Flailing
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.
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.
Smack 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.
You Do Hoodoo 