non-fiction

The Unlikely Story of How I Became an English Teacher

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Sleep Walking on High by Pauline Lim

I left for college as a journalism major, but I quit before ever taking even one introductory journalism class.  All of the journalism professors I met at the freshman orientation were chain-smokers who seemed to have a mild case of the heebie-jeebies.  Also, you had to pass a typing test, and not only didn’t I know how to type, but I also possessed –– and still do –– the fine motor skills of a platypus.[1]

So I gave up on being a newspaper scribe, and without declaring a major, took whatever classes seemed interesting ––  German Expressionism in the Weimar Republic, Film Studies, Shakespeare’s comedies, etc.

Because I was dream-ridden, impractical and enjoyed reading, when forced in my junior year to choose a major, I opted for English without giving future employment a nanosecond’s consideration. No way did I ever envision myself as a future high or middle school teacher. I recalled my highschool days, not with nostalgia, but with a feeling of good riddance, like Japanese Californians might look back on their internment during WW2.

Yet somehow I ended up teaching highschool for 34 years, and how I got that job is not unlike that Popeye cartoon where Olive Oyl sleepwalks her way across crane-hoisted girders swaying several stories above sidewalks far below during the construction of a skyscraper. 

She’s unconscious but amazingly lucky as she blindly makes her way

[1] In fact, believe it or not, I’m still a hunter and pecker.

In 1977, I was engaged to be married but unemployed.  I had only taken one education course as an undergraduate, so teaching high or middle school was out of the question.  Not only that, but I had dropped out of graduate school after earning the requisite 30 hours.  

In late August or early September of that year, I ran across an ad in the Post and Courier seeking an adjunct instructor at Trident Technical College.  The ad directed the applicant contact the Dean of English, Ed Bush.

So the next day, I drove to the North Charleston campus seeking Dr. Bush, although I was supposed to apply at the central office, a detail that I had somehow overlooked.  After asking around, someone directed me to Dr. Bush’s office.  Obviously, I didn’t have an appointment, but there was a line outside his office, so I got in the queue and awaited my turn.  When I approached his desk, he asked what class I wanted to drop or add.  I informed him I was there to apply for the job advertised in the paper.  After asking a few questions –– did I have a Master’s –– “no but I have the hours.”

“But you do have experience teaching, right? 

 “Um, yes” (after all, I had occasionally presented papers to fellow grad students in classes). 

So he hired me on the spot without checking any of my credentials. After all, classes were about to begin, and they needed someone to teach English 102, Technical Report Writing, and Business Communications.

So at 24, I became a podunk adjunct professor who grew to really enjoy teaching, even continuing to teach at night when I had a full time job keeping books and training for management of a company that sold safety equipment. 

Professor Rusty

My wife Judy ended up also teaching at Trident as well, but full time, and she eventually became the head of the psychology department.  After being one of 12 writers selected to study under Blanche McCrary Boyd in a SC Arts Commission workshop, I quit my daytime job, wrote short fiction by day, and taught by night.[2]  

However, once we had our first child, Harrison Moore, Ruler of the Third Planet, Judy wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.  I took care of Harrison in the day, then drove him and handed him off to Judy before teaching my night classes.  It was the worst of both worlds, sort of like being two single parents living under the same roof.

In that first autumn of being a father, I received a call from the chair of Porter-Gaud’s English Department, George Whitaker.  Ed Bush, my former boss at Trident, had given George my name.  Some teacher had been fired mid-year, and Porter-Gaud needed someone ASAP.  I told him I couldn’t, given my child-rearing responsibilities, but that I would love to teach at Porter in the following year.

As it turned out, the fellow they hired midyear also had to be fired that spring.  In addition, an older teacher, Mr. Hubbard, was retiring, and George himself was leaving to pursue writing.

So I interviewed for the job, and despite my not stellar credentials, the new chair, Sue Chanson, the greatest high school English teacher I’ve ever known, hired me, because she later told me, Ed Bush had given me such a stellar recommendation.

So perhaps there is some truth in the old adage “It’s better to be lucky than good.”

Right Olive?

[2] Other writers selected included Josephine Humphreys, Billy Baldwin, Lee Robinson, Harland Greene, Steve Hoffius, Rebecca Parke, and Greg Williams, to name a few.

Wes Joins the Propaganda Poster Wars

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Who’s responsible for Donald Trump’s arrested development? His mother?

Roy Cohn?

I mean, most of the 8th grade boys I taught would be ashamed to unironically depict themselves as a superhero a la the abomination below:

Especially, if in reality, they looked like this.

Now, Pete Hegseth is getting in on the Soviet era propaganda poster craze.  

He posted this the other day.

They’re little boys, these two.  Tweens, these two, absolutely incapable of self-deprecation.

There, I’ve fixed it.

Ersatz Everything

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Rene Magritte: Not to Be Reproduced

I’ve resigned myself to the reality that I can’t always distinguish an AI-altered video from what might be an actual recording of people or animals or vehicles moving in real time in three dimensional space. Hence, I’m not confident of the validity of some of what I see online. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a reel on X where Donald Trump was allegedly cheating at golf, whiffing a drive, surreptitiously picking up the ball and tee, as if the ball were arcing over the middle of the fairway.  Other X viewers asserted that what I had seen was AI fabricated and substituted it with what they claimed to be the unaltered original where Trump legitimately smacks the ball and picks up the tee.  Then a couple of days ago, there he is at the FIFA Club World Cup keeping for himself a gold medal designated for one of the players, pocketing the medal as he had the golf ball.

I have no idea which videos are real.

A young friend of mine, a musician who this fall will be touring the country from coast to coast with a band I’ve never heard of, told me this afternoon that there’s an AI “band” being promoted by Spotify that cranks out catchy pop tunes that are racking up big time numbers.  

Hey, AI, conjure me some light pop grooves. like the Monkees meet BTS.

Is it a real band or is it AI?  Did she filter that photo?  This has gotta be a parody account?

All anyone seems to care about on this broiling planet is attention and megabucks, amassing followers, becoming an influencer, wielding power, casting illusions.

Meanwhile, the government of the United States of America, an erstwhile beacon of hope, has slapped together a concentration camp in Florida and sadistically christened it “Alligator Alcatraz.” [1] Although supposedly a temporary hell for violent, criminal immigrants before they’re shipped off to God-knows-where, some parties claim that the incompetent Trump regime has rounded up any number of law abiding house framers and farm workers and dumped them there, which I bet is true.  Rather than tapping experts to run the government, Trump has selected an array of television personalities, mostly Fox News shills, who look good on TV but, in the case of the head of FEMA, wasn’t aware there was something called a hurricane season.  Holograms as opposed to seasoned professionals are running the country.

The citizenry’s response –– and I include myself in this censure –– seems more or less “meh.” 

I’m powerless, busy, can’t really influence domestic or geo-political events, an attitude that brings to mind Richard Wilbur’s sardonic elegy for Delmore Schwartz, “To An American Poet Just Dead:

In the Boston Sunday Herald, just three lines

Of no point type for you who used to sing

The praises of imaginary wines,

And died, I am told, of the real thing.

*

Also gone, but a lot less forgotten

Are an eminent cut-rate druggist, a lover of Giving,

A lender, and various brokers: gone from this rotten

Taxable world to a higher standard of living.

*

And the soupy summer is settling, full of yarns

Of Sunday fathers loitering late in bed,

And the sshhh of sprays on all the little lawns.

*

Will the sprays weep wide for you your chaplet tears?

For you will the deep-freeze units melt and mourn?

For you will Studebakers shred their gears

And sound from each garage a muted horn?

*

They won’t. In summer sunk and stupefied

The suburbs deepen in their sleep of death.

And though they sleep sounder since you died

It’s just as well that now you save your breath.

Well, at least I know that Wilbur’s poem was written on a typewriter or in longhand.  Of that I can be assured. It’s not ersatz.

Delmore Schwartz

[1] Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman visited the camp and reports that detainees are kept in cages, 32 per cage, served substandard food, and get their drinking water from, as she puts it, “the unit” where they defecate.

Neo Nazi Swag

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In 1983, before we had children, Judy Birdsong and I spent two months galivanting around Europe.  We prebooked only three hotels – one in London, one in Paris, and one in Athens.  In between these destinations, we idly roamed. We climbed white cliffs in Dover, spent a week in Arles as a base camp for excursions to Nice and Cannes, rode a sea-tossed vomit-splashed boat to Mykonos, etc.

On the trip back to Hamburg, where we departed for home, we hung out in Munich for a couple of days and made a day trip to Dachau where we toured the infamous concentration camp. It was an appropriately gray day with leaden clouds misting rain.  On the train, a recording disconcertingly announced, “Next stop, concentration camp.”

I remember that the outdoor spaces of the barbed-wire enclosure featured gravel that crunched beneath our shoes.  We walked through the sleeping quarters with their raw claustrophobic wooden bunks. I also remember an American soldier yanking his four year old son by the arm and swatting him on his butt for some misdeed.

I thought to myself, “Man, I can’t believe he did that here in all places – a concentration camp.”

Of course, back then I never dreamed that my native country forty years later would be constructing concentration camps to imprison minorities.

We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

WB Yeats “Nineteen-Hundred-and-Nineteen”

Not only are we building concentration camps, but the President and his lackies are touting them, paying official visits, sadistically branding them. This one’s called Alligator Alcatraz.

The Republican Party of Florida is obscenely selling  Alligator Alcatraz merch.  

No doubt the Evangelicals are ecstatic, babbling in tongues praises to the Almighty.

Again, Yeats:

Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.

Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.

Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked—and where are they?

Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.

Alex Werrell’s Book Launch Intro for Long Ago Last Summer

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My former student and forever friend Alex Werrell has, as my mother used to say, “a way with words.”  I discovered that talent when I taught him in an honors Brit Lit survey several years ago at Porter-Gaud School.  When we were reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Prologue, Alex, an opera buff, turned me on Alessandro Moreschi, “the last castrato.”  Chaucer hints that the Pardoner has been, as we callous pet owners say, “fixed.” 

No berd hadde he, ne nevere sholde have, 

As smothe it was as it were late y-shave; 

I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare.[1]

I explained to the horrified students that boys with beautiful voices were sometimes disencumbered of their testosterone-producing testicles to preserve the youthful timbre of their angelic voices, “a small price to pay for art’s sake,” I’d joke.

Playing Moreschi’s recording of “Ave Maria” became a tradition in my British Lit course. Forgive the cliche, but talons raking a blackboard would be a more pleasant sound. What a pleasure to watch the students squirm!

Alex ended up at Yale where he earned a BA and MA in English and became the mentee of the great literary critic Harold Bloom.  After Yale, Alex remained in New Haven, published essays in Salon, and taught, first at the Hopkins School, and now at Taft.

After I heard Alex deliver a masterful eulogy for his grandfather, I selfishly thought that, hey, I could tap him for my memorial service, but fortunately, by having him introduce me at the book launch for Long Ago Last Summer, I was able to hear him sing my praises while among the quick.

Forgive my vainglory in posting Alex’s speech below, but once a jackass, forever, a jackass (me, not Alex).  

After all, it’s not every day that you can applaud being called a “motherfucker.”

Take it away, Alex:

Bearing in mind my grandmother’s suggestion for any speech — all great orators should study Shakespeare, she said, and learn his most important lesson: “All’s Well That Ends” — I won’t catalogue all that Wesley Moore has written, taught, and done.

You’d need a TI-84 to add up the lives he molded, shaped, and changed — and if he were to receive royalties for every lesson plan of his that I’ve copied, this book launch would be in Mallorca. It is a gargantuan and daunting task to try to introduce this Renaissance raconteur, writer, poet, teacher, and philosopher king, so I’ll outsource the job responsibly and sustainably to Cecil Franklin, who was once asked by a reporter to describe his little sister: “Call Aretha a great blues singer and you’re telling the truth. Call her a great gospel singer and no one will argue. Call her a great jazz singer and the greatest jazz artists will agree. Bottom line—she’s all three at once. And in the language of the jazzman, that’s what’s called a motherfucker.”

Wesley Moore is all that and more.

His latest work is a testament to that Long Ago Last Summer transports and transforms, synthesizes and sympathizes; short fiction gives way to essays which inspire poetry and deep, graceful swan dives into memory.

Like a casserole in the Donner Pass, this “Southern Gothic gumbo” has a lot of himself mixed in. Given that, one of the many reasons why Long Ago Last Summer is brilliant is that it is precisely the opposite of that scourge of modern texts, generative AI. And while talking about generative AI at a book launch feels a bit like reading “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” at a baby shower, that menacing technology walks among us now. Like one of the foundational sins coursing through the Southern Gothic, AI perverts creation and devalues the human; the fullness of what it means to be a human does not matter half as much as mere production, production, production. In dramatic contrast, Long Ago Last Summer is a thrillingly human book because Wesley Moore stands for what matters: connection, imagination, integrity.

Searching for the book on Amazon — (And, please, gracious hosts: this was for research purposes only; the only destination wedding I want for Jeff Bezos is at the bottom of the ocean.) — I wanted to see what the heartless algorithm might suggest as “related books.” One was Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein which, given Mr. Moore’s excellent lessons on relativity and cultural Modernism, seemed fitting. Then there was Rhinestone Cowboy, Glen Campbell’s autobiography. I don’t have an explanation for that one.

What might the algorithm consider when determining whether to recommend Long Ago Last Summer to a prospective reader? It could be something as simple as geolocation: did this person grow up within twenty miles of a filling station that offers both diesel and barbecue? Or maybe it’s that stray google search for city ordinances concerning the accidental murder of a domestic cat. Maybe it’s looking up sterling silver hallmarks of the Confederacy and then looking up statutes of limitations for stolen Confederate silver. Or maybe it’s trying to find higher resolution images of Pee Wee Gaskins.

While the algorithm is good at pushing polyester blends off of Temu, I have a feeling it would struggle with Wesley Moore’s newest book. In no small part that’s because it’s hard to categorize. As Wesley himself said on television, “It’s really not a novel.” 

In 1925, as she was struggling to write To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf found herself frustrated. Writing in her diary that she needed “a new name” for her books “to supplant ‘novel,’” Woolf floundered about trying to find the right word: “A new — — by Virginia Woolf. But what?” she writes.

The word Woolf ends up on is “elegy” — a word that feels fitting for this book. To be clear, this is not because, as Mr. Moore says, he’s retired and living on a fixed income, nor is it even because of biplane rotors and headless fathers and tubercular aunts.

Instead, it feels so fitting to me because Mr. Moore spent so many classes in English 10 on such poems, insisting that we memorize Blackburn Hughes’s list of the four “greatest English elegies.” To help us in that endeavor, Mr. Moore demonstrated the rhythmic swish-swish of Gray’s heroic quatrains with an epee. Doing his best impression of Stevie Wonder’s star role in the John Milton biopic, Mr. Moore recited bits of Lycidas. And, in his Lowcountry baritone, he intoned Tennyson’s In Memoriam.

Elegy is no stranger to anyone who has grown up in the South. An elegy has but one requirement: it must defy the laws of linear temporality, enabling the past to persist. Time becomes fluid; what for Tennessee Williams was Suddenly, Last Summer, unbearably close, is, for Mr. Moore, Long Ago Last Summer, unbearably distant. The reversal that so haunts Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit — Jesus’s setting the world off balance, taking dead Lazarus and making him walk like a natural man — is the foundation of elegy: a reversible alternation between presence and absence. Reflecting on Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, Vanessa Bell writes to her sister Virginia how “it is almost painful to have [Mother] so raised from the dead.” Milton ends Lycidas with talk not of yesterday and of death, but of “To-morrow” and “pastures new.” Reading through the night the letters Arthur Henry Hallam wrote him, Tennyson finds himself surprised by dawn — and, in a flash, understands that “East and West” had “mixt their dim lights, like life and death, / to broaden into boundless day.”

The fourth great elegy is “Adonaïs, “written by Percy Shelley for John Keats, who died in an apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps in Rome, hemorrhaging up what little remained of his lungs at only 25.

Mr. Moore’s voice always took on a different timbre when he read to us Keats and Shelley. I cannot read their poems without feeling as if I’m back in his classroom — wind-up nuns, Rashaan, paleological timeline and all. His humanity and his teaching have become grafted to the Young Romantics in my mind’s eye. Throughout their poetry are traces of birdsong, so precious and so vital to both short-lived poets — and so like the traces of Judy Birdsong, so precious and so vital, in this work in front of us.

Shelley, mourning Keats, likens life to a “dome of many-colored glass” that “stains the white radiance of Eternity.” The many pieces of colored glass lovingly assembled here — with Caroline’s steady hand, keen eye, and beautiful verse — are aptly described by the author as a “mosaic” of his life. 

The glue that binds these pieces — the guide for navigating the disparate stories, poems, and essays — is memory. “Memory…ties it all together.”

In the spirit of elegy and memory, I’ll close with some words from Mr. Moore’s former colleague Erica Lesesne, who once defined what it meant to be a hero: “Ethical, competent, non-judgmental, yet communicating high ideals and expectations, thereby influencing others to risk their own best sides in a seethingly adolescent environment.” 

It is a pleasure to introduce one of my heroes, Mr. Moore. As he writes, “Let’s crank up the old Victrola.”

[1] No beard had he, nor was meant to have,

It was smooth as if he’s just shaved;

I think he was a gelding or mare.

Long Ago Last Summer Book Launch Highlights

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Wednesday, Buxton Books, Charleston’s premier bookstore, hosted the launch of my new book Long Ago Last Summer.

What follows is an abridged version of the festivities.  Thanks to my wife Caroline Tigner Moore for providing these videos.

Julian Buxton got the show rolling with by reading a passage from the book on James Dickey.

Next, Alex Werrell delivered his introduction.

The first bit wasn’t recorded. Here it is

Bearing in mind my grandmother’s suggestion for any speech — all great orators should study Shakespeare, she said, and learn his most important lesson: “All’s Well That Ends” — I won’t catalogue all that Wesley Moore has written, taught, and done.

You’d need a TI-84 to add up the lives he molded, shaped, and changed — and if he were to receive royalties for every lesson plan of his that I’ve copied, this book launch would be in Mallorca. It is a gargantuan and daunting task to try to introduce this Renaissance raconteur, writer, poet, teacher, and philosopher king, so I’ll outsource the job responsibly and sustainably to Cecil Franklin, who was once asked by a reporter to describe his little sister: “Call Aretha a great blues singer and you’re telling the truth. Call her a great gospel singer and no one will argue. Call her a great jazz singer and the greatest jazz artists will agree. Bottom line—she’s all three at once. And in the language of the jazzman, that’s what’s called a motherfucker.”

Wesley Moore is all that and more.

The video picks up from there:

I followed with a reading of my short story “Their Own Little Worlds.”

Unfortunately, “The Bluegrass Blues,” the poem I read was cut short in the video, so here’s the text:

The Bluegrass Blues

For Kathy McDaniel

Banjos make me blue.  There’s

pain in that frenetic pickin’

fueled by moonshine and misfortune,

pain that goes all the way back to Ireland,

black potatoes and fickle lasses,

the death of lovers or worse.

Fiddling can get downright dolorous, too,

that high lonesome keening,

the breakneck pace

the manic flipside of poverty.

Saturday night

shouting on the hills of glory

but returning to the shack

to find the chickens dead

and Pretty Polly’s tearstained letter.

***

Picture Shelly[1] plucking a banjo,

Shelly in one of those silk

two-toned cowboy shirts

singing through his nose

about how the saddest songs

end up being the sweetest,

a fiddle taking up the strain,

a quick, pained grin to the audience

as he nods his head to the music.

The last piece was a short essay “The Art of Not Thinking” that I wrote a couple of weeks after Judy’s cancer returned.

After a Q and A session, it was book signing time.

I really appreciate all who came out on such an unbearably hot day, and it was especially gratifying to see my fellow authors Eugene Platt, Layle Chambers, Bill Thompson, and Josephine Humphreys.

Cheers!

[1] The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822 

Yesterday, Oh Boy

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Yesterday, Oh Boy

When my friend David Boatwright, who produced the cover of Today, Oh Boy, approached me about adapting the poolroom chapter from the novel into a fifteen-minute film, I jumped at the chance.  David whipped out a script, which I approved, then later made some significant changes. 

Near the end of the novel, which is set in 1970, Rusty Boykin, an ADD-riddled hippie-wanna-be from Summerville, South Carolina, and Ollie Wyborn, a straightlaced, straight-A transplant from St. Paul, Minnesota, join forces in thwarting an attack from a pair of rednecks whose favorite pastime is, to use the Lowcountry lingo of the day, “cutting ass,” i.e., beating up people they don’t cotton to.  

David’s major change in the second draft of the script was fusing Rusty and Ollie into one character, which I again approved, given I had complete confidence in his intelligence and talent, and because as a practical matter, there’s virtually no room for character development in a fifteen-minute movie.  Another significant change, which added gravitas to the film, David created a new character, a Viet Nam vet who relates a harrowing account of wartime mayhem to the bartender, played my former student, David Mandell. 

So anyway, David Boatwright and his producer Paul Brown raised the needed money and assembled a crew of costume designers, cinematographers, assistant directors, sound people, make-up artists, art directors, property managers, actors, a stunt coordinator, a basset hound, etc. and shot the film in four days. 

The exterior shots, which included fisticuffs and car chase, were filmed on bucolic Wadmalaw Island and the interior shots at the defunct West Ashley restaurant Bearcat, which has been transformed into a ’70s era bait and tackle shop/bar complete with pinball machines and a functioning jukebox on loan from my friend Thom Piragnoli.

I asked David if I could have a cameo, and he said, of course, so yesterday I spent twelve amazing hours on the set being part of an incredibly complicated matrix of moving parts. 

When I arrived at seven, an actor was seated having his hair tended to. One of the make-up women said she would do my hair next, and I explained, “But I have no hair,” removing my hat, and she said, “Great!,” meaning, I take it, less work for her.  After I introduced myself, another woman said, “Oh, these young actors can’t wait to meet you. They’re walking around with the book.” 

Indeed, they were incredibly appreciative. Each one sincerely thanked me for writing the novel.  Two actors, twins brothers playing rednecks, asked me why their characters were so angry. When the actor Logan, who played the Viet Nam vet, thanked me for, in his words, “creating all of this,” I told him that, in fact, David had created his character and dialogue. He said yes, but I had created the world around him. To my mind, his performance and speech are the climax of the film. 

I abstractly knew that it would be cool to see characters I had created “come to life,” but had underestimated how gratifying it ended up being.  It was especially moving to see Jill Birdsong, modeled on the high school version of my late wife Judy Birdsong, performing her role, and I especially enjoyed the actor Patrick Basquill, who brought the bully Bobbey Ray Bosheen to life. The creepiness he brought to the role reminded me of William Dafoe’s portrayal of Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.

Also, it was really weird to hear the name “Rusty,” my childhood nickname, called out throughout the day. Sometimes, I thought they were referring to me. And Thomas, the actor who plays Rusty, looks a lot like I did in high school, except he has blue eyes, high cheek bones, brown hair, and isn’t riddled with freckles and acne. 

In other words, he’s skinny.

from left to right, Thomas Beck, Rusty Moore, and “Rusty Boykin”

It was such a wonderful day, the best ever in my life as a writer, and I can’t wait to see the finished product, entitled Summerville 1970, which will make the festival circuit and premiere sometime in the fall at the Terrace Theater on James Island.

Before I end this way too egotistical account, I want to acknowledge my wife Caroline Tigner Moore, without whom the manuscript of Today, Oh Boy would have been found in a drawer after my demise, rather than becoming a published novel. 

Caroline has encouraged me throughout but also has bravely said, “Un-uh, that doesn’t work, why don’t you do this instead.” She’s tactfully guided me through the interviews and the whole befuddling process of my post-teaching career, including offering encouragement in my avocation of creating “fake paintings.” 

After my beloved Judy Birdsong died, I imagined the lonely life of a wounded epicurean, but Caroline has enriched my life in ways I could not have imagined, especially in establishing a loving family that includes my wunderkind stepdaughter Brooks, who is as kind as she is brilliant, and a trio of pets, KitKat, the demi-mutt, and our blue-eyed ragdoll cats, Juno and Jasmine.

Love to them and to you!

PS. Here’s a link to the Kirkus review of Today, Oh Boy that includes an interview and links to purchase it via Amazon and Barnes and Noble, or better yet, get it from your local independent book store, which in Charleston is Buxton Books.

Nothing Orange Can Stay

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Although spring offers rebirth, for example, dollar weeds resurrecting, azaleas ablaze, etc., it also has its downsides.

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

                                                Robert Frost “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

OMG! My life is slipping through my fingers! Nothing good ever lasts for long!

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

                                                Thomas Sterns Eliot “The Waste Land”

Same ol’ same ol’, death and resurrection, death and resurrection, death and resurrection . . . 

Here on Folly Beach, springtime attracts sybarites of all stripes, like those 25 cent beer nights in the 1900s, those days of yore. 

Today at Lowlife, on my side of the bar, a crew of northern males in their early sixties sported expensive haircuts, retro bowling-like shirts, and satiric lanyards celebrating impending inebriation. Maybe it was a college alum get-together. Who knows?  I asked one of them what was up, but he was not forthcoming. 

Meanwhile, inside the restaurant, across the bar from where I sat, a bushel of bachelorettes were doing something similar in the team party department, dressing alike, engaging in one last bacchanalia before the sacred vows.

Hubba hubba hubba, shish boom bah! “Do you?” “I do.” “I now pronounce you.”

Elsewhere (all over the world, in fact) more serious folks were amassing to protest the hare-brained economic and geopolitical executive orders of a leader who always wins golf tournaments held on courses he owns. 

Here’s the White House’s official announcement: “The President won his second round matchup of the Senior Club Championship today in Jupiter, FL, and advances to the Championship Round tomorrow,” 

To quote Bob Dylan, 

I couldn’t help but feel ashamed

to live in a land

where justice is just a game.

But here’s the good news (and the bad news). Trump and his cabinet are too slapdash careless to topple our democracy. Their idiotic unprovoked trade war is sure to produce a blue tsunami in the midterms next year.

Pity the poor Nancy Maces who’ll have to choose between getting primaried a year from now or continuing to vote for destruction.

Trump’s insanity will lead to failure. People will pretend they didn’t vote for him. 

So don’t despair. Nothing orange can stay. Spring leads to summer, summer autumn, fall winter.

Around and around we go, and where we end up is in the rat’s alley where the dead men lost their bones. so I say, to quote the late great Warren Zevon, “Enjoy every sandwich.”

A Renewed Awareness of the Wonderous 

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A Renewed Awareness of the Wonderous 

“Its only boundary was the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine.”
                                                                        ― Barry Lopez, Horizon

At the moment, thanks to my pal Bill Thompson, I’m reading Horizon, Buddha-like Barry Lopez’s fascinating memoir, a meditation on nature, human cultures, capitalism’s role in the secularization of society, language’s function in altering the world we perceive, the poisoning of the planet, among a host of other fascinating topics. 

Lopez is difficult to characterize. For example, he was an explorer, having travelled to over 80 countries. His National Book Award winning work Arctic Dreams details five years he spent in the Canadian Arctic as a biologist.  Lopez possessed, among many other virtues, a profound patience that allowed him the peace of mind to observe over hours, days, and weeks phenomena like light changing in the passage of time from dawn to dusk over the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Though married twice, he seems monkish in his seeking solitude, and indeed, after his Catholic education, he flirted with the idea of becoming a Trappist monk. Instead, he became a novelist, a painter, a landscape photographer, and philosopher. These hours of observation and solitude engender philosophical observation:

During certain periods of uninterrupted vigilance at the edge of the sea, I’ve also had the sense that there is some other way to understand the ethical erosion that engenders our disaffections with modern life—the tendency of ruling bodies, for example, to be lenient with entrenched corruption; the embrace of extrajudicial murder as a legitimate tool of state; the entitlement attitudes of those in power; the compulsion of religious fanatics to urge other humans to embrace the fanatics’ heaven. The pervasiveness of these ethical breaches encourages despair and engenders a kind of social entropy; and their widespread occurrence suggests that these problems are intractable.

Lopez is particularly interested in how commercial enterprises like logging transform forests from diverse ecosystems to tree farms. Clearcutting disrupts the natural order as invasive species displace native plants and animals, so rather than the terrain boasting a variety of different trees, the denuded landscape is replanted with one type of commercially profitable tree, e.g. Douglas firs or loblolly pines. A clearcut,” he writes, “is not the outward sign of a healthy economy but of an indifference to life.”

In a similar light, he laments Colonialism’s obliteration of native people’s cultures, the loss of native languages, and drives home the point that advanced technology does not make a culture superior to a less technically advanced culture, especially if the happiness of a culture’s people is a gauge of success:

The seductive power of this system of exploitation—tearing things out of the earth, sneering at the least objection, as though it were hopelessly unenlightened, characterizing other people as vermin in the struggle for market share, navigating without an ethical compass—traps people in a thousand exploited settlements in denial, in regret, in loneliness. If you empathize with the Jaburrara over their losses, you must sympathize with every person caught up in the undertow of this nightmare, this delusion that a for-profit life is the only reasonable calling for a modern individual.

Sounds a bit like the current ruling US regime.

On the other hand, the contrarian in me wonders how Lopez could afford to circumnavigate the planet, exploring exotic locales like Australia’s Outback and Afghan villages. Where did the money come from to bankroll these expeditions?  

Capitalistic enterprise, I suspect. 

Modern living is incredibly complicated, which, to be fair, he acknowledges, but whether you agree with him politically or not, Lopez provides, not only food for thought, but a feast for contemplation.

Reading this book has in a sense made me more alive in jarring me from my inwardness to seek out wonder outside the Self while seeking is still possible.  

I’ll give him the last word:

Exposure to an unusually spectacular place in conducive circumstance, the thinking goes, can release one from the prison of one’s own ego and initiate a renewed awareness of the wondrous, salutary, and informing nature of the Other, the thing outside of the self.