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, OhBoy, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
[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.
You Do Hoodoo 