Shelby Foote

“The battle scenes are lit by a strange, lurid light.... I have never enjoyed writing so much as I do this writing. ... It goes dreadful slow; sometimes I feel like I’m trying to bail out the Mississippi with a teacup; but I like it, I like it. ... All I want is to work at my book, a great wide sea of words.”

-- Shelby Foote

After finally finishing his Civil War trilogy, Foote lets his friend Walker Percy read it.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

At the end of the drafting of the third and final volume, in July 1974, twenty years to the season after Foote first went to New York to talk over the project, Walker Percy finished reading the proofs and sat down to write his friend. “Dear Shelby,” he wrote, “Yes, it’s as good as you think. It has a fine understated epic quality, a slow measured period, and a sustained noncommittal, almost laconic, tone of the narrator. I’ve no doubt it will survive; might even be read in the ruins.” It might indeed.

-- Jon Meacham, "Shelby Foote's War Story" in Garden & Gun

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Sugar

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

There's a thing I think most women do, so customary to our lives that it hardly bears mention, which is the sizing up of unknown men, and exits.

This happens in an instant. You flick the gaze over, scan the person for a second, absorb available information and review: how-big-is-he. What-is-his-body-language. Has-he-been-drinking. Could-he-be-dangerous -- and just to be safe, your mind takes mental note of the possible routes of escape.

So here's me, just after midnight broke the border between Saturday and Sunday. Exhausted from the blizzard and a mind full up of working, standing alone inside a hotel elevator when two tall men round the corner and their frames fill up the door.

Eye-flick, notes. They are big men, one perhaps in his 50s and the other younger. They have a two-four of cheap beer and a boisterous demeanour. But this is a hotel, it's only four floors, and I feel mostly safe here. So I lower my gaze, press myself into the corner -- comfortable to share the space, but not wanting to be noticed.

"Excuse me," the older man says, the one with the salt-and-pepper beard. "Do you mind if we come in the elevator?"

OK, I confess, I stuttered here. Of course, I said, I mean, yes of course, it's a public elevator, and...

"Thank you," he said, and they filed in. "I just wanted to make sure, I know it's late."
Can you understand, in this moment I see the living proof of everything I've tried so long to say. About the flashpoints of gender and space, power and space, about the constant wrestling dynamics of how much of it we take, and how we fill it up. Feminist, sure -- but mostly, about simple care.

Sometimes, the cultural debates about how we take up space descend into frankly farcical caper. There was that teapot storm over "manspreading," remember -- the act of men splaying their legs across a swath of space on jam-packed subway trains. A New York ad campaign had encouraged them to, y'know, not do that. It was a simple call to courtesy that triggered a flash flood of debate, prosecuted in large part by men fearing a non-existent ban on opening their legs.

At the same time, the way we take up space does impact each other. For women, logically or not, the feeling of being cornered gets the guard up. We've learned this, in order to navigate a society in which our safety is too often in question.

Somewhere in his life, the man on that hotel elevator learned that, and chose to extend compassion.

He did not need my permission to get on the elevator. But it is a great kindness, to think of someone's comfort before your own convenience. It is a great empathy, to put yourself in someone else's shoes just long enough to catch of a glimpse of how they must be aware of you.
Whenever I write about navigating the balances of power, this is what I imagine. It doesn't have to be hard. It shouldn't be hard. It is a simple act of caring enough to step back, when the space that you might take up threatens to leave others feeling trapped.

-- Melissa Martin at The Winnipeg Free Press

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>