bush whacked / rhymes with porky, no offense

Above Roy R. Behrens, painting titled Homage to Arshile Gorky. © 1967. As an undergraduate art student, I had become greatly interested in Abstract Expressionism, and had written a paper about Gorky's famous painting, The Liver is the Cock's Comb. At the time, I hadn't yet discovered that Gorky had taught a camouflage course for civilians during WWII at the Grand Central School of Art in NYC.

•••

During the 1984 presidential campaign, when Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were running against Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, Bush's wife (Barbara Bush) said in response to the question of how she would characterize candidate Ferraro: "I can't say it but it rhymes with 'rich.'" Later, having realized the offensiveness of her quip, Barbara Bush called to apologize, as Ferraro later recalled in her autobiography, Ferraro: My Story. New York: Bantam 1985—

"I just want to apologize to you for what I said," she [Barbara Bush] told me over the phone while I was in the middle of another debate rehearsal. "I certainly didn't mean anything by it."

"Don't worry about it," I said to her. "We all say things at times we don't mean. It's all right."

"Oh," she said breathlessly, "You're such a lady."

All I could think when I hung up was: Thank God for my convent school training.

•••

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

an anagram overkill / What's for repas, Eclat?

Nature Poster / Roy R. Behrens © 2019

W.V. Quine, The Time of My Life: An Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. xii—

At Oxford we had an au pair girl named Tecla, and I could not get over the feeling that the name was a garble. I kept trying anagrams. I would say, "Set the table, Tacle." "Bring the treacle, Tecal." "Bring the meat, Cleat." "Take my plate, Clate." "What's for repas, Eclat?" "All set, Alcet?" My wife was afraid Tecla might leave.

the endangered practice of designing posters

Poster / Roy R. Behrens © 2019

Above Roy R. Behrens © 2019, Poster (a collection of twenty-five bird posters). There are few things I enjoy as much as designing posters. I've created scores of them, especially in the past decade. Most often I've designed them (without charge, pro bono) for nonprofit organizations whose causes I want to help to support. But the opportunities have all but disappeared these days. Printed posters seem almost to have come to be an endangered species. Where would we display them? And for what purpose, since it is far easier to post and share the image and notification on various social media sites. Yet (to my mind) there are few things quite as beautiful as an exquisite poster on a wall. Above is what one might regard as a "metaposter," since it is a single poster made up of an arrangement of multiple posters for a local wildlife preservation site (Hartman Reserve Nature Center in Waterloo / Cedar Falls, Iowa). Too bad this practice is now passé.

•••

Wilbert Snow, Codline's Child (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), pp. 37-38—

There were no septic tanks and no sewers in our village. Each home had a backhouse that had to be cleaned out once a year. For three years, when I was between ten and thirteen, I did this chore for [a woman neighbor named] Fronie. Each time she gave me five dollars, and five dollars to me then was far more than five hundred would be to me now. In those days no lime was thrown over the dung to make the task easier for the shoveler. Each time I became deathly sick, but I needed the five dollars so desperately that I saw the job through. I have no words to express the horror of those two or three hours each year. I would lie on my stomach and throw up when there was little or nothing to yield. After the job was over, I would go to the Mill Cove for a swim and to Patten Point to smell the fragrance of fir trees and bayberry bushes.

•••

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

the transition from man to gluttonous mongoose

Poster, Roy R. Behrens © 2011

Edmund Gosse [describing the British poet Algernon Charles Swinburne]—

It was important, at meals, to keep the wine or beer or spirits out of Swinburne's reach. If this were not done, as often by host or hostesses not aware of his weakness, he would gradually fix his stare upon the bottle as if he wished to fascinate it, and then, in a moment, flash or pounce upon it, like a mongoose on a snake, drawing it towards him as though it resisted and had be to be struggled with. Then, if no one had the presence of mind to interfere, a tumbler was filled in a moment, and Swinburne had drained it to the last drop, sucking in the liquid with a sort of fiery gluttony, tilting the glass into his shaking lips, and violently opening and shutting his eyelids. It was an extraordinary sight, and one which never failed to fill me with alarm, for after that the Bacchic transition might come at any moment.

I mean the thing you use to rub out mistakes

Altered book montages, Roy R. Behrens © 2004

Bessie Head [South African novelist], "Some Happy Memories of Iowa" in Paul Engle, et al., editor, The World Comes to Iowa (Ames: State University of Iowa Press, 1987), pp. 86-87—

American English isn't the British English that is spoken in southern Africa. I walked into a stationery shop and said to the man behind the counter, "I would like to buy a rubber, please." The man said: "We don't sell them in ones. We sell them in threes." I said: "But I want only one rubber." The man became hostile: "But I told you we only sell them in threes." I said: "All right, I'll take three then." The man walked to the back of the shop and returned with a small packet of prophylactics that he handed to me. He had such a peculiar look in his eyes that I thought he believed I was a prostitute who had suddenly invaded Iowa City. Half fainting with shock I struggled to explain, "I mean the thing you rub mistakes out with." "Oh," he said, "you mean an eraser."

awaiting the shared use of a set of false teeth

Altered book montages, Roy R. Behrens © 2004

Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (New York: Summit Books, 1991), p. 1.—

[My paternal grandfather] was a great teller of jokes, typically without preamble, to trap you into thinking you were hearing about some real event. One of these horrified me so much [as a child] that I have never forgotten it. A Scotsman (I was still so young that I had not heard about Scotsmen being supposed to be mean) took his wife out to dinner. Both order steak. The wife started eating hers at top speed, but the man left his untouched. "Something wrong with the steak, sir?"—" No, no, I'm waiting for my wife's teeth." I had not then heard of false teeth either, and imagined the living teeth being torn from the woman's jaws on the spot and inserted into her husband's.

milkman comes up the walk and pauses to talk

Altered Book Montages / Roy R. Behrens © 2004

Susanah Mayberry, My Amicable Uncle: Recollections About Booth Tarkington (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1983), p. 4—

Early one morning during this period he [Booth Tarkington] went for a walk after an unusually long writing session. He met the milkman coming up the walk and stopped to talk: ''You been up all night?" he [the milkman] asked. ''Yes," I answered. "What you been doin'?" he went on. "Working," said I. "Workin'!" said he. "What at?" "Writing," said I. "How long?" said he. "Since yesterday noon," said I. "About sixteen hours." "My God," said he. ''You must have lots of time to waste!"

Tao Te Ching / Bauhaus / Gestalt / Invisible Core

In the past three or four years, I have produced about 18 online video talks, which are indebted to—but not the same—as years and years of classroom slide-embellished talks for courses in graphic design and design history. It is one way to continue to teach, long after having retired from in-person lecturing. The videos have become surprisingly popular, and I suspect that some are being used by university faculty as supplementary teaching resources. The most frequently visited has had thousands of viewers (6000 alone on YouTube, plus those at other sources) which is encouraging, given that I don't admonish viewers to "like and subscribe."The most popular video is a foundations-level overview of the most basic understandings about "how form functions" in design-based art, architecture and graphic design. The title is Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version. In referring to it as "the film version," I intended to distinguish it from an academic paper with the same title, that I published twenty-seven years ago (in 1998) in the journal Leonardo (MIT Press).

That print on paper version was (perhaps still is) one of the top-ten most downloaded articles in that magazine's history. The paper and the video address the same subject, but they differ markedly, and I think the film is better. The film is derived from a classroom talk that I nearly always gave on the first day of class in my university-level design studio and foundations courses. It evolved over the years of course. But it seemed to function reliably as a "big picture" overview of what designers, architects and design-based artists might hope to achieve.

At the end of the film, I conclude by saying how lucky I was to have taught during the last 29 years of my teaching career (not 39, as the film narration mistakenly claims) in the Kamerick Art Building at the University of Northern Iowa. As I noticed when I first spoke there, the design of that building is based on recurrent references to a rectangular motif, the shape and proportion (1 by 2) of a domino game piece. That same motif is also fundamental in traditional Japanese architecture, where it occurs in the floor mats or tatami, which measure 3 x 6 feet. I surmised that the Kamerick building pays homage to that, in features both inside and out, an assumption that was verified years later when I spoke to the architect.

Earlier in the film, I allude to the resemblance between Gestalt theory in perceptual psychology, and the Tao Te Ching, which may have been first introduced to me by Weimar Bauhaus Master Potter Marguerite Wildenhain, with whom my friend and teacher Dean Schwarz and I spent a summer studying pottery at Pond Farm (her mountain-top studio, home and school) in Northern California. In her autobiography, titled The Invisible Core: A Potter's Life and Thoughts, she makes explicit references to Lao-tze's famous passage that claims that the essence of a pot is not in the walls, but in the space (or void) within—its "invisible core."

Here is the full passage from Lao-tze:

Thirty spokes meet in the hub, but the empty space between them is the essence of the wheel. Pots are formed from clay, but the empty space within it is the essence of the pot. Walls with windows and doors form the house, but the empty space within it is the essence of the home.

Marguerite Wildenhain was one of many who were struck by that now-famous passage. Another was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was quoted as follows in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: His Living Voice (Fresno: California State University Press, 1987), pp. 25-26—

One day in 1912 I got a little book from the Japanese ambassador to America ... It was a charming little book and all you ought to own it. It is called The Book of Tea [by Okakura Kakuzo]. Well, there I read Lao-tze for the first time, and I read that the reality of a building does not consist in the roof and the walls but In the space within to be lived in. Well, there is my thesis.

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

a young dog acquires name of Henry Yah-mes

Alvin Langdon Coburn / Max Beerbohm Portrait

Max Beerbohm (in a letter to Lytton Strachey)—

Some time in 1913, at this address, my wife and I acquired a young fox terrier. We debated as to what to call him, and, as Henry James had just been having his seventieth birthday, and as his books have given us more pleasure than those of any other living man, I, rather priggishly perhaps, insisted that the dog should be known as James. But this was a name which Italian peasants, who are the only neighbors we have, of course would not be able to pronounce at all. So we were phonetic and called the name of the dog Yah-mes. And this did very well. By this name he was known far and wide—but not for long; for alas, he died of distemper.

liver in one hand a whiskey tumbler in the other

Montage © Roy R. Behrens

Anthony Powell, Messengers of Day (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), p. 101—

He planned a practical illustration of the harm alcohol can do. He came into Helgate's sitting room holding a tumbler of neat whiskey in one hand, a piece of liver in the other. Dropping the liver dramatically into the whiskey, he paused for a moment while the meat shrivelled up. "That: he exclaimed, "is what is happening to your liver all the time you drink as you do." Heygate, who was undoubtedly startled by this action, reported himself as replying: "What a shameful waste of liver and whiskey."

language in which faith intertwines with desire

Montage © Roy R. Behrens

Francine du Plessix Gray, in George Plimpton, ed., The Writer’s Chapbook—

We must all struggle against all that is curious, already-seen, fatigued, shopworn. I battle against what my admirable colleague William Gass calls "pissless prose," prose that lacks the muscle, the physicality, the gait of a good horse, for pissless prose is bodiless and has no soul. Of course this holds equally true for fiction as for essays, reporting, a letter to a friend, a book review, a decent contribution to art criticism—in sum I search for language in which faith intertwines with desire, faith that we can recapture, with erotic accuracy, that treasured memory or vision which is the object of our desire. I'm keen on the word "voluptuous," a word too seldom heard in this society founded on puritanical principles. I think back to a phrase of Julia Kristeva's, the most interesting feminist thinker of our time, who speaks of "the voluptuousness of family life." I would apply the same phrase to the prose I most admire, prose I can caress and nuture and linger on, diction which is nourished by the deep intimacy of familiar detail, and yet is constantly renewed by the force of the writer's love and fidelity to language.

Edison 's clever gadgets / his turnstile watergate

Montage © Roy R. Behrens

Edmund Fuller, 2500 Anecdotes for All Occasions (New York: Crown , 1943)—

[Thomas] Edison was very proud. He enjoyed showing visitors around his property, pointing out the various laborsaving devices. At one point it was necessary to pass through a turnstile in order to take the main path back to the house. Considerable effort was needed to move the turnstile. A guest asked Edison why it was that, with all the other clever gadgets around, he had such a heavy turnstile. Edison replied , "Well, you see, everyone who pushes the turnstile around pumps eight gallons of water into the tank on my roof."

Arthur Koestler / not in his most admirable state

Koestler on creativity

Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1987, pp. 441-444—

The outstanding personality at the Berlin congress was undoubtedly Arthur Koestler. He was in his element — masterful in expression, keen in give and take, and unwontedly eloquent. Tireless in energy, he had an excellent sense for practical detail. And most surprising to me, he was disciplined and cooperative. There was, however, one aspect of his behavior, not relevant to the proceedings of the Congress, that I found so painful that I could hardly bear to be in the same room with him when he let himself go. This was his rude and cruel treatment of his wife, who though obviously hurt by his remarks seemed to dote on him all the more. It must have been the country bumpkin in me that prompted me to say to him, when we were taking private farewells of each other the last night before our departure: "Well, Arthur, you really excelled yourself at our meetings. We couldn't have succeeded so well without you. I admired everything you did — except the way you spoke to your wife." He cast a startled look at me but said nothing.

The next morning, while I was having coffee early in the breakfast room of the Hotel am Steinplaz, Koestler waved to me from the other end of the room and then approached as I finished. Taking me under the arm, he walked me toward the waiting bus and solemnly said: "Sidney, as a friend, I want to tell you something important. Whatever you do, don't drink! As soon as you get too much liquor in you, you say the most terrible things." He obviously assumed that I must have been drunk the night before to say such a horrendous thing to him. In truth I was stone sober.

the professor cannot meet with his asses today

Digital Montage [detail] / Roy R. Behrens

Ralph Oesper [referring to the 19th century Scottish physicist Sir William Thomson] in The Human Side of Scientists (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati Press, 1975), p. 181—

One day, because of an engagement elsewhere, he posted the following notice on the door of his lecture room: "Professor Thomson will not meet his classes today." The young men decided to play a joke on their beloved teacher, and one of them carefully erased the "c" so that the note read: "Professor Thomson will not meet his lasses today." They then left. The class gathered the next day and anticipated that the professor would make some suitable remark about the altered notice. He came slightly late, but obviously he had already seen what they had left. The notice of the day before had been changed once again, and this time by the professor himself. It now read: "Professor Thomson will not meet his asses today."

Postscript: This reminds me of those rare occasions when, as a university professor, I was too ill to teach. Sometimes (oh, surely not always!) I would post the following note on my classroom door: Class has been cancelled. Professor Behrens is il[sic] today.

Einstein's visitors / a conspiratorial bowl of soup

Digital Montage [detail] / Roy R. Behrens

Lancelot Law Whyte (recalling a visit to Albert Einstein's home), quoted in G.J. Whitrow, Einstein: The Man and His Achievement (New York: Dover, 1973)—

After we had been talking for about twenty minutes the maid came in with a huge bowl of soup. I wondered what was happening and I thought that this was probably a signal for me to leave. But when the girl left the room Einstein said to me in a conspiratorial whisper, "That's a trick. If I am bored talking to somebody, when the maid comes in I don't push the bowl of soup away and the girl takes whomever I am with away and I am free." Einstein pushed the bowl away, and so I was quite happy and much flattered and more at my ease for the rest of the talk.

pungently pointed puns best punished promptly

Anon / visual pun

Puns, pungently pointed and perpetrated promptly are productive of a proruption of a pretty proportion of piquant pleasure; but puns protracted and in every person's premises, should be punishable by a propulsion of the perpetrator from the punning premises.

Boston Evening Transcript (6 August 1832), quoted by C.G. Loomis in "Traditional American Wordplay, Wellerisms, or Yankeeisms" in Western Folklore 8 (1949), p. 2.

BALLAST Quarterly Review / all issues online

At the moment I am preparing an online class session on the experience of founding a magazine in 1985. The magazine was BALLAST Quarterly Review, which I began in Milwaukee, while teaching at the university there. In 2002, a substantially different account of how that magazine began was published in an essay / interview titled How BALLAST Began, which can still be found online. 

The magazine's publication continued for 21 years. It was chosen by Milwaukee Magazine as one of "the best things in Milwaukee" and was also featured prominently in the Whole Earth Catalog, Communication Arts, AIGA Journal, and other publications.

Elsewhere, I have said that BALLAST was an online commonplace book. For those who may not know the term "commonplace book," it is a notebook or scrapbook of sorts in which someone collects interesting information (bits that trigger a double take) that he or she has run across. I had initially posted such findings (both text and image items) on a bulletin board in the hallway outside my office at the university. It became popular, as students who were passing by would check for the newest additions. With BALLAST I began to post such things not in the hallway but in a self-published quarterly mailing.

Throughout the life of the magazine, this forced me to keep reading, in search of flotsam and jetsam to include. In time, I also published essays and a multitude of book and film reviews, all of which were then republished in the journal Leonardo (MIT). But at least half of the pleasure derived from the inclusion of visual components that my students and I or others produced, or from historic sources. All issues of the magazine have since been scanned for reposting on the internet by the ScholarWorks division of the Rod Library at the University of Northern Iowa. Anyone can now search, read online, or download (free of charge) all issues of BALLAST as printable pdfs.

Simultaneous contrast / its role in art and design

In a popular online video talk, there is an overview of the function and importance of simultaneous contrast in art and design.

Its relevance to color theory was popularized by the teachings of Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus, and by Josef Albers (also from the Bauhaus) while he was teacher at Yale.

Its significance, as I try to show, is far greater than in the teachings of Itten and Albers. It had been researched and written about much earlier, in the nineteenth century, by the French scientist Michel Eugene Chevreul, who was the person who gave it the name.

RELATED LINKS

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? / Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage / Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage / Optical science meets visual art / Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness / Under the big top at Sims' circus

sight unseen talk coming to Burlington Iowa

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

Expatriate: from Iowa to the heart of France

Janet Hulstrand (Brooklyn Bridge)

I was initially drawn to this book simply because of its title. I grew up in the American Midwest, wandered off to other surrounds, then returned in 1990. This memoir was too much to resist: A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France. Unlike the author, I did not end up living abroad (she eventually settled in France), and yet in reading the book I found that we had shared concerns in our quest for home away from home.

The book’s subtitle is as appropriate as its title. It turns out that the author was not actually from Iowa. But some of her immediate relatives were. They lived in towns on the state’s northern border, or in Minnesota, which is where she was actually from. But it hardly matters, since as her account confirms, the Midwest is the Midwest, more or less, and customs do not radically change simply by crossing the border. 

This book is in essence the author’s search to find herself. It is from a female point of view, so she is especially determined to learn more about the inner lives of her mother and grandmother (her mother’s mother). Did they somehow influence her writer’s inclination? In search of her beginnngs, she revisits her family’s origins in such Iowa communities as Cresco, Bonair, and Lime Springs. In Iowa, Cresco is commonly said to be the hometown of five US Navy admirals, as well as that of Nobel Prize laureate Norman Borlaug. In addition, Lime Springs is the birthplace of Iowa poet Joseph Langland (author of The Wheel of Summer, and The Sacrifice Poems).

As the book progresses, the author documents her path in search of a life as a writer, just one part of her eventual self, which blends in with her additional roles as a student, marriage partner, parent, teacher, New Yorker, and expatriate. She ran into rough terrain, as have we all to some extent, but survived the challenges admirably. Like so many who search for an unknown, her life has been sometimes a zigzag, a meander, but a largely eventful and colorful one. In an especially candid moment she says that, more than anything, it was her skill as a typist that enabled her to survive, while pursuing her goal as a writer.

For many years, she and her family lived in New York City and Washington DC, in advance of deciding to settle in France. The various things that happened to her—and the people who became her employers as well as her friends—are among the most compelling. It was of particular interest to read her account of working as an assistant for Caroline Kennedy (the daughter of JFK), Andrew Young, Paul Robeson, Jr. and others.

Today, Janet Hulstrand lives in France (below, in her author’s photograph, there is a loaf of French bread in her arms), where she writes books and teaches occasional courses about French culture for Americans, and literary aspects of Paris. She also writes for magazines, and has published two other books, including Demystifying the French: How to Love Them, and Make Them Love You, and (as coauthor) Moving On: A Practical Guide to Downsizing the Family Home. 

Of convenient access is her blog, called Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.

Janet Hulstrand (in France)

 

Independence IA / episodes in its colorful past

There are twenty-five essays in a new book by Roy R. Behrens about American Midwest history, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: MEMORY TRACES OF IOWA’S PAST (Ice Cube Press, 2025). Two of the essays center on events and people who lived in Buchanan County, in the city of Independence, Iowa.

One of those essays, titled “Occupant of a House by Le Corbusier,” documents the life of Iowa-born artist William Edwards Cook, who was born in Independence in 1881. Determined to pursue a career as a studio artist, Cook studied drawing and painting in Chicago and New York, then moved on to Paris, where he continued his studies with French Academy masters. He remained in Europe for the rest of his life, living as an expatriate in Paris, Rome, and Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

While Cook never became a well-known artist, his life was notable for other reasons: He became a close and long-term friend of the American writer Gertrude Stein, who often mentioned him (and Iowa) in her books. It was he who taught her how to drive. He was also the first American to be invited to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Using his inheritance from his parents, Cook commissioned the now-famous Swiss architect Le Corbusier (who was unknown as the time) to design a Cubist-style residence on the outskirts of Paris, which is now referred to as Villa Cook or Maison Cook.

Cook continued to live in Europe until he death in 1959. But he came back to visit his Iowa family on a number of occasions, the details of which he recounted in his correspondence with Stein, of which hundreds of pages have survived, in the archives at Yale University. 

In Behrens’ book, a second essay (titled “Horse Racing’s One-Time Pooh-Bah”) recalls the meteoric career of a Buchanan County creamery owner named Charles W. Williams, who established a horse racing center (called Rush Park) on the western edge of Independence, in the 1880s. Through amazing successes in horse breeding and racing, he built up enormous wealth, which he then used to construct an unusual kite-shaped race track, and a lavish hotel and opera house (The Gedney). His phenomenal rise concluded in 1892, in the wake of an economic crash, at which time he moved on to Galesburg, Illinois, where (believe it or not) one of the stable boys was the poet Carl Sandburg.

Detailed accounts of Cook and Williams as Iowa history legends are provided in Behrens’ book, DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025), which can be purchased online here.

Webster City, Iowa / author witnesses atrocities

Near the end of WWII, [Iowa-born novelist Mackinlay] Kantor was serving in Europe as an American war correspondent. Embedded with the US Army, he arrived at Buchenwald, the German concentration camp, in April 1945, one day after its liberation by the Allies.

Twelve days later, he wrote a letter to his wife, Irene, attempting to convey the dread of what he had recently witnessed. That letter has survived and is quoted in a memoir by the couple’s son. While its content is disturbing, it does not begin to compare with the horror of having been present.

Shortly after the end of WWII, Kantor embarked on writing Andersonville, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. During the American Civil War, Andersonville had been a camp for Union POWs, where 13,000 prisoners died from malnutrition, scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery.

In side-by-side comparisons of photographs of starving inmates in German concentration camps and the barely-surviving prisoners at Andersonville, the resemblance is all too disturbing—especially at this moment when the world is once again at war, and non-combatant fatalities and other atrocities are as commonplace as ever.

•••

The full story is told in a new book of essays by Roy R. Behrens, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025), which can be ordered online here.  

is he related to German architect Peter Behrens

Iowa / past and future new book public events

Just posted on LinkedIn. For details, see online link to new book at DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025).  

Famous modern photographer from Des Moines

More Info

[Gertrude] Käsebier (née Gertrude Stanton) had a photographic studio on Fifth Avenue in New York…Her career had taken off late in the 1890s, when Alfred Stieglitz published and exhibited her photographs. She was, he asserted, “the leading artistic portrait photographer of the day”…

As an adult, Käsebier lived most of her life in the east, but her childhood was more diverse than that. She was born in 1852 in Des Moines, Iowa, and spent her first eight years in what was then called Fort Des Moines. When her family moved westward to profit from providing supplies to prospectors, her father became the first mayor of Golden, Colorado.
    
It was while living in Iowa and Colorado that she became intrigued by Native Americans, specifically Lakota Sioux. She later recalled that, during her childhood, it was a simpler, less treacherous time.…

The full story is told in a new book by Roy R. Behrens, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025). 

More Info

from Tipton, Iowa, to the California gold fields

more info

In early 1849, Sarah Royce and her husband were living in a small community about three miles from Tipton, Iowa, 60 miles west of the Mississippi River.

There had been a flurry of rumors about the abundance of unclaimed land in California. They had also heard that gold was found, the year before, at Sutter’s Creek, about 45 miles east of Sacramento.

They soon joined the ranks of those who were called the “Forty-Niners” because, in 1849, they packed their essential belongings in covered wagons, and all but blindly headed west.…

The immensity of their journey, powered by three yokes of oxen, from Iowa to California, soon became apparent. It took them an entire day to reach the town of Tipton, having traveled only three miles…

As it turns out, Sarah Royce was the mother of Harvard Philosopher Josiah Royce, a colleague of William James and George Santayana at Harvard. He persuaded her to share her memories of that trek. The full story is told in a new book by Roy R. Behrens, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025). Online link.

Buffalo Bill's riotous night in Prairie du Chien

To be truthful, not all the midwestern engagements of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West were free of controversy. The most egregious example occurred in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, on the night of August 20, 1900.…

The full story is told in a new book by Roy R. Behrens, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025).