when reading his poems he performed them

book cover

In 1976, I was fortunate to be asked to design a paperbound edition of Joseph Langland’s The Sacrifice Poems for the North American Review, at the University of Northern Iowa. I was a young designer / teacher, and I am no longer happy with how I handled the page layout. But I remain very pleased with the cover, which is shown above.

Soon after I designed that book, I moved to a teaching position at another university, and moved elsewhere after that. But I rejoined the UNI faculty in 1990, where I taught graphic design and illustration, including book design. More than a decade later, Joseph Langland retired from teaching and he too moved back to Iowa. In 2004, near the end of his life, Langland talked to a class of my students at the UNI about the role of rhythmic sound and the music of the voice in the recitation of verse.

I think it would be fair to say that my students were astonished by Joe Langland’s presentation that day. One could say they were taken aback, because whenever Langland read his poems, it was more that he “performed” them—and in fact he often ”sang” the lines. The session was filmed, and having recently been edited, it can be accessed free online, and freely shared with others..

He also talked about his past, not knowing that his life would end a few years later. He recalled how he was drawn to literature at a very young age, and thereafter used poetry as a way to try to understand his life, such as growing up on a family farm, his rich Norwegian heritage, the death of his younger brother, and his lingering memories of having been an officer in the US Army infantry in Europe during World War II.

His talk took place on Veterans Day, on November 11, 2004. He died in 2007.

Joseph Langland / life, literature, ethnic origins

Newly edited Joseph Langland video

i would rather buy a house than a cantaloupe

Behrens gravestone

Above While engaged in family history research, I ran across this photograph of the gravestone of my paternal German-born great grandparents, Heinrich Simon Diedrich Behrens (1824-1901) and Anna Christina Elizabeth Edelmann (1835-1921), in the cemetery in Garnavillo, Iowa. It is almost a literal family tree. It certainly differs substantially from the design of my own tombstone.

•••

Philip Roth, Patrimony: A True Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990)—

Look, a cantaloupe is a hard thing to buy—maybe the hardest thing there is to buy, when you stop to think about it. A cantaloupe isn’t an apple, you know, where you can tell from the outside what’s going on inside. I’d rather buy a car than a cantaloupe—I’d rather buy a house than a cantaloupe. If one time in ten, I come away from the store with a decent cantaloupe, I consider myself lucky. I smell it, sniff it, press both ends with my thumb…I’ll tell you about making a mistake with a cantaloupe: we all do it. We weren’t made to buy cantaloupe. Do me a favor, Herm, get off the woman's [back], because it isn’t just Lil’s weakness buying a [lousy] cantaloupe: it’s a human weakness.

Banality epidemic | a nationwide memory loss

Poster (©2017) Roy R. Behrens

Studs Terkel in Touch and Go: A Memoir. New York: The New Press, 2007, p.232 and 236—

“Banality” is the operative word…

Britney Spears, a pop singer, shaves her head and goes into rehab. Most Americans know her name. She is a celebrity. None of the contestants in a recent episode of Jeopardy, a popular TV quiz show, knew who Strom Thurmond was. For most of the twentieth century, on the floor of the Senate, he was the drum major of segregation. Not even his fathering a black child was within the ken of the Jeopardy participants. Nor did they know the name of Kofi Annan (the newly former United Nations secretary general).…

What happens to all Alzheimer’s sufferers is tragic. What I’m talking about is what I call a national Alzheimer’s—a whole country has lost its memory. When there’s no yesterday, a national memory becomes more and more removed from what it once was, and forgets what it once wanted to be.

We’re sinking under our national Alzheimer’s disease. With Alzheimer’s you forget what you did yesterday. With Alzheimer’s finally, you forget not only what you did, but also who you are. In many respects, we [in the US] have forgotten who we are.

We’re now in a war [in Iraq] based on an outrageous lie [about “weapons of mass destruction”], and we are held up to the ridicule and contempt of the world. What has happened? Have we had a lobotomy performed on us? Or it it something else? I’m saying it is the daily evil of banality.

life is an ever-shifting network of categories

Poster (© 2019) Roy R. Behrens

Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts. New York: Chilton Books, 1965—

Our lives are bathed in a continuous flow of signs which we interpret to catch the world in an ever-shifting network of categories. The condition of human life is continuous categorical metamorphosis. We are forever engaged in constructing around us an architecture of categories as fluid and yielding to our interests as the air. There is nothing man has not sacrificed, including millions of his fellow human beings, in the vain effort to fix that architecture, to stabilize his categories. But all knowledge, all science, all learning, all history, all thought are unstable, cannot be made static, even by the majesty of the law armed with the power of brute force.

Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos

National Parks Poster Series | Liberty Island

Poster (2019) © Roy R. Behrens

Above Liberty Island National Monument (2019). © Roy R. Behrens. From an on-going series of posters about wildlife habitats, and national parks and monuments.