Kansas City News Blog

​Picture the young artist, dreaming of becoming an editorial cartoonist. He's working hard: drawing for a weekly newspaper in the Omaha suburb of Bellevue, placing his pieces in a few small-town papers around Nebraska, constantly submitting his work to the Omaha World-Herald, only to be rejected. With encouragement from Kansas City Star cartoonist Lee Judge, at the time practically just a kid himself, our artist has started doing an occasional sports cartoon for the Star.

Until now he's had a weird life. His loose-hinged father is, among other disturbing things, beset by nervous tics that our cartoonist has inherited. As a child, our man had a tendency to poke his pinky into gooey cracks in the floor or lick window glass on the bus. He still must exert heroic effort to keep from sticking out his tongue at inappropriate times.

A Kansas City Royal comes to his psychological rescue.

The cartoonist is in the darkroom at his little newspaper, studying the Royals' roster, when he comes across the story of outfielder Jim Eisenreich.

After he was released by the Minnesota Twins, his contract was picked up by the Royals for one dollar. A bargain, as my father might say. What gives me pause is the mention of his tics. Although Eisenreich was a talented player, his symptoms were so bad that in Minnesota he was often booed off the field. As I read about his vocal tics and strange head and arm movements, I marvel at our similarities.

After Eisenreich's arrival in Kansas City, the story goes on to explain, a doctor diagnosed him with Tourette's syndrome.

Over the next few days in his darkroom, the cartoonist -- Jeffrey Koterba, now full time at the World-Herald and author of the gorgeous new memoir Inklings (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 288 pages, $25), can't stop thinking about Eisenreich.

I imagine him living in a modern, sprawling house, tootling around Kansas City's boulevards, dining in fancy restaurants, managing his syndrome as best he can. And like Kansas City, this syndrome that plagues him seems remote. My cartoons, my signature, "Koterba," may appear in print in Kansas City, but I exist in Omaha, struggling in my new marriage, taking care of a sick baby, paying hospital bills, making ends meet. Yet on deadline nights, when I climb into bed next to Joni with my smudged fingers, only to wake three hours later, I remind myself there was a time when I believed no woman would ever love me. To have this, at least, is nothing short of a miracle.

There are other miracles, too.

​In Mitchell Zuckoff's Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 560 pages, $29.95), Altman tells the author that his motto is "Giggle and give in." But this thick, frustrating book -- rich in anecdotes and grudges, richer in defenses of its subject, but only intermittently revealing of Altman's technical mastery -- offers little evidence that the iconoclastic director, who died in 2006, did much of either in his long career.

The Boston University journalism professor doesn't explain how he met Altman, but in his introduction he makes no secret of his admiration: "There's no way to replicate in print what Bob accomplished on film and in life, but an oral biography seemed the next best thing. I hope he'd agree."

Whether Altman, by turns a grumpy alcoholic and a gleeful joker, would have admitted liking the book doesn't much matter. With its nearly 200 participants, the book doesn't lack for insight, and Zuckoff has managed to tap into the essence of Altman's films: a cacophony of voices, some raised in disagreement, harmonizing most clearly when the news is dire. It often is, even when Altman should be triumphant. By the time he succeeds, 20 years into his career (more than 150 pages into the book), with M*A*S*H*, the director feels so affronted by the studio process -- the screenings, the executives, the demands, the missing profit points -- that he forever after swears off cooperation with any part of it.

In his chronicle of walking from Kansas City to Helena, Montana, Patrick Dobson proves that in literature, as in life, there's a fine line between cozy and boring.

​The premise of Seldom Seen, Dobson's first book (released in September from the University of Nebraska Press), is promising because it's at once universal and escapist. We've all been -- or known -- the antsy guy who's uninspired by his blue-collar job and knows he's got precious little time to experience something worthwhile. And we've all dreamed of giving up the 9 to 5 and disappearing down a long road bound for who-knows-what.

OK, maybe not everybody dreams of quitting their job, leaving their young daughter and hoofing it across the Great Plains. But that's how Dobson decides to confront a crisis of identity -- and anyone who picks up this book is going to be eager to see what will happen.

But instead of diving into a revelatory travelogue, the reader sinks into overwrought sentiment and encounters a cast of characters that might confirm outsiders' disregard for the fly-over communities Dobson so desperately wants to romanticize.

Jeff Sharlet

​I apologize for the short notice on this one. Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family, a look inside a Washington, D.C., secret society that prays together and shapes public policy, is scheduled to speak Tuesday night at Congregation Beth Torah (6100 W. 127th St.) in Overland Park.

After his talk, Sharlet with sign copies of his book. 

Mainstream Coalition is sponsoring Sharlet's talk, which should hit home to Kansans. The Family's members include Kansas' U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback and U.S. Reps. Todd Tiahrt and Jerry Moran as well as former Reps. Jim Slattery and Jim Ryun.

If you hurry, maybe Mainstream's Boo Tyson will be nice enough to still let you in. Tickets cost $10 for Mainstream members and $30 for the general public. But a Mainstream membership and a ticket to hear Sharlet costs $25. Call 913-649.3326 or click here for more info.

​It's hard to imagine that there was a time when Americans didn't know what to do with oil -- or that it was just 150 years ago. But when oil was discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, one oil-based product was "advertised as a cure for coughs, colds, and rheumatism." A Pittsburgh entrepreneur sold Rock-Oil, 'grease that could be burned to provide light."

Refining technologies advanced quickly, though, and the rest his history. As writer Steve Weinberg tells it:

When the Civil War ended, thousands of soldiers made their way to the oil region, lured by rumors of lucrative employment and get-rich opportunities. War profits had made numerous oil-field entrepreneurs wealthy, and merchants such as Cleveland's [John D.] Rockefeller had grown flush with cash. ... Many of the veterans had lived elsewhere before the war but felt no desire to return to their family farms. They arrived in the unfamiliar oil region wearing tattered military uniforms, with all their possessions in a knapsack except for the rifle slung over a shoulder.

At the time, one journalist marveled that, from his train window, "the derricks seemed like a thick metal forest."

Watching this great human and economic drama unfold from her hometown not far away was a young girl named Ida M. Tarbell.

Writing for McClure's magazine three decades later, Tarbell would expose the unethical practices of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company -- and forever influence the way America does business.

In Taking on the Trust: How Ida Tarbell Brought Down John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, newly released in paperback (W.W. Norton & Company, 304 pages, $17.95), Weinberg reminds us why it still matters.

Author and minor television personality John Hodgman might best be known to your mom and dad as the charming portrayer of PC in Apple's funny, iconic Mac/PC advertisements, but you probably know him as The Daily Show's "Resident Expert" and the author of two totally unresearched, totally untrue almanacs of fake trivia: The Areas of My Expertise and its direct continuation (as proven by the page numbering), More Information Than You Require.

Hodgman also contributes to McSweeney's and edits the humor section of the New York Times Magazine. He played minor parts in Tina Fey's Baby Mama, Ricky Gervais' The Invention of Lying and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Battlestar Galactica. Hodgman will be in town for a reading at Unity Temple on the Plaza on November 6, and The Pitch spoke with him by phone this week. After the jump, MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE about John Hodgman:

The facts in this book will astound you

​This close to Halloween, getting the heebie jeebies from real-life, weird phenomenon just seems like the thing to do. Good thing there's a new Ripley's Believe It Or Not! book.

Seeing Is Believing, put out by (who else?) Ripley Publishing ($28.95), features pretty much everything the world has come to expect from this company that catalogs the unusual: anomalies of nature, technological novelties, food feats and shocking human proclivities.

Nestled amongst the historical profiles of long-dead circus freaks and newborn two-headed animals are some local stories: Independence man Ray Ettinger's 3,523-foot scarf; Kansas City-wed couple Dan and Jennifer Wells, who lost everything but her wedding dress in a tornado days before the ceremony; and Shawnee fellow George Chandler who didn't realize when a 2 1/2-inch nail was lodged into his skull.

​Graduating from college means leaving behind an unstructured, self-centered existence to jam yourself into the rigid American workforce. At best, we handle the transition with grace, poise and a little excitement. We take our licks but come out smarter, better-adjusted people. At worse, we handle it like David Dickerson, author of House of Cards: Love, Faith and Other Social Expressions (Riverhead Books, 369 pages, $24.95), who worked as a card writer at Hallmark for a few years during the late '90s.

In Dickerson's sociopathic yet readable memoir, self-perceived exceptionalism and a jones for jacking off at work come up against the culture at one of Kansas City's most famous corporate benefactors. That means a good helping of Ben Stiller-movie-ready cringe moments, but with one crucial difference. Dickerson isn't a good-intentioned character stumbling into awkward situations, someone to pity a little and laugh with.

Instead, his book is loaded with un-cute baggage of an unexamined life, which he sculpts into awkward moments. Then he places his family, friends and co-workers into the frame and yells, "Action!"

When Dickerson is hired by Hallmark, he goes out and buys a closet full of identical outfits so he'll never have to think about what to wear. He rejects the cubicle he's assigned in favor of long, chatty walks around the office, then acts surprised when his bosses want to transfer him.

Some of his descriptions of the world of Hallmark are wittily observant: "I hadn't thought about it before, but writing involves a lot of staring into space very quietly," he writes. He also does a fine job of describing his frustrations: "Do this enough and you'll actually feel like you're trapped in a mental hedge maze that someone is making you solve, even if you hate it."

​John Heidenry was a child in his native St. Louis when the events in his latest book, the quick-moving true-crime story Zero at the Bone (St. Martin's Press, 230 pages, $25.99), unfolded. The kidnapping and murder of 6-year-old Kansas City boy Bobby Greenlease terrified parents here and across the state for years afterward, but in Heidenry's hometown, the September 1953 crime also launched a treasure hunt that would fascinate Midwesterners and thwart the FBI for decades.

The book is not a work of suspense -- the jacket outlines the events of the case, from money-hungry Carl Hall's Lindbergh-inspired kidnapping plot to Hall's execution alongside his partner, Bonnie Heady. Bobby Greenlease, son of pioneering Kansas City car dealer Robert Greenlease, dies on page 7, shot through the head while struggling to get away from Hall. The murder itself is so stunning in its offhandedness that there's no turning it or what follows into a thrill ride or an examination of a killer's psyche. Instead, Heindenry compounds the gut-churning simplicity of the crime -- Hall's plan had always been to kill his victim (the Greenleases' daughter was the first target, before Hall decided that the 11-year-old would be too much work) immediately -- by showing that its success owed nothing to planning.

​​Former Kansas City Times reporter Richard Serrano's new book, My Grandfather's Prison: A Story of Death and Deceit in 1940s Kansas City, never quite lives up to its opening scene. But those first paragraphs are a tough act to follow.

The book opens with a guard at the Municipal Farm, then the Kansas City jail, finding Serrano's grandfather in solitary confinement dead from a snapped neck. Decades later, Serrano tries to uncover how his grandfather -- a drunk with dozens of arrests on record -- died in that cell.

From there the historical narrative splits its time between the post-Pendergast Kansas City and Serrano's present day investigation into the darker side of his family history. This is where the problems start, so let's start with the good.

The best stuff is almost entirely contained in the sections covering old Kansas City. Some descriptions, like those of lost people living in once-posh sections of town abandoned by the wealthy, make you shake your head at how little has changed. A lot's been written about Pendergast, but based on what you'll read here, not nearly enough has been written on how the city fought over any little scrap of power the political boss left behind.

Crystal K. Wiebe

Click on the books for a slideshow

​

Sidling up to local authors was real easy in Lee's Summit last weekend. For the second year, Metropolitan Community College-Longview hosted a literary festival. All day Friday and Saturday, poets, novelists, children's book authors, nonfiction writers, bloggers and other scribes of all stripes peddled and read from their works and talked about the act of stringing words together.

Attendance was pretty sparse during the two hours I spent at the fest on Saturday. For a good chunk of their presentation, only I and one other person were in the room for a discussion of The Poetic Life by poets Eva Ridenour and Judy Stock. That's always awkward. Event organizer Susan Satterfield said more people turned out on Friday, when MCC students could pop in between classes.

Katie Horner was Saturday's "special speaker." She might seem an odd choice for a literary festival, but the KCTV5 meteorologist is also the author of Brainstorming, a book for parents on how to deal with their kids during severe weather. I had to leave before she rocked the mic, but I passed her on my way out, and she looked as prim as she does on TV.

​Let's set aside any plausibility issues that might arise from the first scene in Lawrence novelist Laura Moriarty's new book, While I'm Falling (Hyperion). It's fiction, after all, so we have to just go with this opening, in which the too-predictable life of a Johnson County family is wrecked when the attorney father returns early from "a two-day seminar on financial planning" to find a roofer in his bed.

Our house was on a cul-de-sac in a suburb of Kansas City that is known for its safety, excellent public schools, and complete lack of public transportation; still, my father said that for far too long, he truly perceived the man as some kind of confused, unshaven transient who had broken in to take a mid-morning nap.

It takes a few minutes -- and the discovery of a love note to the roofer from his wife -- for the attorney-father to figure out what has happened. For him, this is because his wife Natalie's infidelity is unfathomable; for a reader, this opening is difficult for reasons that have more to do with Moriarty's artistic choices. Yes, the roofer is a shockingly out-of-place character in a bedroom on this cul-de-sac, so he serves the plot well. Someone has to destroy this marriage, after all. But this particular roofer, we find out much later, was a lit major in college, has a master's degree and did his thesis on Nabokov. He's a roofer whose inquiry about the books on Natalie's shelf is pretty much all it takes to get the attention-starved suburban housewife in the sack.

But he's not our main concern anyway. He's merely the one who begins to disrupt the previously placid life of Veronica, who is away at KU.

Crystal K. Wiebe

Heid E. Erdrich: poet among the stacks.

​ The Northern lilt of Ojibwe poet Heid E. Erdrich bounced off the bookstacks in a room on the fifth floor of the downtown library last night. "I love reading in libraries because I get to talk out loud," she said with a chuckle before cracking into National Monuments, her latest volume of poetry.

Erdrich, who hails from Minnesota, is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. Her ancestry and gender figure prominently into her writing. The selections she shared from National Monuments included responses to William Carlos Williams' poem "To Elsie" and Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright." "I speak for people who haunt literature," Erdrich said, meaning American Indian people who may have gotten a short shrift from white writers. Elsie, Williams' flop-breasted maid, haunted Erdrich for years. And so, the Ojibwe poet offers voice, depth and defense to Elsie through multiple poems. In one, she asks, "What if her ample chest had been her pride?"

Erdrich is also concerned with "the haunting of our museums." And though her frustration at the disrespect shown to American Indian remains is at the root of her exploration of this theme, Erdrich's tone is often humorous, even playful. For instance, she imagines the 9,200-year-old bones of the Kennewick Man swimming laps to pass his time interred at a historical storage facility. Her fascination with science and history's claims on human (and pre-human) remains has led Erdrich to ruminate on the the pickled heart of Marie Antoinette's son and the controversial Bodies: Revealed exhibit. As she was composing the poems for National Monument, she said that her RSS feed kept her inspired with such news as the discovery of a possible chimp-human hybrid and the attempted sale of a Hawaiian warrior's skull on eBay. "It's just a crazy world out there -- of bones and hair and stuff," Erdrich said last night. "People are still trading in human body parts."

Erdrich's presentation was the first installment of Park University's 2009-10 Ethnic Voices Poetry Series, which continues on October 22 with a reading by the Latino Writers Collective.

​ As fiction writers tend to, author Amy MacKinnon spins a fair amount of true-ish things into her literary creation. Example: A major character in Tethered, her debut novel, is an elderly undertaker, who with his wife, inhabits a lovely, welcoming home above his funeral parlor. In real life, that's how MacKinnon's aunt and uncle lived. A less personal element of truth that MacKinnon spins into fancy: an unidentified dead child dubbed Precious Doe by the community.

In Tethered, though, that community is Boston -- not Kansas City. Within that gritty city setting, MacKinnon adheres to many of the real case details -- and there's even an Alonzo Washington-like character named Rev. Greene. The book is dedicated "To Erica Michelle Maria Green and all the other children who were never loved enough." But mainly, MacKinnon just co-opts the name and spirit of Precious Doe for an exercise in creativity.

The search for the child's identity and killers becomes a vehicle through which the protagonist, a lonely mortician named Clara Marsh, peers into her own past and heart. Marsh is a vulnerable and complex character -- a withdrawn woman more at ease with the dead than the living due to the abuses she suffered through the years. The secret garden that Marsh nurtures in her home is a symbol of the vibrance that's still possible for her as a person. But of course, she cannot see that until she is -- reluctantly -- drawn deeper into the mystery of Precious Doe.

There are some trite elements to this novel. Without giving anything away, suffice it to say the villain turns out to be drawn with a heavy hand. And at times -- maybe more for those who are familiar with the real Precious Doe story -- the violence and suggested violence can approach gratuitousness. But ultimately, MacKinnon presents a captivating work of fiction that starts out like a murder mystery but twists into a thriller that is poetic and affecting. And just a little bit true.

As I spoke to Thomas Frank by phone on Saturday morning, a mob of conservative Tea Party activists were converging on the National Mall, ranting and raving about government oppression and hoisting placards of the President in creepy, Joker-style white face.

Thomas Frank

​While many were shocked at the boiling outrage that surfaced at town hall meetings this summer, Frank, a political journalist most famous for his 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas?, saw it coming. In his latest work, The Wrecking Crew, he describes how conservatives have strategized to undermine government programs, privatize its essential parts and instill an almost maniacal distrust of Washington, D.C., at the grassroots.

"Conservatism never depicted itself as unruly protesters on the Capitol Mall or guys screaming at a congressman at a town hall meeting," he says.

Welcome to the post-Wrecking Crew era.

Dickinson, Bukowski, Eliot -- they were charlatans. If you want starkness and open space in your poetry, there's a never-ending supply a click away. You just have to imagine where the line breaks would be. Kneel before the new idol.

Information --

​Victims were sent packages

from a student that made them feel

uncomfortable.

 

Disturbance --

Neighbors complained of

a loud party at 54th and Harrison streets. The party moved inside

to keep the noise down.

Suspicious Person --

A home-

less person was

contacted in regard to leaving newspaper

all over the Quad.

Suspicious Party --

A suspicious party arrived

at the Student Health

and Wellness

clinic looking for the Police Department and began

yelling.

Vehicular Hit & Run --

A moving

van damaged the garage

overhang in the Oak Street Parking Structure

and

left

the

scene.

​One of the books on my summer reading list was Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1854-1858, by Wichita State University professor Craig Miner. I wanted to study up on area history, and Miner's research was interesting from a journalistic perspective, too.

I never knew this, but for a few years in the 1850s, the national media was obsessed with Kansas. "Hundreds of thousands of articles and editorials -- 4,500 in the New York Herald alone -- were published about Bleeding Kansas," Miner's book jacket notes.

As the nation split into the two sides that would go on to fight the Civil War -- and Kansans debated among themselves about whether theirs would be a free state or a slave state -- Kansas was "the single matter to which the most ink was devoted by the national press," Miner writes. "This importance played out more in the media and opinion capitals of the eastern United States than in the tiny towns on the plains of Kansas."

What's astonishing to a modern reader is how the name-calling, lies and distortions back then sound the same as they do today -- just swap out "slavery" or "abolition" for "abortion" or "health-care reform."

Arguments over the Kansas-Nebraska Act's repeal of the Missouri Compromise blew up everywhere. The Richmond Enquirer's account of debates surrounding the proposed legislation sounds a lot like what happened at this summer's health-care town hall meetings:

The opponents of the ... bill have set in motion every engine of popular agitation. The public press, popular meetings, the pulpit and the State Legislatures have been employed as a means for kindling the passions of the mob and coercing the actions of Congress.

As arguments intensified in the media, Miner details the name-calling on both sides. From the Southern perspective, for example:

The "Molochs" who controlled the North were the "wizards" who invoked the tempest in Kansas. They wanted to "impale" the U.S. Constitution on "faggots" and plunge the Union into civil war from their safe desks in New York City. The Northerners in Kansas were painted as insatiable beasts, "godless and insane," deaf to reason, insensitive to pity -- bedlamites, tigers who, tasting a drop of a victim's blood, howled for the whole carcass.

Which makes today's insult of "socialist" sound pretty tame -- though it was around back then, too:

"I know no Abolitionist," wrote a journalist in Charleston, "that is not a socialist, and prepared to modify or destroy the right of property."

Then as now, the truth suffered most. "The manufacturing of opinion was key," Miner concludes. "The true events were far less vivid and compelling, and also less emotional and polarizing, than the media-filtered version. Reality was more complex, more ambiguous." And though there were plenty of moderate voices, they "did not compete well in currency or mass quotability."

It is a current popular myth that nineteenth-century newspapers, being pre-Watergate and therefore supposedly in an innocent time before investigative reporting, were boosters and cheerleaders for party, section, or nation. News-gathering was more primitive, indeed. But then, as now, it was tempting, even mandatory, to pillory public figures .... Such activity often went beyond responsible criticism into circulation-building invective.

Anyone who thinks Americans have grown meaner and nastier to each other under the cover of Internet anonymity will be surprised by this book. And probably depressed. After all, it's hard to choke down the idea that talk-radio blowhards or wedge-pounding political strategists might not be to blame for the great divide in American society.

It might just be the way we are.

After the jump, a conversation with Professor Miner about today's rhetoric compared to that of the 1850s -- and how close he thinks we might be to another Civil War.

Elizabeth Gilbert

​Never read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, but I'm told it's a big deal. Something about getting divorced and traveling around the world and working out issues. Good for her.

So I'm guessing that it's an even bigger deal that Gilbert is coming to Unity Village in Lee's Summit on October 6 for a lecture and VIP reception.

If you have issues and $38 (or $85 if you want to be a VIP), this may just be a event for you.

​Matt Fraction moved to Portland? Didn't know that until I read this Los Angeles Times interview with Fraction, the author of Marvel, er, Disney's(?) Invincible Iron Man and Uncanny X-Men.

It's a good interview in which Fraction talks about writing dialogue for the Iron Man 2 video game, dropping out of school and finding inspiration in the U.S. invasion of Grenada. Covering a lot of ground there.

It always sucks to hear that one of Kansas City's most creative and interesting people has moved. KC misses you already, Matt.

1. Ogle a young Jake Gyllenhall. Donnie Darko screens at the Central Branch of the Kansas City, Missouri, Public Library tonight.

2. Ogle some urban fashion. The styles of local designer Clevon Jones will be on display tonight at America's Pub.

3. Look up. Trick planes will be overhead Saturday and Sunday during the Kansas City Aviation Fair and Expo.

4. Hang on the edge of your seat Saturday night at Municipal Auditorium as the Kansas City Roller Warriors do battle.

5. Learn how to live better during Greenfest 2009 at the Uptown Shoppes all day Saturday and Sunday.

6. Listen to a rock and roll poet. Charly "The City Mouse" Fasano reads aloud at Prospero's on Sunday night.

​National Book Award-winning writer and literary fussbudget Jonathan Franzen, who looked a $1.5 million gift horse in the mouth by dissing Oprah Winfrey in 2001 when she picked his novel The Corrections for her book club, has now helpfully outlined the geographic and emotional boundaries of the Midwest.

In an interview printed in the summer issue of Duke University's literary journal, Boundary 2, Franzen, who grew up in St. Louis suburb Webster Groves, explains:

If you ask what the Midwest means to me, it's that myth of an innocence prolonged and then abruptly lost. ... And somehow this dynamic seems more like a Midwestern thing than a Lower East Side thing or a South Boston thing. I'm not enough of a social historian to have a good theory of why exactly this is true. I do know that, for a long time, you really were isolated in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, or Webster Groves, Missouri, or Oak Park, Illinois -- it really was a long way from the Lower East Side. This is all rapidly changing with our new technologies, and our homogenized exurbs and suburbs, but some of the social and mental habits that grew out of isolation may persist in succeeding generations, leaving vestiges of a "Midwestern" character ...

[On what counts as the Midwest:] Indiana is a special case. Evansville is the South. Fort Wayne is still Rust Belt, Valparaiso is definitely Midwest. That's actually an interesting way to approach it--to define where my boundaries of the Midwest run. I think it begins around Columbus, Ohio -- Thurberville -- and stretches west. Anything below I-70 is basically southern. And that's true right across Missouri. My Midwest is bounded on the south by I-70. It stretches all the way to about an hour east of Denver and includes pretty much all of the Great Plains states north of I-70. ... You can take all of Kansas, some of Oklahoma, too. But not, for example, downstate Illinois. You start hearing the South in people's voices. They don't sound like Tom Brokaw anymore.

Hold up a minute. All of Kansas is the Midwest, but in Missouri the Midwest exists north of Interstate 70 but not south of it? That's pretty confusing. Lower East Side, here I come.

Hat tip to Andrew Seal's excellent site Blographia Literaria for the heads up and for the laugh. Seal writes, after quoting Franzen at length: "Also, as someone who grew up right on I-70, I think his cartography's kind of bullshit."

They could have named their book something sexier, but we won't hold that against the folks at the Kansas Geological Survey, because the photos in their new book kick ass.

Kansas Physiographic Regions: Bird's-eye Views, by James S. Aber and Susan W. Aber of the Emporia State University earth science department, includes 60 photographs taken from a rarely seen vantage point: between 100 and 500 feet above ground, which is higher than trees but lower than planes are allowed to fly.

So, for example, the already gorgeous Western Kansas formation known as Monument Rocks -- which looks like this in regular old photos:

C.J. Janovy

 
... looks like this in the Abers' book:

Photo Courtesy of James S. Aber and Susan W. Aber and the Kansas Geological Survey

Monument Rocks in the Smoky Hill River valley, Gove County.

 "Photographs in the book highlight the state's many physiographic regions -- distinguishable from each other by differences in geology, landscapes, climate and vegetation," says the press release KU sent out last week.

According to Jim Aber, "The complexity of the state's natural and cultural environments is depicted by intricate patterns, textures and relationships that are visible at large scale in our photographs but often not seen on the ground or in conventional air photos or satellite images."

Adds Susie: "Our photos give the viewer greater appreciation for the sinuous beauty of a meandering stream, the scars left on the landscape from mining natural resources and methodical planning of houses and infrastructure in cities."

We just think they look cool.

Look at a few more pics and order your own copy here.

Kansas City, Kansas, Public Library's reading mascot

 Local libraries are busy places these days.

Kids are out of school. Air conditioning beckons the sweaty. The unemployed need computers to find jobs, while those fortunate to remain on payrolls may be opting for DVD checkouts over first-run movie tickets.

Alas, libraries are not paid by the Curious George books they distribute or the number of mentally ill people they temporarily shelter. They're reliant instead on property taxes, a revenue stream damaged by the housing collapse.

Two headlines at today's Kansas City Kansan neatly capture the challenges of the modern librarian.

Library budget features near 14 percent cut
Last update Jul 23, 2009 @ 11:07 AM

 Usage of KCK Library breaks record
Last update Jul 23, 2009 @ 11:05 AM

Hallmark has inked a deal for Marvel heroes like Wolverine and Thor to shill its cards. I can't wait for the sympathy line. Sorry to hear a flaming pumpkin throwing, goblin dressed madman kidnapped your one true love and threw her off the George Washington Bridge to her death. Thinking of you ...

Art by Marvel Comics/Luke Ross

Elizabeth Royte writes about the chain of life. In 2005, she published a book, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, that followed the waste out of her Brooklyn home. Her most recent book examines a product brought in to millions of residences and offices: bottled water.

Americans consume 50 billion single-serve bottles of water a year. In

Photo by Rod Morrison

Elizabeth Royte

Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, now in paperback, Royte describes how fashion, which once drove sales of bottled water, now threatens its growth. To some, toting a bottle of Evian is a social crime on par with driving a Hummer.

Much of Bottlemania is set in Fryeburg, Maine, a small town above a spring that Nestlé uses to produce Poland Spring. Royte also visited Kansas City, Missouri, and toured the city's water treatment plant, where engineers run the Big Muddy through an impressive array of filters and processes before it reaches our taps.

Of all the municipal water works in the country, why Kansas City's?
I wrote about KC's water because I wanted to compare it with New York City's water, which is famously tasty and comes from a fairly well protected watershed. Kansas City starts with water from a much dirtier source -- the Missouri River -- cleans it up, and also wins taste awards.

Now, just because it's something cool on a Friday afternoon, here's the latest from our favorite former Missouri state rep/poet, Lloyd Daniel.

Inspired by "Kansas City's authentic cultural identity," and thinking that, regardless of the national economy, we could do a better job of "using our past as a primary pillar of the city's economic future," Daniel recently posted an essay/poem on his Web site called "Mining Cultural Gold." Part of the piece is, Daniel says, "a DJ-type 'roll call' which pays tribute to some of the many cultural legends, icons, people's heroes, spaces and events upon which modern Kansas City is built."

An excerpt:

This is a poem for Charlie Parker, Charlie, Mary, Memo Lona and Captain Tate. Lester Young, Thomas Hart Benton, Tom Bass, Tom Pendergast, Big Joe Turner, the Sign, the Ram and Saber Jets, Mrs. Meeks, Chuck Moore, Town Hall Ballroom, Cowtown Ballroom, the Inferno, Freedom Palace, Buck O'Neil, Ida McBeth, Satchel Paige, Owen Bush, Owen Murray, Mattie Rhodes, Mike Ross, Milt Morris, Buck Buchanon, Larry Sells, John L. Frasier, Eddie Baker, Otis Taylor, Roger Nabor, and Chucky Draper.

From there, the rhythmic list just builds and builds. See if you discover your friends or yourself -- or your city -- here.

This is an untitled piece of art by Greg Crawford.

 Spend some time at Writers Place. Tonight, Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and "Brown Suga Poet" Stacey Tolbert will read from their works, starting at 8 p.m. It's also opening night for a Greg Crawford: Stacks, a new art exhibition at mansion where writers mingle.

Get the song "Somewhere Out There" stuck in your head. The cartoon An American Tail screens for free at 7 tonight at the Kansas City Museum as part of the Free Fridays in July entertainment series.

Sidle up to a snake. The Kansas City Reptile Show happens at the Overland Park Holiday Inn Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Ponder the collage art of Lawrence record label owner/budding artist Zach Hangauer. His first exhibition opens Saturday at Wonder Fair: Art Gallery and How!

It's a fact of life that in modern America we're "pressured to do more, do better and look fantastic while doing it," according to Robin Abrahams, the ethics and etiquette columnist for the Boston Globe, who spoke last night at Rainy Day Books in Fairview. And "when we're stressed out and busy, we may not have the bandwidth" for politeness, Abrahams continued.

But there's still no good excuse for not sending a thank you note.

Abrahams, who used to be known as Robin Pearce and live in Kansas City, was in the area to promote her first book, Miss Conduct's Mind Over Manners. She read excerpts from the volume, which contrary to what you'd expect is not a collection of advice letters she's received over the years but rather an analysis of why impoliteness may seem to be on the rise and how the standards of etiquette are changing as our society becomes increasingly diverse, mobile and tech-oriented.

Homeless? Evicted? Have we found the handbook for you!

"Rent is theft. This zine is free," proclaims the cover of the Kansas City Squatters' Handbook, a guide put together by a local anarchist group. And if you don't mind the Marxist lingo that colors the 27-page zine's introduction, it's a surprisingly practical read.

Squatting has been making the news lately, what with the foreclosure crisis emptying homes all across the country. Yes, it's illegal. But if the squatters are the courteous kind, their residency in a foreclosed-upon home can provide a measure of safety in a hard-hit neighborhood. The far-away banks that now own these homes don't have the manpower to check up on them very often. Warm bodies in a building can keep it secure from intruders who would ransack the place for copper and fixtures.

The legal information inside The KC Squatters' Handbook is pretty fascinating (especially if it's correct). It quotes the Kansas City Police Department's Procedural Instruction Manual  on landlord/tenant disputes, which states that because such disputes are civil, not criminal, police officers don't usually become involved in eviction actions.

"To establish residency/tenancy to a police officer," the zine reads, "and to escape the possibility of trespassing charges, the KCPD procedural handbook states that at minimum, an individual show personal possessions within the building (clothing, furniture, appliances, etc.). A written lease is not required."

In the section called "Finding a Building," the zine advises potential squatters to search the online databases of the city, county, and Land Trust, to find out the status of empty properties.

"General wisdom on squatting is that it can be much [more] difficult to be evicted from a city-owned building than from a privately-owned one," the handbook reads. "... On the other hand, a private owner who pays the taxes but has otherwise totally abandoned a property might make a very desirable 'landlord.'"

Our neighbors at the Barkley Advertising Agency did a really cool campaign for the Johnson County Library, redesigning the library's courier trucks to look like delivery trucks for the characters in four classic books: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Metamorphosis," "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and "Moby Dick: Or the Whale."

Barkley did the job pro bono. Props to both. And check out the library's Flickr for more photos.

Thanks to a friend of the Plog and Librarian.net.

Photo courtesy of the JoCo Library's Flickr.