Friday, September 27, 2013

8:38 News –- Rosie the Riveter – Elinor Otto -- is in the news. She is not only still alive, she is still riveting. She said she gets bored if she doesn't work. She was dressed up and looked pretty at her job. They showed her punching in at her time clock, and a couple of men that she works with, who said that they have no excuse for being late or not showing up as long as she works. She is 93 and drives to work at Boeing every day. She is petite and lively, and speaks with no sign of age like I sometimes have, forgetting what she wants to say. Maybe she will live to be a hundred. According to the NBC report, there were other “Rosie the Riveter” girls as well. At the end of the war, they all lost their jobs, but she did get a new job in the airline industry in California and continued to work on the assembly line until the present time. Sometime next year Boeing is planning to close their operation there, and Otto will probably finally have to quit work. She probably won't know what to do with her time when she does. She has been getting up at 4:30 every morning and going to work all these years. Maybe she should write a book about her life story. If she can't write, she could get a professional writer to do it for her. Lots of people do that. I'd like to read a biography about her.

Well, I finally finished Creole Belle. Burke wrote a hugely climactic ending with the forces of good battling the forces of evil rather than having the police come in and arrest the bad guys. The villains were “larger than life,” and the story had quirky and bizarre twists. It's not my kind of mystery. It's a story created to make heros of Purcell and Robicheaux despite their character flaws, and devils of the southern aristocratic family of villains, who were rich enough to get away with their crimes and therefore had to be killed. In the author's defense, the police, when Robicheaux tried to get their help, told him not to investigate it and to leave the Duprees alone.

I appreciated the critical look at deep south culture that is elegant on the surface and corrupt underneath, as long as racial bias and the misfortunes of the downtrodden poor continue to exist. The politics of the south are still right wing in many places, and the KKK and “patriot” groups of white racists are still active. Too many ignorant southern poor people haven't been brought upward by the progress that has been made in society for the last thirty or forty years to the degree that I would like to see.

I have read several by Burke, a number of which feature Purcell and Robicheaux, but none of them have been this violent and full of corrupt people to the extent that I couldn't identify with the main characters. One of his other titles is called Rain Gods, with a hero named Hackberry Holland, a Texas sheriff, and I enjoyed that one. I'll try to find some more of this series. I think some men might like Purcell and Robicheaux more than I do. I prefer to be able to identify with the characters, especially if the story is going to be more about the characters than the plot. This story didn't develop as a plot as much as I like to see until the very last. I often felt like I was wading through something sticky like molasses when trying to read it. Oh, well, It's done now. I think I'll go to the library and try to get some non-fiction that is interesting, or a classic novel like Pride And Prejudice.

Going out now, to the library, the grocery store and the drugstore if my prescription is ready. 4:13 It wasn't ready, but I got a week and a half's worth of yogurt for breakfast and 5 books –- a biography of Sidney Poitier and a book about Zora Neale Hurston and her work, plus 3 novels. None of them are very long. I think I'm going to start with Zora Neale Hurston. It's called Rhythm and Folklore. According to Wikipedia, she was a folklorist, anthropologist and writer during the Harlem Renaissance. She was born in 1891 and died in 1960. She wrote four novels, over 50 short stories, and plays and essays. She is best known for a 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She was a Republican with libertarian viewpoints and not in favor of integrating the school systems. This book should be interesting. I'll start it tomorrow. It's 4:55 now.