An Episcopal school, being for the other, and a border guard

Trinity School turned out to be a place with a neat history (it's 300 years old next year) and even though it lost its openly Episcopal religious feel, moral instruction and interdenominational chapel services are still very much a part of the scene. Kindergarten through high school, preparing mostly really smart kids with wealthy parents for leadership in business, government, society in general. At least they're teaching against greed and with a sense of obligation to serve the community. Funny thing is that the school started out as a church charity school for poor kids in the 1700s, and now teaches primarily rich kids from the upper part of Manhattan.

After the school history, I got to index a book on psychology and philosophy at the same time. The author, Paul Marcus, has taken a fresh look at the weaknesses of the psychoanalytic perspective in dealing with the ethical imperatives of life. Psychoanalysis has a very self- centered approach to dealing with the anguish and anxiety of life, and the patient spends most of their time going within to balance themselves. The results are often good for the folks around them in the end, but there's little sense of moral obligation to others in the psychoanalytical process. Marcus has taken the ideas of a French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, and applied his radical altruism to the psychoanalytical project. I was very impressed with Being for the Other; it gave me some personal guidance on how to be in the world myself.

And then, back to Texas history with a short book of memories from a Missouri National Guard and sometime regular army fella from the second decade of the 20th century. Ward Schrantz (a very handsome fellow in his youth, by the way) started out in the Guard in Missouri and then switched to the regular army, and then back to the guard. Looks like this business of the border issue between Texas and Mexico has many antecedents. In the period between 1912 and 1917, the problem for the U.S. was the Mexican Revolution and the semi-chaos after it, all influenced by the beginning of World War I. Schrantz didn't get to invade Mexico in 1916 with Pershing, et. al. in the Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa, but he did participate in the guarding the border in various places in Texas and was a witness to the major changes in control over the National Guard that came from Wilson's administration. This was when the federal government got the power to call up the guard for any and all national military operations and the right to control the troops directly. Ward was a journalist in his civilian life and although he didn't originally write this material for publication, the editor, Jeff Patrick, has done a fine job of making his story flow nicely. I think Ward would have been proud. Schrantz was an excellent storyteller, and I laughed a number of times at his anecdotes about life in the army and the characters he encountered. You should check out the naked swim across the Rio Grande story in particular.

Believe it or not, but the American Enterprise Institute, after some last-minute revisions, is putting out a book on the housing market that I get to index later this week. Conservative think tank perspective ought to be interesting in the current context. I'll let you know how it goes.....

And now that we've settled down from the hurricane......

Sorry about the delay, folks, but there was this hurricane called Ike....kinda glad I'm living in Houston rather than Galveston at present, although Galveston's a nicer place most of the time. Thankfully, we didn't lose our big yard tree, just the fences blown down and some roof shingles torn off. Loss of power for several days slowed down productivity, and then the Internet was out a week longer than that. Had to hang out at Panera Bread for free WiFi for awhile. Been back to normal for about three weeks, but too busy catching up with work to write about it.

Let's just begin where I've been recently, literarily speaking. Most fun since the hurricane was with a lovely coffeetable book on old photo picture postcards from Texas towns from about 1900 to the 1930s. Towns had their own photographers whose main job was to take pictures of all the economic progress as folks came in to farm on lands once part of the open range in the Panhandle of Texas. Some of these places were boom towns at the time and are ghost towns now. The weirdest part is seeing all those "old" western buildings looking brand new for a change. Picture books are cool. It's called Taming the Land, and is being published by Texas A&M Press.

Today I just finished indexing a book on four centuries of Jewish women's spiritual writing. Having indexed a lot of Jewish history for the New England Press's series, I was already familiar with some of the names in the nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first-century sections, but the really early stuff was new. They actually found excerpts from some poor Jewish women who were interrogated by the Spanish Inquisition. They had to "confess" to conducting Jewish rituals (Sabbath, Passover, etc.) in secret in their homes. Very sad. Also, although I've read some stuff about the Holocaust as well, it is still moving to read surviving poems and diary entries from the mostly ghostly hands of those who suffered so much at the under the Nazis. The good part is that time has seen a reduction in anti-Semitism as well as a big improvement in women's public role in Judaism, even in Orthodox circles.

Next up is an index for a history of the Trinity School in New York City, some kind of prep school, looks like. Way too many endnotes in tiny print. I'll let you know if the story turns out to be a good one.