, including it in our war games, though it was so heavy that we preferred our plastic weapons. Mama finally gave in to our insistent questions and allowed that Daddy had taken it from a dead German officer towards the end of the war.  His other booty was the real treasure, though. The swastika section of a red Nazi flag, raggedly knife-cut to fit his pack and signed in ink by 27 of his buddies, their addresses – Fall River, Mass; Plano, TX; Pocatello, Idaho; Saginaw, Michigan – scrawled blurrily below their names. On the upper right corner, Daddy had inked in the date: March 26, 1945. Mama kept that artifact in a wooden chest in their bedroom, but we could go in any time, it seemed, to rifle through her keepsakes and pull it out to study that devilish crooked cross happily defiled by the neatly penned signatures of Daddy’s wartime pals.

That flag fragment hangs framed in my study today (with a caption explaining that, no I’m not a latter-day Nazi). In attempting this narrative, I’ve tried to track down the men who signed the flag.  Too late. The youngest among them would be a centenarian, and nothing has come of my inquiries. Why didn’t I make this effort earlier? Why didn’t I finally over-rule Mama’s injunction and ask Daddy about those old pals or try to find them on my own? Well, all I can say is that childhood taboos are hard to break. And it was clear, even in old age, that Daddy preferred not to reflect on wartime memories.

Well, that’s not strictly true. Apparently, when drinking with my sister Kay’s husband Butch, he’d loosen up and share a few choice anecdotes. Butch died suddenly last year, before I’d learned about those talks. So, again, too late. From time to time, though, a brief story would slip out. I overheard him reminiscing with another WWII veteran one day, sharing an eye-opening tale of wartime bliss. And he startled me one night, leaping up to snap off the tv when a guy being interviewed on the old Tom Snyder talk show claimed the Holocaust was a myth. Daddy stood there in his t-shirt and briefs, in a haze of cigarette smoke, and declared: “He’s a liar! I’ve seen bodies stacked from here to Fork Union.” (Fork Union is a town a few miles from our home.)  Other anecdotes, as I recall them, pepper this narrative.

The rest of Daddy’s wartime memories died with him. Mama’s gone, too, and all of his six siblings have joined them, either in the Fork Union Baptist Church cemetery or at the old Lyles Church graveyard near their childhood home. What happened, I wonder, to the letters Mama and Daddy mailed each other during the war? I have one postcard that Daddy sent to his older sister Dorothy from North Africa at Christmastime 1943. That’s all.

Mama wrote a memoir that recalls her childhood during the Great Depression and what it was like to be a wartime bride. As she tells it, Daddy used to whistle a bob white quail call when he came a-courtin’.  And that’s how she knew he was home from the war, hearing that call again from her bedroom window. The title of her book Then the Bob White Called honors her precious memory. So we do have her side of the story, at least.

What follows is my best effort, such as it is, to tell his. I’ve tried to patch together Daddy’s path through the War, stitching his few personal anecdotes onto sparse documentation about his Army battalion. I’ve also pulled from a shelf full of pertinent wartime narratives, and in footnotes offer links to YouTube film clips that do a better job than my story does at evoking that era before tv’s, cell phones, computers, and air-conditioning, when the whole country was pulling together for a cause. Over time, if I learn more, I’ll thread that in, too. This story is for Daddy’s descendants, my sons among them, who might occasionally wonder about their ancestors from the Greatest Generation. It’s one story among many millions thrown up by the global catastrophe that was World War II. I did this for me, too, of course. A much-belated effort to come up with some answers to the question I never dared ask: What did you do in the War, Daddy?

If you’re interested, you can purchase the book as a paperback or Kindle version on Amazon at this link: https://amzn.to/3HaT9in. If you’d like a signed copy or if you’d like high-resolution digital photos of any of the pictures in it, email me at tonygentry@me.com.

Cribbing from the Master

/ Tony Gentry / 2 Comments

Thanks to our phones, all of us are photographers now, and that means we carry with us, all the time, a tool to make pictures that are more than just snapshots or selfies. Your phone can’t do everything a Nikon can; maybe you don’t have the talent or dedication of a professional, but by visiting gallery shows, perusing coffee table books, maybe reading thoughtful essays by critics like John Berger or Susan Sontag or Geoff Dyer, maybe some of it begins to wear off on you. Maybe you find yourself looking a little more closely, and occasionally surprising yourself with an interesting image. All that said, here’s a list of photographic strategies I noted (Notes app on phone) at a gallery show of black and white pictures by Lee Friedlander visited last July. This droll documentarian of American townscapes is a master at framing shots using split-screens, juxtapositions, mirrors, shadows and, well, for instance:

  • Close up versus distant people to shrink one of them
  • Mirrors to show different view
  • Rear view mirrors
  • Open car door, its window a frame
  • Split a person with a vertical pole
  • Pole as deceptive focal point
  • People going opposite directions on either side of divider
  • Poster plastered wall plus blank wall
  • Maybe with an arrow
  • Squared geometry of receding buildings
  • Glamorous poster juxtaposed with dowdy maid in window
  • Partial words on wall (woe) comments on image
  • Hole in wall as frame for image
  • Window reflection and other side of slit what it’s reflecting off kilter
  • Elongated shadow of pole as divider
  • Wallpaper patterns
  • Distant pyramid paired with street sign triangle
  • Tilted poles like arrows in ground
  • Piles of junk paired with church
  • Do all of these tricks in one photo
  • Ad on poster framed in bedroom window
  • TV screen image as comment on room
  • Patterns, diagonals, squares
  • Chain link fence as screen
  • Empty picture frame hung on chain link fence
  • Back of head not face
  • Multiple shadows
  • Shadow of photographer looming
  • Nude framed in block of light thru window

The show was fascinating, each photo a puzzle, and collectively a lesson in how our mind’s eye unconsciously guides and shapes what we see (and fail to see). Walking out of the gallery, spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around midtown Manhattan, attempting to snap shots like his. It was fun, one of the year’s more memorable afternoons. And here’s my favorite Friedlanderish picture, of a barber shop in the 30s:

Lagniappe: Check out this New Yorker article about Vivan Maier, who died unknown but left a trove of remarkable photographs.

My Favorite Books of 2023

/ Tony Gentry / Leave a comment

It’s Thanksgiving week, so it’s time to list my favorite reads of the past year. And, as usual, please add your own faves in the comments or email a list to me and I’ll add on.  Happy reading to all – tag, you’re it!

This year I’ve enjoyed light-weight pop essay books by the likes of Quentin Tarentino (Cinema Speculation) and Bob Dylan (Philosophy of Modern Song), graphic novels (I recommend Kristen Radtke’s moving examination of depression Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness), comics (the “Groundhog Day” effort to save the universe in Marvel’s House of X/Powers of X series was brilliant), art criticism (the late John Berger’s Portraits dazzles) and the usual histories, poems and novels. Here, listed alphabetically by author’s last name are my faves:

Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin – American Prometheus. The authors labored for 22 years on this surprisingly riveting 700-page biography, which, yes, details the remarkable life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, but in doing so also tracks American history across the 20th Century, in science, engineering, war, politics, and social mores. I read it after seeing the movie Oppenheimer, which is based on this book, and recommend them both to anyone interested in better understanding how we got to the precipitous place we’re in.

S. A. Cosby – Razorblade Tears. Cosby is a local writer (Matthews County, VA) of gritty noir thrillers that cannily confront the imbedded racism and other inequities we Virginians live with day to day. Here’s my review of his breakthrough novel.  It’s the only book on this list that I couldn’t put down, finishing it late in the night with a whispered wow. His new one, btw, on The New York Times Top 100 list (on my nightstand, too) is All the Sinners Bleed.

Samuel Delaney – The Motion of Light in Water. Delaney, a science fiction luminary, has written several memoirs. This one is about his early life in Manhattan, growing up in a well-to-do family in Harlem, then scraping by as a young scribe and folk musician on the Lower East Side (he once bumped Dylan from a gig) in the early 1960s. I know these streets from my own years in the East Village, and Delaney’s hard luck tale took me back. Such an engaging raconteur on the page, too, letting it all hang out: crappy jobs, cold water flats, roaches, freeloaders, celebrity encounters, speculative scribbles, troubled love, back alley sex, all the song of a young artist discovering himself by living life as fully as he can.

Phil Klay – Redeployment and Missionaries. For my money, Klay’s the best of the writers who served in our Iraq-Afghanistan debacles. Each of National Book Award winner Redeployment’s short stories nails a searing moment from that twenty-year (and ongoing) saga, as experienced by Americans in combat (and back home afterwards); Missionaries, a novel, tells the tale of American imperialism from the other side, tracking the depravities of Columbian cocaine cartels and our hapless, half-hearted efforts to contain them. In both volumes, Klay lets the stories tell themselves, but his anger at the lies we get told (and roll with) seethes between the lines.

James McBride – Deacon King Kong. I read everything McBride puts out, and he seems to publish a new book every year (have 2023’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store at the top of my Christmas list). This one’s my favorite so far. In a Brooklyn project in the late 1960s a heavy-drinking old man named Sportcoat shoots a drug dealer in front of everybody, and all hell breaks loose, except, not really. McBride steps back to embrace the whole neighborhood with its disparate characters and overlapping histories, masterfully shaping a sort of inside-out detective story that is all about how people – even in hard times – can learn to look after each other.

Cormac McCarthy – The Passenger and Stella Marris.  McCarthy’s been a literary hero of mine since I first read his wonderful Suttree back in the ‘80s, and then everything else he wrote. This novel in two-parts is his most experimental work, intimate, speculative and fractured (read The Passenger first). Upon learning of Cormac’s death back in June, re-read his masterpiece, the dystopian western Blood Meridian. If you haven’t yet, saddle up!

Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow. Every year, I try to tackle a classic doorstopper, and this year, while researching my father’s service in World War II, took another shot at this sprawling road trip across the ravaged phantasmagoria that Europe must have been at war’s end. Like Moby Dick, the tale grows madder page by page, exactly in line with the burgeoning insanity of our tech-mad society that it assays.

Andrew Roberts – The Storm of War. Seems that a lot of retirees dive into wartime histories. This year, writing the book about my father’s WWII service, I read a dozen at least. If you can only read one, recommend this single-volume history of the war, which vividly scans both the view from the generals’ castle HQ’s and from the fox holes.

Alisa Roth – Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness. American prisons have become our largest treatment facilities for the mentally ill (half of the imprisoned have a psychiatric disorder). Roth sketches how we got here, visits the prisons where this “treatment” takes place, and tells the harrowing stories of individuals whose lives have been upended by our failure to more humanely address our mental health crisis; fortunately, she also explores ways out of this quagmire, ways that don’t seem impossible, if only we cared.

R. J. Smith – Chuck Berry: An American Life. Smith’s James Brown biography The One was on my Top Ten list last year, so I jumped on this one as soon as it came out. Like Brown, who invented funk, Berry was the architect of rock’n’roll (always a nod to Little Richard, the music’s heart and soul); Smith, in both cases, shows how these prickly musical avatars rebounded from prison time in their youth to shape a new sound, how they coped with acclaim, how they dreamed beyond the music, and how their indulgences marred their legacies. The later chapters make for tough going, as Berry’s more lurid sexual peccadilloes emerge. What is it about fame and pop music that so warps its most acclaimed geniuses anyway?

Lagniappe – If you get a chance, watch the Little Richard documentary I Am Everything on Max, which convincingly positions him as the true king of rock’n’roll (and the fountain from which so much else that is fun and freeing has sprung); and catch Zero Gravity on Amazon, the inspiring 3-part biography of the legendary composer/jazz saxophonist/great soul Wayne Shorter, who died in March.