non-fiction

The Old Masters

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Frequent visitors to this blog (all three of you) have no doubt noted a predilection to illustrate my rants with paintings of Bosch and Brueghel, Juvenalian satirists of the highest order; however, when it comes to unflattering depictions of the human race, those two Old Masters share many a Flemish cousin who can also render grotesqueries and human folly with Chaucerian panache.

The Ugly Duchess

Take the above masterpiece, Quentin Massy’s (1466-1530) portrait of Margaret, Duchess of Carinthia, also known as Margaret Maultasch (“Satchel-mouth”), though best known as The Ugly Duchess.  

An exquisite warning to in-breeders everywhere, she, of course, is the great-great-great grandmother of the Duchess Alice encounters in Wonderland.

The Ugly Duchess’s famous issue also include the Cowardly Lion:

AKA Bert Lahr (pictured below in drag)

In Auden’s frequently anthologized poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” he notes that 

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along [. . .]

He goes on to describe the suffering’s occurring “anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot” and cites Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus as an example.

icarusbreughel

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

But it’s not only suffering that goes on in the untidy corners of the paintings of Flemish masters; plenty of hankypanky takes place there as well.

Take this example from the above-mentioned Massys, The Ill-Matched Lovers.

Quentin-Massys-Ill-Matched-Lovers-550x373

Note while the lecher’s hand is copping a not-so-surreptitious feel,

Quentin-Massys-Ill-Matched-Lovers-Detail-thumb

the young woman’s transferring his purse to her companion,

Quentin-Massys-Ill-Matched-Lovers-Detail-purse

a literal Fool.

Quentin-Massys-Ill-Matched-Lovers-Detail-fool

Anyway, it’s not all tongue-clucking burlesque; these masters certainly could capture beauty when in the mood [not to mention pre-photographic perfection (check out the instruments at the bottom)].  

2fourmus

Caesar van Everdingen, Pegasus and the Four Muses

Nevertheless, for whatever reason (an overabundance choleric humors, perhaps), I prefer the Old Masters’ satire to their high mindedness. 

42757-wayfarer2-1

I leave you with these details from Bosch’s The Wayfarer.

56

Oink, oink, say the piggies. Splash, splash goes the urine.

Confessions of a Fair Weather Fan

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Let’s begin with a string of clichés since this post is about sports.

I sort of admire those die-hard fans who, rain or shine, stay true to their teams.  I know many Clemson fans who would remain in the stands till the bitter end in the good ol’ days when Clemson would occasionally take a drubbing.  Back when Carolina won five straight from the Tigers, I marveled as Clemson devotees posted in unequivocal terms on Facebook that their love was steadfast, that there was no Himalayan peak high enough, no Mariana Trench deep enough, etc.  

Not I-and-I.  During the Gamecocks 21 game-losing streak, you wouldn’t find me anywhere near the am radiobroadcast of the game.[1]  In 1990, when the Atlanta Braves ended up in last place, I wouldn’t even bother to glance at the box scores in the paper.  No, I’m a fair weather fan, one whose tribal affiliations are weak.  

This disinclination to link with hometown teams began in Summerville where high school football seemed to be the center of most people’s lives.  Back in the pre-hippie days, if you weren’t on the team or a cheerleader, you could not be an A-list celebrity.  Going to the games on Friday nights was de rigueur.  In fact, my father, who didn’t give a sou[2]about sports, pulled against the Mighty Green Wave for spite’s sake.  Needless, to say, he never accompanied me to a game, nor, in fact, sat in to watch me strike out in my Little League games. [3]  He had better things to do, and I mean that sincerely.  

So, once I deep-sixed preppydom and donned the bandana hairband of the counterculture, I, too, quit going to the games, spending my Friday nights at my pal Adam’s apartment listening to him and his bandmates jam, drinking PBRs, and smoking stems and seeds. After the games, we’d cruise Tastee Freeze’s parking lot, circling amid the blare of rock-n-roll blasting from the speakers of various cars.  What fun!

Post Preppy I-and-I

So when I matriculated at USC, I wasn’t at all into football and didn’t particularly like the players I had in my classes, those hulking short-haired muscle men with “Nixon’s the One” campaign buttons pinned to their pecs.   As a matter of fact, in college I didn’t attend one single game.

However, under the influence of postgraduate peers, I began following the Gamecocks, and I have always been a Braves fan, even in the most bohemian of my days.  Nevertheless, these affiliations are weak, and I no longer let a broadcast impede on anything more promising, like a party or concert.

All that said, I’m really enjoying the 2019 Atlanta Braves, who, right now are killing it.[4]

It’s fun getting to know the players, and the game itself is so inherently interesting with the many complexities underlying each individual pitch.

So let’s go Bravos, I’m with you some of the way.

[1]These pre-dated the ubiquitous television broadcasts that fans now enjoy.

[2]Let’s keep this French merde going for a while.

[3]To show you what a better father I was than Daddy,  I attended my sons’ games, though bringing a New Yorker magazine with me, which I read during the contests.

[4]Not at this very second; they’re down 4-1 in the top of the fifth.  But they’ve won 9 out of their last 10 and something like 16 out of their last 18.  

The Ever Losing Gamecock Blues

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Take me to a taproom,

Pull me an IPA.

Ain’t no Pabst gonna do it,

The Gamecocks played today.

 

Most talented team ever,

All the sportswriters said,

But when the game clock expired,

My hopes were also dead.

 

So here we go again,

A dozen or so Saturdays shot.

Ought to cancel my ESPN

And buy me a pound of pot.

 

But Hope is a powerful drug,

And patterns easy to ignore.

So sure as hell next Saturday,

I’ll be cursing our failure to score.

 

So take me to a taproom,

Pull me an IPA,

Ain’t no Pabst gonna do it,

The Gamecocks played today.

 

Weekday Road Trip, Featuring Live: Steve Earle, Beto O’Rourke, and the Mighty Dukes

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Steve Earle and the Dukes At Francis Marion U. Performing Arts Center Tuesday 27 August 2019

BBQ and Alt American Heroes

For the last couple of decades, on a weekday around 11:30, you’d likely find me at the cafeteria sneaking an early bite in hopes of avoiding the crush of famished adolescents who descend upon the regular lunch period.  But last Tuesday at 11:30, I was pulling into what my father-in-law Lee Tigner calls the omphalos of the barbeque world, Brown’s Bar-B-Que, right outside of Kingstree on North Hwy 52.

For our first anniversary, my wife Caroline bought us tickets[1]to a Steve Earle concert in Florence, South Carolina, a city on the move in an otherwise non-prosperous region of the Palmetto State.  On a whim, we decided to take the back roads and have lunch on the way.  The obvious choice was Brown’s.

If I should ever find myself on death row, I’m ordering Browns’ buffet for my last meal.[2]

Rice, roast beef stew, delicious tiny fried creek shrimp, fried catfish, mac and cheese, vinegary pepper barbeque (lean and clean), pork brusque, potato salad, coleslaw, desserts galore, including banana pudding, any condiment you could hope to have.[3]

Overstuffed but satisfied, we continued our journey racing graffiti-covered boxcars as they rumbled along parallel to us on 52.

As the outskirts of Florence became center city, we slowed down in anticipation of making a right turn when we saw on the sidewalk coming towards us this quirky bespectacled man sporting red knee-length shorts, a ZZ-Top-like beard, and long shoulder length hair.

Yes, it was the man himself, Steve Earle, American treasure, brilliant songwriter, and eclectic producer of a various strains of Americana music – blues, country, bluegrass, rockabilly, Celtic hybrids.  He’s also a published short story writer, novelist, and playwright. Probably, he was on his way to the Francis Marion Performing Arts Center, which was walking distance from our hotel and the Hyatt.  I’m embarrassed to say it, but it was sort of thrilling seeing him as a civilian, sporting what my pal Jake would call a dgaf [4]outfit.

Checking In and Out

The Hotel Florence is lovely and well staffed, and I don’t know why this happens, but when Caroline checked us in, they bumped us up to a two-bedroom suite with a full kitchen and two full baths, shades of our honeymoon when we were bumped up to the Presidential Suite at the Grove Park Inn.  In both cases it was too much, appreciated, but under-utilized.

Despite the swanky digs, we weren’t in the mood to lounge around in our rooms.  We needed a drink, so I googled “bars in Florence,” and the most interesting name that came up was “Downtown Southern Funk,” located eight minutes away in the warehouse of Seminar Brewery, Florence’s oldest.

While we were in that cavernous space, the Manager asked if we wanted a free ticket to the concert that night.  We told him we were set, but he insisted we take the ticket and try to give it away at the venue.  So we took the ticket, and as we were chatting with a bartender, I said,” Hey, man, you really ought to take the ticket and go.”  He insisted he couldn’t because with Beto being there in a couple of hours, they’d need all the bartenders they could muster.

“Beto O’Rourke?”

“Yeah, he’s giving a town hall meeting here at six.”

We ended up giving the ticket to another patron, whom we saw later at the show and who picked up our tab.

 To Go or Not to Go

Back at the hotel, we contemplated.  The town hall started at 6, the concert at 7:30, which would mean an Uber to and fro, but ultimately, we opted for the rough and tumble of American democracy instead of the serenity of the hotel bar.

We arrived at about a quarter to six, and the lack of security surprised me: no metal detectors, no riffling through handbags.  I’d call it a modest crowd, mostly white.  We grabbed a couple of beers and chatted with Beto’s South Carolina chair, a lovely, articulate woman in her late twenties.

After a brief introduction from a state representative, Beto took the microphone and delivered his stump speech, which focused on guns and immigration.   Of course, he hails from El Paso, site of recent carnage, and I was somewhat surprised when he said the word “shit.”  “We need to quit selling that shit,” he said, referring to assault weapons. Indeed, how absurd that it’s legal to buy weaponry not intended for hunting or self-defense but for rapidly killing human beings, whether they be elementary school children, patrons of movies or gay bars, or Walmart shoppers.

Some smug, ramrod-erect old man interrupted Beto, who goofed by handing him the microphone. [5]The man launched into a screed claiming it was cellphones, not guns, that were to blame for the spate of American bloodbaths. No, these massacres are a by-product of educational dereliction, a consequence, he claimed, of society’s and government’s rejection of Yahweh and His Only Begotten Son.  Aides attempted to get the mike from him and finally succeeded.  Once Beto was able to speak, looking directly into the man’s face, he calmly mentioned that European countries also had high cellphone usage and were much less religious than the USA but rarely were the the scenes of mass shootings.

Once questions began, a young man with a baseball cap flipped backwards claimed that Trump was not a racist among a shower of boos as Caroline and I sidled outside to catch our Uber and hit the concert.

Beto at Seminary Brewing Tuesday 27 August 2019

 

The Francis Marion Performing Arts Center

Florence, or FloTown as the hipsters call it, is enjoying urban renewal, and you could sense a genuine pride in several of the residents we talked to about the transformation. They said that before the Performing Arts Center, you wouldn’t want to be in this section of town at night.  One actually compared it to Detroit. Now, it’s very peaceful, laidback, verdant.

Anyway, the area is now quite nice, and I agree with brochure we were handed when we entered  the Performing Arts Center that “the unique facility offers patrons an unusual level of intimacy, paired with sophisticated acoustics.”

The Concert

Steve came out and introduced the first act, the Mastersons, a husband-and-wife team consisting of superb guitarist Chris and exquisite fiddler Eleanor Whitmore, masters of technique and vocal harmony.

Alexandria, VA – July 18, 2017 – Steve Earle and The Dukes perform at The Birchmere. (Photo by Richie Downs)

They also accompanied Steve and the Dukes throughout the concert, which featured several covers of Guy Clark songs and a generous sampling of Steve’s greatest hits, which, as I have already said, cover the gamut of various Americana subgenres.

I can’t provide a complete set list but songs included Clark covers “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” “Dublin Blues,” and “LA Freeway.”

Among Earle’s hits, we heard “Guitar Town,”  “Galway Girl,”  “Fort Worth Blues,”  “Copperhead Road,” and many others, including a car medley featuring Springsteen’s “Racing in the Streets,”  “Sweet Little 66,” and “Pink Cadillac.”[6]

The Dukes sounded great, whether harmonizing a bluegrass number, plucking an Irish melody, or fuzzing dissonantly on one of his rockers.

A+

At the Francis Marion Performing Arts Center Tuesday 27 August 2019

The Dispensary

We walked home after the show, and instead of going back to the hotel, we hit the rooftop bar at the Dispensary.

It’s fairly dark up there and seating consists of sofa sets and coffee tables.  When we arrived, a couple of females nestled at a corner table, but that was it.  About a half an hour later, a college couple arrived, and the male gave his date a sort of a mini tour of the skyline before snuggling down on a sofa across the bar from us.

As we got up to leave, in stepped the Dukes: the above-mentioned Chris Masterson and Eleanor Whitmore, Ricky Ray Jackson, and Brad Pemberton (sans bassist Kelly Looney).  We told them how much we enjoyed the show, and Chris thanked us. I apologized for being intrusive, and he said, “Oh no, thanks for coming to the show.”

We hauled our glasses downstairs, the bartender thanked us, and that was that: a memorable post-retirement weekday, to say the least.

Selfie at the Dispensary Rooftop Bat Tuesday 27 August 2019

[1] Of course, the traditional gift for the first anniversary is paper.

[2]BTW, Mr. Earle has two dramatic monologue songs sung by death row denizens, “Bill Austin” and “Jonathan’s Song.”

[3] Or would it make more psychological sense to order a pack of saltines and a Carling Black Label beer?

[4] an acronym for “don’t give a fuck fig.”

[5]At these town halls, aides carry a separate microphone to field questions.

[6] Steve’s hero, Townes Van Zandt also covered “Racing in the Streets” on one of his live albums.

The Omission of Blue Cheer

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In my last two years at Porter-Gaud, I taught a class called “America in the Sixties,” a history elective I felt unqualified to teach.  Sure I came of age in the Late Sixties and Early Seventies, yes, I was suspended from school for wearing a black armband on Moratorium Day[1], and, um, sure, I could offer firsthand insight of what it is like to ingest lysergic acid diethylamide. On the other hand, my knowledge of the Freedom Riders, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and the Great Society agenda was on par with Mike Pence‘s knowledge of the poetry of Charles Bukowski.

The one topic we covered I felt confident about was music.  Thanks to the sophistication of the latest technology, I could embed short videos into Keynote slide shows that covered the roots of rock, Early Sixties music, Mo Town, Stax, the British invasion, and finally the San Francisco sound.

But even here I was somewhat derelict because in the San Francisco piece I failed to mention the seminal acid blues rock band Blue Cheer, whom some identify as the very first heavy metal band.[2]

My pal, the late Gordon Wilson, turned me on to Blue Cheer in ’69.  The band, which borrowed their name from a variety of LSD, had released a really arresting album, Vincebus Eruptum, the year before.   Its most successful single, a cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues,” actually peaked at #14 on Billboard, though I don’t remember ever hearing it on the radio. Also featured on the album was the blues standard “Rock Me, baby,” made famous earlier by Muddy Waters and BB King.

Eddie Cochran

So what you got was the blues all hepped up on goofballs.

Here’s a video.  Note the relentless drumming and wailing guitar.

 

 

Anyway, I think “Summertime Blues” holds up fairly well, though I doubt if many of my students in the Sixties course would have dug it.  When I first started teaching at PG in the mid-Eighties, students were obsessed by Sixties music.  In fact, I dubbed them “the re-generation.” However, nowadays hip hop and country have replaced rock as the most popular genres, and most of those students of mine last year would prefer to hear Beyoncé over Janis Joplin.

[1]15 October 1969

[2]Maybe, but isn’t the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” at least a heavy metal song, even if you wouldn’t call the Kinks a “heavy metal band?”

Al Gored

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Where will my typing fingers lead my mind this morning?  There are so many topics to explore, from the divine (is there an afterlife and what would it be like) to the absurd (evangelical Christians claiming a Professional Wrestling promoter who paid off a porn star to keep quiet about their tryst three months after the birth of his son was sent by God Almighty to save us all).

Or I could waste my and your time engaging in wishful thinking.  For example, how would the world be different if 19,000 Palm County Florida ballots had not been spoiled because of shoddy ballot design and Al Gore had been elected President in 2000?

Here are some possibilities:

Perhaps 9/11 would have been prevented.  Bush ignored intelligence warnings that Bin Laden was planning to attack the US. Perhaps Gore would have put the nation on Red Alert, but, of course, there’s no way of knowing for sure.

I am, however, supremely confident that Gore would not have waged war against Iraq – Afghanistan perhaps, but not Iraq — saving hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

Imagine that money being directed towards infrastructure instead of military hardware.

Remember his much maligned idea of taking the Clinton surplus, placing it “in a lock box” for the upcoming rainy day (think monsoon, deluge) when our aging population overwhelms Social Security and Medicare funds?

John Roberts and Samuel Alito wouldn’t be on the Supreme Court.

The Great Recession avoided.

I could go on.

But what is it about Al Gore that makes him the target of such widespread animosity?   He seems to provoke a disproportionate amount of scorn from Late Empire citizens from all walks of life.  I remember all too well during the 2000 Campaign when the mainstream [insert nervous throat-clearing audio] liberal press pilloried him, as if coming off as a somewhat pompous, wooden media presence was more worthy of scorn than being a dysphasic Connecticut cowboy with a mutant Midas touch that turns everything he touches into shit, whether it be an oil-drilling company, a war of liberation, or the United States economy.[1]  So what if Gore served in Nam?  W served his country in the saloons of Texas.  So what if W is incapable of delivering an unscripted coherent paragraph? Al Gore claims that he invented the Internet. Ha ha ha ha ha.

You would think that in the ruinous aftermath of the Bush Debacle, people might cut poor Al some slack, realizing that a rather robotic public persona doesn’t mean that human being behind the automaton mask is necessarily a buffoon.  Having W as your lab partner might yield a couple of funny jokes you could tell later, but you’re much less likely to have a beaker blow up in your face if Al (or Hillary Clinton) were working at your side.

But people still love to hate Gore.  I remember a decade ago when the South Carolina Aquarium bestowed upon Gore its Legacy Award, providing him a pulpit to preach his sermon on looming environmental disaster.

At the time, disgruntled citizens inundated[2]our local paper with comments like these:

 

An award? An AWARD???  Instead, ARREST this sorry piece of trash for aiding and abetting the greatest scientific fraud in the history of mankind!

Ask any REAL scientist, physicist, etc. Gore’s theories are not supported by the scientific community.

Anyone curious about how Gore’s family made their money in Tennessee?

[. . .] the SC Aquarium is honoring the father of all hoaxes ALGORE. It is a joke. I sure am not going to visit or take my children to a place that supports fraud science.

We already have clean air, water and food or we would all be dead.

Critical thinking at its finest!

So what are we to make of the general public’s disdain of this well-meaning man?  I have noticed similar reactions to certain students when I worked as an educator.  For whatever reason, some unfortunates attract a disproportionate fusillade of slings and arrows for their seemingly petty peccadillos – their fashion faux pas, shyness, sexual orientation, intellectual curiosity, etc.

I suspect that this tendency for folk to gang up on the socially awkward lies in some deep-rooted evolutionary adaptation.  It’s nothing new.

[1]Our current President, who makes W sound Ciceronian when it comes to oratory, shares these sentiments.

[2]Have you picked up on the flood motif?

Ayn Rand’s Treasury of Children’s Verse

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“The proper method of judging when or whether one should help another person is by reference to one’s own rational self-interest and one’s own hierarchy of values: the time, money or effort one gives or the risk one takes should be proportionate to the value of the person in relation to one’s own happiness.” — Ayn Rand

 

Good Riddance

Jack and Jill went up a hill
to fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

And none of John Galt’s women
and none of John Galt’s men
lifted one little finger
to help either of them.

Pork

This little piggy went to market (as bacon)
This little piggy as ham;
This little piggy was injected with chemicals
And ended up as spam,
And this little piggy (see below)
went wee wee on the killing floor.

Pitch Black Night

Three blind mice
Three blind mice
See how they stumble
See how they starve.

All three were poisoned by the butcher’s wife
Who didn’t get the dosage of the poison quite right,
So now they spend their very last day
in pitch black night, pitch black night.

Yuk

Georgie Porgy pudding and pie
Hung with the girls and not the guys.
Puberty’s hitting him, however,
Precipitated a change in Georgie’s weather,
So Georgie ditched his girly toys
And hid in the closet with like-minded boys.

Mistress Ayn has this to say
To all of you who might be gay.
Breaking nature’s laws
Denotes “psychological flaws.”

She finds you personally “disgusting”
For your perverted lusting.
If you want to join her nation
Then you better switch your orientation.

Lullaby

Now I lay me down to sleep
in a universe dark and deep.
If I die before I wake,
Tough shit, them’s the breaks.

In High Praise of Deadwood

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Yesterday in the cool air-conditioned confines of the Irish Pub St. James Gate, I told my beloved (who is more intelligent and literate than me I) that I considered the HBO series Deadwood to be a greater work of art than Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, a particularly insensitive comment on the week of the Nobel Laureate’s demise.  However, I didn’t make the claim to diss Song of Solomon or Ms Morrison, but rather to heap high praise on Deadwood, which I went on to compare to a magnificent Victorian novel in its construction (created in the flux-time of serialization), its breadth and depth, the complexity of its characters, etcetera, etcetera.

Robert Penn Warren mentored the series’ creator and writer, David Milch, and as far as 20th Century narratives go, Deadwood might owe more than a little something to All the King’s Men, but forgive me; I digress.[1]  These multi-seasonal television series I consider a really important advancement in the making of fiction. No longer must Middlemarch be freeze-dried into 90 minutes of cinematic action, hence the breadth and depth alluded to above. We can see the action and hear the characters and tailor the pace of the narrative to our individual attention spans, be they flea-like or godlike, as we do when reading a novel.

Many have (to point of cliché-dom) compared Deadwood to Shakespeare’s works, not only in the broad array of human types incarnated in individual flesh, but also in the language Milch employs.

Here’s Milch addressing the language of the series:

Many of them might have been illiterate, but they knew the King James Bible and Shakespeare, and that’s what shaped the way they thought and the way they expressed themselves.

Formal letters didn’t convey a great deal of how people spoke, but informal letters—say, a brother writing a brother about life in a mining camp, or period memoirs or diaries—do. Of course, much of the best stuff wasn’t written with the idea of publication. But you can get a fairly good idea of the evolution of the language and the derivation of most words and terms in the Library of Congress papers on oral history, and H. L. Mencken’s The American Language is very good on this too.

 

The dialogue, often iambic, can be stilted in its diction and syntax, but is infused with jazz-like riffs of alliterative vulgarity and profanity.[2]

I’ll offer a couple of quick examples from Calamity Jane, who is mostly employed as a means of comic relief but who possesses, nevertheless, depth, because of her sensitivity and moral courage.

Robin Weigert as Calamity Jane

Here are a couple of examples of her use of language, both dealing with African American characters. When Jane tells Samuel Fields (who has dubbed himself the Little N-word General) that she’ll help him bury fellow African American Hostetler, he says, “That ain’t gonna raise your popularity with your fellow white people.” She replies, “Question I wake to in the morning and pass out with at night: ‘What’s my popularity with my fellow white people?’”

Later Aunt Lou, George Hearst’s cook, asks Jane if she could have a taste of the liquor Jane’s been chugging from a bottle.  Jane says, of course, but stops Lou from reaching for a cup as she hands her the bottle. “Do not employ a mug lest next we’d be donning white gloves.”

I could go on and on, but unlike a television series, a blog ain’t the medium for long-windedness, so I end with this admonition.  If you haven’t seen Deadwood, you need to check it out.  Despite its battlefield load of corpses, it’s life-affirming in the truest since of the word, the story, in Milch’s own words “of order rising from chaos.”)

Listen to the language here (there are vulgarities and racial epithets, be warned).

[1]I’ve never quite succeeded in squelching my bad habit of name-dropping.  I actually met Robert Penn Warren in a smallish group of English majors when he visited the University South Carolina circa 1974.  One of my teachers (a PhD candidate) had the courage to ask the first question:  “Mr. Warren, do you think a formal education would have ruined Earnest Hemingway?” Mr. Warren (screeching): How in the hell would I know!”

[2]There is a difference.  Vulgarity traffics in sex and excrement; profanity traffics in taking the Name of the Lord in vain.

Channeling Joseph Campbell

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Chapter 1

Hello, I’m an English teacher, so this blog post is about sex.  All English teachers talk about in class is sex.  Just ask any of our students.

Above is a photograph of the finish line of the most important marathon in which you’ve ever competed. That sperm that helped bring you into existence went up against ~ 250,000,000 competitors.  You know that cloying cliché, “we’re all winners.”  Well, in the case of conception it’s true.

The image below is an artist’s rendition of a comet or meteorite’s crashing into our planet, an occurrence that scientists believe set in motion the series of chemical chain reactions that resulted in life.

Chapter 2

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. William Wordsworth.

           The  world is too much with us; late and soon,

          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

          Little we see in Nature that is ours;

          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

          The winds that will be howling at all hours,

          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

          It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be

          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;                         10

          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

                                                              1806.

The world that Wordsworth laments in the octave of this famous sonnet isn’t the magical world he describes in the sestet.  No, the world of the octave is the dreary quotidian world of getting and spending, the world of the long line at Food Lion where you find yourself because earlier at Harris Teeter you had forgotten eggs, so now you’re in bumper-to-bumper traffic headed home to a mailbox that holds a communication from the IRS.  No wonder as you walk back to the house with that letter in your hand that you don’t notice the hummingbird hovering above the impatiens in the forgotten flower box.

Wordsworth, of course, was big on childhood.  He believed in the pre-existence of the soul and that when children were born they brought with them traces of holy wonderment.  “The child is father of the man,”  he proclaims in “My Heart Leaps Up,” and “I hope my days to be/Bound each to each/By natural piety.”

Of course, what’s separating the Wordsworthian child attuned to the miracle of being and Thoreau’s wretched adult living a life of quiet desperation is school.

Chapter 3

 

Get born, keep warm

Short pants, romance,

learn to dance,

get dressed, get blessed,

try to be success.

Please her, please him,

Buy gifts, don’t steal, don’t lift.

Twenty years of schooling,

and they put you on the day shift.

Bob Dylan “Subterranean Homesick Blues”

By the way, I’m not one of these people who grew up knowing they wanted to be a teacher.  To the contrary, I couldn’t wait to graduate from high school, for the world of school for me was a factory world, very much like the world depicted in the above photo.  Each class, though configured exactly alike in gridlike fashion, was its own little self-contained kingdom.  No teacher ever wandered outside her dominion to help us connect the dots.  For example, in geometry, when we were solving proofs, no one mentioned that we were also using deductive reasoning in the essays we were writing in English across the hall, which, in fact, might has been across the Gobi desert.  School seemed random, a series of disconnected facts and skills taught for the purpose of preparing us for employment – the factory, the day shift.

Now, if ever there was a place that should instill in us a sense of wonder, it is a school.  We should constantly be reminding our students of the mysteries of existence and how all the disciplines we teach are interrelated so that our students don’t end up like poor Charlie Kaufman, whom we’ll meet in the next chapter, a man leading a life of quiet desperation, despite the fact that he’s a bigtime screenwriter.  This clip is from the movie Adaptation, written by Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. In the film Kaufman – who has written himself into the script – asks the existential questions, who am I and how did I get here.

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

250,000.000 sperm

Now, we’ve seen how Charlie got to where he is, but what exactly the odds of his having gotten there? We’ve established that each ejaculation yields approximately 250,000,000 sperm, but then we need to factor in 300 or so ova an average post pubescent woman carries.  Humans have come up with a language that can compute these odds – mathematics, a sort of poetry in its own right – but what if we extrapolate those individual odds up the family tree to Genghis Kahn, and what if my great-great-great grand pappy hadn’t just ducked out of the way of that musket ball at the Battle of the Second Manassas – I wouldn’t be here in my this particular incarnation.

The odds of our existing are so infinitesimally small, it’s mind-blowing.  The idea that we possess self-consciousness on a pebble swirling around a hydrogen explosion wheeling through a vacuum shouldn’t drowned by the mundane.

Chapter 6

This is essentially the first lecture I delivered each year to my Honors tenth grade British Lit survey course when I was a teacher. To try reawaken student wonder of the world, I turned to mythology, and my guide was Joseph Campbell, he of the famous admonition – “follow your bliss.”  I used the word mythology, instead of religion, because, I know all too well that another person’s religion is a mythology.   However, as Campbell has eloquently demonstrated, myths are what make the world come alive for us, so each year, in British Literature, I began by talking about mythology and establishing science as the preferred myth of the class.

At first, students balked at the idea of science being a myth, but through the Socratic method, I led them to the idea that myths can be defined as symbolic configurations that attempt to explain the mysteries of Being – Being with a capital B – how the universe came to be and how we came to be.  I stressed, however, that although myths are not literally true, they can be metaphorically true.

But science is literally true they claimed.

Well, I said, let’s hop into my time machine.

Chapter 7

The year is 1970, and I’m in Mrs. Ballard’s physics class.  There I am center-right standing, tilting towards a desk (obviously, Mrs. Ballard’s classroom management left something to be desired).  Anyway, Mrs. Ballard asks, “What do we call the smallest component of an atom,” and my hand shoots up.  “A quark!”  I proclaim.   Mrs. Ballard frowns.  “No Rusty,” she explains, “we’ve been over this time and time again.  An electron is the smallest particle of an atom.”

Atom 1970’s style

Atom 2010’s style

 

Actually, though, I’m right.  Quarks are smaller than electrons, but in 1970, they hadn’t made their way into science books. By the way, Murray Gell-Mann, the discoverer of the quark didn’t know what to call it until he ran across the word in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, a novel so difficult it makes quantum mechanics seem like child’s play.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Sure he hasn’t much of a bark

And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

But O Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn’t un be a sky of a lark

To see that old buzzard whooping about for runs shirt in the dark

And he hunting round for runs speckled trousers around by Palmerstown Park?

Hohohoho, mounty Mark!

Of course, we could take this idea of science not being literally true back even further to Aristotle who had scholars convinced for two thousand years that the earth was the center of the solar system.

However, science does possess a significant advantage over older myths because it’s self-correcting, and that’s why it was the chosen myth of my British literature class.  I found myself needing to establish this standard because in past years I had had folks who took the Genesis myth literally, wasting class time challenging Darwin, whose theories had created a crisis of faith in Victorian England, a crisis that profoundly affected Victorian poetry and fiction.  In Wordsworth at the turn of the 19th century nature is paradisal; in Hardy you can hear the shriek of the raptors; nature is coldly indifferent to him.

Chapter 8

So on the first full day of class, I offered my students a history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present, according to the myth of science.  In doing so, I hoped to engender in them a sense of wonder, but also to underscore the importance of science, how it is central in understanding the mechanics of the world, and how it informs the other disciplines they study.  I had a timeline that ran from left to right at the top of one of my white boards board, starting with the Big Bang.  The only two historical events (i.e. non-biological) I had listed on the timeline were the discovery of agriculture and the detonation of the hydrogen bomb at Hiroshima, eye-blinks apart in our species’ past. I would choose a student and ask her to plot the Eden myth on the timeline.  Of course, it comes after agriculture, right before Hiroshima.  Adam’s curse was farm labor.

Chapter 9

But what about the older myths – how can they be true?  Obviously the Greek myths are mere fantasy.

Well, let’s take a peek at the Greek creation story – Uranus the Sky mated with Gaea the earth to produce the first living creatures, which is more or less the current scientific theory a comet (sky sperm) impregnates earth to produce life. See, it’s true! The Greek creation myth and the scientific creation myth are essentially the same.

Chapter 10

Students love connections like this – love the integration of our disciplines, and, of course, what happens in outside of the realm of literature affects literature and the rest of the arts.  After Freud, the novel goes inward; after the invention of the camera, painting goes abstract; after Planck, poetry goes atomistic.

So, the more we can cross-pollinate across the curriculum, the more engaged our students will become, and the more connections they’re able to make, the more likely school will be a positive experience for them, and not the drag that Wordsworth bemoans.

Adventures in Editing

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IMG_1968.jpeg

 

A few years ago when I chaired an English Department at an independent school, it occurred to me that I could save my employer literally thousands of dollars by replacing the ridiculously expensive textbooks of our survey courses with compilations we put together ourselves.  After all, 90% of our texts fall in the realm of public domain.  Rather than forking out $145 a pop for an anthology, we could download the material, format it, print and bind it for $20 each.  Although the volumes would lack background on historic periods and authorial biographies, we could provide the cultural underpinnings of the Augustan Age or Ernest Hemingway’s gallivanting via lecture. Even better, the kids could keep the books and therefore annotate the texts.  Since it was my big idea, I volunteered to do the amassing, formatting, and editing myself.

O, dear readers, that was a promise I wish I could have undone.  Formatting was nightmarish.  Any slight correction would send the text gaping open, sliding along the screen, the blocks of prose or poetry gaping open here and there, like this:

 [. . .] afraid of Jim; he was a drunkard, but he could twist the law to suit his client’s needs as no     other man in all western Kansas could do; and there were many who tried. The lawyer closed    the door gently behind him, leaned back against it and folded his arms, cocking his head a little             to one side. When he assumed this attitude in the courtroom, ears were always pricked up, as it    usually foretold a flood of withering sarcasm.

Plus I needed to number lines or paragraphs, which further disjointed the format.  We’re talking hours, days, weeks, a summer of uncompensated labor.

One aspect I came to enjoy, however, was providing footnotes.  Ever since I was a child, I’ve dug footnotes (endnotes not so much). Anyway, I started traditionally enough:

Passage: A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,”

Footnote: From Act 5.1 of Hamlet, the graveyard scene, when Hamlet contemplates Alexander the Great’s corpse decomposing into clay and Alexander’s clay ultimately being used to plug up beer barrels.

However, as time passed, I started relating the material to works they had read the previous year.

Passage: “The false society of men —

— for earthly greatness

All heavenly comforts rarefies to air.”

Footnote: From George Chapman’s (c. 1559 – 1634) The Tragedy of Caesar and Pompey. Chapman, by the way,  is the translator Keats lauds in “On First looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

As even more time passed, I became self-indulgent and egocentric.

Passage: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged (sic) our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one    of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Footnote: Psalm 137.  Also, the first two lines are the beginning of the Reggae great Jimmy Cliff’s “By the Rivers of Babylon,” a lament about Jamaicans’ colonial enslavement. Slaves of the Americas identified with the Israelites of the Old Testament.

 

And then even more egocentric.

Passage: Porphyrogene!

Footnote: Literally “born to be purple,” as in of royal blood. Cf. the composer of “Purple Rain” and ”Little Red Corvette.”

Then downright sardonic:

Passage: “The evil that men do lives after them.”

Footnote: This famous line you should know, damn it! (BTW, you don’t get footnotes like this at the Magnet).

Passage: It is the excess of the suggested meaning — it is the rendering this, the upper instead of the undercurrent of the theme — which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so called poetry of the so called transcendentalists.

Footnote: Not exactly a ringing endorsement of ol’ Ralph Waldo and his gang.

Passage: The next desideratum was a pretext for the continuous use of the one word “nevermore.”

Footnote: Why spend all those days and nights studying Latin unless you get to flaunt your learning with an unnecessary, showoffish phrase or two?

At any rate, I managed to complete the project in time, and now, even in my retirement, I continue to edit the Readers as my former colleagues add and subtract entries.  It’s not nearly as burdensome now that I don’t have classes to prepare for or summer reading to complete.