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.”
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.”
You Do Hoodoo 