You Do Hoodoo: Recent Episodes
None
My mother’s people were Baptists, serious Baptists, no drinking, no playing cards on the Sabbath, no dancing, though where would they have danced in rural Orangeburg County if given the chance? Juke joints were devil dens. Maybe there were barn dances, but I doubt it.
On the other hand, my daddy’s people were indifferent Methodists. In the 19th Century, they must have been devout because my great-great grandfather Wesley, a Confederate foot soldier and later prisoner of war, named his son Luther, and I’m one of four descendants named Wesley in honor of the founder of the Methodist Church.
However, by my grandfather’s generation, none of the Moores I know of attended church. We did pray, mumbled the same rote grace every meal, but otherwise, the only time God’s name was uttered in our house, it was taken in vain by my father in anger.
Other families I occasionally ate with might ad-lib their blessings, mentioning current events, family members, and on one occasion, me, which made me feel somewhat uneasy for whatever reason. Obviously, praying was meaningful to them, an attempt at communication with the Lord rather than the empty abracadabra lip service we recited at our dinner table.
For a year or two, when I was eight nine, my mother, my brothers, and I sporadically showed up at Summerville Baptist Church where my grandmother Hazel worshipped. Pathologically shy, I despised going because I felt out-of-place, like an intruder; plus the place smelled strange, chemically odd, like they overdid the disinfectant. I’d much rather been at home smelling stale cigarette smoke dreading Monday reading the funny papers.
My mother wasn’t enamored with Summerville Baptist, yet sought a spiritual haven, so she joined St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, willing to be tarred with the accusation of being a social climber. So here I was again intruding in a strange place of worship, this one with ritualistic recitations, head-bowing, and kneeling that were alien to me. But Mama was serious this go around. She signed me up for confirmation classes.
I hated being two years older than the other confirmation students, yet once I started attending, I did learn the basics of Judeo-Christianity, that the Old Testament was a covenant between God and Moses, and the New Testament a covenant between God and us mediated by his only begotten son. We had to memorize the names of the books of the Torah and the names of the first six books of the New Testament. I scored a 100 on the exit exam, was confirmed, and became a member of St. Paul’s.
Back then, we used the 1928 version of the Book of Common Prayer which employed Jacobean English, and because of my uncanny ability to retain verse, song lyrics, and in this case liturgy, in a few years I could recite “The Order of Morning Prayer” by memory.[1]
Here’s my favorite ditty from the Rite of Holy Communion: “If any man sin we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and he is the Propitiation for our sins.”
Has a ring to it, doesn’t it.
Anyway, once I became an adult and married Judy Birdsong, who had been a Young Lifer in high school, lost her religion at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC, “a small Christian College for small Christians,” as Judy used to say, I bid adieu to Christianity.
We had our two sons baptized, but other than a short two-month stint at Sullivan’s Island’s Church of the Holy Cross when the boys were five and six, we didn’t go to church. However, they did attend Porter-Gaud, an Episcopal School, and sat in chapel every other week.
My cousin Zilla, my great aunt Ruby’s daughter, an incredibly nosy and outspoken Baptist, once asked me if I had seen to my sons’ spiritual needs, and I could honestly say they frequently attended services at their school.
As I’ve written more than once, I envy people blessed with faith. It must be an enormous comfort, especially in the waning days of the American Empire.
O God, the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, our only Saviour, the Prince of Peace; Give us grace seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions. Take away all hatred and prejudice, and whatsoever else may hinder us from godly union and concord.
Amen!
[1] This “uncanny ability” of memory doesn’t, alas, kick in with people’s names.
The Flip Side of Marcus Aurelius
All I want to do is sleep,
to keep my
ailing thoughts
at bay,
to enter the cinema
of a dream
that will take me far away
from dripping faucets,
twisted sheets,
branches scratching
at the windowpane.
But no such luck.
Sleep, like a bitter divorcee,
has packed her bags
and moved away.
In times of trouble, it’s not Mother Mary who comes to me, but Marcus Aurelius whose Meditations provide a practical response to the woes we face, and there’s no question that because of the election of Donald J Trump, the Western World is going to go through some things, especially Eastern and Western Europe. My father used to say that Russia will take us over without firing a shot. It certainly seems as if he might have been right.
Here, in the US, we have a patchwork of abortion laws, some so strict that so-called pro-lifers would rather a woman bleed to death than receive treatment during miscarriage. Trump has promised to put crackpot Robert Kennedy in charge of health and Elon Musk in charge of transforming the civil service into a Soviet-like bureaucracy of yes men. Most galling to me is that this adjudicated rapist, convicted felon, incorrigible liar and his servile minions are now in full celebration mode, not to mention that my faith of the good will of the American people has been severely compromised.
Yes, I’m heartbroken, but I am powerless at the moment to change the situation; however, I do have the power to herd my thoughts from the edge of a cliff to safer ground.
Here’s Aurelius:
“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
Of course, maintaining an untroubled spirit is much easier said than done.[1] However, “if you are pained by external things,” as Aurelius writes, ‘it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.”
By judgement, I think he means your thinking of them, dwelling on them at the expense of the mundane joys of life, like looking up and seeing a formation of geese flying overhead, listening to Lester Young speaking through his tenor saxophone, enjoying the taste of olives plucked from a bowl that has been cured in a kiln, the bowl, a thing of beauty, which guides your thoughts to Keats’ great ode in which he sings, “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
Our moments are too precious to squander in barren speculation. What will be will be. I’ll attempt to employ what the Buddhists call mindfulness. I’ll try to pay attention to what is in front of me rather than the agonizing over what may or not be. I’ll attempt not to dwell in the shadows dark speculations.
In short,
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
WB Yeats
[1] Here’s a link to a piece I wrote called “The Art of Not Thinking.”
Look, if you’ve ever been sucked into one of those social media video medical advertisements where some physician or chemist claims to have discovered a ridiculously easy way to detox the superfund-grade contamination of your liver without dieting or exercising or giving up your Jim Beam, you know you’re going to have to endure twenty plus minutes of tease before the secret is revealed that for $59.99 for can purchase a magical elixir, the great great great grandchild of 19th Century snake oil, and presto, no more liver problems.
But I’m not going to put you through that. I’m going to explain right away why Kamala Harris is going to win the presidency, maybe by a comfortable margin, and I wouldn’t be risking my stellar reputation as internet sage the weekend before the election if I were not positive.[1]
Let’s start unscientifically by plumbing the rich grotto of my intuition, a storehouse of data and sensations forming what the vulgar call “a gut feeling,” or what I’d prefer to call “an intestinal foreshadowing.”[2]
Okay, let’s get this show on the road.
Although I don’t believe that yard signs and crowd sizes are accurate predictors of election outcomes, this cycle seems somewhat different. At her rallies, Kamala’s audiences hang on her every word as she catalogues a future marked by communal problem solving whereas the less populous crowds at the Trump rallies tend to leave early during Trump’s interminable dystopian descriptions of mongrel hordes laying waste to municipalities or children exiting their school buses an entirely different gender than when they boarded in the morning. Any sane person who doesn’t reside inside the un-fun house of QAnon conspiracy theories knows that Trump is lying and/or delusional. Not a good look for someone entrusted with nuclear codes.
He offers no specific plans, but all the world’s and the nation’s ills will be solved, like the magic liver elixir, by his magical presence.
Slathered with orange make-up and topped with clownish platinum hair, like a cartoon character in the same clothes, he shambles around the nation in a haze that very well could be drug-induced. I mean who falls asleep during his own felony trial? At any rate, his campaign has devolved into a Roman circus where he cosplays fast food minimum wage earners or sanitary workers. Yesterday, the garbage truck driving in circles with Trump staring out the window seems an apt metaphor for the campaign’s final stages. It’s almost as if his staff wants him to lose.
He’s just out on the tarmac having someone drive him around in circles. Why do I feel like this will become the defining meme for his entire campaign? pic.twitter.com/WrESaWJ6cN
— Hey, Dave! (@davegreenidge57) October 30, 2024
Segueing into a more data-driven arguments, early voting seems very promising for Kamala. Although Republicans have been voting early, unlike in 2020, the voters have tended to be elderly high propensity voters, and Jen O’Malley Dillion, Kalama’s campaign chair, says, “We feel really good about what we’re seeing out there.” Even in Nevada where early voting rural Republicans have established a red fire wall, Dillion says in the last two days in Clark County, a Democratic stronghold, “we’ve had higher turnout from young voters than we have at any other point in this cycle.” She adds, “We are seeing Republicans voting early, but these are Republicans that are going to vote no matter what. So what they’re doing is that they’re changing their mode of voting. They were going to vote on Election Day, now they’re voting early.” She also claims that in other states low propensity voters are voting Democratic early. Polls also show that undecided voters are more open to voting for Kamala, not to mention than more women than men are voting with reproductive rights being one of the major issues.
Then there’s the discrepancy in the ground games. The Democratics boast a well-trained, well-staffed group of dedicated, enthusiastic doorknockers, postcard writers, phone-callers and texters whereas the Republicans are relying on paid workers, mercenaries you might say, to attempt to get the undecided to vote.
In short, the Republicans are, like their Dear Leader, disorganized (cf. Trump’s stashing classified documents in his bathroom). In the last days of the campaign you have Mike Johnson promising to end Obamacare if Trump wins, you have Elon Musk predicting Trump’s slashing spending will create temporary economic hardship, and Nikki Haley trashing the campaign. I suspect that Kamala will win at least 10% of Republican voters and a majority of independents. After all, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are voting for Kamala.
Lastly, the Democrats have several pathways to 270 electoral college votes, even if they were to lose Pennsylvania, which seems unlikely with a half-a-million pissed off Puerto Ricans living there.
Last, but certainly not least, the last three heart-breaking presidential loses in 2000, 2004, and 2016 featured wooden candidates incapable of warming the hearts of non-partisans. Obviously, Kamala is charismatic, out-Obama-ing Obama in my opinion.
Now that’s it. Excuse me while I check out some new promising dietary supplements. Cheers!
[1] Caveat: I’m not as positive that fawning Republican state legislatures and/or Speaker Mike Johnson will allow the certification of a Harris victory.
[2] Please note, I have now removed my tongue from my cheek.
Apocalypse by Adrian Kenyon
Donald Trump has dubbed his rambling speeches “the weave,” claiming that if you connect the dots of his zigzags, a unified picture appears. So I thought I’d give it a try myself.
Here goes.
The other night, after suffering through a self-righteous, ill-informed screed from a Facebook follower, I found myself listening to Bob Dylan’s masterful protest song “Hurricane,” a cinematic narrative recounting the arrest and trial of Rubin Hurricane Carter, a boxer wrongly convicted of a triple homicide in 1966 in Patterson, New Jersey.
Meanwhile, far away in another part of town
Rubin Carter and a couple of friends are drivin’ around
Number one contender for the middleweight crown
Had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down
When a cop pulled him over to the side of the road
Just like the time before and the time before that
In Paterson that’s just the way things go
If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street
‘Less you want to draw the heat
Near the end of the song Dylan sings,
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game
Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell
As I was listening, the long gone idealism of the 60s came to mind. Dylan himself — and Joan Baez –performed at the March on Washington, sharing the stage with Martin Luther King. They heard firsthand the “I Have a Dream Speech.” They’re both still alive sixty-one years later.
In 1963, the American people considered communism the greatest threat to the nation’s sovereignty, and the Soviet Union was our greatest enemy whose spy agency the KGB eventually became the employer and training ground for Vladimir Putin, whom Donald Trump so idolizes, along with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator.
According to Trump, outside forces like Russia and North Korea aren’t the greatest threat to American sovereignty; no, it’s “the enemy within,” American citizens, news organizations, and celebrities tarred with the paradoxical disapprobation “woke.” It’s Joe McCarthy redux, and McCarthy’s corrupt lawyer Roy Cohn was Donald Trump’s mentor.
Trump and his followers bring to mind WB Yeats’s lines from “The Second Coming”:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Fueled by the fifth deadly sin wrath, these resentful white supremist faux Christian cultists seem to prefer a dictatorship of oligarchs to the teachings of their would-be Savoir who famously preached
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Meanwhile,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
Connect these dots and what do you get?
[a] rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born.
After reading Dwight Garner’s laudatory review of Percival Everett’s James, I was eager to check it out, especially since I’m a huge fan of Huckleberry Finn.
Here’s a snippet of Garner’s paean:
Percival Everett’s majestic new novel, James, goes several steps further. Everett flips the perspective on the events in Huckleberry Finn. He gives us the story as a coolly electric first-person narrative in the voice of Jim, the novel’s enslaved runaway. The pair’s adventures on the raft as it twisted down the Mississippi River were largely, from Huck’s perspective, larks. From Jim’s — excuse me, James’s — point of view, nearly every second is deadly serious. We recall that Jim told Huck, in Twain’s novel, that he was quite done with “adventures.”
Garner goes on to say, “This s Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful.”
Alas, when reading James, I was never able to suspend my disbelief, to lose myself in the flow of action and forget that the narrative I was reading was a fictive construction. In his retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Everett creates the conceit that the antebellum argot of slaves, the “Else’n they takes you to the post and whips ya[s]” is a linguistic ruse to appease the white population by making them feel superior. The narrator James (aka Jim) speaks (and thinks) in English so standard that he uses “one” instead of “you.” In short, for me the novel is a contrivance; it’s created in a way that seems artificial and unrealistic.
Everett’s relating the events from James’ perspective in easy-to-decipher prose makes a lot of practical sense; however, the regionless diction of the retelling of Jim and Huck’s escape robs Jim of a breathing individual’s voice –– he could be from 21st Century Dayton, Ohio –– there are no quirks in his phraseology, no flashes of individuality, few regional linguistic markers, which divorces him from time and place and therefore relegates him into the status of a character in a novel rather than a person whom we believe is real.
That said, Everett does an outstanding job of effectively depicting the horrors of slavery, the never-ending degradation, the perennial fear of having your family disbanded, the horrors of being horsewhipped, the constant verbal abuse. And the novel, especially after James hooks up with a minstrel show, becomes a real page turner, a sort of thriller with cliffhanging chapter endings as he and Huck manage a series of hairbreadth escapes a la The Perils of Pauline. Everett also creates a rich array of colorful characters that you care enough to keep reading, though you might grow a bit weary of the episodic nature of the plot bequeathed by Clemons.
I couldn’t help unfavorably comparing James to James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, which is also narrated by a slave, Little Onion, who is “liberated” by the historical abolitionist John Brown.
Here’s Little Onion describing his liberator:
The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath ’em all, and his grey eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren’t no lunacy. It was something he knowed true inside him. I saw it clear for the first time. I knowed then, too, that he knowed what I was – from the very first.
This is a person talking, not the idea of a person talking, which creates a depth of character that James lacks.
Compare McBride’s description with this:
I was afraid of the men, but I was considerably more afraid of the dogs I’d heard coming our way. I could only imagine that they were after me, and so I was left confused by the presence of these two white men in our boat. Adding to the absurdity was the fact that they were opposite in nearly every way. The older man was very tall and gaunt, while the younger was nearly as short as Huck and fat. The younger had a head full of dark hair. The older was completely bald.
That’s not what I would call “cooly electric first person narrative.” In fact, when I taught composition, I would not allow my students to use the phrase “was the fact that.”
But, hey, look, as I’ve said elsewhere and often, writing a novel is a very difficult undertaking, and James is well worth reading, even though it falls short of my censorious standards for the high praise it has received. It’s an audacious effort to reconfigure the novel that Hemingway credited with being the root of “all American literature.” Also, the idea of seeing Huck’s world from Jim’s perspective is existentially cool, underscoring Hamlet’s observation that “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
I’d give it a B+ overall.
Today, 21 September 2024, happens to be the autumnal equinox, and here on Folly Beach, the Edge of America, the weather is perfect, not a cloud overhead, the temperature Edenic, downright Elysian — no flies at Chico Feo, no mosquito swatting needed on my walk home from the bar.
However, today also happens to be the 35th anniversary of Hurricane Hugo. As you can see above, Hugo was, “a mighty, mighty storm.”[1] Ask any Lowcountry resident who opted not to evacuate, and you’re likely to hear tales ranging from extreme discomfiture to abject terror.
Our family – Judy Birdsong, sons Harrison (5) and Ned (3), springer spaniels Jack and Sally, and I-and-I lived on the Isle of Palms, a barrier island that lay in the crosshairs of a cone of inevitability – in other words, Charleston was going to get clobbered by a monster category 4 cyclone.
On Wednesday evening before Thursday’s late night landfall, before we drove to my parents’ house in Summerville to drop off the dogs and spend the night before fleeing further inland to Columbia, I drove downtown to Charleston to hear Allan Gurganus read from his just published novel The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. I bought a copy, had Allan inscribe it, then drove back home and nailed plywood over sliding glass doors.
As it turned out, the novel, which deals with Reconstruction, offered a parallel to what we were about to endure. My father-in-law Ralph Birdsong compared the post-Hugo Isle of Palms and Sullivans Island to the bombed out towns of Europe he witnessed in World War II.
Sullivan’s Island 22 September 1989
Reconstruction indeed.
We left Summerville first thing Thursday morning and arrived at my friend’s Jake’s house around noon where we watched the storm swirl closer and closer to the coast on a television screen. That evening, we had dinner at a restaurant in Five Points. We had been lately listening to Lyle Lovett’s most recently released album, which featured a song called “Here I Am.”
Here’s are the lyrics from the last verse, which is spoken rather than sung:
Look, I understand too
little too late.
I realize there are things
you say and do
you can never take back.
But what would you be if
you didn’t really try?
You have to try.
So after a lot of thought
I’s like to reconsider.
Please if it’s not too late,
Make it a cheeseburger.
When it was time to order our meal, I asked three-year-old Ned what he would like to eat, and he said in a tiny little Lyle Lovett voice, “Please make it a cheeseburger.”
That almost made the entire ordeal worth it.
Almost, but nor entirely. Because the only bridge to the islands was destroyed, we became homeless for 17 long days, moving from family to family, devoured by anxiety. However, once we finally made it to the island via a ferry and walked from the marina to our home, he were delighted to see it standing in one piece. The ground floor had received about two inches of water, a tree had smashed through a back door into our bedroom, the floors were warped, so we had tons of work to perform, but we could sleep upstairs.
Sullivan’s Island Bridge (photo credit Judy Birdsong)
Ever it be so pounded, there’s no place like home.
[1] I copped that quote from the Black spiritual about the Galveston hurricane of 1900.
Every Bod Gone Cruzy[1]
Well, not everybody’s gone cruzy. I’m as sane as David Attenborough, Walter Cronkite, Ward Cleaver, as sane as Thich Naht Hahn — or at least I’d like to think so. Certainly, I’m saner than the Lt. Governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson, who has dubbed himself a “Black Nazi” on a transporn[2] site where he confessed nostalgia for the institution of slavery and expressed the desire to purchase a couple of human beings himself.
Here’s a photo of him mugging with the 45th president of the United States. Obviously, he and Idi Amin share a common ancestor.
BTW, here’s the greatest sentence in the history of American literature that features “Idi Amin.”
“I was in the water for six hours. Shivering, praying, scared, full of adrenaline. I kept making deals with the Fates, with God, Neptune, whoever, thinking I’d trade places with anybody anywhere – lepers, untouchables, political prisoners, Idi Amin’s wives – anything, so long as I’d be alive.”
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Budding Prospects
Idi Amin
Also, I’d like to think I’m saner than Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr. For example, if I were ever unfortunate enough to run across a washed up dead whale, I’d like to think I wouldn’t saw its head off and take the head home with me.
How did these [alliterative participle deleted] fools attain such high status you might wonder.
Well, Kennedy is a Kennedy after all. He was born into perhaps the most famous American family this side of Maybelle Carter’s clan. But Robinson? How did he rise from an abusive childhood bouncing back and forth from foster homes to his mama? Here’s how. By giving a pro-gun speech at a Greensboro City Council meeting that went viral on Facebook.
Robinson’s entry into politics reminds me of Lester Maddox’s who gained fame by chasing potential Black customers out of his restaurant with ax handles, became a sort of redneck folk hero, and was chosen as governor by the state legislature because of election confusion caused by a write-in candidate.
Lester and Mark strange bedfellows indeed.
And now both Georgia and North Carolina are swing states.
It’ll be interesting to see in forty something days, how many US citizens will vote for a candidate promising detention camps, mass deportations, tariffs, a candidate who portrays The US as a hellscape despite inflation under 3%, all three stock indices at record levels, and crime significantly decreasing.[3]
Maybe, a majority of voters in swing states won’t have gone cruzy. Maybe Georgians and North Carolinians will dump Trump.
I wouldn’t bet on it, though.
[1] The title is a direct quote from a paragraph I received when I was teaching Developmental English at Trident Technical College circa 1980. Here’s another direct quote from the same paragraph. “Vivid sex on my mind every day.”
[2] Can’t believe stodgy ol’ Microsoft Word doesn’t have “transporn” in their spelling dictionary. Tsk, tsk.
[3] In 2020, the United States experienced one of its most dangerous years in decades.
The number of murders across the country surged by nearly 30% between 2019 and 2020, according to FBI statistics. The overall violent crime rate, which includes murder, assault, robbery and rape, inched up around 5% in the same period.
But in 2023, crime in America looked very different.
“At some point in 2022 — at the end of 2022 or through 2023 — there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics.
In cities big and small, from both coasts, violence has dropped.
Observations from the Other Other Wes Moore on the Trump Harris Debate[1]
Back in the hypersensitive days of yore, Gary Hart’s extra marital shenanigans or Howard Dean’s oddly too exuberant “woo-hoo” could suddenly disqualify candidates from seeking their party’s presidential nomination.
To coin a phrase, “Them days is over.” Nowadays, paying hush money to porn stars and being convicted on thirty-four felony counts are no longer disqualifying.
Also, nowadays, online misinformation is taken as the gospel truth by simpleminded people.
For example, here are two direct quotes from Donald Trump from Tuesday’s debate, which, in a sane society, would in and of themselves end his campaign for the presidency..
Quote number one: “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”
This statement is so off-the-charts-creepy-Thanksgiving-dinner-bachelor-great-uncle-ish, that I can’t summon the energy to cough up from my dyspeptic spleen an HL Menckenesque screed of mockery because Trump’s claim is so batshit crazy that anything I’d come up with wouldn’t do justice to its absurdity.[2]
So here’s another quote: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” [i.e., Springfield, Ohio]
They, being Haitians, i.e., goggle-eyed zombies that at night wander from homestead to homestead abducting unfenced pets to feed on their brains.
An aside: Do white people hate people of color so much they don’t mind that this idiot is in charge of the nuclear codes?
When the debate started, I disapproved of Kamala’s first answer, an evasion of the question, a rehearsed opening salvo, a laundry list of proposals, and I thought Trump looked calm and uncharacteristically presidential at first. I was worried for a minute or two.
However, in no time. he was careening into nonsense while she was getting her groove, smiling incredulously in high-snark amusement while Trump bragged about how much Hungarian strongman Vicktor Orbán admired him.
His performance throughout the debate was the opposite of grace under pressure.
In other words, it was ugly – like his rallies, like his hair, like his suits, like his ties.
[1]For the record, I’m not the Governor of Maryland.
[2] I’d love some grammar maven to diagram that sentence.
Lines Stolen on a Gloomy Sabbath after Being Led Astray
Do you know the New York Times game Connections?
If not, in the game, you’re presented each morning with a square consisting of sixteen boxes, four up and four down. The object is to discover an affinity of four of the words/terms that appear in the boxes, in other words., to find a common thread. Essentially, if you correctly identify three groups, you win because the final four you didn’t choose, will form the last group.
Here’s today’s puzzle:
Frost Beach Pump Pope
Race Bishop Pet Shop Pound
Hardy Beat Prior Bake
Throb Bad Preheat Pastor
The first category that came to my mind was poets’ surnames.
(Robert) Frost
(Alexander) Pope
(Elizabeth) Bishop
(Ezra) Pound
(Thomas) Hardy
This seemed unfair because there are five obvious choices, but not to worry, poets weren’t a category, and I almost botched my 48-day streak, missing my first three guesses but somehow managed to get the blue category (the second to the hardest), then the green (the second easiest), and finally, the yellow, the easiest, third, which left the purples, the hardest, now a gimme.
So I decided in protest to construct a poem by lifting lines from the poets that appeared in the puzzle. Here it is:
Lines Stolen on a Gloomy Sabbath
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Down their carved names the rain drop ploughs.
One tear, like the bee’s sting, slips.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
And sport and flutter in the fields of air.
Sources:
Robert Frost, “Directive”
Thomas Hardy, “During Wind and Rain”
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Man Moth”
Ezra Pound, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”
Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock, Canto 1”
So thank you, whoever, constructs Connections, for leading me astray.
A Post Labor Day Meditation
I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.
WB Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”
It’s the Tuesday after Labor Day, and, as if on cue, the weather has turned a tad cooler. The trees outside my second story office are swaying, nodding, trembling in a brisk breeze. In the back yard, morning glory vines have carpeted the Asiatic jasmine with purple flowers while the untended Elaeagnus is broadening its realm and sprouting ugly baldish shoots skyward.
So this morning, armed with swing blade and hedge clippers, I braved the mosquitos to do a bit of long overdo maintenance, which oddly enough brought to mind Milton’s Paradise Lost where Eve and Adam are tasked by their Creator to tend to the garden’s growth. They must “lop” or “prune” or “bind,” but nevertheless “wanton growth derides” and the garden “tends to wilde” (sic). So, channeling her inner Adam Smith, Eve suggests she and Adam divide their labor, which leaves her isolated and vulnerable to the blandishments of Satan’s forked tongue and phallic charms:
[The Serpent] Address’d his way, not with indented wave,
Prone on the ground, as since, but on his reare,
Circular base of rising foulds, that tour’d
Fould above fould a surging Maze, his Head
Crested aloft and Carbuncle his Eyes;
With burnisht Neck of verdant Gold, erect[1]
Amidst his circling Spires . . .
This seduction, of course, leads to the fall of humankind, so farewell, delightful gardening, hail back-breaking farm labor.
Thus, Adam’s curse is twofold: death and labor.
Yet, I think that without meaningful labor we humans tend to wither, and how horrible a terrestrial eternal life would be! Just ask Petronius’s Sibyl:
I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.”[2]
Petronius, The Satyricon
Or the old man in Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”:
Thus I walk, like a restless wretch,
And on the ground, which is my mother’s gate,
I knock with my staff, both early and late,
And say, “Dear mother, let me in!”
Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale”
So, we should be thankful for Original Sin. Otherwise, we’d be stuck in a never-ending cycle of gardening, which would delight some of my friends, but is not to my taste.
I’ll give Wallace Stevens the last word:
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”
[1] Emphasis mine. But while I’m at it here below, shouldn’t some vice crusader alert Moms for Liberty that this filth is hiding in virtually every high school library in America!
[2] “The Sibyl of Cumae was a prophetess in service to Apollo and a great beauty. Apollo wished to take her as his lover and offered her anything she desired. She asked to live for as many years as there were grains in a handful of dust. Apollo granted her wish, but still she refused to become his lover. In time, the sibyl came to regret her boon as she grew old but did not die. She lived for hundreds of years, each year becoming smaller and frailer, Apollo having given her long life but not eternal youth. When Trimalchio speaks of her in the Satyricon, she is little more than a tourist attraction, tiny, ancient, confined, and longing to die.” from a hyperlink in windingway.org’s hypertext version of TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
Back Then, Right Now
When you face the preacher, there’s only one thing to say:
Just skeep-beep de bop-bop beep bop bo-dope skeetle-at-de-op-day!
Cab Calloway
Back Then
In the1950s version
of yesteryear
beatniks all hepped up
on goofballs
snapped their fingers
in the wee hours
while
Cub
Scout
den
mothers
slept.
Secondhand smoke thick as pre-EPA Pittsburg smog.
Dizzy, Bird, Trane,
blowing their horns,
Roy, Max, Billie Higgins beating their drums.
But then what?
The next day,
the unforgiving light,
and then another day . . .
Right Now
In the 2020s
not much linguistic abracadabra,
but on the other hand,
I can hook up with Lester Young and Lady Day
on YouTube
and snap my fingers
all hepped up on
my very own
garden variety
brain chemicals in a
smoke
free
space.
It ain’t all bad – not yet.
In the early ’80s, after my late wife Judy Birdsong landed a full-time position at Trident Technical College teaching psychology, I quit my po-dunk so-called assistant managerial position at Safeco[1] and decided to try my hand at writing short fiction full time. I had been selected to participate in a SC Arts Commission workshop headed by Blanch McCrary Boyd. Other writers in the workshop included Josephine Humphreys, Lee Robinson, Billy Baldwin, Harlan Greene, Steve Hoffius, Greg Williams, and Starkey Flythe, Jr., among others.
Through Starkey’s suggestion, Greg Williams and I attended the Sandhills Writing Conference at Augusta College in Georgia, where Starkey lived.[2] At the conference, I learned a lot from writers I’d never heard of before, but the most profound consequence of my attending was discovering Raymond Carver. Why I had not heard of Carver is puzzling; nevertheless, better late than never.
I found his short stories thrilling, well crafted in the Flannery O’Connor sense of every detail contributing to the stories’ central themes, for example, the long white beard of the blind man in “Cathedral” evoking associations with blind seer Tiresias as he guides the benighted first person narrator into the realm of light, the blind not leading the blind not into a ditch but into a state of enlightenment.
However, most of Carver’s stories are the opposite of uplifting, like “A Serious Talk,” the story of a post-divorce Boxing Day encounter in which an estranged husband attempts to make up with his wife after trying to burn her house down, or like “Popular Mechanics,” a story dramatizing a breakup that ends with the husband and wife engaging in a literal tug-of-war with their baby:
“Let go of him, he said.
“Don’t,” she said. “You’re hurting the baby,” she said.
“I’m not hurting the baby, he said
The kitchen window gave no light. In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder. She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.
“No!” she screamed just as her hands came loose.
He would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back. But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.
In this manner, the issue was decided.
Three years after Carver’s collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was published, Bruce Springsteen released his seventh album, Born In the USA. Aside from the sonic pleasures of Springsteen’s rock-‘n’-roll, I have always admired his story-telling talents, how he creates working class characters who come alive for the listener. He, too, like Carver, provides details that vivify his narratives, and as with Carver’s, Springsteen’s characters often don’t find redemption.
Here are the lyrics of “Downbound Train,” the final song of Side 1.
I had a job, I had a girl
I had something going, mister, in this world
I got laid off down at the lumber yard
Our love went bad, times got hard.
Now I work down at the carwash
Where all it ever does is rain
Don’t you feel like you’re a rider
On a downbound train?
She just said, “Joe, I gotta go
We had it once, we ain’t got it anymore.”
She packed her bags, left me behind
She bought a ticket on the Central Line.
Nights as I sleep, I hear that whistle whining
I feel her kiss in the misty rain,
And I feel like I’m a rider
On a downbound train.
Last night, I heard your voice
You were cryin’, cryin’, you were so alone
You said your love had never died.
You were waiting for me at home.
Put on my jacket, I ran through the woods.
I ran ’til I thought my chest would explode.
There in the clearing, beyond the highway
In the moonlight, our wedding house shone.
I rushed through the yard, I burst through the front door.
My head pounding hard, up the stairs I climbed.
The room was dark, our bed was empty.
Then I heard that long whistle whine
And I dropped to my knees, hung my head and cried.
Now I swing a sledgehammer on a railroad gang
Knocking down them cross ties, working in the rain.
Now don’t it feel like you’re a rider
On a downbound train?
But here’s something else. When Springsteen performs these songs, he transforms into the characters he sings about. Like a method actor, he summons memories that blur the distinction between rock star and the wretches he sings about. He feels what they feel, and it shows.
For example, note during the dream sequence of the clip below, at 1:55, how he trembles when he sings,
“Put on my jacket, I ran through the woods.
I ran ’til I thought my chest would explode.
There in the clearing, beyond the highway
In the moonlight, our wedding house shone.
I rushed through the yard, I burst through the front door.
My head pounding hard, up the stairs I climbed.
The room was dark, our bed was empty.
Then I heard that long whistle whine
And I dropped to my knees, hung my head and cried.”
I mean, I find this to be very moving. Like the blind man in “Cathedral,” Springsteen is creating empathy, creating someone besides myself I can feel sorry for.
Blessed be the artists who take us out of ourselves.
[1] Not the insurance company but a safety equipment distributor.
[2] Coincidentally, Greg won in a tie the second place short fiction award.
I have the slightest acquaintanceship with the novelist TC Boyle, whom I occasionally try to convince that his despair over what he sees as Trump’s inevitable election is unfounded, so I thought I’d summarize my arguments and share them with the public at large.
So, ladies and gentlemen, bulldogs and babies, here’s why Trump’s going to lose the 2024 election.
Technical Reasons
Donald Trump runs the Republican Party the way dictators run their fiefdoms, i.e., by purging professional bureaucrats and replacing them with family members, like daughter-in-law Laura, the head of the RNC, who would probably have trouble successfully running a laundromat, much less a complicated multi-state conglomeration. This means that the party doesn’t have the organizational apparatus in place to competently run a campaign, to assemble a 50-state ground game, for example.
A case in point, the piss poor vetting of JD Vance. To win the election, Trump needs to increase his appeal among suburban women, and he’s not going to win them over by selecting a frothing at the mouth misogynist like the Senator from Ohio[1]. In 2020, on Eric Weinstein’s podcast Portal, Vance agreed with his host that “postmenopausal females” exist just to help take care of children. I’m certain some slick communistic Hollywood commercial maker is crafting an attack ad quoting Vance as I type this. Hey, JD, this is late empire America not Medieval Slovenia.
With more states adding right-to-choose referenda – most recently Arizona and Missouri – more women will be inclined to vote. The women I hang with, postmenopausal and otherwise, don’t want some self-identified hillbilly or convicted rapist telling them what they can’t so with their bodies.
Perhaps the most salient technical reason that DJT is going to lose the election is that he seems incapable of attempting to broaden his coalition. All he does at these rallies is sling red meat to lost souls in attendance and promise massive tax cuts to CEOs who would rather increase their wealth than provide free school lunches to food-insecure children.
And by the way, as much as Donald would like the economy to crater before the election, with today’s strong retail sales report and a likely interest rate cut coming in September, that ain’t going to happen in the 90-odd days before the election.
Fundamental Reasons
Donald Trump’s always suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder; however, now that pathology is compounded by his diminished mental acuity, the product of decrepit age, to use WB Yeats’ unlovely term. Some also suggest that Trump is addicted to Adderall, which they blame for his periodic sniffing. Anyway, he is, as he said the other day, who he is.
No way he’ll quit obsessing over crowd sizes or cease with the adolescent nicknames, and as the election intensifies, his infirmities will be increasingly obvious to those paying attention.
Anyway, his song and dance is getting really stale, or as one wag put it on Twitter/X, Donald is in his fat Elvis stage. Diehard fans adore him, but who else enjoys being bombarded with a constant barrage of hyperbolic negativity – foreign hordes pouring into our cul-de-sacs, the future a Blade Runner hellscape if Kamala wins – a land in which saying Merry Christmas could land you in jail.
Only idiots believe shit like that.
Harris Walz
Trump could very well have defeated Biden, especially after the debate; however, now he’s running against a formidable ticket that exudes joy and points to a bright future where citizens collaborate to address problems, a ticket that doesn’t want to dismantle NATO, or coddle up to dictators.
Conclusion
So chins up, pinko-fascists, if we work hard to get out the vote and unloosen our purses and donate, we got this thing. I don’t foresee my deleting this post on November 7, the day Caroline and I are going to see fellow Trotskyite Sarah Silverman at the Charleston Music Hall.
So, chill thyselves.
[1] Note the authentic-sounding pundit-ese. – “the Senator from Ohio.”
My brain is like a Victorian attic – cluttered, too busy,
crisscrossed with cobwebs
and full of musty old books with colorful illustraytions.
(sic)
Let’s crank up the old Victrola.
“I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”
Floating like a vapor . . .
Consciousness,
burning,
burning like, like, a dying star,
blazing a circle seen
in this very room where
I remember that other darkened room,
my grandmother, Saisy Blanton,
her hair unbunned, grey as slate,
hanging past her waist,
a big woman squatting
over the bedpan like, like a human tent,
the metallic stream’s sizzle abating
tinkle, tinkle. Little
Boy Blue come . . . Lasssssssss-seeeeeeee!
Words accumulating like marbles in a bowl.
That tiny explosion when the TV’s clicked on.
A horizonal line on a black screen.
Crackle,
then Rin Tin Tin running.
The real dog Ace, a Doberman, outside
chained to a post.
lying in the stripe of a shadow
in the dirt under the eave
of the house that also serves as a service station.
Leah Palmer PreissThe Self-Help Book I Wish Someone Would Write
Even though I’ve written parodies of self-help books, I don’t think I’ve ever read a real one all the way through.[1] But, oh, lots of other people have. According to Worldmetrics.org, “the global self-help industry is estimated to be worth $11 billion,” and “58% of Americans have purchased a self-help product at least once.”
I guess one reason I’m not into self-help is that I’m in my seventies, retired, so not in the market to pick up “the 7 habits of highly effective people” nor do I have the energy to “accept nothing less than the life [I] deserve.”[2] Before retirement, revisiting the texts I was teaching left little time for recreational reading, so if I were going to slip a side book in between Crime and Punishment and The Sound and the Fury, it would be a contemporary novel like Cloud Atlas rather than the bogus-sounding The Influential Mind: What Our Brains Reveal About Our Power to Change Others.
There is, however, a topic I wish some self-help sage would address, i.e., helping wretches like me come to terms with “the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to,” in other words, how to help us forget those PTSD-inducing experiences.
My late wife Judy Birdsong used to complain about what she called my “demons,” for example, my habit of awakening in the dead of night screaming after a nightmare conjuring that time at age seven when I accidently saw my demented wheelchair-bound great aunt naked. Or my self-defeating habit of reexperiencing in a never-ending loop Lonnie Smith’s getting deked in the ’91 World Series and not scoring what would have been the winning run. Imagine being at your in-laws at the Thanksgiving table holding hands while the patriarch is praying out loud, but rather than joining in the amens, you blurt out, “Dammit, Lonnie, why did you stop running?”
I wish some self-help sage would write How to Turn Your Demons into a Flea Circus. Ideally, this book would demonstrate to the – to use a quaint term – neurotic reader that she has blown negative life events way out of proportion, that she should shrink those bloodsucking vampires of her imagination into fleas, absurd itty bitty insects performing amusing little tricks in a miniature circus mock-up complete with tiny trapezes and tightropes. In essence, to find the humor in horror.
How to Turn Your Demons into a Flea Circus would teach us how not to take ourselves so seriously. Rather than being blown out of proportion, these negative life events would be weighed against what TS Eliot called “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy” i.e. the historical tapestry of famine, war, and genocide.
Come to think of it, though it’s certainly not a quick fix, reading great literature is a way to tame those demons because it teaches, to quote Wesley Moore III, that “suffering doesn’t make you special; it makes you human.”[3]
I suspect that there’s not a quick fix. So, to quote the late, great Kurt Cobain, “never mind.”
I’ll leave you with this:
[1] Tolerating Upper Middle Class Northerners for Dummies, Crippnotes: Moore’s Treatise on Rearing Children in Late Empire America, and Mining Insomnia for Gold.
[2] Come to think of it, given some of the stupid, hurtful things I’ve done, I’m thankful that I’m not living the life I deserve.
[3] from “The Art of Grieving.”
photo credit Judy BirdsongFlailing
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can . . .
WB Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”
In the not so good ol’ days of yore,
the heyday
in my blood
untamed,
I’d tap out trite love poems
on a typewriter.
Frustrated, I might snatch the paper from the machine,
ball up the
the aborted Petrarchan
bellyaching,
and fling it across the room –
as if I were a protagonist in a film,
not a melodramatic nobody
all hepped up on hormones
sitting at a desk
flailing.
photo credit Judy Birdsong
Our Farcical Phase
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”
Karl Marx
Let me begin this scholarly screed by introducing you to some of the lovelies who frequent the Felliniesque get-togethers at Mar-a-Lago.
I mean, we’re in John Waters territory here, in the land of farce, grotesque exaggeration, caricature.
From John Water’s “Female Trouble”
Speaking of which, Thursday a week ago (18 July 2024) on the stage of the Republican National Convention, Hulk Hogan endorsed Donald Trump, “the quadrice-indicted twice-impeached once-convicted popular-vote-losing adderall-huffing insurrection-leading ear-diapering testimony-ducking judge-threatening lawyer-ignoring witness-tampering day-one-dictatoring disabled-veteran-dishonoring inheritance-squandering rube-fleecing clown-makeup-smearing language-mangling serial-sexual-predating draft-dodging casino-bankrupting butler-bullying daughter-perving hush-money-paying real-estate-scamming bone-spur-faking ketchup-hurling justice-obstructing classified-war-plan-thieving golf-cheating weather-map-defacing horse-paste-promoting paper-towel-flinging race-baiting tax-evading evidence-destroying charity-defrauding money-laundering diaper-filling 88-count 78-year-old fluorescent tangerine felony factory.”[1]
At the end of his speech, Hogan ripped off his shirt to reveal a tee emblazoned with
TRUMP
VANCE
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Not surprisingly, the literature of Nero’s Rome provides us with an ancient parallel to our current farcical state of affairs. Check out in your ample spare time The Satyricon by Petronius the Arbiter.[2] Here’s a still from Fellini’s cinematic treatment of Petronius’s classic, from the chapter known as “Trimalchio’s Dinner.”[3]
In his famous statement, “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” Marx was riffing on the Hegelian idea that history repeats patterns but in different ways, e.g., the French Revolution leading to Napoleon I (tragedy) and then to rise and fall of Napoleon III (farce).
Or, to draw a North American Parallel, the American Revolution is followed by the Civil War (tragedy) and then by the MAGA revolution (farce).
However, the thing is that when melodrama is exaggerated it becomes comic a la Reefer Madness, but when farce is overly exaggerated, it can become terrifying in a creepy clown sort of way.
I mean, imagine being trapped in an elevator with Don, Jr.’s fiancé Kimberly Guilfoyle! Imagine the future White House wedding.
Bring in some pillars and Cecile B DeMille.
[1] from the poison keyboard of Jeff Tiedrich.
[2] Which also provided TS Eliot with his epigraph for “The Waste Land.”
[3] More fun facts to know and share. Fitzgerald’s working title for The Great Gatsby was Trimalchio.
Grading Essays Back in the DaySmack Dab in the Middle of the Summer
I try not to take things for granted. For example, yesterday Caroline and I sludged on foot through heavy humidity to Planet Follywood for breakfast, and as my sunglasses fogged up like a time-lapsed cataract, I thought to myself how nice it is not to have to assess essays.
Of course, we’re smack dab in the middle of the summer, so I wouldn’t have any essays to grade anyway, but still, if I weren’t retired, I’d be lamenting that it’s really not the middle of the summer, given contemporary school schedules. The post Labor Day onset of school has gone the way of the hand-cranked eggbeater, a relic of the predigital era. I recently overheard someone say that school this year starts on August 7th, which is way too early — way, way too early.
Of course, the very beginning of school does have its charms, like meeting new colleagues and students, and the welcome-back faculty and staff cocktail party is fun, but the next thing you know, you’re slogging through over-annotated summer reading books and their accompanying journals. More than any other project, including research papers, I hated assessing those annotated novels and journals, fussing over inelegant quotation integration, encouraging students to break quotes into small units and imbed them into analytical prose.
For example,
Not: “Moore juxtapositions descriptions of impoverished Camilla Creel and Jill Birdsong during Activity Period. Camilla has no friends. ‘As usual Camilla Creel doesn’t move from her seat when the bell rings for Activity Period. The rest of the girls in her home economics class can’t wait to put away the dress patterns they’re cutting out and stow those scissors so they can rush out into the teeming halls where boys cut fool and girls gossip.’ Compare this with ‘Jill Birdsong has made her way to the Junior Civitan meeting in Miss McGee’s room.'”
[vigorous yawn]
But Instead: Moore adds another set of foils to underscore differences among the characters, in this case Camilla Creel and Jill Birdsong. At Activity Period, friendless Camilla ‘doesn’t move from seat when the bell rings,’ unlike Jill Birdsong, who is making ‘her way to the Junior Civitan meeting in Miss McGee’s room’ to interact with her peers in choosing a charitable project for an African American nursing home. Ironically, Camilla is so impoverished that her family lives in an abandoned school bus, but to the rest of the school, she’s essentially invisible.”[1]
[lesser yawn]
So, my mid-summer Island life isn’t darkened by dreading upcoming responsibilities. Now I can complain about the heat and tourists walking five abreast on Hudson Street instead of interminable faculty meetings and the annual blood borne pathogen tutorial and accompanying test.
[cue Alice Cooper]: “School’s out forever.” The back-to-school sales no longer produce sighs.
[1] from Today, Oh Boy, (121-3). BTW, I realize it’s obnoxious to market my novel like this. But buy it, dammit. Here’s a LINK.
Not Missing Misbehaving
I don’t remember the last time
I cranked down a backseat window
and stuck my head out into
the wind shoosh of a moving vehicle
down a suburban street
back in the day before seatbelts,
shouting some silly something like “E=MC2”
to startled pedestrians
just because I felt like it,
so it’s been a while since I hollered out
of a car window, misbehaving in public.
Private misbehavior I’ve also been guilty of,
like calling bullshit on some shared Biblical absurdity
at a cocktail party in Atlanta or Charleston,
embarrassing my spouse, when I should
have dismissed the chemical spritz
of the believer and not call
attention to myself.
I’m guilty of lesser sins as well
like being the last to leave the party,
absentmindedly belching after a meal,
checking my phone mid-conversation.
But there’s no fun in any of that,
no fun in the sudden oath, the blows and fall
of anger, but I do confess I still
(in my acetic heart) appreciate
the jiu jitsu of a bitchy bon mot
done up in Oscar Wilde style,
knocking a snoot down a
peg or two or three.
So I’m laying off misbehaving, y’all,
heeding the call,
but not exactly minding my own beeswax it seems.
Where to Begin
How about with invasion: muskets versus bows and arrows? Wind-borne lamentations. Later, clinking chains, songs of woeful repetition. The worst kind of karma, evil spreading out in concentric circles, dispersing like an oil spill, sullying every man, woman, and child.
This degradation is Faulkner’s great theme: the darkness of terrible wrongs blighting the Southern landscape, passing from generation to generation, destroying both the rich and the poor, Joe Christmas and Quentin Compson.
These shadows—genocide, slavery, the War—incubate the monsters of Southern Gothic literature: incestuous aristocrats, necrophiliac halfwits, sadistic Alabama sheriffs—not to mention the supernatural, hoodoo and haints.
When I was eleven or twelve, I asked our housekeeper Alice who was part Cherokee and part African if she believed in ghosts, and she told me that she had seen her father standing in her backyard the night after his death. We were sitting in my mother’s 1960 Ford Fairlane in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly in Summerville, South Carolina. I could see wonder and dread on Alice’s face when she told me about that visitation. She was tall, slender, graceful, light- skinned with high cheekbones, but always wore a somewhat sad expression. I have no idea how old she was.
The dog was howling, she said. The dog had seen her papa’s ghost as well.
The supernatural is one strain of Southern Gothicism; however, the suicide hanging in the attic, the alcoholic great aunt who gave birth to the idiot child buried in the backyard is another. These more mundane instances of Southern Gothicism are even more terrifying because they’re not merely figments of superstitious imaginations, but flesh-and-blood monstrosities. William Faulkner’s Miss Emily Grierson and Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit did not materialize out of thin air; their prototypes, walking and talking lost causes, traveled the streets of Oxford and Milledgeville.
Over the course of her long life, Shirley Gibson, a Charleston institution, has amassed an enormous number of friends from every social strata, from countesses to street musicians. Also, she has mentored dozens of young people including the artist Shephard Fairy and the novelists Katie Crouch and Grady Hendrix. Having taught art at Porter-Gaud School for four decades, her house on Trumbo Street features an array of colorful ceramics she has crafted in an Italian style. A somber portrait of her great grandmother hangs in the downstairs parlor, but the house, despite its age, projects a youthful vibe. Associating with young people keeps you young, they say, and Shirley remains young at eighty-something.
Some of Shirley’s people come from Mississippi, the birthplace of the blues and the former stomping grounds of William Faulkner himself, whose novels take place in the imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha, modeled on Lafayette County and its county seat Oxford, Faulkner’s hometown. He spent the majority of his life populating Yoknapatawpha with characters who span the entire history of Mississippi, starting with native inhabitants of the early 19th Century, through the antebellum period, the War itself, and its awful aftermath — characters like Chief Issetibbeha, the planter Thomas Sutpen, Bayard Sartoris, Sam Fathers, Ike McCaslin, Joe Christmas, Benji Compson, Flem Snopes, Dilsey Gibson . . .
Mississippi is also where the novelist Walker Percy and his brothers LeRoy and Phinizy moved after they were orphaned in the 1930s. Their adopted town Greenville calls itself “the heart and soul of the Delta,” and it was there that Walker Percy became lifelong friends with Shelby Foote, the novelist and chronicler of the Civil War. As young men, they embarked on a pilgrimage to Oxford to meet Faulkner. Although Foote and Faulkner engaged in a spirited conversation, Percy was so awestruck that he was unable to utter more than a couple of words.
Shelby Foote and Walker Percy
A few years ago at one of Shirley Gibson’s dinner parties, I sat at the dining room table next to Walker Percy’s niece Melissa. Although Melissa didn’t delve into her family’s “ancient history,” her great grandfather, John Walker Percy, committed suicide in 1917 when Uncle Walker was one, and Walker’s father, LeRoy Hope Percy, took his own life when Walker was thirteen. After her husband’s death, Walker’s mother, Martha Susan Phinizy, moved to Athens, Georgia, with her three sons to live with her mother.
At the dinner table on Trumbo Street, Melissa told the story of her grandmother’s death, how she drove her car off a county bridge into a creek with Melissa’s father in the front seat. Her father Phin, only nine years old at the time (six years younger than his brother Walker), somehow managed to extricate himself from the sinking automobile, but his mother would or could not escape. Uncle Walker, she told us, regarded the death as a suicide.
After crawling his way up the bank, her father Phin waited on the side of a desolate Georgia dirt road in the middle of nowhere, his mother by now a corpse in the submerged car. He sat there alone for twenty minutes. Melissa said that the next car that came by was Uncle Walker’s. They, along with brother LeRoy, were now the orphans of suicides, fortunate to find a good home with their first cousin once removed, William Alexander Percy, a bachelor lawyer and a poet, but the orphans of suicides, nevertheless. At the time of this telling, her father was still alive—though not alive—in a nursing home, one of the living dead. In the Percys’ case, Southern Gothicism was not merely a literary genre, but a way of life.
Long Ago Last Summer, a collection, short fiction, poetry, and essays, forms a sort of a mosaic of my life. It’s a guided tour, if you will, of the haunted houses and cobwebbed attics of my youth. You will encounter a collection of characters: village idiots, spinster aunts, hard core alcoholics, and at least one mass murderer, Pee Wee Gaskins, who picked me up hitchhiking in 1971. Each piece can stand alone, so you can skip around. However, if you read the chapters in chronological order, you will grow up and grow old with me, as it were. For example, the first two stories in the collection, “Those Who Think, Those Who Feel” and “Airwaves,” are highly fictionalized accounts of portions of my parents’ lives. The last entries deal with my wife Judy’s death and my finding new late life love.
Although coming of age in the South in the post-World-War-II era could be very unpleasant—not to mention dangerous—it wasn’t all bleakness and mayhem. We had more than our share of laughs, and despite the ignorance and bigotry and anger manifest throughout our history, including the present with the MAGA movement, I’m nevertheless proud to claim the South as my homeland.
After all, if it weren’t for Blacks and Scotch Irish rustics, American culture would be dull indeed.
For whatever reason, this summer I’ve started missing teaching. I have an acquaintance, a very intelligent and accomplished young woman who is trilingual, spent a couple of years in Africa with the Peace Corps but who now suffers from what I’ll call low-grade ennui, her post jungle job not as satisfying as it seemed on paper. I see her occasionally at Chico Feo, and I ask her how her ennui is going, I’ve also been reciting snippets of poems dealing with profound boredom, riffing on Baudelaire, Yeats, Eliot, Roethke, Berryman, and Bukowski.
For example, J. Alfred Prufrock is no stranger to tedium.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
She enjoys these snippets, leans in so she can hear Prufrock above piped-in music.
Contemporary culture is so impoverished. TikTok, Insta, Facebook, et. al offer quick fixes to sate the need for constant stimulation, but they’re about as nourishing as cardboard. It’s not only fun but also life enhancing turning young people on to what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said.” As a teacher, I especially enjoyed explaining how the elements of cultures reinforce each other and how the best art incorporates contemporary science and history into its mix: Planck and Einstein + WW1 + Freud = Modernism.
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
So yeah, I miss that (but not meetings, emails, EpiPens, essay grading, overwrought parents, dress code violations, and all that life-negating rigmarole.
What brought this nostalgia to mind was watching last night a video of Elvis Costello in 1978 performing “Watching the Detectives” in Kohn, Germany. We had a tradition that if every student in my class scored a 100 on a reading or vocabulary quiz, we’d have what I called a “Festival” and turn them on to some really wonderful music videos like Etta James and Dr. John performing “”I’d Rather Be a Blind Girl” or the Pogues doing “Dirty Old Town.” I considered it not a waste of time but an enrichment of their lives.[1]
“Watching the Detectives” is an homage to film noir, and the lyrics mimic a screenplay:
Long shot at that jumping sign
Invisible shivers running down my spine
Cut to baby taking off her clothes
Close-up of the sign that says, ‘We never close’
He snatched at you and you match his cigarette
She pulls the eyes out with a face like a magnet
I don’t know how much more of this I can take
She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake.
And the music that supports these lyrics percolates ska-like. It’s such a good song, and I wish I could share it with someone and explain it to them[2] why it’s relevant.
[1] Also, it was a huge incentive to read the assignments.
[2] Yeah, I know, I know, “them” should be a singular pronoun.
Thursday night, our friend David Boatwright met Caroline and me at the Terrace Theater to check out the Ethan Hawke Flannery O’Connor biopic Wildcat.[1] It’s gotten mixed reviews—hovers around 5 on the Rotten Tomato ten point scale— but I wonder if to fully appreciate the film you need to be familiar with O’Connor’s work. Throughout the action, Hawke and fellow screenwriter Shelby Gaines intersperse fiction from O’Connor’s canon into the story of her adulthood, but if you’re unfamiliar with her stories — e.g., “Parker’s Back” or “Revelation”— you very well may find the film quilt-like, a series of narratives stitched together that don’t create a comprehensive or unified overview. Brandon Yu, who reviewed the movie for New York Times, complains, “Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.” However, if you’ve read the stories, this is not the case. You see how they came to be via her daily interactions with others and understand how the stories embody her Catholic vision.
I don’t think the Hawkes (Ethan’s daughter Maya plays O’Connor and his wife Rachel is credited as a producer) necessarily set out to produce a fully integrated masterpiece like Citizen Kane but rather made the movie as an homage to Flannery, an artist of the highest caliber who simultaneously can make you laugh out loud and feel pathos. Maya Hawke discovered O’Connor in high school, used O’Connor’s Prayer Journal for her audition monologue at Julliard, and essentially became obsessed with the writer.
I can empathize. I’ve learned a lot from Flannery O’Connor about writing fiction. Not only that, but her stories are so fun to teach, are so well crafted with each element of the plot — name selection, physical description, characterization, symbolism, and tone—linked to a common central theme: in a Catholic universe underserving people can be granted grace, even in the seemingly godforsaken Southern Gothic world of rural Georgia.
Take the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” for example, which dramatizes a family vacation where a mother, father, two bratty children, an infant, and a grandmother are murdered by an escaped convict called the Misfit. Yet I’d classify the story as a comedy, both in the literary sense and also in the Medieval sense of “The Divine Comedy” where a soul moves from darkness to light. The grandmother in the story is a self-centered pain-in-the-ass who essentially causes the wreck that allows the Misfit to murder the family and steal their car. However, at the very end of the story, grace descends upon the old woman when she sees how miserable the Misfit is and tries to comfort him:
[The Misfit’s] voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
illustration by Jeffrey Smith
Note that her “legs are crossed,” an obvious Christian symbol, “under her like a child,” which suggests innocence regained, and that she is “smiling up at a cloudless sky.” In O’Connor’s Catholic universe, this amounts to a happy ending for the Grandmother’s death comes at a moment of redemption. This message is no doubt alien to most contemporary US citizens; however, as the movie makes abundantly clear, she wasn’t writing for the materialistic middle class.
“Either one is serious about salvation or one is not,” O’Connor writes in Mystery and Manners. “And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.”
For me a movie is a successful if I think about it a lot after seeing it. In the wee hours this morning, as I wandered the barren moors of my insomnia, I thought about how the subdued colors of the film in general and threadbare genteel shabbiness of her home in specific underscore the profound melancholy of Flannery O’Connor’s life. She had studied at the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop, hung out with Robert Lowell and Katherine Anne Porter, but after developing lupus was exiled from a literacy life in the North to a suffocatingly provincial existence on a farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, There she worked in pain and physical decline until her death at 39, all the while being totally unappreciated by her homefolk who found her fiction to be inaccessible and life-negating.
My only gripe is that the Hawkes’ depiction of O’Connor lacks the dry humor that she demonstrated in her letters. Maya Hawkes’ acting is superb, but she portrays O’Connor as sort of a rigid, humorless young woman on the spectrum whereas in reality O’Connor was fun to be with. I once had dinner with the late Ashley Brown, a professor at the University of South Carolina, who was close friends with Flannery and who appears often in her collected letters. I asked him if she were as severe a Catholic as the stories suggested, and he said, “Oh, no, not at all. She was delightful, very witty, fun to be with.” Then he whipped out photo albums featuring pictures he had taken of her with her peacocks. She was often beaming in those photos.
Nevertheless, by external standards, her life was bleak, and the film’s underscoring of that fact has made me appreciate her achievement even more. To see her alchemizing on screen the characters from her daily life into the immortals of her stories is very satisfying indeed. I also appreciate the way she didn’t outline her stories but had them unspool spontaneously from her subconscious, which is the way I also write fiction.
I’ll leave you with this delightful seduction scene from “Good Country People” where in a hayloft Manly Pointer, a door-to-door Bible salesman, demands that one-legged hot-to-trot nihilist Hulga Joy Hopewell say the words “I love you” to satisfy a mechanical formula he insists must be followed as a prerequisite for sex:
The boy’s look was irritated but dogged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care a thing about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don’tcher?” and he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with kisses until she said, “Yes, yes.”
“Okay then,” he said, letting her go. “Prove it.”
She smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had seduced him without even making up her mind to try. “How?” she asked, feeling that he should be delayed a little.
He leaned over and put his lips to her ear. “Show me where your wooden leg joins on,” he whispered.
I often say that my novel Today, Oh Boy has the most unerotic sex scene in all of American literature, but now, rereading the above, I take it back.
[1] Although better known in Charleston a muralist and a painter, David is also a filmmaker, and sitting next to a filmmaker made me pay closer attention to technique, which is a good thing.
America, Good Luck by David Boatwright
Hey, I got a beef with whoever writes the narratives of the PBS series Nature. It really bugs me when the narrator – and it happens all the time – says stuff like the panther chameleon’s eyes have been engineered by nature to rotate independently as they stalk their prey.
Panther Chameleon by Robbie Labanowski
Note to the science writers at Nature: check out Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. Natural Selection ≠ Engineering. Natural Selection is a horrifically random process that includes genetic mutations, asteroids colliding with the Earth, etc. Your use of the word engineering suggests the decrepit teleological intelligent-design argument (as if having an asteroid smack into the planet is an efficient way for an engineer to facilitate the rise of mammals).
I’ll give Robert Frost the last word on this topic:
Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth —
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth —
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small.
Now, that’s what I call engineering: a Petrarchan sonnet that through pattern debunks the argument from design!
Hey, what’s all this negativity, mon? It’s Bloomsday, for Joyce’s sake and Father’s Day to boot, not to mention Sherry Browne’s birthday.
Let’s not squander this day bellyaching. Why not in honor of the Master spend your day wandering the streets of Folly, breakfasting on Guinness and kidney, writing love letters using a nom de plume, hitting a funeral, lunching in a pub on cucumber sandwiches, visiting a library and then another pub, releasing some tensions at the beach, getting into an altercation with a one-eyed anti-semite, dropping in on a maternity ward and then a brothel, bringing home a troubled young man, peeing together in your garden as you bid him adieu, then crawling into bed with your wife who has fond memories of you in your youth.
O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Hell yes!
Cheers, oh my brothers and sisters! Cheers!
art by Sherry Browne
A year or so ago, Buxton Books invited me to recite a favorite poem for their on-line series, “The Power of Poetry” as part of the promotion for my novel Today, Oh Boy. However, I don’t think the clip was ever posted, so in honor of Yeats’ 159th birthday, I’m posting it here. The text of poem itself is below the video.
We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’
And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There’s many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.’
I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’
We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
Of course, I’m not amazed that Donald Trump is thoroughly corrupt (from the split ends of that plasticine confection he considers hair, to the soulless soles of his feet), nor am I amazed that millions of lost souls worship him as a Jim-Jones-like demigod, consumed as they are with envy and anger, the two least enjoyable of the deadly sins. What does amaze me is how the leaders of the Republican party, people who should know better – like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, for example – kill off their better angels to keep in the not-so-good graces of this totally despicable Mammon-worshiping, porn-star bonking, delusional, self-pitying piece of shit.
Yesterday, seemingly seconds after Trump’s conviction, Speaker Johnson was assailing the verdict, Mitch McConnell claiming that the charges should never have been brought against him, and Elise Stefanik prevaricating that Biden’s corrupt Justice Department (who, by the way, is prosecuting Biden’s son) is to blame for the unjust prosecution of a presidential candidate for falsifying business records to conceal a payoff to a porn star he had sex with during the first month of his third son’s life.
I’ll concede that the so-called hush money trial is the least nefarious of Trump’s several indictments, not nearly as bad as illegally hoarding nuclear secrets in his bathroom, nor as bad as attempting to cajole Georgia’s secretary of state into stealing enough votes to overturn a legal election, and certainly not as bad as encouraging an insurrection in an attempt to disrupt the transition of power.
However, a jury of Trump’s peers, fellow New Yorkers – one of whom gets her news from Fox – convicted him after carefully weighing the evidence.
Yet, there’s no guarantee, given the inequities of the Electoral College, that Trump won’t be reelected, that he will once again raise his right hand and swear to uphold the Constitution so he can begin organizing his mass deportations, constructing detention camps, and putting into action his campaign of Putin-like retribution.
After all, Nikki Haley is voting for him.
Having spent a portion of this gorgeous late May day in the cool sunshine of an alfresco cantina where shadows danced on the bar while I slurped down a mahi taco and a couple of session IPAs, I have turned my back on the blue skies overhead and retreated into my ill-lit drafty garret to listen to “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” The song takes up the entire side of the second record of Blonde on Blonde. It’s an eleven minute and twenty-three second paean for a lover, perhaps Joan Baez, maybe ex-wife Sara[1]
I still love the song, despite no longer being a romantic in the Percy Byssshe Shelly sense, because the lyrics are so well-crafted that they can almost stand alone naked on a page without musical accompaniment.
Dylan is the master of the AAAAAAB rhyme scheme, a rarity both in poetry and song lyrics. Dig this:
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.[2]
“Sad Eyed Lady” consists of four quatrains with an AAAB rhyme scheme, with a chorus appearing after every second quatrain. (see below)
As I listened to the song on my iMac, I read the lyrics, and much to my delight, I discovered for the first time that in the last line of each quatrain, the penultimate word rhymes with the penultimate word of the previous quatrain.
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
Who among them do they think could carry you?
See and hear for yourself. (I’ve bolded the penultimate words).
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross and your voice like chimes
Oh, who do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well-protected at last
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk and your face like glass
Who could they get to carry you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I put them by your gate
Or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
With your sheets like metal and your belt like lace
And your deck of cards missing the jack and the ace
And your basement clothes and your hollow face
Who among them did think he could outguess you?
With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims
And your matchbook songs and your gypsy hymns
Who among them would try to impress you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I put them by your gate,
Or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
The kings of Tyrus, with their convict list
Are waiting in line for their geranium kiss
And you wouldn’t know it would have happened like this
But who among them really wants just to kiss you?
With your childhood flames on your midnight rug
And your Spanish manners and your mother’s drugs
And your cowboy mouth and your curfew plugs
Who among them do you think could resist you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate,
O sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
Oh, the farmers and the businessmen, they all did decide
To show you where the dead angels are that they used to hide
But why did they pick you to sympathize with their side?
How could they ever mistake you?
They wished you’d accepted the blame for the farm
But with the sea at your feet and the phony false alarm
And with the child of the hoodlum wrapped up in your arms
How could they ever have persuaded you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man’s come
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate,
Or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
With your sheet metal memory of Cannery Row
And your magazine husband who one day just had to go
And your gentleness now, which you just can’t help but show
Who among them do you think would employ you?
Now you stand with your thief, you’re on his parole
With your holy medallion in your fingertips now enfold
And your saintlike face and your ghostlike soul
Who among them could ever think he could destroy you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate,
Or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
[1] I did have a galley-review of Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric appear on the massive Dylan site Hard Rain but no comments or emails were forthcoming from the future Nobel laureate.
[2] On the song “Sara<” he writes ” Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/
Writin’ “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” for you.”
[3] “It’s Alright, Ma, I’m Only Bleeding.”
Like its older sibling A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s 2022 novel The Candy House consists of a series of interlinked short stories written in various voices featuring a host of characters we meet and reencounter at various unchronological stages of their lives. Its narrative structure is in a sense digitalized, modeled on various Internet modes such as Facebook, email, texting, and constructs a sort of narrative labyrinth of mirrors where the virtual is privileged over the corporeal.
Or to paraphrase the abstract of my son’s PhD dissertation[1], The Candy House (and other contemporary novels of its ilk) explore how new media technologies affect psychological and sociological structures and blur the boundaries “between history and fiction, physical and virtual spaces, as well as public and private notions of the self.”
The novel demonstrates that not only has the richness of raw “undigitalized” reality been diminished by our habit of staring into screens, but also that “authenticity” becomes incredibly problematic as we scroll through the filtered sunsets captured by our Facebook friends whose profile pictures have also been filtered.
A plot summary is virtually (pun intended) impossible. But here’s a stick figure drawing.
Miranda Kline, an anthropologist and the ex-wife of a famous record producer Lou Kline, writes a book called Patterns of Affinity that creates an algorithm that explains what makes people like and trust one another. Based on Kline’s theory, Bix Bouton creates a technology that allows humans to upload their consciousnesses to a cloud and starts a company called Mandala where you can pay to have your consciousness uploaded and then tap into it to relive your past. Also, you can pay to have access to anyone else’s consciousness who has agreed to buy a subscription to Collective Consciousness.[2]
As far as point-of-view is concerned, now even first person narrators can be omniscient. For instance, Lou Kline’s eldest daughter Charlene, after accessing Collective Consciousness, relates her father’s introduction to cannabis during an expedition into a forest, which took place when she was only six.
Other characters, often interrelated by kinship or friendship, find themselves attempting to experience authenticity. One character works at a startup where his job is to reduce possible events in fiction to algebraic equations, e.g. “(a (+ drink) x (action of throwing drink) = a (- drink) + i/2.”
Another chapter is narrated in the second person by a chip implanted in a spy’s brain to provide instructions during a dangerous mission:
Spread apart your toes and
gently reinsert the plug, now
magnetically fused to
your subject’s phone, into your
Universal Port.
Yet another chapter consists of texts featuring a medley of characters attempting to set up an interview with a famous fading movie star.
The Candy House is quite a tour de force.
I wonder, though – despite its brilliant polyphonic orchestration of narrators’ voices, its imaginative story telling techniques, and its construction of an all too real Brave New World – if the novel itself abstracts itself from the corporeal richness of the very best of literary fiction.
It’s a bit of a paradox: the fragmentation of its narrative mode, which reflects the shattered lives of its characters, makes reading the novel a mental exercise of sorts, something akin to solving a puzzle, which abstracts the reader from the characters. But then again, this may be Egan’s point: people have become, to riff on my main man Will Shakespeare, walking shadows, or better yet, walking holograms.
Here’s a character cloud created by someone who goes by u/astroloveuz on Reddit.
[1] Wesley Edward Moore
[2] Bix owns a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses that he treats as a sort of talisman.
In the last twenty or so years, parents have been opting for phonetic spellings for their children’s names, which often increases the number of letters needed to convey the sound of the name. The other day in the obituaries I ran across a survivor, a grandchild, whose first name was Kennidee. (I’m not sure of the pronunciation: Is it Kennedy or Ken-a-DEE?). I’m assuming Kennidee’s a girl because these cutesy spellings almost invariably are assigned to female names – Ashlee, Emmalee, Brandee, etc. Also, sometimes parents invert the vowels E and A to create a sort of Celtic look, rendering Haley as Haeley, for example.
Obviously, it’s none of my business what parents name their progeny, and I’m not claiming that my family’s names are particularly stellar. My maternal great grandparents, David and Minnie Fairey Hunt, named their daughters Ruby and Pearl, and Aunt Ruby named her daughter Zilla. Sister Pearl christened one of her sons Fairey, so his name ended up being Fairey Goodman, which sounds like a character in a nursery rhyme fantasy.[1] My own grandmother, the younger sister of Ruby and Pearl, was named Hazelwood Ursula Hunt, a mouthful, if you ask me, which became even more of a mouthful after she wed Jerome Kistler Blanton and became Hazelwood Ursula Hunt Blanton.[2]
Lewis David Hunt, born 1863; Minnie Anna Fairey Hunt, born 1873
Given that I’m a fiction writer, I’m in the business of naming characters, and for me it’s a lot of fun because I try to imbue my characters’ names with symbolic meaning. For example, I tagged the protagonists of a break-up story Abby Huffington and Ashton Gray, she quick to take offense, he as drab as sackcloth. In Today, Oh Boy, the main character’s Rusty Boykin’s name weds incompetence and immaturity, and conveniently Boykin is a traditional South Carolina surname.
His foil and eventual friend’s name is Ollie Wyborn, a transplant from Minnesota with Nordic roots. Ollie is an intellectual, a questioner, so I chose Wyborn to suggest that Ollie possessed a philosophical bent.
Anyway, it must be nice to have a distinctive name. For example, if you google Wesley Moore you get hundreds of thousands of hits, from the current governor of Maryland to Wesley Charles Moore serving 30 years in Michigan for child molestation. Wes Moore is about as distinctive a name as John Smith when you get down to it.
But I’m not complaining. I grew up around the corner from a girl named April Lynn Paris.
[1] I have a copy of the Fairey family tree. The first American Fairey’s name was John, born in Ireland in 1720 and killed at the Battle of Hanging Rock in 1780 during the American Revolution. When I first visited Ireland, I told the proprietor of the B&B where we were staying that some of my ancestors came from Ireland, the Faireys, and he looked at me as if I were daft and said, “Now, there’s a name I’ve not heard of.”
[2] Grandmama Hazel wanted to name my mother Barbara Ursula, but the doctor talked her into shortening it to Bobbi Sue, a name my mother detested because she considered it way too country cute.
Like a shortwave radio attempting to tune into a remote overseas station, my threadbare synapses sometimes spit out static as I try to remember the point of story I’m trying to tell.
Maybe it’s the cannabis, maybe the onset of dementia, or to harken back to Big Brother and the Holding Company, “a combination of the two.”
For the uninitiated, “A Combination of the Two” is the opening track of Big Brother’s album Cheap Thrills featuring the incomparable Janis Joplin. I had always assumed that the song was a live recording, but as it turns out, the audience noise and Sam Andrew’s introduction of the band, “Four gentlemen and one great, great broad,” have been dubbed in to create the illusion of a live recording. Well, it certainly had me fooled for over a half century.
BTW, the great Robert Crumb did the cover art.
In my novel Today, Oh* Boy, as Will Waring is popping Cheap Thrills into his van’s 8-track tape player, he says out loud to himself, “Four gentleman and one great, great broad.” Recently, when Rodgers Nichols interviewed me on his podcast Cover to Cover*, he mentioned the allusion, said as a former radio DJ he really appreciated it.[1]
Anyway, what was my point?
Oh, yeah, forgetfulness.
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
“Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins
[1] You can catch the interview HERE.
Today in Manhattan in a dingy 14th floor courthouse with inadequate heating, lawyers will present their opening arguments in Donald Trump’s first trial of 2024. He’s accused, of course, of falsifying business records to hide $130,000 paid to a porn actress so that the American people would not find out that he and she had engaged in adulterous sex during his first run for the presidency.
Pundits speculate that the prosecution’s first witness will be David Pecker.
David Pecker was then the publisher of the National Enquirer. When I was a child, I used to peek at the Enquirer at the magazine rack at Kramer’s Pharmacy in segregated Summerville, South Carolina. Back then, it published photographs of splattered suicides who had leapt from high rise windows and other violent images. I confess I’ve always had a morbid imagination.
This dark memory has engaged in the jukebox of my subconscious Peggy Lee’s rendition of “Is That All There Is,” a sad, decadent tune that sounds as if originated in a cabaret in Berlin during the Weimer Republic. I suspect that Tom Waits loves this song.
To exorcise the tune, I’ve gone to YouTube and discovered this wonderful video of Bette Midler covering the song. Here it is.
And also dig this: Tom and Bette doing a duet in which virtually every line of the song is a cliche.
I’d call this a successful exorcism.
Dr. Gregory Williams interviewed Sunday Night 21 April at 9:00 PM Eastern Time on his pod cast Breaking the Silence.
Here’s the link: https://podcast.app/breaking-the-silence-april-e350451300
A veteran who has interviewed over 800 authors, Rodger is a real pro. I’m fortune to have had the opportunity to discuss my novel “Today, Oh Boy” with him.
Years ago I saw Barbara Walters interview Jack Nicholson on one of her specials. The British actor Hugh Grant had just been busted for solicitation, so Barbara asked Jack why someone as goodlooking and famous and rich as Hugh Grant would require the services of prostitutes.
Jack donned his patented devilish grin and said, “Peculiarities. Peculiarities.”
Which brings us to Louis CK.
I first caught Louis on the Letterman Show back in the days of VCRs when I prerecorded Dave for civilized midmorning viewing. If I remember correctly, Louis didn’t do standup that night but walked over and took a seat next to Dave. Louis started riffing on the entitlement of whiny airline passengers who carp about minor inconveniences while soaring o’er the plains of Nebraska where wagon trains once rambled through “Injun” territory in months-long treks.
“You’re sitting in a seat in the air, for Christsakes!”
[c.f. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.]
Earlier this evening, perched on a barstool at Chico Feo, I almost texted my wife Caroline, who is in New York City, to complain that my boredom was approaching John Berryman red alert levels:
Dream Song 14
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
Who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, and gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself and its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
John Berryman
But I didn’t want to darkcloud any fun Caroline was having, and anyway, I got into a conversation with a travelling nurse named Elise who is doing preop duty for a couple of months at Roper Hospital where my late wife Judy Birdsong stayed every other two weeks getting 96 hours of continuous chemo during the first stint of her cancer. Yet, the thing is, I don’t have a negative feeling about Roper. I told Elise how I had come to appreciate the nurses there. They were absolutely wonderful. They knew/know life from a perspective of pain. They are brothers and sisters of mercy.
I asked her what she was reading. She said she didn’t enjoy reading, had never enjoyed reading, that she would rather “watch things,” so of course I told her I was novelist, which elicited headshaking and a rueful chuckle.
We continued to make small talk. I asked her superficial questions about her life, thinking I might create a character like her for a minor role in some future fiction, maybe a confidant. I appreciated her forthrightness.[1]
On my walk home, Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues” got stuck in my head, so I started singing it, walking along singing, checking out the afternoon’s fading, shimmering, almost nervous sunlight. When I-and-I am afflicted by these songs looping in my head, the only cure is to listen to the song as a form of exorcism.
Like Louis CK’s disgruntled flier, I had forgotten that I live in an age of miracles. Now I am sitting in front of my computer listening to Bob sing “Tom Thumb’s Blues” and reading the lyrics against the static background of the iconic Highway 61 Revisited album cover that – look – I’ve conjured from a Cloud and presented below.
But now I realize that for fifty years I have misheard the lyrics. For example, the first line isn’t “When you’re down in Wallace”; it’s “When you’re down in Juarez,” which makes a lot more since given that “Sweet Melinda speaks good English” and “the authorities just sit around and boasts.” In other words, the song is about being down and out in Mexico. I also mistook “Rue Morgue Avenue” for “Remark Avenue,” which I sort of like better. My favorite line from the song is “Well, I started off on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff,” which I always thought was “hardest,” which definitely would be better, going from burgundy to heroin, instead of going from burgundy to Jim Beam.
Anyway, I’ve exiled my boredom to an ice floe in Antarctica. “It’s all good,” as the young people say after you’ve bumped into them and apologized.
[1] “Forthrightfulness” ought to be a word.
Certainly some sociologist has studied why laziness is so predominant a vice among male protagonists in newspaper comic strips. Alas, I’m too slothful myself to really attempt to find that research. My halfhearted Google search has yielded nada. Yet, I’m curious: this comic celebration of lassitude must be indicative of something in the American character.
I read the comics every day as part of my morning ritual, starting with “Andy Capp,” who lolls around the house on the dole while his wife Flo slaves away both at work and at home. Meanwhile, if Andy’s not conked out on the sofa, he’s gambling, playing football, hitting up acquaintances for booze money, brawling, or standing trial. Most nights, his nose aglow, he stumbles into the canal on his way home.
In fact, if you pronounce his name with a Northern England accent it sounds like “handicap.” This strip has been around since 1957, it’s syndicated in 13 languages, so obviously lots of people enjoy his antics. Laziness delights!
Next I read Lincoln Pierce’s “Big Nate,” which has replaced “Dilbert” in our paper.
Nate Wright, the protagonist of the strip is a lazy, rebellious 6th grader who attends Public School 38. Like his distant relative Andy Capp, Nate spends much of his time in detention. He’s much more likeable than Andy, though. However, his nose is on the side of his head cubist-style, which bothers me for some reason.
I skip “Grand Avenue” and read “Zits” next. In this morning’s iteration, Jeremy’s mom is trying to rouse him from bed while he’s attempting “to mentally bend time and space,” so he “can be at school without leaving [his] bed.” His mom mentions that he’s still in his boxershorts.
Do you see a pattern here?
The next few strips I read don’t fully align with the laziness trope – “The Wizard of Id,” “Luann,” “Mary Worth,” and “Hi and Lois.”[1]
Which brings us to “Beetle Baily” who makes Faulkner’s Anse Bundren look like a human dynamo.[2]
Once again, “For Better or Worse,” Sally Forth,” “BC,” “Hagar the Horrible,” “Blondie,” and “Peanuts” don’t celebrate sloth, so that leaves us with “Dustin” and “Garfield,” who also epitomize lassitude.
In today’s strip, twenty something Dustin announces at breakfast that he’s landed “a big job with a hefty salary, benefits, and a company car.” His sister Megan asks, “April Fool’s,” and indeed today is the first of April.
Perhaps Garfield is the most famous of this lazy crew, a gluttonous cynic and egocentric extraordinaire. His half hooded eyes say it all. But people adore him. He’s a hot selling stuffed animal, and I’ve even seen him imprinted on beach towels. Bravo, Garfield!
So here’s the question: Why do we find these losers so amusing? Do they make us feel good about ourselves in comparison?
Do comic strip creators despise puritanism, the Protestant work ethic, and all that jazz?
Don’t ask me. I ain’t got a clue.
[1] You know you’re really old when Mary Worth starts looking good to you.
[2] Here’s how Anse’s son Darl describes his father: “The shirt across pa’s hump is faded lighter than the rest of it. There is no sweat stain on his shirt. I have never seen a sweat stain on his shirt. He was sick once from working in the sun when he was twenty-two years old, and he tells people that if he ever sweats, he will die. I suppose he believes it.”
On his podcast, David Watson interviews Caroline and me about my novel “Today, Oh Boy,” teaching adolescents, and the nature of time, plus a lot of other stuff.
I’ve always been a big fan of allusions because they infuse whatever the writer is conveying with even more meaning, offering subtext or cross references that deepen. If you don’t pick up on the references, no harm done. If you do, God is in his heaven, and all’s right with the world.[1]
Here’s what I’m talking about: in the Richard Wilbur ‘s poem “A Late Aubade,” the speaker is trying to talk his lover into cutting class so they can continue to lie in bed in what I’m assuming is an interlude between another session of lovemaking.
Here’s, as the vulgar say, the money shot:
It’s almost noon, you say? If so,
Time flies, and I need not rehearse
The rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse.
If you must go,Wait for a while, then slip downstairs
And bring us up some chilled white wine,
And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine
Ruddy-skinned pears.
Rehearse, as in re-hearse, as in death mobiles, black limousines, but then – BAM – the allusion to Robert Herrick’s, “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
Carpe Diem!
Or, as Andrew Marvell put it:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
ILLUSTRATION: YAO XIAO
[1] BTW, I wish I did, but I don’t believe in anthropomorphic Semitic deities. “God is in his heaven” is an allusion, albeit an ironic one, to the Victorian poet Robert Browning.
Blind Girl Walking by Wesley Moore III
As my regular readers know, I entertain myself by creating what I facetiously call “fake paintings,” which others have described as “photo collages.” I guess that’s more accurate, or at least more precise; however, when I think of a collage, I imagine a proliferation of cutouts that create sort of visual mosaic whereas my “pieces” attempt to blend the cutouts into a dramatic scene so that the viewer isn’t aware that images have been swiped from somewhere else and inserted into the “painting.”
Here are four examples in order of their compositions from oldest to latest.[1]:
I occasionally post some of these on Facebook, and recently someone commented that AI was going to put me out of business to which I replied, “AI ain’t never listened to a Tom Waits song or changed a flat tire. It ain’t know.”
Of course, AI has probably already put traditional illustrators out of business, but to me, the visuals all look alike, smacking of early Soviet propaganda.
The same goes for AI generated prose. I can identify it fairly easily because it reads like Strunk and White on steroids with all those active verbs “clambering” to “propel” well-varied clauses that are the equivalent of the Trump Kim poster above.
It’s soulless.
Of course, AI is no doubt going to become more sophisticated, but I’d like to think it could never come up with this:
Well, it’s Ninth and Hennepin
All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes
And the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky
Like a tarp thrown all over this
And the broken umbrellas like dead birds
And the steam comes out of the grill like the whole goddamn town’s ready to blow
And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos
And everyone is behaving like dogs
And the horses are coming down Violin Road and Dutch is dead on his feet
And all the rooms they smell like diesel
And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here
And I’m lost in the window, and I hide in the stairway
And I hang in the curtain, and I sleep in your hat
And no one brings anything small into a bar around here
They all started out with bad directions
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear
One for every year he’s away, she said
Such a crumbling beauty
Ah, there’s nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won’t fix
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse
With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific going by
And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
Till you’re full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen
And I’ve seen it all
I’ve seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train
[1] These are printed on canvas so to the careless eye they appear to be “paintings.”
Episode 3 – Eatonton’s Rural Literary Legacy
[In episode 2, My ex-pat son Ned and I wended our way through backroads headed to Reynolds, formally known as Reynolds Plantation, just outside of Greensboro, Georgia, to reunite with his Aunt Becky at Uncle Dave].
Around four-thirty on Thursday, Ned and I arrived at Reynolds where we negotiated the security gate rigamarole. At the house, Becky and Dave greeted us warmly, plied us with drinks after our long (well, six hour) journey, and we did some catching up. It turns out that Becky and Dave had recently suffered a hair-raising flight from New Jersey to Atlanta, the inside of the plane perpetually rocked by turbulence for the entire time they were airborne. As she was exiting the plane, Becky found it especially disconcerting to see the pilot and copilot exchanging high fives. She informed Ned if she were going to visit him in Nuremberg, she was likely to take an ocean liner.
On Friday, Dave, who is overseeing the construction of one of the houses his son Scott is building in Reynolds, headed off to work, and Becky drove Ned and me to Eatonton so we could check out the Georgia Writer’s Museum, home of the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame.
Eatonton is a lovely, sleepy verdant town that reminds me of the Summerville of my youth. It seems like a pleasant place to retire, that is, if you’re not a Folly Beach hedonist hellbent on cha-cha-cha-ing yourself to death.
The museum itself, located in a coffeeshop, struck me as the literary equivalent of a science fair, consisted of tables lined up with poster board information. Eatonton and its environs have produced a remarkable number of noteworthy writers including Alice Walker, Jean Toomer of Harlem Renaissance fame, and Joel Chandler Harris, who adapted African folk tales in book form, creating the Uncle Remus stories. Milledgeville, the home of Flannery O’Connor, is a mere twenty miles south.
The museum houses both Joel Chandler Harris’s and Flannery O’Connor’s typewriters, plus an exhibit delineating the evolution of machines of writing, starting with primitive typewriters and ending with a progression of computers getting smaller and sleeker through the decades.
As I slowly strolled along the exhibits, The fact that Joel Chandler Harris had been born in the Barnes Inn and Tavern caught my eye. Being born in a tavern seemed odd, colorful, so I read on.
Here’s a short version of his life:
The year of his birth is uncertain, either 1845 or 1848. His mother Mary, an Irish immigrant who worked at the inn, was impregnated by a cad who abandoned his infant son and Mary. She named the baby Joel Chandler Harris after her attending physician.
Of course, illegitimacy, as it was called in my youth, was especially problematic in the antebellum South.[1] In addition to that disadvantage, Joel was redheaded and stammered, which made him a target for bullies.[2] The stigma of his “lowly” birth haunted him throughout his youth and early adulthood.
Fortunately, Dr. Andrew Reid, a prominent Eatonton physician, provided Mary and Joel with a small house behind his mansion. He also paid for Joel’s tuition (in those days public education didn’t exist in the South). Mother Mary fostered Joel’s future literary prowess by reading to him out loud, which helped him to develop the remarkable memory he would utilize in assembling the Uncle Remus tales. She read him Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield so often that he could recite lengthy passages by heart.
At fourteen, Harris dropped out of school and went to work for a newspaper, Joseph Addison Turner’s The Countrymanwith a circulation around 2,000. There Harris mastered the basics, including typesetting. Addison allowed Harris to publish his own stories and poems. Eventually, Harris moved into Turnwold Plantation, Addison’s home, located nine miles outside of Eatonton. Here Harris had access to a voluminous library and where he began devouring the classics and contemporary authors such as Dickens, Thackery, and Poe.
At Turnwold, Harris spent hundreds of hours in the slave quarters. Wikipedia claims that Harris’s “humble background as an illegitimate, red-headed son of an Irish immigrant helped foster an intimate connection with the slaves. He absorbed the stories, language, and inflections of people like Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy,” who in amalgam became the narrator of the Brer Rabbit Tales, Uncle Remus.
I was unfamiliar with Harris’s biography, but what strikes me as truly remarkable is that he replicated these stories in dialect without any written sources. He essentially gave voice to and preserved these tales that had been stored in the brains of Africans, transported across the Atlantic in slave ships, and told and retold in slave cabins throughout dark nights of captivity.
Because of the Disney movie, Song of the South, Harris has been tarred (pun intended) as being a racist, which is unfortunate. What Harris did was preserve a rich trove of folklore featuring an African trickster who used his wiles to outfox foxes, tales where the underdog prevails. Of course, you can accuse Harris of cultural appropriation, but to my mind, the dialect enriches the tales, making them much more linguistically interesting.
After the war, Harris moved up in the world of journalism, working at the Atlanta Constitution for nearly a quarter century, and addition to the Remus tales, he published novels, short stories, and humorous pieces. Luminaries such as Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain were among his admirers. Alas, he was an alcoholic, and died from complications from cirrhosis of the liver at 59.
After our visit to the museum, Becky gave us a driving tour of the area, which includes a dilapidated chapel where Alice Walker’s ancestors are buried. We arrived back at Reynolds in the early afternoon, looking forward to Cousin Scott’s arrival the next day. At the museum, Ned had bought me Jean Toomer’s Cane, a literary mosaic of poems and short stories that brings to life a subculture, which reminds me of my work-in-progress Long Ago Last Summer, an up close and personal exploration of real life Sothern Gothic.
In short, it was a very meaningful morning and afternoon for Ned and me.
Alice Walker’s Childhood Home around 1910
[1] Of course, “bastard” was the preferred 19th Century nomenclature.
[2] As a former redhead, I can emphasize. If interested, check this LINK out.
It’s too bad the quaint cool-sounding derogatory noun oaf is dying out, having been supplanted over the years by bonehead, spastic, and most recently dickhead, all of which lack the specific visual associations we conjure at the sight or sound of the word.
Oafs are male, usually bald, fat, dull-eyed, slack-mouthed, and clumsy whereas dickheads can be good-looking Lotharios who catalog their romantic conquests or gifted athletes who make acrobatic catches or PhDs who lord their petty powers over TAs eking out livings in academia.
The thing is, though, if you close your eyes and attempt to visualize an oaf, chances are you picture some lout in Medieval garb, Chaucer’s Miller or Shakespeare’s Bottom the Weaver.
The Millere was a stout carl for the nones;
Ful byg he was of brawn and eek of bones.
That proved wel, for over-al, ther he cam,
At wrastlynge he wolde have alwey the ram.
He was short-sholdred, brood, a thikke knarre;
Ther nas no dore that he nolde heve of harre,
Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed.
His berd as any sowe or fox was reed,
And therto brood, as though it were a spade.
Upon the cop right of his nose he hade
A werte, and thereon stood a toft of herys,
Reed as the brustles of a sowes erys;
His nosethirles blake were and wyde.
A swerd and a bokeler bar he by his syde.
Illustration from Thijs Porck’s leidenmedievalistsblog
Here’s my translation:
The Miller was a stout dude of stone
Very big he was of brawn and bone.
That proved well. When it came
to wrestling, he always won the ram.
He was short, broad-shouldered, a thick tor
Who could rip the hinges off any door
Or break it by ramming it with his head.
His beard like a sow or fox was red
and broad just like a spade.
On the right side of his nose he had
a wart that sprouted a tuft of hairs
red as the bristles of a sow’s ears;
his nostrils were black and wide.
A sword and buckler he had by his side.
You probably wouldn’t call the drooling loud mouth banging his hand on the bar for service an oaf; however, in my research I have discovered a modern day oaf, thanks to that most urbane of publications The Daily Mail, the UK’s version of the National Enquirer. Checkout these headlines.
Foul-mouthed motorist with ‘Big Oaf’ number plate and ‘Fast and the Fuhrerious’ T-shirt rants at coach driver to ‘get a proper job’ in 15-minute road rage stand-off that sees him dubbed ‘the new Ronnie Pickering’
- Bald man tells coach driver to ‘get a proper job and shut your mouth’ in video
- Overweight VW driver launches an abusive tirade through the coach window
- The road rage motorist wore bizarre T-shirt reading ‘Fast and Fuhrerious’
- Compared to Ronnie Pickering, whose 2015 row with motorcyclist went viral
- Do you know the ‘Big Oaf’? Contact alex.robertson@mailonline.co.uk or call 0203 615 3767
Here’s the LINK.
So, dear readers, I encourage you to be on the lookout for oafs and use the word, which is such an unlovely embodiment of sound and sense. Say it out loud – oaf – and feel it coming out your mouth – oaf.
Ah, life’s simple pleasures.
I sort of wince whenever I read the expressed shock of social media sharers taken aback at the death of aged musicians like Gordon Lightfoot, Robbie Robertson, or Charlies Watts. After all, no one should be shocked by the death of septuagenarians or octogenarians. The surprising thing to me is that these musicians managed to amass so many years given all the primary and secondary smoke they inhaled – not to mention the drugs, unsafe sex, and chartered flights.
Nevertheless, Jimmy Buffett’s demise did surprise me, maybe because he seemed unstoppable and forever young, a near (if not literal) billionaire who transformed his pop-a-top Texas-tinged Calypso into a financial lifestyle empire. I perhaps should add here that my cynicism prevented me ever coming close to being a parrothead. Despite my epicureanism, I’m not a fan of “resort casual” or much of his music after his AIA album. Maybe he was too much like me, or I was too much like him, to like him.
That said, Jimmy seemed to be a genuinely good fellow. I saw him live once, not on stage, but sitting across the bar from me in Oliver’s Pub in Columbia, South Carolina in 1976. His girlfriend/future wife was student at USC at the time, as was I, sort of. I’m not one to intrude upon celebrity, so I let him and her be.
What does surprise me, though, is how much his death saddens me. “Know thyself,” the Delphic Oracle advises. Maybe I need to get around to that before it’s too late.
Me in 1976 on the left along with John Robinson and someone named Lee (photo credit Jim Huff)
You know how some literates, English majors and their ilk, just for the sake of argument joust about whether we’re living in Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984? Well, this afternoon Chico Feo is giving off some heavy Huxley vibes. Workers off-the-clock loll in full self-expression, tattoos mapping their life histories in hieroglyphic fashion. A 21st Century … Continue reading In a Retro-Futuristic Tawdry Sort of Way
Photo by Steve Rhea Really stoked to have Today, Oh Boy receive such a boffo review from Kirkus. I’m not sure about the legality of presenting it here wholesale, so I’m providing the kink HERE. Thanks for reading!
From left to right Aretha Franklin, John Hammond, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Rusty Moore, Kip Vino, Erich Huber, Billie Holiday Thanks to my pal Erich Hubner, the guitarist of the killer cover band Pleasure Chest, I’m getting schooled by the ridiculously erudite musicologist Andrew Hickey, whose podcast The History of Rock Music in 500 Songs traces the … Continue reading Andrew Hickey Explains Swing, Boogie Woogie, Backbeats, and All That Jazz
As I’ve grown older – and I doubt if this is typical – my opinion of my fellow Americans has improved, which makes me somewhat optimistic about the long term prospects for our democracy. Of course, I could be wrong, as I often am. One MAGA juror could lynch each of the Trump trials.[1] Thanks to … Continue reading Take a Peek Through My Rose-Tinted Spectacles
Certainly, there must be some film maker somewhere who is gathering the various videos taken of what has become known as “The Montgomery Boat Brawl” to fashion them into a well-edited epic entitled Afterbirth of a Nation. By now, you know the basics. White boaters take offense when a Black security man asks them to move … Continue reading Afterbirth of a Nation: The Montgomery Boat Brawl
My sons circa 1988 Although I write about the past quite often, I don’t think of myself as nostalgic. Last week, for example, I uploaded hundreds of photos from a CD-ROM to iCloud. Even though I enjoyed revisiting my life, I wouldn’t want to return to those not-so halcyon days of diaper training or middle … Continue reading A Nostalgic Dismissal
Now that I can legitimately claim to be a novelist, I feel obligated to eavesdrop, to ask strangers about their lives, even at the cost of seeming intrusive. It’s my job to chronicle the human condition, dammit! For example, at the moment I’m in a bar at Charleston International Airport sitting next to a young … Continue reading Inquiring Minds Want to Intrude
Intro So, I decided to take Amtrak to DC to spend time with my Yankee-Doodle-Dandy grandson and his parents instead of driving up there on 95 in a 2007 Mini Cooper jockeying among speeders headed to New York and those big rigs spewing their diesel that travel at varying speeds. Nor did I want to … Continue reading Choo-Choo Ding-a-Ling-a-Ling
8 September 2013 Sad to say but word has reached me that a disgruntled fellow ethnologist (who shall remain nameless) has criticized yours truly for choosing Folly Beach, SC – the Edge of America – as the focus of my anthropological studies. Granted, habitating Folly might on the surface seem cushier than dining on locusts in a … Continue reading Folly Float Frenzy
Here We Go Loopy Light Here we go looby loo,All on a Saturday night, They say socializing jazzes up old people’s metabolism, that yakking it up may ward off something or another, which is a happy accident in my case, because even if I were operating an electric wheelchair, I’d be locomoting up to the … Continue reading Here We Go Loopy Light
When I was a rising 8th grader, that summer I started hanging out with nerdy high school sophomores who, rather than drinking and fornicating, behaved like tweens, tweens who could drive at night but who also did dumb shit like chunking lit cherry bombs out of windows of moving vehicles with fireworks galore on board. … Continue reading Transitioning from Tween to Teen in 1966
You Can’t be Any More Out of It Than Dead Nor dread nor hope attendA dying animal;A man awaits his endDreading and hoping all. WB Yeats Perhaps the only people who die happy are James Dean types who, defying speed limits, enjoy an intense adrenaline rush right before a fiery crash instantaneously switches off the … Continue reading You Can’t be Any More Out of It Than Dead
Illustration by James Lee Chiahan. Source image: Karol Jalochowski / Santa Fe Institute / Miller Omega Program. 13 June 2023 I can’t listen to music and write simultaneously. For example, right now I’m attempting to crank something out while listening to the Human Beinz only hit, “Nobody But Me.” “Nobody, Nobody, Nobody, Nobody . . … Continue reading Here Comes the Night
Obviously, Donald Trump considers himself above the law, thinks that whatever he wishes can be conjured by the genie of his entitlement to become immediately manifest. If he, the Mighty Wizard of Oz Mar-a-Lago, wants documents declassified – presto – they’re his to keep. According to an audio tape in the possession of prosecutor Jack Smith, Trump … Continue reading Lock Him Up – Let the Great Axe Fall
I read this morning in an actual newspaper printed on newsprint that some parent in Utah has successfully petitioned to have the Bible removed from elementary and middle school libraries in that most conservative of states. I guess, though, if you’re going to yank Judy Blume, ‘ol Moses ought to go down, too, writing all that shit about fratricide, genocide, incest. Add to that David’s offing Uriah to he could be with Bathsheba; Job’s getting whacked with woe by his Creator in a friendly bet with his prodigal son Satan; Jacobs’ sons attacking Hamor and Shechem, butchering every male of their enclave, looting livestock, dragging away the wives and children of their victims.[1]
I suspect that the usual vulgarians in Congress (a couple of whom are depicted above) will be howling in protest, perhaps not discerning that their putting parents in charge of schools has more than one ideological scenario. If they’re sincerely serious about eradicating the Woke Mind Virus, they should be ecstatic that the New Testament with its pacifistic, communistic, and inclusive messages won’t fall into the hands of impressionable young people trying to make sense of what TS Eliot called “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history.”
Compare the MAGA ethos with the Beatitudes, delivered by Jesus after dividing private property (i.e., loaves and fishes) and redistributing them among the masses.
Talking about woke!
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
I’m reminded of Woody Guthrie’s song “Jesus Christ,” sung to the tune of “Jesse James.”
This song was written in New York City
Of rich men, preachers and slaves
Yes, if Jesus was to preach like he preached in Galillee,
They would lay Jesus Christ in his grave.
[1] The last item in that series happens to be Donald Trump’s favorite Bible story. For more, do yourself a favor and click on the link for BIBLE STUDY WITH DONALD TRUMP.
[Cue Alice Cooper] Now that for me school’s out forever, I have ditched academics, abandoned trying to explain sprung rhythm[1], deep-sixed Victorian bric-a-brac, and turned my attention to my first love, my av-av-av-ocation, anthropology. For the last two weeks, between book signings and interviews,[2] I’ve been hanging out with Oscar Wilde, the great-great grandfather of Diana Ross/Lady … Continue reading Cha-Cha-Cha-ing Towards Bethlehem
Facing the setting sun, I’m sitting at the northeast corner of the bar at Chico Feo, elevated by a bar stool and decking and looking down at a picnic table where White people in their early thirties chat. From this perspective, the attractive young blonde’s nose ring makes it look as if she has the … Continue reading Perspectives
Alchemizing One of John Berryman’s Hangovers
with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles
from John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14”
In my dyspeptic little world,
birds don’t sing in the trees overhead,
but perched aloft on limbs,
they shit on pedestrians,
trudging to jobs that they despise
on a neverending
Sisyphean
Monday morning.
La la, la la la.
There once was a MAGA from Dallas
that had Trump tattooed on his phallus.
Whenever he pumped,
he’d choke Donald Trump
who eventually became quite callous.
Warren Moise and I experienced similar childhoods in that we grew up as White males in relatively small South Carolina towns in the Fifties and Sixties, both graduating from high schools that were integrated in the 1970-1971 school year.
Here’s a quote from the back cover of Warren’s excellent historical memoir The Class of ’71.[1]
When the Class of ’71 began first grade as young children in 1959, they lived in a totally segregated society. Except for some few prior student transfers and with limited other exceptions, the Black and White members of the Class of ’71 had never met, played music together, gone to church with one another, eaten food at the same lunch counters, or swum together in the same pools. All of that would change on the first day of their senior year.
In Summerville, South Carolina, where I lived, even physicians’ waiting rooms were segregated into White and Black sections. In fact, Bryan’s, the Black owned barbershop that I patronized, only cut White people’s hair. John F. Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated within five years of one another when we were students. A cultural revolution was underway.
Again, to quote Warren:
Soul music, oxford shirts, and oxblood Wejuns penny loafers were disappearing from the streets of Gamecock City[2]every day, It was as if the 1960s were burning rubber in a Chevelle V-8 Super Sport on Highway 15 South leaving town toward Paxville. At the same moment, the 1970s were rollin’ into town on Highway 15 North inside a Volkswagen van painted with slogans of peace, love, and daisies.
Warren and I met our freshman year in Thornwell dorm the fall of 1971 at the University of South Carolina and became fast friends, deciding to room together in Tenement Nine on the Horseshoe the next year, which we did until Warren left college to pursue a musical career.[3]
Warren and I circa 1972
We also shared houses when Warren returned to USC to earn his undergraduate degree in history in 1974 -1976. Unfortunately, we more or less lost contact after school. Oddly enough, fortyish years later we both ended up writing books about being in high school the same year. My novel Today, Oh Boy takes place during the course of one day, October 12, 1970, a month or two after Warren began his senior year at Edmunds high school.[4]
So, The Class of ’71 and Today, Oh Boy cover some of the same terrain, small towns transitioning from the Old to New South, the tumultuous raging of hormones, adolescent crushes, physical violence engendered by culture clashes.
In my not-all-that-humble opinion, they offer interesting perspectives from non-fictive and fictive landscapes in that pivotal school year that ended the Sixties and ushered in the Seventies.
We better stop
Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look, what’s going down?
from “For What It’s Worth,” lyrics by Stephen Stills
[1] I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a historical memoir. The Class of ’71 contains multitudes – it’s a history of Sumter County, a coming-of-age story, a judicial and political chronicle of desegregation, a sociological review of the cultural changes of the late Sixties, a profile of serial killer Pee Wee Gaskins. In short, it’s difficult to succinctly classify. Here’s some more expansive. You can purchase the book HERE. It’s a great read propelled by well-crafted prose.
[2] I.e., Sumter, South Carolina.
[3] You can read the horror story of the roommate who replaced him HERE BTW, Warren’s musical career was successful. He’s a member of the Beach Music Hall of Fame, though he abandoned life on the road for a career in law.
[4] Actually, I decided to delay Summerville’s integration until the next year, which we novelists have the freedom to do. You can purchase Today, Oh Boy HERE.
The I Ain’t Got No Health Insurance Blues
Too bad I ain’t got no
self-help-guru instincts
as far as
copping a livable income
is concerned.
I should be able to come up with
seven
or nine
or
ten
or so
steps
that lead to Psychological Salvation!
Potential titles of bestsellers:
How to Dismantle Your Ego
Slow Down, You’re Thinking Too Fast
We Are They and They Are We
The problem is that I don’t follow
them steps myself.
I think to write a book like that
that you need credentials of super-duper success.
Why buy a book from someone
who claims to know the wayful path
but who lives in a tiny two-bedroom duplex house
on the border of a bad neighborhood?
So I live on a tree-lined street where doors slam,
car alarms blare
children squeal
leaf blowers roar
keyboards quietly click.
A Little Madness in the Spring
I recently ran across a balding fellow, probably in his early forties, wearing a grey too-snug tee-shirt that read “Every Day Is a Good Day.” Of course, I get the subtext: life is miraculous on the cosmic impersonal plane – the nighttime sky, as Hamlet put it, a “brave o’erhanging firmament, [a] majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” not to mention down below “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” We should be thankful for the chain of events that gave rise to a consciousness that allows us to appreciate and contemplate these wonders around us. The subtext of the subtext is that this wonderfulness is the handiwork of a benevolent deity. Every day is a good day because it’s a colorful shard in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of a creator god’s abracadabra.
But, as we all know, a day’s goodness or badness depends on an individual’s experience during that 24-hour period. For example, at Chico Feo I just heard a horrific account of a traffic fatality that happened on Folly Beach last night. A car crammed with six drunks doing 65 in a 25-zone barreled into a golf cart driven, as the story was told to me, by a woman who had just gotten married that very day on the island.[1]
So, I might suggest, that the tee shirt’s message be edited: “For me, every day is a good day” instead.
And print this on the back.
A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene —
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own!
Emily Dickinson
[1] The fellow who related the story said she was in her bridal gown.
Me in 1973 (all photos by James Huff)
Lost Youth, or “I Had Pretty Plumage Once”
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
WB Yeats, “Among School Children”
Poverty is not all that terrible if you’re in college. After all, most students live in dormitories, and for my first two years of undergraduate school, the dorms I lived in were officially known as “The Tenements,” the oldest dorms on campus, picturesque but Spartan. And when I say Spartan, I mean tres austère –** no air-conditioning in the summer; hand-searing radiators in the winter; merely two telephones in the hall, one for on campus communication, the other a pay phone you had to feed quarters during long distance calls. And perhaps the worst indignity of all, there were no stalls around the three toilets lined up in the flashback-inducing black-and-white diamond-tiled bathroom. Whenever nature called, the residents of Tenement 9 shielded themselves with open newspapers to create a modicum of privacy. No one, conversed, i.e., no one shot the shit while shitting.
OMG! TMI!
Even though I couldn’t afford it, I moved off-campus my junior year, and after a couple of nightmare rentals in the fall and winter of my senior year, my housemate Warren Moise, along with a host of other impoverished students, moved into the once genteel abode of 1830 Greene Street conveniently located on campus.[1] I’m fairly certain than none of us owned an automobile. SLED paid a visit our first week, and half the residents were carted off to jail for simple possession. Luckily, Warren, Jim, and I were off when police came a calling.
1830 Greene Street
Interestingly enough – and least for me – I had lunch with my Greene-Street housemate Warren Thursday and then encountered another Greene-Street housemate that afternoon when I was signing copies of my novel Today, Oh Boy in Summerville.[2] I hadn’t seen Jim Huff or his wife Jane in this century – in fact, not since the late 80s or early 90s. Jim had been lease-signer of 1830 Greene and therefore collected our $20 rent each month (there were eight of us) and utility money and money to buy kerosine for the enormous furnace that consumed fuel as rapidly as RJ McCarthy downed his 24-ounce cans of “the Bull,” aka Schlitz Malt Liquor. Every room except for the kitchen and the two bathrooms was utilized as a bedroom, including the living room and the conservatory where I slept, only assessable through Mr. McCarthy’s room.
Hail, affordable housing; farewell, privacy.
Jim Huff circa 1975
Here’s a list Jim compiled of the house’s residents, including girlfriends who spent multiple nights.
At the signing in Summerville, Jim gave me some photographs he had taken back in the day, which I so much appreciate. They demonstrate quite eloquently that whatever I may have gained in monetary wealth, I have equaled in girth, but lost in hair.
Anyway, it was great seeing Warren, Jim, and Jane, though I must admit that the photos have engendered a wee bit of melancholy.
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.[3]
[1] If you’re in the mood for some Night of the Hunter noir, click HERE and read about a couple of harrowing experiences we suffered before moving to Greene Street.
[2] Get ’em while they’re hot. LINK.
[3] You can read the rest of the poem here. LINK.
Heeding Andrew Marvell
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell – from “To His Coy Mistress”
One of the entries in the epic catalog of my character flaws is a lotus-eater-grade tendency towards lassitude, which I’ve written about HERE.
However, in the last two weeks I’ve been on the go-go-go, on a tear – touring Mexico City, hosting family and friends, signing books, reading from Today, Oh Boy at its book launch, attending the reading of an original play in a private home, and dancing to the music of the Krushtones.[1]
Mexico City
Caroline had booked the trip before we discovered that T,OB‘s publication date was to be 31 March, the day before our departure. Buxton Books scheduled the launch for 11 April, so the trip didn’t interfere with promotion.[2] On the other hand, ex-pat son Ned booked a flight to Charleston that arrived on 4 April, three days before my scheduled return, so I came back a day early while Caroline and Brooks stayed on in Mexico City, which is 2000 miles higher than Denver, the Mile High City. Hey, but none of us suffered any altitude sickness, so praise Huitzilopochtli!
We traveled with Celeste Joye and her husband Tom Foster and their daughter Juliette. The short-term rental they had booked was a falsely promoted malodorous, sofa-stained apartment without hot water. The rental is located the floor below at kick-boxing studio where a cousin of Cujo barked ferociously.
Not succumbing to the languor that would have me holding my nose (literally) and staying there all week, Celeste and Caroline scouted out new digs, called and cancelled, and we ended up staying at the swank Camino Real, which boasts a 007 early-60s vibe.
When I travel, my above-mentioned lassitude demands that I engage in only two tourist activities a day, one mid-morning and one after lunch; however, Celeste, Tom, and Caroline were go-getters, and the days and nights were filled with sight-seeing which featured a guided tour of Aztec ruins and a guided tour of Museo Nacional Antropologia.[3]
We also ate a various top tier restaurants, had drinks at Tenampa, a mariachi bar, and saw the Ballet Folklórico perform in a beautiful performing arts center.
But, as Andrew Marvell was wont to point out, all good things must end.[4]
Hosting my Family
Last week was the first time that my two sons had been home at the same time since 2018 – Harrison, his wife Taryn, her mother Susan, and grand-toddler Julian rented a house on Folly, and Ned and his love Ina came all the way from Nuremberg and stayed with his at 516 East Huron.
Also, I had the pleasure of having lunch with a childhood friend John Walton whose mother and my mother were best friends growing up and always.
But dammit, but that too had to end with Harrison and crew flying out Wednesday and Ned and Ina Friday.
The Book Launch[5]****
I’ve already gone on enough about the launch. The curious can access the reading HERE if they have “world enough and time.”
Seeing Is Believing
The indefatigable Eugene Platt and his wife Judith hosted a soiree of sorts in which a cast of seven or so readers performed his play-in-progress Seeing Is Believing. Based on the account in the Gospel of John, the play is set post-resurrection and consists largely of Andrew and Thomas walking to a “safe house’ where Jesus appears and puts a screeching halt to Thomas’s skepticism.
If I were Eugene, I’d produce it as a film instead of trying to get it produced as a play. Staging a fifteen-minute walk would be challenging, but you could really do some interesting things on film.
I bet some religious-minded film student at SCAD would find it interesting.
The Krushtones
What can I but enumerate old themes? I love me some Krushtones, who play at the Sand Dollar around 15 April every year. I couldn’t believe how fresh and practiced they sounded.
If you’re interested in learning more about this killer cover band and the Sand Dollar Social Club, click HERE.
THE END
Sometimes, Mr. Marvell, endings aren’t all bad. For example, I’ve finished writing the first draft of this blog post, and my dear readers have finished reading it and can get going on something more productive, because, as you have pointed out so eloquently:
[. . .] all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity.
So, carpe diem, y’all. Hubba-hubba-hubba, swish-boom-ba-ba-ba-ba-Barbara Ann.
[1] Not to mention doing our taxes.
[2] After zooming to number 570 on Amazon’s Young Adult and Teen Historical Fiction category, it’s now dropped into the 900s. C’mon people. I’m a senior citizen on a fixed income!
[3] I’ve been told my Spanish accent isn’t terrific. BTW, I’ve never been much for guided tours, but I must admit you learn a helluva lot more.
[4] E.g., “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace.”
[5] Thank you, Polly and Julian Buxton!
photo credit Steve Rhea
Order Options
BUXTON BOOKS
BARNES AND NOBLE
AMAZON
AUSTIN-MACAULEY
Fourteen months after its acceptance, my novel Today, Oh Boy is out and available at
Buxton Books
Barnes and Noble: LINK
Amazon paperback: LINK*
Amazon ebook: LINK
Coming soon to Guerin’s Pharmacy in Summerville and Bert’s Market on Folly Beach
Upcoming Events:
Book Launch at Buxton Books
Reading and signing from 6:30-7:30 p.m. near Hutchinson Square during Third Thursday on Apr. 20 (featuring music by Fleming Moore).
Reading and signing at Porter-Gaud School April 29th from 5:00 – 6:00 PM
Media
Story in the Charleston City Paper by Bill Thompson LINK
Interview with Eugene Platt in The Post and Courier LINK
Interview with Mary Reagan in the Summerville Journal Scene LINK
Television interview with Leyla Gulen. Click Below
Get ’em while they’re hot!
*Note, the back cover is displayed on Amazon’s paperback link:
I’ve written on Hoodoo previously that I don’t blame young people for holding golden-agers, i.e., senior-citizens, i.e., their elders, i.e., old farts in contempt as we shuffle along taking tiny steps, fumbling for our checkbooks while striking up conversations with grocery store clerks, or poke along doing 45 in passing lanes, oblivious to the hustle and bustle of Late Empire capitalism.
Even I-and-I, a forgetful 70-year-old, have been known to disparage my fellow geriatrics when their egocentricity (or declining faculties) don’t take in account the needs of others. No doubt I get on young people’s nerves myself, an overly dressed gadfly Oscar Wilde wannabe nodding my head and droning on about myself on barstools and in dentist offices.
Yet here I am in my twilight the author of a little ol’ bagatelle of a YA novel written on a 12th-grade-plus reading level, and I’m shamelessly promoting it as if it’s the great American novel. Three newspaper articles have appeared that focus on my late life productivity[1], and I’ve also appeared on midday local television program talking about me, me, me, not exactly a fascinating subject.
Ultimately, it’s much ado about not much.
Yet it does give me something to do and to dread.
My sons and their significant others are coming to the book launch[2] (Harrison and Taryn from Chevy Chase, Ned and Ina from Nuremburg), Old and new friends will be there. Eugene Platt, who has recently published his collected poems Weaned on War will introduce me, an honor for sure. I see the launch as a sort of funeral I get to enjoy before I die.
However, I do want to set it down here that I’m a little ashamed of myself for all this hullabaloo. There’s something a little tawdry about it, a little needy.
Rather, I should
like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult
or better yet, as the young people say STFU.
Cheers!
[1] I’m also, to use a polite term, a digital collagist.
[2]Buxton Books, 120 King Street, 11 April 2023 6 PM rsvp@buxtonbooks.com
In the early Sixties, South Carolina state law mandated that children in both the third and eighth grades receive instruction in the state’s history. As randomness would have it, my first tour of the annals of the Palmetto State coincided with the centennial celebration of “The War Between the States.” Lessons about “Caw-Caw the Indian boy” competed with classroom drills in which we swiftly assumed fetal positions beneath our tiny desks. (Charleston with its Polaris submarine base offered an inviting target for those Cuban Missiles). Also, on the domestic side, in the background, we could detect a soft growl of discontent rising in the throats of what my family politely called colored people, who, as the ad populum argument went, were being stirred up by “outside agitators.”
Times, you might say, were a-changing.
Not in the teaching of South Carolina history. Preserved in our textbook, time-honored “statements of fact” explained that the vast majority of slaves were well-treated, that unfair tariffs had sparked the Civil War, that the Ku Klux Klan had provided a public service during the dark days of Reconstruction, that Pitchfork Ben Tillman was a man of courage, that the textile industry promised a potential economic stimulus that might propel the state back into its former glorious position as the cultural vanguard of the nation . . .
When I first started teaching high school in the Mid-Eighties, I still encountered traces of these old arguments, particularly concerning the paternalism of slavery and the predominance of tariffs as the cause of the War. To counter the latter argument, I found copies of Declarations of Causes of Seceding States and highlighted in blue all of the sentences that referred to slavery. Believe me, the unhighlighted patches were about as prevalent as peanuts in Hershey bars. However, back in the day, I, too, believed what I had read. As an eight-year-old, I applauded the Klan of yore, those white-clad knights who had cleansed my native state of nefarious scalawags, carpetbaggers, and, yes, Negroes.
Flashforward a half century. The descendants of Pitchfork Ben have again taken to the streets eager to “retake their country” from Woke radical Democrat communist fascists.
Screeching in ALLCAPS, Trump, as he likes to refer to himself, predicts that he will be arrested this week:
“THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!
WE JUST CAN’T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE,” he wrote. “THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA! PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!”
Well, he’s certainly riled up this “patriot.”
How is the right handling news of trump’s pending arrest? A #ChudThread /1 pic.twitter.com/QdN2xDpygK
— Michelle (@LivingBlueTX) March 18, 2023
Meanwhile, the right wingers who run state schoolboards are co-opting Joseph Stalin’s tactics by rewriting US textbooks and removing books from the library. From The New Yorker.
In late January, at Greenland Pines Elementary, kids attended a party for an annual event called Celebrate Literacy Week, Florida! There was an escape room and food trucks. Brian Covey, an entrepreneur in his late thirties, came to pick up his daughter, who’s in second grade, and his son, who’s in fifth. His kids looked confused. “Did you hear what happened at school today?” his daughter asked. “They took all the books out of the classrooms.” Covey asked which books. “All the books,” she said. Covey’s son had been reading “Measuring Up,” a coming-of-age story about an immigrant to the United States from Taiwan. Students who read from a list of pre-selected books, including this one, were rewarded with an ice-cream party. “They even took that book,” Covey said.
In Manatee County a group that calls itself Community Patriots Manatee is reaching out to “WOKE BUSTERS” calling out to “Warriors” that it needs “Digital, Investigative, and Boots on the Ground.”[1]
What do these disaffected MAGA screechers and rightwing school boards have in common besides a contempt of the Other? They’re reactionaries, of course. They seek the status quo ante of the past, the good old days when the government stayed out of their lives (those glorious days before Interstate highways and VA hospitals).
Of course, the irony of their Orwellian neo-newspeak is lost on them. “Patriots”= those who tried to violently disrupt the legitimate election of the President of the United States. MAGA “Christians” call for violence to eradicate their enemies.
Chance are that their children – and the children of Woke Floridians for that matter – won’t be able to check 1984 out of their school libraries.
And as far as teaching history goes, schools may very well revert to the indoctrination I suffered when I studied South Carolina history way back then. It’s just a different type of indoctrination than the Anti-Woke indoctrination they so fear.
Anyway, I think I’ll forgo my V-8 this morning and have a bloody mary instead.
*1] I don’t know if it’s by design or ignorance, but they have adopted Trump’s penchant for randomly capitalizing common nouns.
[2] BTW, in my last two years of teaching, I taught 1984 to 9th graders. Here’s a link to a teaching guide I created for teachers tackling the novel.
A dozen years ago when I chaired Porter-Gaud’s English Department, I received a parental email so shrill it made a banshee keen sound like Barry White love talking.
One of my colleagues in the New Testament unit in 8th grade English had assigned the Gospel of Thomas, a compilation of “Jesus sayings” declared heretical by the early Church Fathers Origen and Hippolytus of Rome. Here’s an example:
His disciples said: On what day will you be revealed to us, and on what day shall we see you? Jesus said: When you unclothe yourselves and are not ashamed, and take your garments and lay them beneath your feet like the little children (and) trample on them, then [you will see] the Son of the Living One, and you will not be afraid.
Gospel of Thomas Saying 37
Anyway, this email (which I long ago deleted) seemed to have originated from the windblown sands of ancient deserts, the Land of Thou Shall Not, the land where graven images are taboo, where Jezebels are stoned to death. The email actually contained this suggestion: “(see Origen).”[1]
On the Monday morning after my confirmation c. 1964, Bishop Gray Temple administered to me my first communion in the church pictured above, and my fellow communicates and I breakfasted afterwards with the Bishop and my parish priest Steve Skardon at the (unfortunately named but elegant) Squirrel Inn in Summerville, South Carolina. The ritual had seemed (sort of) holy to me, and at breakfast the men wearing the collars were not in the least bit patronizing. They were literally gentle men. Afterwards, Father Skardon dropped me off to school. He respected my father, who was not a gentle man, who saw the world much differently than Father Skardon, but my father respected Steve as well. In fact, the last time I saw Father Skardon was at a wedding in Florence in 1977, and the first thing he asked me was how my father was doing.
He and Gray Temple possessed a quiet confidence. The sins of the flesh that they knew we would commit in the next few years did not terrify them. The Gospel Of Thomas did not enrage them. They understood Thomas was an alternative text that shared roots with the canonical gospels in that long process from word of mouth into writing. They understood that Yahweh-Nazarene-Ghost did not literally oversee translations from Aramaic to Greek nor guided the hands of scribes throughout the centuries to insure no deviation of the texts. They possessed imaginations. They had embraced the Enlightenment and understood that myths can convey the most profound truths. In other words, they understood that the Bible was not literally true. If asked if Augustus Caesar ever decreed that you had to travel back to your hometown to be counted in a census, they would have said no, that was an invention to establish Jesus in the line of David, etc.
And, I suspect, they realized that despite their canonizations, Origen and Hippolytus of Rome, were, not to put too fine a point on it, fanatical to the point of insanity, and that it would not be such a good idea to have their millennium-old decrees dictating 21st Century curricula.
Steve Skardon
Not long after my first communion, I witnessed a remarkable act of courage, Father Skardon preaching integration to a seething segregationist congregation.
Although I stupidly held my father’s bigoted viewpoint at the time, this man standing before a hostile audience pronouncing what was heresy to them made a profound impression on me. I am ashamed now to admit that I didn’t like what he was saying – that Blacks deserved the same social and political rights that whites possessed – but his demeanor as he calmly faced those angry parishioners profoundly affected me: Summerville’s own Atticus Finch.
Having a half-Baptist family, I felt much more comfortable at St. Paul’s than at Summerville Baptist, where the carpets were blood red and the smell antiseptic. St. Paul’s offered the redolent pleasures of candle scent; Chanel No. 5; and the occasional exhalation of last night’s Makers Mark, the somewhat sweet but unpleasant odor of sin. Our Church League Basketball team had the words “Episcopal Fifths.” on our jerseys. Father Skardon did not seem to mind.
Those harsh life-negating deserts of origin/Origen seemed thousands of years and thousands of miles distant. The liturgy and accompanying rituals were life affirming. The sermons tolerant, forgiving. The cerebral cortex (logical discourse) rather than the brain stem (babbling in tongues, etc.) held precedence.
After all, we lived in a semi-tropical climate.
[1] Origen, a 3rd Century Christian scholar, is the poster Eunuch for taking Biblical texts too literally, e.g., “there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of God.” Or, to put it another way, “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee.” To cut to the chase, both his left and right testicles offended him, so he castrated himself or had a friend castrate him. Origen had condemned the Gospel of Thomas, as heresy hence the suggestion to consult his writings.
Darkness has Crept in at Midnight by James Christopher HillsThe Alex Murdaugh murder conviction saddens me, not because I think he’s innocent, but because I didn’t want it to be true, didn’t want to believe that the Sophoclean shit show the prosecution posited could be real, that a father could premeditatively gun down his son, splattering his brains, then utilizie a different weapon to gun down the mother of that son, shooting her five times, the final shot to the head.
[Cue Kurtz: the horror, the horror.]
I was chatting with a stranger at the bar at Chico Feo yesterday afternoon about the trial and about the ubiquity of surveillance. I mentioned that Siri, Apple’s arbitress[1] of data, sang like – if not a canary – like a soulless automaton out of Orwell, providing law enforcement with information about how many steps Alex had taken, how fast he was walking before and after the event. The black box of his Suburban also ratted him out, digitally informing SLED that his SUV had hit seventy on the bumpy dirt road on his way to the house of his Alzheimer’s ridden Mama in the dark of a night as black as any in Southern gothic literature.
It out Faulkners Faulkner.
The stranger had his own story about super-surveillance. I didn’t know this, but there are magnetic (for lack of a better word) homing devices that you can affix to someone’s car and track its movements just like they did in the Bond movie Goldfinger.
He had purchased several and affixed one to his then girlfriend’s car because he correctly feared that she was cheating on him. On the last day of their relationship, he drove to where her car was parked, discovered her as she was leaving an apartment complex, and thanked her for showing him what kind of person she really was.
Happily, no shots were fired. Even, at least in his telling, the recrimination was mild-mannered.
Anyway, in this case, even if his girlfriend didn’t possess a cellphone and drove an early model computerless automobile, she still would have been busted.
Let’s face it, Big Brother’s corporate siblings, his little brothers, our cell phones, automobiles, etc. are watching us, and we pay them to. Could the knowledge our every move is monitored move us to emend our sinful ways. After all, if we don’t slaughter our families, cheat on our lovers, or binge watch Monkees videos, we have nothing to worry about.
[1] Even though I consider myself “woke,” I like the sound of feminine suffixes, and, on another topic, realize that the personality that is Siri is not an employee but merely a voice strung together with ones and zeroes.
If my grandmother hadn’t been diagnosed with terminal throat cancer at the age of 42, you wouldn’t be reading this sentence.
You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?
When prepping for my trip to “the Hostess City of the South” to hear T. Coraghessan Boyle read at the Savannah Book Festival, I searched high and low (literally) for my copy of his short story collection Greasy Lake to get him to autograph it. Oh, I own probably two-thirds of the thirty-one books he has published, but I especially wanted his signature on Greasy Lake because it is stained with my blood, now a brown smear after thirty-eight years of residence on page whatever.
It had been in my hand when I stood up in the back of a pick-up truck to tell the driver Larry Howland he needed to turn right, which he did suddenly, catapulting me Buster-Keaton-style out of bed of the pickup onto the hard pavement of Folly Beach’s Ashley Avenue.[1] When I stumbled to my feet, I was bleeding from my head and right hand. I must have picked the book off the pavement, thus the blood stain. Anyway, I couldn’t find Greasy Lake anywhere, not in my drafty garret, nor in the book-choked guest room where I keep my valuable volumes, like the one pictured below.
So, I took Water Music instead, Boyle’s first novel and a first edition to boot, probably a felicitous turn of luck for the heirs of the Moore Living Trust given that it will likely fetch a better price at the upcoming the estate sale, whenever that is – let’s hope not soon.
Anyway, I’m a huge fan, especially of his early short stories, manic riffs like this first paragraph from “Green Hell,” a parody of all those movies involving plane crashes and jungles:
There has been a collision (with birds, black flocks of them), an announcement from the pilot’s cabin, a moment of abeyed hysteria, and then a downward rush. the plane is nosing for the ground at 45-degree angle. Engines wheezing, spewing smoke and feathers. Lights flash, breathing apparatus drops and dangles. Our drinks become lariats, the glasses knives. Lunch (chicken croquettes, gravy, reconstituted potatoes, and imitation cranberry sauce) decorates our shirts and vests. Outside there is the shriek of the air over the wings; inside, the rock-dust rumble of grinding teeth, molar on molar. My face seems to be slipping over my head like a rubber mask. And then, horribly, the first trees become visible beyond the windows. We gasp once and then we’re down, skidding through the greenery, jolted from our seats, panicked, repentant, savage. Windows strain and pop like light bulbs. We lose our bowels. The plane grates through the trees, the shriek of branches like the keen of harpies along the fuselage, our bodies jarred, dashed and knocked like silver balls in a pinball machine, And then suddenly it’s over; we are stopped (think of a high diver meeting the board on the way down). I expect (have expected) flames.[2]
Boyle might resent this comparison, but his early stories remind me of the early Woody Allen movies, inventive, farcical, satiric, hilarious.
Here’s one last example from “The Big Garage,” an homage to Kafka, where the protagonist B. fills out an application to get an appointment to repair his Audi that has been towed to a Kastle-like nightmarish auto repair establishment:
B. Takes a seat beside the Cougar women and stares down at the form in his hand as if it were a loaded .44. He is dazed, still tingling from the vehemence of the secretary’s attack. The form is seven pages long. There are questions about employment, annual income, collateral, next of kin. Page 4 is devoted to physical inquiries: ever had measles? leprosy? irregularity? The next delves deeper: do feel people are out to get you? why do you hate your father? The form ends up with two pages of IQ stuff: if a farmer has 200 acres and devotes 1/16 of his land to soybeans, 5/8 to corn a 1/3 to sugar beets, how much does he have left for a drive-in movie? B. glances over at the Cougar woman. Her lower lip is thrust forward, a blackened stub of pencil twists in her fingers, an appointment form, scrawled over in pencil with circled red corrections, lies in her lap.
The Savannah reading, which was well attended, took place in a Lutheran church. Caroline and I had good seats/pews, but because of the acoustics of the church or the PA system or most likely my defective hearing, I had a hard time making out much of what he was reading, which I could tell was a fine performance, complete with acted out voices from several characters and emphatic gesturing.
Afterwards, we strode over to a square a block away where tents were set up for signings. We were about fourth in line, and once we shook hands, I mentioned that I used to teach “The Big Garage,” and as it turned out a student of his had made a film from it.[3] We had, what I would call a meaningful conversation. He said he really enjoys channeling disturbed male characters like in the story he had just read “because we’re all such saints.”[4]
Caroline asked if he minded if she took our photo, and he smilingly consented. And here we are, I gazing up like a beaming schoolchild in the presence of Micky Mantle.
[1] It’s one thing to trick fate, but to trick natural selection is especially gratifying. Although, to be truthful, I had already procreated, my older son Harrison being just over a year old and my younger son Ned at the time nestled in utero inside of luckily not-to-be-widowed-at-31 Judy Birdsong.
BTW, I have immortalized Larry, who in his fifties changed his name to Buck, with this BALLAD.
[2] I’ve always been a sucker for razzmatazz prose, like this sentence from James Wolcott: “An orange Elvis squirted from a can of Cheez Whiz, the Trump of The Apprentice bent the distortion field of Reality TV until it fit him like a girdle.”
[3] Here’s a link. Tap on media and look under the column FILM.
[4] From an interview: “Some writers just write about their own lives. Well, I don’t want to do that. I want to have a really boring life. A quiet, boring life so no one wants to write a biography. I’m the only writer in history only to have one wife, for instance.
image via The Beat who copped it from Shotgun Stories
**The Hyper Southern Gothic Murdaugh Saga**coming soon to a drive-in theater near youBoating under the influence, involuntary manslaughterway down south in the godforsaken backwaterof Colleton Country, South Carolina,we have, in addition to addiction, a double homicide –alleged filicide – mother and son dispatched via assault weapon and shotgun,a botched faux murder/staged suicide, and earlier, in the abode of the accused,a housekeeper tumbling down steps to her death..Did I mention insurance theft, crystal meth, financial skullduggery,abandoned mills,prescription pills?It's as if William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connorjoined forces with Harold Robbins. Add an ebon dashof E.A. Poeand presto:you got the hyper Southern Gothic Murdaugh saga.
If Hunter S. Thompson hadn’t blown his brains out, he’d be 85, perhaps too old to book a flight to Atlanta, too old to drive the back roads through Flannery O’Connor country past Blind Willie McTell’s grave, past that weird ass art installation that practically defies description, past the Jesus Saves billboards, over the Savannah River Bridge, through the desolation of the town of Hampton on his way to the Colleton County Court House in Walterboro to cover the double homicide murder trial of Alex Murdaugh.[1]
two photos of that “weird ass art installation” located outside of Thomson, GAIf you’re unfamiliar with the horror show, here’s a link to a New Yorker article that provides an excellent overview. New Yorker.
I would love to read Hunter’s drug-fueled take on the drug-fueled mess, what he’d make of the prosecution’s scattershot case, a shotgun blast of so much disassociated information that Immanuel Kant couldn’t follow it. Then there’s defense attorney Dick Harpootlian, shuffling papers, fumbling for his reading glasses, the food trucks outside the courthouse, the moss-draped oaks minding their own business as they always have.
But, alas, as the final song of the Stones’ album Let It Bleed says, “You can’t always get what you want.”
[1] I realize the phrase “homicide murder trial” is redundant, but it sounds so much better than either adjective by itself.
Here’s a video of my reading my original poem “St. James Infirmary iPhone Blues” on February 6 2023.
St James Infirmary iPhone Blues
Tapping a cane,
Mr. Andre Beaujolais,
with some hoodoo magic
in his front pants pocket
bopped down St. Charles
on his way to see
Miss Hattie Dupree,
the one-time lover
of McKinley Morganfield,
better known as Muddy Waters,
King of the Chicago Blues.
Those who got bad mojo
go see Miss Hattie Dupree
for the inside dope
in the hope of counteracting
shenanigans ¬– hexes,
curses, drywet nurses,
vexations, permutations,
marital relations.
genetic mutations,
Haitian sensations,
and genital truncations.
Mr. Andre Beaujolais
was on his way
to deliver a batch
of John the Conkeroo juice
to help some dude
whose private
conversations had
been swiped by
advertisers, enterprisers,
franchisers, monopolizers,
and merchandizers.
He’d been telling his gal
about Blind Willie McTell,
how the Dylan song
by the same name
was sung to the same tune
as St James Infirmary Blues.
Their moment of intimacy
the next day mysteriously
appeared in an ad
for a book being peddled
on the dude’s Facebook page.
“I Went Down to the
St, James Infirmary:
Investigations in the shadowy
world of early jazz-blues
in the company
of Blind Willie McTell, Louie Armstrong . . .
where did this dang song
come from anyway?
“That title don’t trip off the tongue,”
Mr. Beaujolais said when
he heard the dude explain.
“Hand me your phone,” Andre said,
then took off its cover,
whupped out the Conkeroo juice,
poured it all over the device,
mumbled some mumbo jumbo.
“Ta da! problem solved!”
“Wait a minute, “the dude complained.
My phone’s not working!”
“No shit,” Mr. Andre replied.
“That’ll be fifty dollars.
I’ll accept ten fives.”
Yesterday my cousin Pamela Moore Allen posted the above photo of my father (on the right) and his brother David fighting on a street in Charleston, South Carolina, during the Great Depression.
Here’s another photo standing outside their grandfather’s pharmacy where they worked as curb boys.
I posted the street-fight photo on the Facebook site “Charleston History Before 1945” and misidentified the location as Spring Street, where the pharmacy was located.[1]
A few sharp-eyed history buffs weren’t so sure about the location and began sleuthing.
Ray Benton, a Charleston lawyer, posted that in the early 60s he worked at a corner pharmacy that had an apartment upstairs. Lester Dempsey, another old-time Charlestonian, suggested the fight took place near Cannon Street and Rutledge.
Mary Thiedke Grady weighed in:
Look at the intersection of Spring and Rutledge looking west toward the bridge. The building currently occupied by Xiao Bao Biscuit was once upon a time a gas station and had a canopy. (The supports changed, but the canopy is still there.) Also look beyond to the other corner (northwest of Rutledge.) That building is tall enough, though the architecture isn’t quite the same. Given the proximity to the road, that first house could have been torn down and a second where the current house is located. (Ok, this part I think I’m fishing around with, and the argument doesn’t hold water.”)
Lester Dempsey provided an aerial view:
And dig this, Rutledge Rivers Webb, Jr. took two photos after dropping off his kids at school this morning. He took them on Rutledge near Spring looking towards Cannon. The Texaco service station on the right in the original photo is now the restaurant Fuel.
Mystery solved.
Thanks to all who weighed in.
[1] They lived above the pharmacy on the second floor.
Bo Diddley Revisited
I’ve been making good use of my time, watching YouTube videos of interviews with Eric Burdon, former front man for the Animals.[1] In the mid-Sixties, the Animals ranked as my favorite band because the timbre of Burdon’s singing voice sounded as if he could have been from my native ground, the Lowcountry of South Carolina (as opposed to Eric’s Newcastle-upon-Tyne). In fact, it was the Animals, and to lesser extent the Rolling Stones, who introduced me the blues, to Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and a host of others.
Decades ago, at his record store on Society Street (we’re talking Charleston, South Carolina), Gary Erwin, AKA Shrimp City Slim, told me that the Animals also had turned him onto R&B and the blues. He referenced their album Animal Tracks as his gateway into the land of shotgun shacks, cotton fields, black snakes, two-timing, big-legged women, and prison farms.
Here’s the tracklist for Animal Tracks.
| A1 | We Gotta Get Out Of This Place | 3:17 | | A2 | Take It Easy Baby | 2:51 | | A3 | Bring It On Home To Me | 2:40 | | A4 | The Story Of Bo Diddley | 5:42 | | B1 | Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood | 2:26 | | B2 | I Can’t Believe It | 3:35 | | B3 | Club A-Go-Go | 2:19 | | B4 | Roberta | 2:04 | | B5 | Bury My Body | 2:52 | | B6 | For Miss Caulker | 3:55 |
Although “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and “Don’t’ Let Me Be Misunderstood” are the big hits from the album, my two favorite tracks are the magnificent cover of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me” and “The Story of Bo Diddley,” a sort of pop song bio of one of the pioneers of rock-n-roll, which ends with a comic encounter when Bo, his sister the Duchess, and Jerome Greene meet the Animals at the Club A-Go-Go in Newcastle.
Listen and read along:
Now lets hear the story of Bo Diddley
And the Rock n Roll scene in generalBo Diddley was born Ellis McDaniels
In a place called McCoom, Missississipi about 1926
He moved to Chicago about 1938
Where his name was eventually changed to Bo Diddley.He practiced the guitar everyday and sometimes into the night
Till his papa’s hair began to turn white
His Pa said “Son, listen hear, I know
You can stay but that guitar has just gotta go.”So he pulled his hat down over his eyes
Headed out for them Western Skies
I think Bob Dylan said that, he hit New York City.He began to play at the Apollo in Harlem,
Good scene there, everybody raving.
One day, one night, came a Cadillac with four head lights
Came a man with a big, long, fat, cigar said,
“C’mere son, I’m gonna make you a star”
Bo Diddley said, “Uh.whats in it for me?”
Man said, “Shut your mouth son,
Play the guitar and you just wait and see.”Well, that boy made it, he made it real big
And so did the rest of the rock n roll scene along with him
And a white guy named Johnny Otis took Bo Diddleys rhythm
He changed it into hand-jive and it went like this
In a little old country town one day
A little old country band began to play
Add two guirtars and a beat up saxophone
When the drummer said, boy, those cats begin to roamOh baby oh we oh oh
Ooh la la that rock and roll
Ya hear me oh we oh oh
Ooh la la that rock and rollThen in the U.S. music scene there was big changes made.
Due to circumstances beyond our control such as payola,
The rock n roll scene died after two years of solid rock
And you got discs like, ah…
Take good care of my baby
Please don’t ever make her blue and so forth.About, ah, one year later in a place called Liverpool in England
Four young guys with mop haircuts began to sing stuff like, ah…
It’s been a hard days night and I’ve been working like a dog and so on.In a place called Richmond in Surrey, whay down in the deep south
They got guys with long hair down their back singing
I wanna be your lover baby I wanna be your man yeah and all that jazz.Now we’ve doing this number, Bo Diddley, for quite some time now
Bo Diddley visited this country last year
We were playing at the Club A Gogo in Newcastle, our home town.The doors opened one night and to our surprise
Walked in the man himself, Bo Diddley
Along with him was Jerome Green, his maraca man,
And the Duchess, his gorgeous sister.
And a we were doing this numberAlong with them came the Rolling Stones, the Mersey Beats,
They’re all standing around diggin’ it
And I overheard Bo Diddley talkin’
He turned around to Jermone Green
And he said, “Hey, Jerome? What do you think these guys
Doin’ our.our material?”Jerome said, “Uh, where’s the bar, man? Please show me to the bar…”
He turned around the Duchess
And he said, “Hey Duchess… what do you think of these young guys
Doin’ our material?”She said, “I don’t know. I only came across here
To see the changin’ of the guards and all that jazz.”Well, Bo Diddley looked up and said to me,
With half closed eyes and a smile,
He said “Man, ” took off his glasses,
He said, “Man, that sure is the biggest load of rubbish
I ever heard in my life…”Hey Bo Diddley
Oh Bo Diddley
Yeah Bo Diddley
Oh Bo Diddley
Yeah Bo Diddley
Bo, the Duchess, and Jerome GreenBy the way, this is my second homage to Bo. I also wrote about him in April of 2021 and my father-in-law’s Bo Diddley obsession. If so inclined, you can access that HERE, and it features videos of Bo performing on the Ed Sullivan Show and a snippet from the movie Fritz the Cat.
By the way, the white fellow in the collage up above is my father-in-law Lee Tigner in his younger days.
[bongo fade out]
[1] What prompted this foray into nostalgia was my recent poem, which you can access HERE, “The St James Infirmary iPhone Blues.”
I first heard “St. James Infirmary Blues” covered by Eric Burdon and the Animals, and the song really moved me, the horror of it, having to encounter the corpse of your lover “stretched out on a long white table/ So cold, so stiff/ She was dead.” Throughout the years, it really stuck with me.[1]
The other night, Caroline and I were at the Lowfife Bar on Folly, and somehow the topic of public domain tunes came up. I mentioned that Dylan had borrowed the melody of “St. James Infirmary Blues” for his masterpiece “Blind Willie McTell.” In fact, I sang two verses of the Burdon cover right there at the bar.
Well, the very next day, an ad showed up on my Facebook feed for this book, which I’m eager to read.
Anyway, we can probably chalk up the ad’s appearance to coincidence, but, man, could it be some bot was listening to us via our phone?
Then last night at the Soapbox open mic at Chico a banjo player covered the song. WTF?
So, this morning, during one of my undelightful stints of insomnia, I composed this piece of doggerel in my head, which I consider a more productive use of my time in the wee hours than contemplating politics, my health, the past, or the future.
(BTW, occasionally, a reader accuses me of cultural appropriation one of these paeans to Black culture, but my conscience is clear on that score.)
St James Infirmary iPhone Blues
Tapping a cane,
Mr. Andre Beaujolais,
with some hoodoo magic
in his front pants pocket
bopped down St. Charles
on his way to see
Miss Hattie Dupree,
the one-time lover
of McKinley Morganfield,
better known as Muddy Waters,
King of the Chicago Blues.
Those who got bad mojo
go see Miss Hattie Dupree
for the inside dope
in the hope of counteracting
shenanigans ¬– hexes,
curses, wet nurses,
vexations, permutations,
marital relations.
genetic mutations,
Haitian sensations,
and genital truncations.
Mr. Andre Beaujolais
was on his way
to deliver a batch
of John the Conkeroo juice
to help some dude
whose private
conversations had
been swiped by
advertisers, enterprisers,
franchisers, monopolizers,
and merchandizers.
He’d been telling his gal
about Blind Willy McTell,
how the Dylan song
by the same name
was sung to the same tune
as St James Infirmary Blues.
Their moment of intimacy
the next day mysteriously
appeared in an ad
for a book being peddled
on the dude’s Facebook page.
“I Went Down to the
St, James Infirmary:
Investigations in the shadowy
world of early jazz-blues
in the company
of Bling Willie McTell, Louie Armstrong . . .
where did this dang song
come from anyway?
“That title don’t trip off the tongue,”
Mr. Beaujolais said when
he heard the dude explain.
“Hand me your phone,” Andre say,
then took off its cover,
whupped out the Conkeroo juice,
poured it over the device,
mumbled some discrete mumbo jumbo.
“Ta da! problem solved!”
“Wait a minute, “the dude hollered.
My phone’s quit working!”
“No shit,” Mr. Andre replied.
“That’ll be fifty dollars.
I’ll accept ten fives.”
[1] In fact, I asked Gary Erwin to play it at Judy Birdsong’s memorial service, which he graciously. BTW, Gary is an underappreciated Charleston treasure.
Death and Dominos
Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter.
Duke Vencentio, Measure for Measure, 3.1
Yesterday, on what would have been Janis Joplin’s 80th birthday, I was shooting the breeze with bluesman Johnny Holliday at Chico Feo and asked him if he’d ever heard of Steve James, the superb blues guitarist who died earlier this month.
Johnny HollidayJohnny hadn’t, so I sang Steve’s praises, mentioning his partnership with Del Ray, a ukulele virtuoso. Johnny asked how old Steve was when he passed, and I replied 72.
“Well, that’s a good age to die,” the thirty-something said, and I agreed, but mentioned I’d just turned seventy.
A sheepish look, a nod of the head. “You don’t look seventy,” he graciously said, and I responded with a thank you, attributing my supposed well-preserved wreckage to clean living and the fedoras that hide my freckled bald scalp.
After I made my way home, climbed the stairs to my drafty garret, and logged on my computer, I learned that David Crosby had just bitten the dust at the beyond ripe old age of 81, he who had been addicted to cocaine and heroin but who nevertheless had managed to outlive the author of the best-selling book The Complete Guide to Running,Jim Fixx, who succumbed to a heart attack while jogging at the age of 52.
I will have to say that David Crosby looked worse for the wear, as does his one-time collaborator Joni Mitchell. Jeff Beck, on the other hand, who died suddenly five days ago, looked pretty damned good, though unlike David and Joni he dyed his hair.[1]
Anyway, these iconic rock stars of yore seem to be on a death roll, falling like dominos, painfully reminding the “me generation,” i.e., m-m–my generation, that all good, bad, and indifferent things must come to an end.
A host of others are waiting in the wings, Rod Stewart (78), Pete Townsend (78), Eric Clapton (75), Tina Turner (85), Paul McCartney (80), Ringo Starr (82), Keith Richards (79), Mick Jagger (79), Robert Plant (75), Willie Nelson (89), Joan Baez (82), and the man himself, Bob Dylan (81).
Bob’s demise will likely warrant a screaming above the fold front page headline in the New York Times and Washington Post.
By the way, I say Dylan live last spring, and the show was terrific, the songs new, the interplay with bandmates a thing of beauty.
Anyway, back to the subject. This is counterintuitive, but it seems as if rock musicians, at least famous rock musicians, enjoy longevity, outpacing the general life expectancy of 71.6 – 73.2. Maybe the secret is avoiding those overdoses they’re prone to in their 20s and, of course, avoiding the helicopter and plane crashes that seem to take out so many.
And on that upbeat note, I’ll leave you to take my blood pressure and cholesterol meds.
Ciao.
Del Rey and Steve James
[1] Maybe Mick Jagger should give up the ol’ hair dye. Once you hit the big 8-0, dark hair looks weird, sort of creepy, according to me, a fashion aficionado.
Folly Beach is in the throes of a political battle that wages real estate interests versus residents who would prefer Folly remain a community rather than become a resort destination.
Two competing collectives have formed, Saving Folly’s Future and the Folly United, which employs the shaka “hang loose” hand signal as its logo.[1]
I certainly understand real estate investors wanting to expand their net worth and protect their investments. However, I wish they’d make their case without resorting to misinformation.
My friend Chris Bizzell has taken the time to analyze some of the erroneous information from the flyer that Folly United recently distributed and from the Folly United web site.
First, Folly United argues that Folly Beach residences have grown 2% per year since 2015; however, even though the number of houses, i.e., residences have grown, the number of full-time residents has fallen, as shown in the chart below.
Chris provides the following analysis:
Based on the latest 2022 data from the US census, the current population of Folly Beach is 2,056.
What was the peak population of Folly Beach?The peak population of Folly Beach was in 2010, when its population was 2,617.
Folly Beach’s population is currently 21.4% smaller than it was in 2010 and 6.0% smaller since the year 2000.
In fact, Folly Beach’s growth is below average. 63% of similarly sized cities are growing faster since 2000. If the STR market is not capped, we can easily expect Folly’s full-time population to decrease further.
The flyer also contends that fewer short-term rentals will lead to higher crime rates because the properties are left empty.
Again Chris:
While studies do show that empty properties can lead to higher crime rates, this has nothing to do with STR levels. In fact, a new study shows that a proliferation of Airbnbs, or similar short-term rentals, in a neighborhood contributes to higher rates of crime in the area.
The study compiled 911 data from 2011-2018 determined that higher STR properties in a community does in fact lead to higher crime rates. A major finding in the report was that certain violent crimes, including fights, robberies, and reports of someone wielding a knife, tended to increase in a neighborhood a year or more after the number of Airbnbs increased. “What seems to be the problem is that Airbnb is taking households off the social network of the neighborhood and eroding its natural capacity to manage crime,” says O’Brien, who also studies criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern.
“What we’re seeing is evidence of a slower process, one that becomes significant over the years,” Babak Heydari (associate professor at Northeastern and author of the study) says. “It’s another support that changing the social fabric of the neighborhood is what’s undergirding these results.”
Folly United’s web site has a page entitled “Did You Know,” that ends with incredible bit of so-called information:
The STR commission discovered that STR had NO impact on the number of Long term rentals and no impact on population growth. INCONVENIENT FACTS that have repeatedly ignored.
C’mon, commonsense tells us that this couldn’t be true. As off-island owners transform their properties from long term to short term rentals the renters who called Folly home are replaced by vacationers.
Chris Bizzell:
As more properties are converted to STR’s, the supply of available housing open for long-term renters and homeowners shrinks. With housing in short supply, everyone ends up competing for the same tiny pool of rental properties and rents increase.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that Airbnb “mildly cannibalizes” the long-term rental supply. And in the cities they studied where Airbnb was popular, residents faced a more severe reduction in housing stock.
Research at the University of Arizona and University of Denver found that Airbnb is indeed making the real estate market more expensive. By enriching its hosts while making housing less affordable for others, Airbnb and other home-sharing platforms may be compromising public affordability for private wealth, the research suggests. “It’s going to increase the gap between the rich and the poor,” Wei says. “It’s going to make inequality a little worse.”
The study concluded: “STR’s have become a major alternative for real estate investment and have had a significant impact on housing affordability.”
We can learn by looking at what has happened in other vacation destinations.
In Colorado ski towns, the demand for short term rentals and the increase in supply of STR’s are growing at such a rate that it is displacing local residents of the towns they are supposed to serve.
Margaret Bowes, Colorado Association of Ski Towns executive director, says that the perfect solution to the crisis is still not within reach. “The trajectory of the number of properties becoming (short-term rentals) is not sustainable,” according to Bowes. She adds that at the current rate, no one working in the said communities will be able to live in them.
Look, like I said earlier, I understand that property owners, especially those who don’t live on the island, want to increase their wealth, and certainly, if you live in your Folly residence nine months out if the year, you should be able to rent it short term and that goes for adjacent properties. However, we’re not talking about eliminating short term rentals but capping them, creating a happy symbiosis between full time residents and vacationers.
But, please, don’t resort to cherry picking data and resorting to misinformation to make arguments.
Aloha.
[1] Cue George Orwell: “Yes, war is peace!” If Folly were united, there would be no issue, and nothing screams “hang loose” and the aloha spirit like frenetically placing signs in the yards of short-term rentals that read “Don’t Cap Folly’s Future,” as if Folly is sentient being that would prefer to have its few remaining lots clear cut for the construction of McMansions than maintain a verdant residential vibe.
Photoshopped from Jerry LoFro’s Clumsy Painting
In pains me to admit I have the fine motor skills of a duck-billed platypus. I’d hate to add up the total time I’ve squandered in supermarkets struggling to open those plastic bags you unspool from rollers in the produce department. When shoppers stroll by, they probably attribute my fumbling ineptitude to senescence – or perhaps to a stroke I’ve not fully recovered from – but truth be told, this disability has plagued me from my earliest years.
The humiliation began in kindergarten when Miss Marion hauled out some shoes and attempted to teach the class how to tie them. As my playmates looped and threaded, the laces kept slipping from my tiny fingers. Miss Marion had to come over and help me, and when I had finally accomplished the feat, the bow I had managed was so loosely constructed, the whirr of an oscillating fan unraveled it.[1]
Then there were those horrid two weeks after third grade when Mama made me go to Vacation Bible School at Summerville Baptist Church, a church we didn’t attend regularly, so many of the kids were strangers to me, especially the older ones. We were required to thread a knitting needle, which took me so long I had missed steps two and three and suffered verbal abuse from a tall dark-haired older kid. Thank Allah this was not a Muslim religious school because if it had been, my ineptitude in later painting the clay likeness of our Lord might have been mistaken for desecration.
I could go on with further examples, like my attempting to carve a likeness of the Statue of Liberty from a bar of soap in Cub Scouts or much later struggles in freeing prophylactics from their tiny plastic pods; however, for me the most embarrassing incident concerning my total lack of fine motor coordination occurred when my older son Harrison and I teamed to construct a Pinewood Derby racer from a block of wood.
As a boy, I would turn over such a project to my father, who would fashion the car at his workplace. Once he got home, I fetched newspapers so he could paint it in the carport.
See, I helped!
So, when Harrison and I tackled the job, I followed my father’s lead, in a way. I carved a very un-aerodynamic semblance of a car, but, in a more honest rendition of my old man’s methodology, I had Harrison sand and paint it. After I had attached the wheels, I wrote “Free Tibet” on the side of the car with White Out.
I had the good sense not to photograph this monstrosity.
The great race took place at the gym of the Isle of Palms rec center. Harrison and I arrived early and got in line to have our car inspected, which essentially meant weighing it. The lady in charge was very complimentary to Harrison, and as she handed to car over to me, she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “It’s so nice for a change to see a dad who let his child do all the work all by himself.”
I smiled and said, “Thank you.”
[1] The year was 1957 before such establishments were equipped with air-conditioning. I remember being in the first grade sitting in my reading circle in early September eagerly awaiting the fan to turn its puny breeze my way.
Example One: Andrew Tate
I had never heard of former professional kickboxer, world class misogynist, and current jailbird Andrew Tate until this week when he trolled Greta Thunberg on Twitter asking for her email address so he could “send [her] a complete list of [his] car collection and their respective enormous emissions.”
Her response, “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”
With an atomic bomb boom, her tweet went nuclear, racking up 3.5 million likes and 650K shares as of yesterday.
Caught off guard, Tate tweeted back a surprisingly effete “How dare you?!” echoing Thunberg’s famous speech to the United Nations.
Stung, he attempted to salve his black-and-blue ego by posting a minute-long wit-bereft video featuring cartoonish cigar puffing and a red robe that Oscar Wilde might have found a bit much.[1] During the video, he calls for two boxes of pizzas and announces that he won’t recycle the boxes as he drones on about Greta, the matrix, etc.
Well, fellow karma lovers, police were able to locate Tate and his brother Tristan from delivery records from the pizza provider. He and Tristan are now languishing in a Romanian prison on charges of human trafficking.[2]
And let’s not forget to congratulate capital crime fighter Elon Musk, who by reinstating Tate’s Twitter account, made his arrest possible.
Perhaps, irony isn’t quite dead yet.
Example Two: George Santos
I don’t have the energy to construct the epic catalog of lies Santos (if that’s actually his real name) spewed in his successful run for Congress in New York’s 3rd Congressional District.
Let this one suffice: After claiming to be descended from Holocaust survivors, after investigative scrutiny into his actual ancestry, Santos backtracked by saying he didn’t mean he was literally “Jewish” but nominally “Jew-ish.”
Um, George, no. If I were you, I’d don a disguise and slink off to some obscure Montana off-the-grid outpost.
O shame, where is thy blush?[3]
[1] Polonius is a fool, but he is right about this: “brevity is the soul of wit.”
[2] [cue Hamlet]: “For ’tis the sport to have the engineer/Hoist with his own petard.”
[3] That makes three Hamlet allusions in one post. Alas and alack!
Damn, Why Aren’t Our Moral Compasses Working?
But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.” Matthew 19, 13-14.
Wendy Brown, the swashbuckling political theorist from UC Berkeley, has an excruciatingly depressing theory on how we’ve arrived at a point where Gregg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, can dump immigrant children on the street in sub-freezing temperatures on Christmas Eve, the next day tweet Christmas blandishments, and seemingly suffer no pangs of conscience (and nary a word of censure from mainstream Republicans who claim to be followers of Jesus).
Brown’s theory is complicated, somewhat “over my head,” but fascinating, so I thought I’d take a stab at explaining a simplified version as I understand it.[1]
She begins with Nietzsche’s contention that nihilism begins “with the rise of reason and science as challenges to God and other forms of authority, challenges that reveal all meaning to be constructed and all facts to be without inherent meaning.”
“Unmoored from their foundations,” in an arena of disenchantment and desacralization, “the Christian virtues along with democracy, equity, truth, reason and accountability […] become fungible, superficial and easily instrumentalized.”
“When a Martin Luther King Jr. speech about public service is used to advertise Dodge trucks during the Super Bowl, when Catholic clergy are revealed to have molested thousands of children while their superiors looked away, when ‘moral values’ politicians are exposed for consorting with prostitutes or making abortion payments for mistresses— these things bring not shock, but a knowing grimace, nihilism’s signature.”[2]
In her view, unwittingly, neoliberalism has created a Frankenstein’s monster by monetizing every aspect of life in the West. “As we all become human capital,” she writes, “all the way down and all the way in, neoliberalism makes selling one’s soul quotidian, rather than scandalous. And it reduces the remains of virtue to branding, for capital large and small.”
Thus, the heavy repression of Christian values, especially the repression of sexuality, becomes, to use Herbert Marcuse’s term, “desublimated,” and capitalist culture subsumes pleasure.
“Pleasure, instead of being an insurrectionary challenge to the drudgery and exploitation of labor, becomes capital’s tool and generates submission. Far from dangerous or oppositional, no longer sequestered in aesthetics or utopian fantasy, pleasure becomes part of the machinery.”
She further argues that “as late capitalist desublimation relaxes demands against the instincts, but does not free the subject for self-direction, demands for intellection are substantially relaxed. Free, stupid, manipulable, absorbed by if not addicted to trivial stimuli and gratifications, the subject of repressive desublimation in advanced capitalist society is not just libidinally unbound, released to enjoy more pleasure, but released from more general expectations of social conscience and social comprehension.”
Values, no longer byproducts of the Divine, have been devalued, which leads to the weakening of conscience, not only conscience concerning individual misdeeds but also conscience concerning the misdeeds of our associates, especially when these misdeeds are waged against “Others” and “Outsiders.”
I’ll give Brown the last word.
Bringing Marcuse’s version together with Nietzsche’s, the historically specific nihilistic depletion of conscience and desublimation of the will to power perhaps explains several things. To begin with, it may animate what is commonly called a resurgence of tribalism, but is better framed as a broken relation to the world demographically outside and temporally after one’s own. It may be the decoding key for Melania Trump’s infamous “I really don’t care, do u?” emblazoned Zara jacket worn on her visit to migrant children separated from their parents at the Texas border. It may explain the routinized mocking, on rightwing websites and in comments sections, of “libtard” concern with human suffering, injustice, or ecological devastation.
Happy New Year!
[1] Warning: I have a creative as opposed to an analytical mind.
[2] All quotes are from Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West.
Well, dear scrollers, Time’s turbocharged chariot has rocketed past another year – ‘Tis here!” “Tis here!” “Tis gone!” – poof.
However, before it disappears in memory’s rearview, I thought I’d recap the year in posts, providing links to a few I think worthwhile. So without further ado, I’ll bid adieu to this intro and get the retrospective rolling.
January
By far, the most popular post of not only January but of the entire year was a melancholy meditation entitled “The Gentrification of Folly Beach,“ which laments the metamorphosis of a community into a resort. This fall and winter have been the slowest bar and restaurant traffic in the quarter century I’ve lived on Folly. Could it be that the exodus of long term renters and home owners is the culprit? As I type this, the din of construction across the lane assaults my ear.
Here’s a view from my front porch as two identical behemoth short term rental clones arise from low lying lots that required groundwater to be pumped into a tidal ditch.
As Bobby Zimmerman once pointed out, “Money doesn’t talk; it screams.”
February
Slim pickings in February. I guess I’ll go with “Strange Encounters,” a weird-ass conversation I had with two puttering tourists.
March
After checking out Dylan (i.e. “Bonny Zimmerman”) at the Performing Arts Center, my friend Keith Sanders and I tuned into the Academy Awards just in time for the Will Smith/Chris Rock brouhaha, which I commented on in “The Sixth Deadly Sin.”
And there can be silver linings to dark clouds. Because from that sad incident, my friend, the prolific Pernell McDaniels, wrote this brilliant song, “The Ballad of Chris and Willy,” which you can watch him perform by hitting the link.
April
Here’s another post featuring a live performance at Chico Feo’s Singer/Songwriter Soapbox, this one by George Fox, who took the above photo of Pernell. If you’re from the Charleston area, you need to make the trek to Folly on Monday nights to check it out.
This one’s called “Song Lyrics as Opposed to Poetry, George Fox Edition“.
May
For May, let’s go with “The Folly of Living on Folly.“
June
In June Caroline and I travelled to Germany to visit my ex-pat son Ned. We had a great time, got to meet his girlfriend’s Ina’s parents, have dinner with them, and visit their home.
Before all that wholesomeness, though, Caroline and I visited a speakeasy that was so weird it was like being on acid.
“Decadence Lite, Berlin Edition.”
July
Here’s a post for you language mavens: “Redundant Tautologies” whose very title merits a footnote.
August
I took August off, essentially recycling old posts.
September
Dig this live reading of an original poem from Meg Posey (pictured above), who doubles as my spiritual advisor.
“Screen-Faced Nation”
October
I only produced four posts in October. Even though it’s really stupid to follow the above poem with one of my own, I can be really, really stupid. This is called “From Old Wes’s Almanack.”
November
Oh man, in November, a pickleball tournament took place on Folly, and I went all gonzo.
The Pickleball Extravaganza.
December
This may not surprise you, but I first smoked marijuana in high school. You can, too, vicariously, by shitting this link: “Smoking Pot, Weed, Refer in the Bad Ol’ Days.”
Thanks so much for reading, dear scrollers. Caroline and I are headed to DC to see my boys, my daughter-in-law Tayrn, Ned’s Ina, and my glorious grandson Julian.
Happy Holidays!
Last Wednesday night at the dinner table, I mentioned to Caroline and Brooks that I’d run across an ALL-CAP Trump post on Truth Social heralding a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT to be revealed the next day.
I confidently suggested that they “mark my words,” that Trump was going to announce that defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake was his choice for vice president. After all, Lake has been a ubiquitous presence at Mar-a-Lago, and she and Trump share the conviction that the elections they lost had been stolen from them. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve engaged in a little extramarital hanky-panky.
”Whatcha wanna bet that the announcement is about Lake?” I asked.
Luckily for me, they demurred, because as we now know, the “major announcement” was that the Trump organization was trotting out an “official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card collection” in the form of non-fungible tokens. For a mere $99 dollars a pop, you could collect cards depicting the former president in various heroic poses – as superhero, sheriff, hunter, astronaut, etc.
To quote Aretha Franklin, “I ain’t no psychiatrist, I ain’t no doctor with degrees,/
but, it don’t take too much high IQ’s ” to see Trump’s got him a mental disease.
Acute Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
I mean, you’re talking Caligula-grade delusions of grandeur.[1] Check some of these out, a svelte yet swole Trump glistening godlike in poorly photoshopped incarnations from images illegally lifted from the internet.
These are especially inept:
I mean, what sane adult would publish altered images of himself to impress total strangers.
Okay, never mind.
[1] During his reign, Caligula, not only proclaimed his divinity and appeared in public dressed as various gods, but he also had heads removed from various statues of the gods and replaced with his own (not unlike Trump with these cards).
Smoking Pot, Weed, Reefer (Whatever You Wanna Call It) in the Bad Ol’ Days
I started out on Burgundy
But soon the harder stuff.
Dylan, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”
In the fall of 1970, I abandoned the friend group I’d embraced since kindergarten and Cub Scouts to become a member of Summerville’s small but growing counterculture.[1]
Rather than going to football games on Friday nights, my new friends and I started hanging out at an apartment, swapping stories, and drinking Old Milwaukees in fourteen-ounce cans.[2]
Sometimes, we’d head out to the Clay Pits, an abandoned heavily wooded former phosphate site, and do essentially the same thing, except under the stars and around a campfire. We had all grown up in the Southern tradition of storytelling and were learning how to practice the art ourselves.
We sported bellbottoms, wide flowery woven belts, dingo or desert boots. We boys had hair longer than the dress code allowed, and occasionally we’d get sent home from school to get it cut. Our girlfriends could grow their hair down to the waists but weren’t allowed to wear pants to school, so miniskirts became all the rage.
Hippies gotta do what hippies gotta do.
Eventually one of us, probably Gordon, purchased a nickel of skank-ass seeds-and-stems from some Middleton High surfer dude. Back then, Summerville was so small that if you went down to the Piggly Wiggly and bought a pack of rolling papers, the checkout lady was liable to tell your mama. So, we ended up rolling our first joints in Juicy Fruit chewing gum wrappers.
Sad? Pathetic? Comical?
I’d never even smoked a cigarette, so I didn’t know how to inhale. I sort of gulped the smoke in swallows. Of course, I didn’t get high, but I did suffer stomach distress the next day that had me bending over in pain as I attempted to rake some wealthy people’s expansive yard for pay. It was a weekly October Saturday gig. I dreaded it so much it gloom-shadowed my Friday nights.
I didn’t have to burn the leaves but merely haul them to the edge of the woods that bordered their house. On that day, after I had dumped a load of leaves onto an established waist-high pile, I lay down on top it, clutching my stomach, eventually rolling on my back, lying there, looking up, closing my eyes, following the sun-spawned blobs of color floating in greyness.
“Rusty!”
It was the woman, the homeowner, I don’t remember her name.
“Rusty, what are you doing?”
I told her I had a stomachache. She commanded I get back to work, which I did. This was before I could drive, so my mother picked me up at four. When the lady paid me, she told me my services were no longer required. She said it pleasantly.
I think she paid me something like two dollars for four hours work, so I was happy about getting dismissed. I’d rather collect cast away Coke bottles on the side of the road for deposits than suffer the Sisyphean labor of raking her yard and coming back the next week to see it again blanketed and to do it all over again, to have the onus of the obligation weigh me down on Friday nights.
Mary Jane had set me free.[3]
[1] Summerville, South Carolina. Population 1970, around 3,000
[2] I could barely force two beers down at first. I hated the way it tasted and sometimes even surreptitiously poured out a swallow or two. I’d get slightly buzzed but never really drunk.
[3] Mary Jane is the lamest of all cannabis sobriquets in my esteemed opinion.
Marius van Dokkum On Turning Seventy The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Psalm 90:10. King James Version I have a milestone birthday coming up, … Continue reading On Turning Seventy
One of my many irritating habits is repetitively singing/reciting snatches from old songs or jingles or poems that have risen from the playlist of my inner jukebox and loop through my consciousness like irritating commercials that repeat time and again during a television broadcast. After yesterday’s unexpected Gamecock triumph over the 14-point-favorite Clemson Tigers, a … Continue reading Sports Tribalism, Ear Worms, and Falling Acorns
Moms for Liberty: Vice Crusaders Farting Through Silk “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings, too.” Henrich Heine “the vice-crusaders, farting through silk,waving the Christian symbols . . .” Ezra Pound, Canto XIV Wandering through war torn Twitter these days reminds me of Neville Shute’s On the Beach, a novel … Continue reading Moms for Liberty: Vice Crusaders Farting Through Silk
image courtesy of The Telegraph I consider Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour one of the musical highlights of the early 21st Century. Each week from May 2006 to April 2009, for an hour Dylan aired a sort of parody of an AM radio show, except that the songs weren’t the latest hits from the … Continue reading The Eclectic Musings of Bob Dylan
Scholar by Osman Hamdi Bey A friend recently sent me the copy of a speech that a friend of his had delivered at a Cum Laude induction at Exeter, which reminded me that I too had given a similar speech at Porter-Gaud in the 2010s, so I thought I’d pass it along, for what it’s … Continue reading A Speech on Scholarship
Vacuity Cubed Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most soulsWould scarcely get your feet wet. Christopher Guest, “Deteriorata” Hi, how are things?How are you?What have you been up to? I was so drunk last night!Oh my God!I love your shoes!
Bad Mental Picture! Shakespeare wrote that misery makes for strange bedfellows, and you could say the same about a shared antipathy for Donald Trump. Certainly, ten years ago I wouldn’t have imagined myself sharing a bunk with Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin or former Republican strategist Rick Wilson, but that was then, and this is … Continue reading Strange Bedfellows
George Fox, impresario extraordinare, has made Mondays on Folly Beach a day not to dread but one to look forward to. His open mic Singer/Songwriter Soapbox, which features original works, is attracting nationally known artists such Sierra Hull, Joel Timmons, Sally George, and the poet Chuck Sullivan, who published in Esquire Magazine in the Seventies … Continue reading Chuck Sullivan Reading “Juggler on the Radio”
Yesterday afternoon, after dropping Caroline and Brooks off at the airport, I returned to my pet-ridden but otherwise empty house, and like a good canine stepdad, took KitKat to the dog park where she spazzed out with her patented chihuahua/Jack Russell berserko barking – high-pitched, frantic – perhaps off putting to the other dog owners. … Continue reading The Pickleball Extravaganza
Is there anything worse than contrarians mansplaining conspiracy theories?[1] What really gripes me is not so much the ridiculousness of their arguments but the smug all-knowing tone these crackpots employ as they confidently explain, for example, that the US government is injecting tracking devices into its citizens via the COVID vaccine or that Princess Di … Continue reading Complaining About Mansplaining
These Terrible Dreams That Shake Us Nightly Macbeth (3.2.18-28) In the wee hours this morning, I suffered through one of my post-retirement nightmares, a reprise of I’ve Never Been to Class and the Final Exam Is Tomorrow. However, in this morning’s remake, I’ve transitioned from slack-ass student to unconscientious teacher. In the dream, I’ve … Continue reading These Terrible Dreams That Shake Us Nightly
Be thankful (if you’re not reading this from Russia)[1] that the cosmic crap throw of innumerable permutations of space/time has landed you in a nation that doesn’t ambush males lounging in neighborhood saloons, drag their startled selves to recruitment centers, and in less than a week, transport their untrained asses to the killing fields of … Continue reading Dysfunction, So-Called Strong Men, and American Idiocy
Before I begin this paean on the exquisite pop/rock masterpiece “China Girl,” I thought I’d mention that some consider Bowie’s 1983 hit racist because he portrays a diminutive Asian female in stereotypical ways, and, [throat clearing], the sexualization of Asian females has been a Western European/North American thing for centuries.[1] Take Graham Greene’s The Quiet … Continue reading An Appreciation of David Bowie’s “China Girl”
Disencumbered with Old Nonsense, the Old Doggere[a]list Turns the Page Let yesterday go,Ralph Waldo says sagely.Forget about the squandered doughand your dead dog Saisy. Ray Charles was right,“They ain’t nothing you can do,”so enjoy today’s ephemeral lightand whip up a pot of oyster stew.
This is the first day of autumn weather wise, the turning of yet another page in the annals of my accumulated seasons, dating all the way back to 1952 when I was born just two weeks shy of the winter solecist. Autumn was my mother’s favorite season, my late wife Judy’s favorite season, and my … Continue reading Rambling, Riffling, Reminiscing
Cliffs of Fall Frightful, Sheer, No Man Fathomed Who needs actual supernatural ghosts when we all have harrowing memories haunting us? Take combat veterans for example. Like poor Wilfred Owen who lived just long enough to write this before getting killed in WWI. Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed … Continue reading Cliffs of Fall Frightful, Sheer, No Man Fathomed
One of the premier artists at Chico-Feo’s Singer/Songwriter open mic Mondays, Pernell McDaniel performs a wide range of originals. Whether he is singing about his beloved grandfather, star-crossed interracial couples, or the abundant goods available at Bert’s Market, his melodies and lyrics seamlessly meld into well-crafted crowd pleasers. Here he is performing “The Ballad of … Continue reading Pernell McDaniel at Chico Feo
When I was a child, before the completion of I-26, there were two routes that led from Summerville to Charleston, and the two couldn’t have been more different in character. The more pleasant passage my parents called “the River Road,” Highway 61, a tree tunnel of moss-draped oaks running parallel to the Ashley River and … Continue reading That Way, Down Highway 61
George Fox’s Monday Night extravaganza known as the Singer/Songwriter Soapbox provides local musicians and poets a venue to showcase their original works, and many of them are damned good, like Jason Chambers, Chuck Sullivan, among a host of others. Last night Megan Posey recited – not read – recited “Screen-Faced Nation,” a performance you can … Continue reading Screen-Faced Nation
The Hoodoo Honkey Tonk for Stev Jam* Taking the backroads from Allendaleto Statesboro, I spotteda hand painted road sign that read “Hoodoo Honky Tonk two miles ahead.” Beneath it, nailed to the same post,a smaller sign, with two words: Cold Beer. It was just now getting dark.I was about halfway there.Hey, why not? A couple … Continue reading The Hoodoo Honky Tonk
Just for the hell of it, since I’m soon to become a YA author, I decided to reread A Catcher in the Rye.[1] Although Salinger wrote the novel for adults, it was until recently a mainstay in high school English curriculums. However, because sixteen-year-old first-person narrator Holden Caulfield frequently spews vulgarities, occasionally references sexual encounters, … Continue reading A Teacher’s Recommendation for Holden Caulfield
I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that until last night I didn’t know that “A Certain Girl” was an Ernie K-Doe tune. I only knew the song from the Warren Zevon cover. Thanks to the killer Asheville band Pleasure Chest for educating my ass. Here’s a snippet of Pleasure Chest’s cover and the original below that. … Continue reading A Certain Girl
When you get to be my age, i.e., the ol’ “three score and ten” of Psalm 90, the years can seem like a blur, so when I opened Facebook this morning, I was surprised that already nine years have passed since the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s death at 74. Although it is commonplace now … Continue reading In Memory of Seamus Heaney
You Do Hoodoo is honored to welcome Archibald Ascot Anderson, Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus of the University of Greenville, who has contributed the following WesTalk. The Editors of Hoodoo (i.e. I-and-I) do not necessarily agree with our guests’ suppositions, but we do take pride providing a wide range of provocative views on newsworthy topics. … Continue reading Guest Post: Post Hoc, Ergo Procter Hoc[1]**: Post Dobbs Bralessness
brat, noun a disparaging : CHILD specifically : an ill-mannered annoying child, a spoiled brat b: an ill-mannered immature person Merriam Webster On-Line Dictionary the perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who have set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses Ezra Pound, “Canto XIV”[1] Perhaps modeled on Josh Hawley’s raised fist on 6 January as the … Continue reading Brat Power
The democratization of media means that we’re all stars now. Self-styled comedians flood TikTok with their bits, musicians upload videos, retired English teachers with lowly BAs spew cultural observations in blog posts as if they’re social scientists.[1] You don’t need any talent or expertise to do any of this, only the right software and an … Continue reading Everybody’s in Showbiz
Polonius: What are you reading? Hamlet: Words, words, words. I rationalize my obsession with word games by thinking of them as therapeutic strategies to stave off senility. By working through the NYT, Washington Post, and New Yorker crosswords each day, the reasoning goes, I’m keeping my synapses clean, firing them like sparkplugs, raging, raging against … Continue reading Words, Words, Wordle
Oh, I say let it rain every day. Pour. Flood the Crosstown. Swell the Edisto. Let the weeping sky paint the marsh even greener so mosquitos swarm and bats dive and devour and thrive. Out on the deck when I see their zigzagging swoops and hear the frogs croaking, I know that our habitat is … Continue reading Monsoon Season
My novel Today, Oh Boy, which is supposed to appear in early September of 2022, takes place during the daylight hours of Monday 12 October 1970 in Summerville, South Carolina. The title comes from the Beatle classic “A Day in the Life” as does the epigraph of Book 1, “Surfaces” – And though the news … Continue reading A Relatively Modest (If I Say So Myself) Promotional Article on My Just-About-to-Be- Published Novel “Today, Oh Boy” in Which I Compare It to Joyce’s “Ulysses” and the Paintings of the Flemish Master Pieter Breughel the Elder[1]
As my regular readers know, I’m not a fan of euphemisms. It’s not the word retard’s fault that people began associating its past participle form with “mentally slow, lagging significantly in mental or educational progress.” Etymonline.com attributes its medical mental health coinage to G.E. Shuttleworth, “late medical superintendent, Royal Albert Asylum, for idiots and imbeciles … Continue reading Redundant Tautologies[1]
A aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, so what shall I do with this absurdity, O Heart, O Troubled heart, decrepit age that has been tied to me as to a dog’s tail? What am I gonna do? Make a fool out of myself, that’s what. Here’s exhibit … Continue reading Ain’t Got You
Prior to my sophomore year in high school, I had developed a robust crush on a social studies teacher named Mrs. Palmer. I can’t tell you how old she was – late twenties or early thirties would be my retrospective guess. She wasn’t the hot, mini-skirt-sporting bleached blonde that your typical adolescent boy might lust … Continue reading Bad Teaching Personified
We saw lots of sights during our recent two-week trip to Germany: for example, the murals on what’s left of the Berlin Wall, the DDR and Toy museums in East Berlin, the Albrecht Dürer Haus in Nüremberg, cathedrals in every city we visited, an incredible beyond-baroque palace in Würzburg, and in Heidelberg, a museum devoted … Continue reading The Würzburg Shuffle
Last night Caroline and I engaged in some decadence-lite by visiting the Berlin nightspot Bellboy. Of course, when you think of Berlin, you think decadence, cabarets, drag queens, leather, and donuts. In the movie version of our escapade, Emil Jannings would play me, and of course, Marelene Dietrich would play Caroline. Bellboy pretends to be … Continue reading Decadence Lite, Berlin Edition
I’ve always been supersensitive to sounds, particularly to the sound of words. I especially enjoy attempting to marry sound and sense when I write poetry and prose. Or as Alexander Pope[1] put it. ‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,The sound must seem an echo to the sense.Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,And … Continue reading Rock ‘Em the Full Blast Early in the Morning
It strikes me as strange that when so many restrictions of Late Empire American morality have been softened– the acceptance of premarital cohabitation comes to mind – that speech has become less free, especially corporate speech, academic speech, speech addressed to a crowd, whether it be a cache of Facebook acquaintances or a classroom of … Continue reading Hold That Thought, Better Yet, Deep Six That Thought
Stone walls do not a prison make Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage.[1] Richard Lovelace It’s very easy to take our freedoms for granted, especially given the irrationality of a substantial number of our citizenry who see freedom as merely a license to do whatever they damn … Continue reading Concrete and Barbed Wire
I probably shouldn’t express such an obviously shallow sentiment, but I sometimes prefer style to substance. I’d rather read cleverly constructed sentences in fluff pieces than pedestrian prose dedicated to grand subjects. For example, I just finished Mark Leyner’s novel (if you want to call it that) Et Tu, Babe[1]. This narrative is not for … Continue reading Hold That Sentence, Embrace That Sentence
Jason Chambers is a truly remarkable poet. When he reads at Chico Feo, the crowd automatically hushes and hangs on every breath. I appreciate his granting me the privilege to share this recent poem and to recite it in my gorgeous Lowcountry baritone.[1] [1] My former students will recognize that italicized well-worn phrase, a tongue-in-cheek … Continue reading Hearts
When cataloguing the top ten stupidest stunts I’ve pulled, smuggling marijuana into Jamaica probably ranks in the top 5 behind leaping off the top of a chest-of-drawers onto a rocking horse that catapulted me face first onto a Biloxi Beach cottage’s wooden floor, driving my MG down steps of a parking garage that housed the … Continue reading Number 5 of the Stupidest Stunts
Here’s my reading a parody of the George Gershwin classic “Summertime” performed 9 May 2022 at Chico Feo’s Singer/Songwriter Soapbox hosted by George Fox.
What a wonderful stroke of luck to be born and grow up in a quaint town like Summerville, South Carolina, with its verdant, lush, flowery neighborhoods and old-fashioned downtown one-story shops and cafes. Of course, nowadays, the nowhere-that’s-everywhere sprawl of Walmarts, strip shopping centers, and hotel chains have grown outward from the town proper, creating … Continue reading His Town, My Town, Our Towns
Here’s a snippet from a reading from Today, Oh Boy! at Chico Feo’s Singer/Songwriter’s Soapbox. The novel is coming out this fall via Austin Macauley Publishers. A Bit of background: Over the intercom, Summerville High School Principal Paul Pushcart is interrupting art class by summoning Rusty Boykin to the office on a Monday in October … Continue reading A Reading from “Today, Oh Boy!”
The Folly of Living on Folly With apologies to DuBose Heyward and George Gershwin[1] Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined. Tennyson, “The Lotos-eaters” Summertime,And the living is queasy,Traffic’s stalled,And the rent’s sky high.Our landlord’s richAnd constantly bitching,So, c’mon, sweet baby,Let’s stiff … Continue reading The Folly of Living on Folly
Stubborn Denial Bill ignored the early symptoms of the major coronary event that did him in. After all, he was only in his early 50s[1]. Yet, the googleable telltale signs were there, both in his body and on WebMD: cold night sweats, stentorian snoring, tightness in his chest, and then, on the day of his … Continue reading The Ol’ Pearly Gates Ain’t What They Used toBe
Every now and then on Facebook or Twitter, I run across a give-yourself-a-point list like the one below. I remember my first one. I was maybe twelve or thirteen, hadn’t even broken a bone, much less skinny-dipped or enjoyed a one-night stand. In fact, I scored a 19. I had appeared on a local kiddie … Continue reading Give Yourself an Ill-Deserved Slap on the Back
Generally, when I first listen to a song, I don’t pay much attention to lyrics. If I dig the melody and beat – as the boppers used to say on Bandstand – I’ll start paying closer attention to the words, and if the diction is clever or thought-provoking, all the better. After all, it’s really … Continue reading Song Lyrics as Opposed to Poetry, George Fox Edition
I recall as a boy my daddy complaining about how television news stereotyped Southerners, the correspondents constantly trotting out before the cameras a series of Bull Connor belligerents, grammatically challenged podunk politicians, and/or dentally deficient racists whose lack of front teeth made pronouncing the n-word problematic. I didn’t know enough back then to explain that … Continue reading Excuse Me, Sir
Wouldn’t it be nice if the pleasant moments of our lives passed as slowly as Mac system updates? For example, for the last hour or so, my update bar has been stuck on “about 15 minutes remaining.” You glide into a warm bath. Rather than cooling, the water remains at a constant soothing temperature, pleasure’s non-existent … Continue reading Idle Thoughts at 9:50 a.m. on a Wednesday
One of the recompenses of old age – and believe me they are few – is that getting rip-roaring, intestine-unloading, word-slurring, sidewalk-reeling drunk has lost its allure.[1] Oh, Lawd, my geriatric muse, Erratatata has descended: Dionysius, boon companion of my youth, has grown so very long in the tooth that he looks like Nosferatu, like, … Continue reading Being of Two Minds: Dionysian Edition
Victorian Whippet by Michael Thomas My love for creatures isn’t wholesale.
For example, I don’t love a dog merely because it’s a dog, don’t love a baby because it’s merely a baby. Loving something just because in falls into category strikes me as indiscriminate.
Oh, look at baby Putin, he’s so adorable. Coochie Coochie Coo, Vladimir.
On the other hand, I have loved and do love individual dogs like Jack, Sally, Bessie, Saisy, Milo, Cosmo, Daisy, and KitKat because they cool, not because they merely possess four legs, sport fur, and love you unconditionally if you feed them and offer them the scantest attention.[1] I don’t love babies because they’re supposedly innocent or cute or whatever. I love babies with personality, party babies, babies with soul. Like this one:
Grandson Julian If you don’t like dogs – and some people don’t – it’s probably not a great idea to announce it on your Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.[2] For whatever reason, where I live dogs have risen in status approaching the parental love levels of demi-human.[3] Sometimes. it seems to me that people who bring their dogs to bars consider their dogs alter egos, like the dog is an extension of themselves, a walking scarf, as it were. I suspect that some dog owners work all day and feel obligated to drag their shepherds and Boykins to Chico Feo or Lowlife for a modicum of stimulation and companionship for the dog while the owners seek human contact and alcohol.
Unfortunately, today I had unpleasant encounters with three bar dogs. The first one, one of these ubiquitous poodle mixes (perhaps a waddle waddle doodle doodle) was lying underneath my stool and looked up beseechingly and me, so I addressed him as if he were human, saying something along the lines of, “How you doing, Buddy Roe,” and he immediately growled at me, showing his teeth. His owner, a dour faced woman eating an exotic dish, didn’t chide the dog, so I said to it testily, raising my hands with palms pushing outward, “End of conversation, canine.”
A bit later as I was leaving, my passage was blocked by two straining spaniels on leashes, held by an attractive smiling blonde, and when I tried to slide past them, they barked aggressively.
I stopped and addressed the dogs. “Look,” I said, “I come to this bar practically every day. This is my territory.” Then glanced at the woman and said, “I’m serious.”
A Dear Abby suggestion: If you’re gonna bring belligerent dogs to restaurants, sit in a corner.
On the way home, the light was beautiful as I walked down Cooper to Hudson to take KitKat out to pee, which she did indeed, happy but not overjoyed to see me.
The cat, on the other hand, hangs with me in the study, now asleep he is, curled up like a black, hairy caterpillar. No way I’m ever taking him to a bar.
[1] I’m a slack ass grammarian and lazy to boot, so I omitted the verb here because most of the dogs are dead, though a couple are alive, and I didn’t want to clutter the sentence with the verbs “were” and “are” as in “because they are and were cool.” I could have used “be” as in “they be cool.” But you really don’t need it:
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
[2] Donald Trump isn’t into dogs, not to mention not being into his son Barron, or whatever his name is. Some people consider not liking dogs a character flaw, but I don’t. Not liking your son is a different matter. Trump’s father doesn’t seem to have loved him, which reminds me of these lines from Larkin:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
[3] Parental here means ownership. Dogs have become like offspring, especially for single people, which is fine.
Caroline Tigner Moore Although she doesn’t publish, my wife Caroline Tigner Moore is an elegant, accomplished poet, one who embraces Archibald MacLeish’s dicta in “Ars Poetica.” MacLeish argues that poems should embody abstractions in images rather than merely stating themes.
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.
Archibald MacLeish from “Ars Poetica”
Caroline is a craftsperson, one who eliminates every extraneous word so that her final product is imbued with meaning.
For example, check this link out.
She prefers fixed forms, villanelles, sonnets, even limericks.
So perhaps foolishly, I have attempted to channel her methodology in a sonnet celebrating her birthday.
For Caroline, on Her Birthday
Modern poets eschew silken sonnets,
consider them passe, clichéd, old hat –
like antiquated Easter bonnets –
but Caroline Moore doesn’t buy into that.
When she puts her pen to paper, she seeks
to frame her words within a fitting form,
to render vaporous thoughts concrete,
even as they billow, swirl, and swarm
inside her head ¬– sonnets, villanelles –
fixed forms that demand strict cohesion,
apt rhymes and rhythmic syllables
befitting terrain and season.
Oh, how she has rejuvenated my life,
My discerning poet, my word-wielding wife!
Happy Birthday, my love!
Happy Birthday, my love!
photo courtesy of Savannah Morning News via Latitude Margaritaville When it comes to dead-end hedonism, I’m not one to wag my trembling finger at those Boomers who have opted to spend the twilight of their lives playing pickle ball, riding from bar to bar on golfcarts, or listening to classic rock on what they wished might be a never-ending loop.[1] In other words, I’d be a hypocrite to diss the 55-plus crowd who have decided to purchase expanded dorm suites in the Jimmy Buffet-themed retirement community of Margaritaville.
After all, nearly every afternoon, I shuffle down to Chico Feo to bask in its Caribbean vibe and consume two or three session IPAs (on Monday open mic night maybe six or even seven). I will say, however, that Chico provides much more diversity than Margaritaville (which you can read about in this New Yorker article).
For one thing, Chico offers a range of ages, from minors unsuccessfully trying to pass off fake IDs, to surfer dudes with their bronze tans, bleached hair, and intricate tattoos; to middle-aged Folly denizens; to tourists, who come in all ages, shapes, and sizes; and finally, to codgers like I-and-I with, if not one foot in the grave, a big toe testing the temperature of the down below.[2]
Chico Feo in the Morning, collage by Wesley Moore (for sale to a hip family) Obviously, Margaritaville also lacks economic diversity, which Chico possesses in spades. Economic diversity, I might add, enriches those of us who hang with the day-to-day strugglers, which for many years I counted myself as one. Dishwashers and house painters don’t share their First World irritations but tend to embrace the swirling eddies of day-to-day existence where the future exists merely as tomorrow’s sunrise.
Blind Willie McTell’s dishwasher never went on the fritz, which brings to mind that American musical culture comes to us from the bottom up, from Mississippi Delta shacks and hillbilly hovels, not from the gated communities where Bennington Rhodes is unsuccessfully attempting to tune his brand-new Stratocaster.
Of course, Margaritaville has its share of house cleaners and maintenance workers, but they’re unlikely to be swapping tales with the parrot-shirted McSweenys, who have forsaken the high taxes of the Delaware for sunny, low-tax Daytona Beach.
Chico also possesses a modicum of racial diversity, and once again, I can’t imagine that many African Americans admire Jimmy Buffett’s meld of country and calypso.[3]
A bright lightbulb just flashed on above my fedora: Some enterprising entrepreneurs should come up with a retirement community based on Willie Dixon’s music. I might seriously consider moving to Wang-Dang-Doodleville:
Tell fats and washboard sam
That everybody’s gonna jam
Just shake it boxcar joe
We got sawdust on the floor
Tell chicken head till I die
We’re gonna have a time
When the fish head fills the air
Be snuff juice everywhere
We’re gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long
[1] I suspect that Eric Burdon and War’s cover of “Mother Earth”: isn’t on the playlist:
Mother Earth is waitin’ for you, yes she is.
She is big and she’s round,
And it’s cold way down in the ground.
[2] They say teaching high school keeps you young because you spend many of your days with adolescents. I think this is true to an extent. Also, you don’t know how close I came to mixing metaphors with that sentence.
[3] Nor am I fan, except for his early album A-I-A.
from Blade Runner I believe that old folks, senior citizens, golden-agers, stooped shufflers – whatever you want to call them – tend to project their mental and bodily decay on the world at large, which leads them to disparage the present and overpraise “the good ol’ days.” Of course, their parents did the same, derided those good ol’ days we fondly look back on as doom-ladened even as they themselves waxed nostalgic about World War II or the Great Depression.[1]
And I can’t help but wonder if this tendency might have something to do with moon-faced Vladimir Putin’s waging war on Ukraine as he nostalgically looks back on the post-Stalinist era of his youth, on good ol’ Nikita banging on a UN desk with his shoe, a lapse of protocol that makes Marjorie Taylor Greene’s and Lauren Boebert’s screeching during Biden’s the State of the Union address seem downright urbane.
The 60s, the good ol’ days
owning the libs Putin wants to restore the Soviet Empire, a project not unlike restoring the Blade Runner set. Look, I spent twenty-eight days in the Soviet Union in 1989, and I’d never witnessed a population more depressed, especially in Leningrad where virtually every face I encountered was stamped with despair.
If you’d like, you can click HERE for a side trip that offers more specifics on the despair.
Ah, yes, 1989, fun times in the Evil Empire To be fair, Putin did a fairly good job of fostering a middle class, even in a Kleptocracy, that is, up to now.
At any rate, Putin is suffering from some malady, perhaps Parkinson’s, as his shuffling gate and clenched fist suggest, or perhaps he’s had a stroke. At any rate, he’s obviously on steroids, and some have even suggested his belligerence is rooted in “roid rage.”
What’s the diagnosis? Immunosuppression, metastatic cancer, frontal lobe tumour, steroid abuse, other autoimmune disease, Botox with fillers, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, tertiary syphilis with delusions of grandeur & Hitler fixation, psychosis or simply NFP (Normal For Putin)? pic.twitter.com/MGuuUE8p4T
— Dr Phil Hammond (@drphilhammond) March 17, 2022
Given the six-thousand nukes he has at his disposal, it’s pretty damned scary. I remember in the fourth-grade squatting under desks during the Cuban Missile Crisis in duck and cover drills[2].
Now, with my bad back and aching knees, I’m not sure I’m capable of squatting, so let’s pray –if we pray and hope if we don’t – that Putin shows some restraint. He does, I hear, have to daughters via his first wife and four more with a mistress, an Olympic gold medalist gymnast, who, no doubt, is very adept at squatting.
Cheers!
[1] Writeth achy Wesley in his 69th year.
[2] An oldie but goodie: “In the event of a nuclear attack, get under the desk, cover your head with your hands, and kiss your ass goodbye.”
Richard Tuschman, Pink Bedroom (Still Life at Night) “Sonnet-ish: What Can I do, Dad?” “Nothing, son.”
He quit watching the news, quit his book club,
quit shaving. Let the subscriptions lapse.
Sleep became a hum, dreams dubbed
like foreign films, the phlegmy rasp
of his breathing a cause of concern
not broached by Mama or me.
He did trudge off to lecture
until the dean dismissed him.
Near the end he called out from his bed
Mama was out running errands. “Yes sir?”
I said, cracking open the door. “Sleep, I need to sleep.”
I was fifteen. “My dreams,” he said,
“all take place in this room, ghosts,
floating above the bed, gossipy whisperers.”
Aleksei Adele Panilov I’ve been devoting un-precious moments of my wee-hour insomnia thinking about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
[Swoosh]
He’s lying on his back in a crib or cradle kicking his little legs and waving his little arms.
Grandmother, Mother, and Baby Putin [Swoosh]
He’s in middle school, pasty and sawed-off[1], targeted by bullies who stink of B.O and Turkish cigarettes.[2]
[Swoosh]
Now, he’s sitting at the end of a table, a fifth of an American football field[3] from his nearest underling.
(Photo by Alexei Nikolsky\TASS via Getty Images) In a recent NYT op-ed piece. Madeleine Albright, who spent three hours with Putin when she was Clinton’s secretary of state, described him as “reptilian.”
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C So obviously something went terribly wrong with him somehow, somewhere.
He claims to have revered his parents, so they must have loved him – or maybe not.
A bad seed?
I bet it’s complicated.
Then end product is overcompensation. Why all the overcompensation?
Overcompensation, micro and macro.
Micro: Judo black belts, bare-chested horsemanship.
Macro: Resurrecting the former Soviet Union.
In the irrational pre-dawn of my depressive sleeplessness, it seems we’re regressing, devolving, that even in the US democracy is disappearing.[4]
Meanwhile, In Ukraine, babies lie on their backs, kick their little legs, wave their little arms.
[1] A hip 1950’s synonym for “short.”
[2] I spent twenty-eighty days in June of ’89 in the Soviet Union. Anonymous high rises galore, the stench of Turkish cigarettes, shuffling pedestrians everywhere looking down at the sidewalk.
Putin’s citizens are more prosperous, less woebegone. He’s popular, especially among the countryfolk, c.f. Trump
[3] Approx. twenty yards, two first downs, i.e., 18.288 meters, give or take a centimeter or two.
[4] Folk wisdom insists “that just before daylight is the darkest hour.”
My interest in street art commenced in 1975-7 when I lived next door to the artist Blue Sky. I can’t claim that Blue Sky and I were even acquaintances—don’t recall any conversations I had with him, meaningful or otherwise. We merely nodded and smiled as we passed, coming and going.
To me he was just another old hippie stubbornly clinging the ‘60s zeitgeist at the dawn of the disco age. Even though we were neighbors, I wasn’t aware that he was in the process of creating the iconic[1] mural Tunnelvision on the Federal Land Bank until shortly before its unveiling, which I attended with a few of my friends.[2]
What a contrast in worlds! I wanted to pass through that tunnel out of the otherwise soulless streets of Columbia into the wide-open spaces of that setting sun.
A quarter of a century later, visiting my son Harrison who was studying at Humboldt University, I once again encountered graffiti that blew my mind. The building, originally a department store, stood in the Old Jewish quarter in East Berlin on Oranienburger Straße. After reunification, a group of artists moved into the building as squatters. Harrison frequented a bar in the building that once held French prisoners during WW2. For whatever reason, the mural, with its marching African army or conga line and smiling spermatozoa, thrilled me.
photo by me Of course, the remaining sections of the wall that had not been torn down also became media for graffiti artists.
a 4 second video I took during the Berlin trip So, I became interested in street art, in commissioned murals as well in the renegade productions of spray-can-wielding night painters like SEEN, the so-called Godfather of Graffiti. Whenever we visit an urban area, my wife Caroline, who wrote her master’s dissertation on outsider art, seeks out graffiti and murals, and I am more than happy to tag along.
Thus,[3] over a long weekend in Atlanta celebrating stepdaughter Brooks’ thirteenth birthday, we wandered over to the High Museum to check out the KAWS exhibition, which Caroline enthusiastically embraced, pointing out to her less visually astute husband the ways in which KAWS’ work, a crown jewel of the genre, illuminates the work of all graffiti artists.
photo by me After seeing the exhibit, immediately I started paying closer attention to my physical surroundings, noting especially the shadows of trees on the sidewalks of Decatur, where we were staying. Even at night, these shadows created beautiful, life-enhancing patterns.
photo by me at night The next day, Caroline suggested we Uber to Cabbagetown, a funky Atlanta enclave with some of the finest street art in the city. Cabbagetown was originally a mill town east of Atlanta, and the ruins of the high wall of the mill span a half mile along Wylie and Tennelle Streets in an electrifying, eclectic array of divergent styles.[4]
Here are a couple of examples:
photo by me
As we Ubered back to the house, we traversed the incredible Krog Street Tunnel, a place so spooky few people attended a Halloween festival staged there.
me again Obviously, visiting both the museum and Cabbagetown inspired me. I couldn’t wait to come home and create one of my collages.
Ta da!
Blind Woman in Cabbagetown So hail, museums, hail street art!
[1] I hate the overused word “iconic: however, in this context, I can’t think of a more accurate adjective.
[2] Although the Federal Land Bank refused to fund the project, they did grant Blue Sky permission to use the side of the building, that is, if he swore he wasn’t a communist (Wikipedia).
[3] A creaky looking old word that when uttered out loud sounds so cool, a sibilant hiss of a transition.
[4] Check out Day Trip Queen’s excellent overview of Cabbagetown art: https://daytripqueen.com/cabbagetown-street-art/
Me writing fiction circa 1980 When I first started writing as an adult, around 1978, publishing short fiction was very difficult.[1] Hotshot quarterlies like The Georgia Review received a thousand manuscripts a month, and of those three thousand submissions, they’d publish maybe two an issue. Stephen Corey, one of its editors in those days, told me if the story didn’t grab a reader’s attention in the first paragraph, it was tossed in the “thanks-for-submitting-your-manuscript-but-it-doesn’t-meet-our-needs” pile.
Fortunately, my home state of South Carolina has an Arts Commission that provides writers chances for publication. I was fortunate to be selected to participate in a workshop led by Blanche McCrary Boyd. We met once a week for six weeks or so, and I learned a helluva lot about technique, but on the less positive side of the ledger, I discovered that my writing was no great shakes. Jo Humphreys, Lee Robinson, Starkey Flythe Jr., and William Baldwin were among the participants. It was humbling –disillusioning in the positive sense that – poof – an illusion had disappeared.
It was through the Arts Commission that I published my first story “Airwaves,” which was later anthologized by the Hub City Press. Encouraged, I started sending manuscripts out to literary journals I’d cull from the Fiction Writer’s Market published by Reader’s Digest Books, a pre-internet storehouse of possibilities.
One journal that caught my eye was a quarterly out of Richmond, Virginia, the New Southern Literary Messenger. They, according to the entry, received 140-150 submissions per month and published five. The pay was meager, $10, 6 copies, and a free subscription. So, I sent them a story entitled “Almost Blue,” my latest.
It took them so long to get back to me that I had forgotten I had submitted it. In fact, I’d gotten full-time teaching job in the meantime and had more or less given up writing.
I’ll never forget reaching in my mailbox in Rantowles, pulling out the acceptance letter, and doing a little jig of joy. They wanted me to provide a photograph and write a first-person bio. Of course, I was ll too happy to comply.
I crowed, I boasted, informed my parents and in-laws and my new bosses at Porter-Gaud. After all, Edgar Allen Poe had once been an editor of the [Old] Southern Literary Messenger!
I should have been more careful reading the entry in the Writer’s Market, for example, that the journal was 5×8 with card stock cover.
Here’s a Xerox reproduction of the last page. To say I was disappointed at the layout would be an understatement.
My poor parents, my poor in-laws, my poor wife. The Georgia Review this was not.
So now that I’m finally publishing my first novel, I have some trepidation about the quality of the product, but so far so good. I received the preliminary proofs this week, and the editors had gone through the manuscript with [awkward attempt at avoiding a cliché alert] a cootie comb, and with David Boatwright doing the cover, I’m confident that the book itself will be high quality.
The quality of the writing, however, I’m still not so sure about.
A Cootie Comb
[1] It’s still very difficult, but a bit less so with so many on-line journals out there nowadays.
Here’s a brief video of me reading “Wintry Mix” at the George Fox’s Singer/Songwriter Soap Box at Chico Feo on 31 January 2022. The poem is printed below.
``` Wintry Mix
I’m not a fan of the wan light of winter, the weakening light of day, the marrow-penetrating wind off the river, the fallen leaves’ decay.
I’m not a fan of hypocrisy, the politician’s flipflop, the post hoc ergo propter hoc array of fallacious thinking I hear every day.
I’m not a fan of fantasy, ogres, princesses, dragons, flying carpets defying gravity, flagons containing elixirs, mages with conical caps, sages holed up in caves.
I am a fan of poetry, though, even the darkest of wintery verse, Dylan Thomas’s father’s curse, John Keats’s death lament – that shiny black hearse in reverse.
```
Senator Mike Fair, the carefree hypochondriac, has successfully struck a clause from cutting edge South Carolina’s not-so-new new science standards as the Modular Home State continues to lead the nation in embracing the concept of a 1st Century AD classroom.
This educational ~~apostasy~~philosophy, according to Senator Fair, will prepare students for the most profound challenge they will face in the upcoming century, i.e., avoiding an eternity of everlasting perdition, “torture without end [. . .] a fiery deluge, fed with ever-burning sulphur (sic) unconsumed,” as the 17th Century astro-physicist John Milton put it.[1]
Here is the controversial clause in question:
Conceptual Understanding: Biological evolution occurs primarily when natural selection acts on the genetic variation in a population and changes the distribution of traits in that in that population over multiple generations.
Not so fast, says broad-minded Baptist Fair: “To teach natural selection is the answer to origins is wrong. I don’t have a problem with teaching theories. I don’t think it should be taught as fact.”[2]
In agreement with Fair is state Superintendent of Education Mick Zais, a Darwinian doubter who for some odd reason introduced forensic chemistry into Newberry College’s college curriculum when he served as president. “This has been going on in South Carolina for quite some time,” Zais noted. “We ought to teach them both sides and let students draw their own conclusions.[3]
Actually, Dr. Zais’s idea of teaching the theory of evolution vis a vis with creation ~~myths~~science has already been implemented in a few avant garde Upcountry independent schools in the state. Your commentator has obtained an exclusive copy of a comparison/contrast essay by a senior at Pitchfork Ben Tillman Christian Academy.
Skinner Hodges
Mrs. Tammy Jean Weektee
English IllI
Febuary 2014 A.D.
For the six thousand years man has walked the planet
earth, they have been arguing about how this God-Created
miracle of a planet came to be. And we are not only talking
about people, that are saved, but about pagean people, too.
That being the case, it is not, we reckon, not all that
surprising that people are still arguing about this topic.
This six-weeks we have been studying two different
versions of creation. The scientific and biblical versions.
The scientific version is based on human observation, that
is often faulty, and the Biblical version is based on the
unerrant Word of God. This paper using the block method
will compare and contrast the two theories.
First, the scientific theory, which is full of holes. According
to this, out of nowhere this bigbang spit stars that cooled
and somehow or other little cells popped up on earth,
started dividing and over a ridiculous long period of time
ended up being monkeys that ended up being man. Not to
mention they haven’t found a missing link to prove any of
this.
The Biblical theory is that the Lord created the world and
all of its creatures. This makes more sense. First, the world
did not come from nothing, which even a special education
kid could tell you makes no sense, but from the Hand of the
Almighty. Adam and Eve started out as people, not as
germs and viruses, who could walk upright in the garden
from Day 1. Add to this that this version does not come
from the faulty observations of Fallen Man but from the
Mouth of the Almighty by way of Its servant Moses.
In conclusion. We live in a free country. You’re free to
believe in evolution if you like or in the Biblical version.
The facts, though, speak for themselves.
A+
Great job Skinner. Almost perfect, except that
“Six Weeks” should be in capitols because it
refers to a specific school-related period of time
In other good news, Governor Hayley is expected to sign the bill allowing patrons to bring their firearms into bars without their having to go through training or criminal background checks.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!
SC Celebrity, Pee Wee Gaskins
[1] Symbol S, atomic number 16.
[2] When self-proclaimed right-thinking leftist Pointee Head questioned if Fair, a product of SC schools, could actually read, given that the above clause says nothing about “origins,” he was easily squashed by Fair’s Churchillian sally, “Hey, if I can’t read, how did I get a football scholarship to USC?”
[3] The “naked” this in above sentence doesn’t refer to sex education but to “not believing in science.” Dr. Zais believes students should receive abstinence only sex education and that students should not be aware that condoms even exist because sometimes letting students “see both sides” and “draw their own conclusions” can lead to eternal damnation.
Bill Thompson, prolific reviewer, travel writer, and retired editor of the Post Courier Arts and Leisure section has written a profile of me that features my art and upcoming novel Today, Oh Boy.
You can read Bill’s article by clicking HERE.
In 1989, the South Carolina Fiction Project selected my story “An Invasion of Tourists” as one of twelve short stories to be published in Columbia, South Carolina’s daily newspaper, The State. The story, written in second person, dramatizes a male twenty-something’s encounter with two very strange bar patrons who seem not only foreign, but downright alien, and by alien, I mean alien in the extra-terrestrial sense:
There’s another woman, but something’s not quite right about her. In a tropical print sundress, she’s practically catatonic. Her eyes are fluorescent green, very far apart and don’t blink. Slowly, she picks up her banana daiquiri, cocks her head, and laps it up with a flickering tongue.
You stare in disbelief. She looks at you and smiles stupidly. “Hello,” she says, “how goes it, amigo?” Her voice is fresh, friendly, but somehow mechanical, like the voice on your Portuguese Made Easy records.
[snip]
“Where y’all from?’
“Q.”
“Queue? Where’s that?”
“Just around the corner from Tri-Alpha 6.”
They’re smiling like his and hers ventriloquist dummies. You manage to muster a fake laugh as the jukebox engages. Pop-a-top, pop-a-top, pop-a-top. Reggae. Bob Marley.
“Excuse us,” they say in unison and head for the small, tiled rectangle that serves as a dance floor. Like exotic birds, they go through elaborate steps, a mirror image mating dance. Then shoulder-to- shoulder, back-to-back, butt-to-butt, they shimmy, like two people with terrible itches.
“What’s the scoop on those two?” you ask the bartender.
“Beats me,” he says, “but they sure can do the Dorsal.”
As the story progresses, the unnamed protagonist sees more and more evidence of an intergalactic incursion. For example, the lead story on the eleven o’clock news is unexplained lights hovering over cars on I-26. After a sleepless night, he drives to the television station to share his story with the anchor. There he encounters a teenager convinced he’s also seen an extraterrestrial. The kid looks crazed, so the protagonist decides to bail.
You’ve called in sick. Deservedly so. You’re shook. You came within a heartbeat of making an utter fool of yourself. You can’t believe that you’d ever fall a victim of mass hysteria. With so little sleep, your memory is even more suspect than usual. Probably her tongue wasn’t as long as it seemed yesterday. Maybe she was wearing contacts that made her eyes that color.
Maybe you’re going insane.
You head out to the beach for rest and relaxation. You’ll swim, exhaust yourself, and go home for 18 hours or so of sleep.
Food. You haven’t eaten. Food will make you feel better. So you pull into Frankie’s Place, a rundown joint on the front beach. Seated on the deck with a salt breeze blowing, you feel better already. Frank, a fat, freckled, tattooed ex-Marine brings you out a cold one.
How’s business,” you ask.
“Great,” he says. “Tourists are flocking in from everywhere.”
“Do you get many from Tri-Alpha 6,” you ask, as if he’s your pal, as if it’s an inside joke.
“Huh?”
“Tri-Alpha 6.”
“What’s that? A fraternity?”
You don’t answer him.
As he waddles off, he shakes his head as if to say, “Give me a break.”
You turn to look out over the ocean, half hoping to see one flashing over the horizon, but there’s nothing, not even a cloud in the sky.
Scene of the Second Encounter Well, brothers and sisters, yesterday I had a real-life strange encounter, though not quite as disorienting as the one in the short story.
I was walking my dog to the end of the unpaved road where I live (see above). A grey medium-sized SUV slowly made its way towards us and stopped. An elderly woman on the passenger side rolled down her window, and the driver, another grey-haired woman, leaned towards the steering wheel so I could make eye contact with both. They didn’t look like aliens from another planet but like characters in a David Lynch movie, corny and blandly friendly in a creepy, Trumanshowesque[1] sort of way.
“We just have a question,” the passenger said in a vowel-deprived Midwestern accent.
“Ask away.”
“What’s behind these houses? Marshes?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Marshes and the Folly River.”
“A river?” the driver asked. “There’s a river back there?” Her tone was incredulous.
“Yes, ma’am, a river.”
“But what are those long things jutting out? Flat wooden things projecting outwards. It looks like you could walk on them.”
“They’re docks,” I said, somewhat taken aback, wondering what planet they were from.
“Docks!” They seemed flabbergasted.
The passenger said, “You mean you can have boats back there?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s deep water. You could take a boat out of there and sail all the way to Lisbon, Portugal.”
The passenger said, “We’re not from around here.”
I laughed. “I’d never guess with those accents of yours.”
They were beaming.
“Where are you from?”
“St. Louis.”
I mentioned going to see the Braves play at Busch stadium when my boys were young.
“We’re Cardinal fans,” they said, almost apologetically.
“No shit Sherlock,” I thought, but instead said, “I got to see Ozzie Smith do his backflip.”
They both smiled genuine smiles. They knew who Ozzie Smith was, which came as a relief.
(You may have heard that during the Battle of the Bulge, army units would quiz each other at checkpoints with baseball trivia after they learned that German spies, wearing US uniforms and speaking perfect American English, were attempting to infiltrate the lines.)
I showed them where to turn around (it’s a dead end road) and bid them goodbye. Twenty minutes later, as I was walking to Lowlife for my afternoon constitutional, they passed me without waving, puttering along about fifteen miles an hour.
When I told the tale to my pal Jeremy at Lowlife,” he said. “Haven’t they seen movies? There are docks in movies. St Louis is on the Mississippi, for chrissakes. They must have seen a dock before.”
He added, waving and nodding, “I would have said, ‘good day’ and walked away.
[1] Yes, goddammit, add it to the dictionary.
The Freedom to Offend
“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.” ― Henry Louis Gates Jr.
“[. . .] and above it the mouthing of orators,
the arse-belching of preachers.” – Ezra Pound, “Canto XIV”
Okay, so we don’t want to ban AK-47s because that would be unbarring the door of tyranny. On the other hand, we don’t want our precious, delicate children exposed to depressing historical events like the Native American genocide, slavery, the Holocaust – perhaps even Sandy Hook – because the truth might make them feel uncomfortable.
I’ll tell you what made me feel uncomfortable when I was teaching: crouching under a Harkness table stifling a fart with my AP Lit students during a live shooter drill.
And, O, my Brothers and Sisters, we read many a bannable book in those AP classes.
Oedipus Rex – parricide, incest, sacrilege
The Canterbury Tales – vulgarity, profanity, nudity, plagues
Hamlet – fratricide, adultery, vulgarity, a corpse-strewn stage
Crime and Punishment – murder, prostitution, crushing poverty, alcoholism
Madame Bovary – serial adultery, suicide, insanity
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – atheism, masturbation, prostitution, adolescent rebellion
The Sound and the Fury – promiscuity, suicide, racial epithets, abject cruelty
The Song of Solomon – premarital sex, vulgar language, murder
The Hand Maid’s Tale – dystopia, sexism, theocratic cruelty
And that’s not even considering the poetry we read.
Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop
I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
`Those breasts are flat and fallen now
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’
`Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.
`A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’
~WB Yeats
That’s it.
Thanks for listening to my Ted Rant.
In a not so shocking development, Bob Dylan’s coming to Charleston, South Carolina, in his Never Ending Tour.[1]
The cat’s indefatigable: March 16, Austin, March 18 Shreveport, March 19 New Orleans, March 21 Montgomery, March 23 Nashville, March 24 Atlanta, March 26 Savannah, March 27 Charleston . . . [2]
And the beat goes on, as they say.
I just checked the last set list from December of 2021, and if you’re planning to attend a show, I strongly suggest purchasing the album Rough and Rowdy Ways because a majority of the songs performed (at least in December of 2021) come from the album, his first album of original songs since 2012.
Here’s the first paragraph of Jon Parleles’ review in the Times:
Latter-day Bob Dylan is for die-hards. His voice is tattered and scratchy, not always bothering to trace a melody. His lyrics can be cryptic or throwaway when they’re not downright bleak. His music is adamantly old-fashioned, and he’s not aiming to ingratiate himself with anyone.
And the last:
And in “Black Rider,” a string-band ballad that tiptoes along, pausing each time Dylan takes a breath, he addresses a mysterious figure — Death, perhaps — with alternating sympathy and aggression. “Don’t turn on the charm,” he warns. “I’ll take a sword and hack off your arm.” For all he has seen and sung, on “Rough and Rowdy Ways” Dylan refuses to settle down, or to be anything like an elder statesman. He sees death looming, but he’s still in the fray.
I should add, perhaps, that his shows are for die-hards as well. Sometimes, because he has changed the melodies and his voice is indistinct, you might not recognize a song, even an iconic one like “Blowing in the Wind,” until it’s almost done.
Obviously, I’m one of the die-hards, and I’ve seen some fantastic concerts, one in Columbia, SC, in 1988, one at the North Charleston Coliseum in which he played a killer electric guitar, and my favorite, at the Orange Peel, a bar in Asheville, during the 2004 election campaign.
I’ve also seen some less than stellar shows, the worst outside at the Joe with Willie Nelson as the opening act.
But I’ve never seen one quite as bad as my pal, fellow die-harder, Jeremy Jones described to me last night at Low Life, one of Folly’s coolest spots. Anyway, I’ll let Jeremy tell it.
“The best bad Dylan I ever say was at the Saegner Theater in New Orleans. He was as drunk as a skunk. The band went into the Hendrix version of “All Along the Watch Tower,” and he stumbled to the mike and started singing “Like a Rolling Stone,” and the band was like, what the? I mean it was absolutely fantastic.”
This occurred in the Aughts, so I suspect we’ll not witness something so conjunctificated, but if we do, I’ll be smack dab in the middle of Row A in the orchestra, if Dylan and I are still among the quick, that is.
illegal photo by my son Ned Moore
[1] It began 2 June 1988 and has featured 3,066 shows and counting. Of course, one day it will end, when ol’ Bob succumbs to something or another. Certainly, Keith Richards will be named one of the pallbearers.
[2] No wonder is voice is raspy.
I’m not a fan of the wan light of winter, the weakening light of day, the marrow-penetrating wind off the river, the fallen leaves’ decay.
I’m not a fan of hypocrisy, the politician’s flipflop, the post hoc ergo propter hoc array of fallacious thinking I hear every day.
I’m not a fan of fantasy, ogres, princesses, dragons, flying carpets defying gravity, flagons containing elixirs, mages with conical caps, sages holed up in caves.
I am a fan of poetry, though, even the darkest of wintery verse, Dylan Thomas’s father’s curse, John Keats’s death lament – that shiny black hearse in reverse.
In the halcyon days of the early century, when people asked me how long I’d lived on Folly, and I’d reply ten or fifteen – depending on the year –they’d inevitably respond, “Wow, you must have seen lots of changes.”
“Actually, not all that much on the East Side where I live,” I’d say. “There’s no sewage, so you can’t build a beach McMansion on a lot that doesn’t perk, or barely perks.”
Alas, however, that assessment predated the proliferation of Airbnbs that are popping up all over the island like irritating internet ads, infiltrating not only the commercial district but residential neighborhoods as well. The unpaved lane where our home stands, once the site of an idyllic neighborhood of mostly unmarried senior citizens, has been transformed into Little Fort Lauderdale. Houses that were zoned for one or two bedrooms now hold as many as fifteen to twenty defecators straining the unseen septic tanks over which they park their vehicles on lawns of well-tended rye.
And, when night/ Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons /Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.[1]
Why rent your quaint beach cottage to a struggling musician or food and beverage worker when you can make more in three days than you would in a month by renting to bachelor party attendants or untanned wanna-be beachcombers rolling up in their exhaust-spewing Pathfinders?
I walk to the post office every weekday morning, and I’d guess seventy percent of the traffic consists of the white pick-up trucks of subcontractors, the plastic surgeons of construction, engaged in the soul-crushing transformation of gentrification.
However, it’s not really the funky real estate that makes Folly Folly; rather, it’s the long-term renters, the bartenders, cooks, and waitresses, the painters, the musicians, eking out their livings in a soulful setting.
The population of residents of Folly is in decline. Leave it to Springsteen to nail it:
Because there’s just different people coming down here now and they see things in different ways
And soon everything we’ve known will just be swept away.[2]**
But look, there’s a conga line of bachelorette party weekenders! Hubbub-hubbub-bubba, swish boom Bah!
art by Wesley Moore III
[1] Paradise Lost, 1.500-3. Perhaps I should have titled this piece “Paradise Lost.”
[2] “Independence Day
. . . either for tragedy, comedy,
history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral,
tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral . . .
Polonius, Hamlet, 2.2
First, as cliché demands, the good news: my novel Today, Oh Boy has been accepted for publication, which, of course, delights me. Already my mind is running riot with unreasonable aspirations. No, I’m not dreaming of PEN awards or Pulitzers. We’re talking commercial fiction here, a narrative devoid of deeper meanings, a plot concocted to distract, not to enlighten. No, I’m not rehearsing acceptance speeches but wondering who is going to play the protagonist Rusty in the Hula Netflix TNT USA Network Apple TV adaptation.
You know of any skinny redheaded sixteen-year-old actors with acne?
And now the potentially bad news. The publisher (who shall remain anonymous for now) has classified the novel as Young Adult. Here’s a quote from the acceptance letter:
“The characters fit nicely into their setting, embodying the south of the past and making the story stand out against a typical high school drama. The Board was keen to comment on the dynamic writing style and believes the story has the potential to excel within its genre.”
But the thing is, I wrote Today, Oh Boy for literate adults, not for tweens. Here’s a sentence from the novel describing one of the characters, AJ, who has cut school in the middle of the day and just finished smoking a joint with his dropout friend Will Waring:
“While Will has been daydreaming and tuning out his mother, Weeza has been quizzing AJ about his dismissal from school, essentially perp-walking his thoughts right out of lotus land into the dingy confines of a Raskolnikovian closet.”
Of course, I know whoever the editor might be will definitely ax “Raskolnikovian closet” because no tween or teen (or typical adult for that matter) has read Crime and Punishment and therefore won’t recognize the allusion to its agoraphobic protagonist pent up in his impoverished toilet stall of a rented room. But, hey, I like the way it sounds.[1]Read it aloud: Rask-KOL-ni-KOV-ian closet.
And to add insult to injury, I don’t dig YA novels, have only read a handful because I taught 7th and 8th grades in my earlier teaching career. Although well-crafted, The House on Mango Street and The Giver aren’t up my alley. I’m not an admirer of To Kill a Mockingbird for that matter.
I’ll admit, though, that Today is difficult to classify. In one sense, it’s historical fiction because it takes place in a real place, Summerville, SC, in the year 1970, which in the Hula Netflix TNT USA Network Apple TV adaptation will require period clothing and vintage automobiles.
In another sense, it’s a souped-up Greek comedy sans chorus: it takes place in one day and essentially in one setting with continuous action.
It’s got a gruesome death, stolen goods, drug use, kung-fu fighting, and a highspeed chase.
So, what are we dealing with here? A historical-romance-Greek Comedy-Mystery-Action Adventure?
If it were up to me, and I was forced to ram into a sub-genre, I’d call it Pulp YA.
If I had self-published, I could have had full autonomy, but now my brainchild is under the authority of others. They say they’ll work with me, but the contract also makes it clear that they have the final say-so. Chances are Today, Oh Boywon’t be sporting the cover below when you buy it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or better yet, from your local independent bookstore.
[1] I did read the Classic Illustrated version of C&P when I was ten or so and didn’t enjoy it.
``` . . . weeds, in wheels shoot long and lovely and lush
Hot springs’ vented vapors spew skyward
in cloudy swirling images to be carved in wood
chiseled in stone,
personified.
First Gaia,
then Maia,
Oh God,
Zeus is on the loose,
Isis is in crisis,
Noah drunk and Jonah swallowed,
Jesus, Vishnu, Jah-Jah
JAH-CHOO!
*Gesundheit!*
```
Here are my favorite HooDoo blog posts of 2021.
January
The year certainly started off with a bang with the January 6th Insurrection, and, of course, I found it impossible to keep my mouth shut.
It Ain’t Orwellian, You Patronizing, Hubris-Bloated Blathersnipe
White Power Plagiarist Here’s a bit of doggerel aimed at the participants of the insurgence.
Loose Cadences for Loose Cannons
February
Some of my most popular posts deal with growing up in Summerville. Here’s one on the infamous Clay Pits where I first dropped acid on my 18th birthday.
Killing Off Innocence
And some ruminations on dogs, who in my youth ran free.
If Dogs Run Free
The late, great Jack Moore March
One of the cool things about blogging is that you can pretend to be whatever you want to be and write what ever you want to write. Here’s a bit of art criticism on a piece my my friend Douglas Ballentine.
Her Myriad and Sunken Face
April
I also write a lot about music, complete with audio clips. Do you know how to pony?
Garage Band Modernism
An homage to the great Bo Diddley.
Homage to Bo
May
Sometimes I don a pith helmet to do anthropological work in the wilds of Folly Beach.
An Anthropological Adventure Highlighting Pandemic Folly Beach Behaviors
Speaking of weird South Carolina shit, dig this:
The Latest News from South Carolina Features Firing Squads
June
I invite you to sing along with my parody of “A Few of My Favorite Things.”
A Few of My Least Favorite Things
Here’s a short video of my talented friend, the singer/songwriter Danielle Howle.
Jazzy Danielle
July
In July karma came a-calling to smite my arrogant ass.
Sickroom Notes from a Whiny, Wounded Epicurean
I also do travelogues. Here are some highlights to Caroline and my pilgrimage to Blind Willie McTell’s grave.
Back Roads in the Age of the Internet
August
I bid adieu to The Outer Banks.
And acquired another moniker, Grandpa Rusty
September
At a high school football game, I ended up appearing in a video of a famous person I’d never heard of.
Bryce Somebody
October
Hop aboard Nick Daily’s VW microbus.
Praise Be
After catching a Jasper Johns retrospective at the Whitney, I reminisced about my pal, his half sister Owen Lee. Jasper Johns, Owen Lee, and I-and-I.
November
Copped some great seats for the Stones show in Atlanta.
Roll On, Roll On
December More ruminations on pets.
Bow Bow . . .
I sincerely appreciate your reading and commenting. Here’s hoping for a calm, uneventful 2022.
from the Smithsonian Art Museum In the summer of 1972, I went to work for Flack Jones Lumber because it was one of three establishments in Summerville that hired longhairs. To say I was an unskilled laborer would be an understatement. Driving a nail, much less running a power saw, transcended my meager talents, so I ended up bouncing around the lumberyard on a truck driven by a Black man who went by the name of Hambone. We performed odd jobs like moving stacks of boards and shoveling sawdust. Hambone, who had crinkly cottony hair beneath his green hardhat, was a man of few words, but I do remember his making this pronouncement one blistering June afternoon: “When I was young, I couldn’t wait to knock off work so I could go fishin’. Now I can’t wait to knock off so I can get me a drink of liquor.”
Surprisingly, my White coworkers were cordial, given that the early Seventies were fraught with clashes between blue collar laborers and longhairs, especially in the Deep South. Once a fellow who looked Scots-Irish asked if I thought a man’s hair could grow as long as a woman’s.
My hair was red, so I stood out like ~~a sore thumb~~ WC Fields’ nose.
“I reckon so,” I said.
I recall one particularly irksome task. Armed with a shovel blade, I crawled beneath a power saw and filled a plastic bucket with sawdust and then crawled out to dump the sawdust in a designated pile, and then crawled back under to repeat this labor until all the sawdust had been removed. Shortly thereafter, I decided Flack Jones wasn’t for me, though the hours were all right, Monday through Friday from 7 to 4.
I heard that Red and White, which also hired longhairs, had an opening, so I applied and was hired, joining my friends Joey Brown, David Kaczor, and Jim Collins bagging groceries, though actually Joey and David had worked their way up to stocking shelves.
On my very first day, I got yelled at by the owner’s son for overloading a bag with canned goods, and twelve hours later, when tasked with mopping the floor, the owner’s son chided me for my poor technique and demonstrated how to move the mop head in circles. So, of course, I followed his lead, only to be confronted by the produce man John Henry who told me I was doing it all wrong and modeled for me an alternate technique. moving the mop in S-like patterns. As I’d move up and down the aisles mopping, I’d keep a look out for my two instructors and switch back and forth depending on who was passing my way, though I preferred John Henry’s method.
“Now, that’s more like it,” one or the other would say.
Working at Red and White was less grueling than working at Flack Jones, but the hours sucked – two twelve hour shifts on Fridays and Saturdays and every other Sunday with afternoon shifts on the other weekdays with Mondays and Wednesdays off.
So, I quit to take a pay cut to work at Carolina Home Furnishers, the third place that hired longhairs, where I mostly sat in a recliner and watched daytime TV with my boss Weeza, a benevolent overseer who called me “darling” and sent me to the liquor store around the corner in the afternoons.
It seems that she and Hambone were on the same page.
Yes, I was lazy that summer, not to mention vain, and unaccustomed to working, but my leisure days were over. At USC, I worked at Capstone cafeteria after classes on weekdays and on Saturday mornings and bused tables at the revolving restaurant Top of Carolina during Sunday Brunch. The pay was $1.15 an hour, but I got one free meal. After I graduated and entered grad school, I stopped working at the cafeteria to tend bar at the Golden Spur but continued to bus tables on Sundays until I dropped out to seek my fortune in the Lowcountry.
The rest, as they say, is history.