non-fiction

Inherit the Hot Air

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This morning’s edition of The Post and Courier features clashing “conservative” columns by Senator Mike Fair and assistant editor Frank Wooten on natural selection’s being taught in public schools.   David Brooks versus Paul Krugman this ain’t.   Think, rather, The Emperor of Lilliput debating Bottom the Weaver.

Since Mr. Wooten’s column is a response to Senator Fair’s, I’ll begin with his, which poses some syntactical challenges for the reader .

He begins by announcing his world view is Christian and he has “that perspective on issues when it applies.” He complains that some who perpetrate subtle attacks “on some issues promoted by Christians” like evolution ignore the Christian bias in other issues, for example, legislation Fair has promoted to help “inmates, women, children, etc” — as if Christianity held a patent on human kindness, as if compassion could not manifest from other religions or mere humanism. By the way, in my travels I have run across ragged beggar children, but I’ve never thought to myself, “Hey, I’m not a Christian, so I’m not going to give that grimy by-product of a random series of accidents and mutations any of my tourist dollars.”

Fair then goes on to claim that “the courts have placed a stranglehold on the search for truth in science.” What in the hell does this mean? Are anti-evolutionary scientists being arrested, convicted, and imprisoned Galileo-like so they can’t continue their quest to prove evolution fallacious? He then goes on to write, “The ‘truth’ must conform to Darwinism, or it is not allowed. I don’t suppose it matters what your eyes see or your mind tells you.”

What he means by that last sentence I can only guess. Do his eyes see a cloud floating above, and does his mind tell him there’s a white bearded, golden robed masculine God sitting on a throne up on that cloud who created our solar system in 6 days 6,000 years ago?

Then Fair careens off on a tangent and argues that “Noah, Webster, a Founding Father (Webster, by the way, spent the Revolution as an undergraduate at Yale), was considered the Father of Education” (ah, the obscuring cloak of the passive voice), and Founding Father Webster declared, “The Christian New Testament is the Moral Law for the United States,” which certainly should be news to the Navaho, Cherokee, and Sioux tribes.

This rhetorical path leads Fair to the Supreme Court, which in essence has embraced “atheism, a religious belief,” to be “allowed to be a factor in driving Darwinism in public schools.” So, a religion, after all, is driving public policy, and that religion is atheism.

He then writes

The Big Bang Theory confirming the truth of a beginner, judged to be a conclusion or debate that is not allowed; many facts are excluded from science and astronomy because of their non-atheistic implications that point directly to intelligence.

I have no idea what he means by the string of phrases masquerading as a sentence that begins the quote, but I wish he’d offered an example or two of scientific facts that have been banned from textbooks because those facts “point directly to intelligence.”

He asks rhetorically, “Why should a young person care about character if he is just a random conglomeration of particles” and ends with “we are all here for a purpose, and random causes do not fit with the facts.”

From the film version of "Inherit the Hot Air starring from left to right Frank Wooten, Sen. Mike Fair, and Wesley Moore

From the film version of “Inherit the Hot Air” starring from left to right Frank Wooten, Sen. Mike Fair, and Wesley Moore

Mr. Wooten begs to disagree with Senator Fair. He wonders if these “South Carolina folks who still see perceive evolution as a threat to Christianity” have seen Inherit the Wind.”

My guess is probably not, but if they had, they no doubt would identify with William Jennings Bryan, not Clarence Darrow.

Although Wooten blithely ignores some of the problems evolution poses for Christianity, he makes a credible case for the separation of religious belief and scientific education.

He fears that op-ed pieces like Fair’s that reject “basic science” undermine “true conservatives who fairly object to anti-American slants in textbooks,” slanted stuff that mentions the massacre at Wounded Knee and questions the detonation of atomic bombs on civilian populations, acts that suggest that maybe the Christian New Testament is not the Moral Law for the United States after all.

 

Public Houses I Have Known and Loved

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My mother’s side of the family — the Baptist side – considered alcohol an abomination, Satanic spittle concocted to rob the imbiber of his or her moral wits, or to shift to a perhaps more accurate metaphor, concocted to de-magnetize the self-polluter’s moral compass.

My father’s people, on the other hand, despite their Protestant names – Luther and Wesley – didn’t much adhere to Holy Writ. My mother – praise be — was a non-judgmental, fun-loving redhead with a heightened, countercultural aversion to self-righteousness, so she didn’t consider drinking sinful and enjoyed a Crown Royal and Coke on occasion.

Mama's childhood residence, the setting of one very unmerry Xmas

Mama’s childhood residence

Nevertheless, her father when he drank could be a belligerent drunk, and my own father reacted to alcohol in Jekyll/Hyde fashion — either he had you on the carpet rolling in laughter or cowering as he hurled some odd or end across the room. So I suspect that early in their marriage, Mama might have followed in her own mother’s footsteps and attempted to discourage my father from drinking.

Perhaps Mama’s antipathy to Daddy’s drinking explains how I ended up hanging out at bars at a very early age — even before I acquired language and therefore memory. These bar excursions must have occurred when we lived on Wentworth Street or when my parents lived at Clemson. The story goes (and my parents shared it together on numerous occasions to numerous audiences) that sometimes when Mama left me in Daddy’s care, he absconded with me in tow to the most obscure bar he could think of, only to have the phone ring there and the barman to ask if there were a Wesley Moore present. Daddy, according to this legend, awed by Mama’s preternatural ability to track him down, would come straight home to face the wrath of his red-headed Scotch-Irish wife.

No telling the impact the conviviality of taverns — the blinking pinball machines, the raucous laughter, the seductive perfumes, the voice of Nat King Cole on the jukebox — had on my tiny developing cerebral cortex. Some studies claim that exposing infants with their rapidly developing brains to classical music enhances math skills, so perhaps my exposure to cigarette smoke, vulgar jokes, and male camaraderie helped to develop my Dionysian social skills, my ability to strike up an amiable conversation to the occupant of my adjacent bar stool, whether he be a vacationing Wall Street bigshot at Rue de Jean or a bushy bearded homeless rummy at Chico Feo.

Truth be told, I like hanging out solo at what my ancestors called public houses.

The Pool Room

My first post-toddler bar/tavern/pub hangout was the S&S Sporting Center (aka the Pool Room) located on Main Street in my hometown Summerville. Although it wasn’t literally a tavern, Mr. George, his wife Monkey, and son Boise served draft and canned beers in an establishment that featured a long bar with at least twenty swivelable bar stools. I sat at that bar many a Saturday afternoon or summer day slurping down delicious chilidogs, sipping Cokes, eavesdropping on beer swilling rustics or wayward Episcopalians.

Scrupulously honest, the Pool Room proprietors demanded proof of age, and when you turned 18, handing your license to Boise as you ordered a draft was a rite of passage. You could go there by yourself and be sure to know someone — if even if were only Boise, who not only had a degree from Brevard College but who had also served his county in the arm forces. He was our hometown Hemingway, a stoic who had seen the world.

Once I hit college and my hair had reached my shoulders, I quit hanging at the Pool Room in the summers. The last time I remember being there, some white stranger with a Hendrix-sized jew-fro and tie-dyed tee shirt strolled in, and I overheard a native son say, “Let’s kick his ass before he puts one of them psycheee-DEL-ic records on the jukebox.”

Morris Knight’s

I don’t know how exactly to characterize Morris Knight’s. Because it was within walking distance from my house, and not far at all if you cut through the woods and later people’s yards, we would go there in the daytime to buy firecrackers. There was a bar with floor-attached stools and a coin-operated pool table. This was back in the days before pop tops, and I remember the bartender, a fat woman, opening the cans with a church key, puncturing two triangular openings across from one another. I’m pretty sure they didn’t serve draft.

I only went there at night once on a camping out excursion when I was in junior high, and the joint was rocking, as Chuck Berry might say. The odor of beer mixed with cigarette smoke was heavy in the air, and I saw a man staggeringly drunk try to traverse the narrow front room. Whoever ran the joint immediately ran us off when we tried to cop some firecrackers.

Later there was a place on the north side of town called the Teepee Lounge when I was in college, but I only patronized it a couple of times.

By then, we had started driving to Charleston to hang out at College of Charleston bars like Hogpenny’s or to the Isle of Palms to destinations now long gone.

USC Bars

IMG_1468Let’s see, the Campus Club, the Opus, the Second Level, Don’s, the Senate Plaza, Capitol Coal, Oliver’s Pub — and, of course, the Golden Spur where my late wife Judy Birdsong and I met as bartenders.

Located in the back of the student union building, what the Spur lacked in style — it felt sort of like a cafeteria — it made up in convenience and prices. Happy Hour beers cost 15 cents and a pitcher a dollar. Also, sometimes the Spur featured musical and comedy acts. Steve Martin performed there before anyone had ever heard of him, and I saw Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee play there for free. sonny-1

Being a bartender at the Spur made you sort of a minor celebrity around campus in that seeming strangers recognized you and called you by name, but I tended not to dig lots of the regulars, a few of who seemed to be nascent alcoholics. We had this irritating promotion where you’d by your own Golden Spur mug and carry with you to the bar and receive your first draft free.

In the dead summer time, when I was the only non-managerial bartender, some kids would come in at 11 and stay virtually all day and night. You could set your watch by their coming and going. Then in the high season during Monday Night Football or Columbia’s big party night Thursday, the place would be packed wall-to-wall, and occasionally you’d have to deal with belligerent drunks or puke-bespattered restrooms.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time there. It might be the best job I ever had.

Charleston Bars

Rue de Jean is my downtown hangout, and back before the pandemic, I’d show up there around 9:30 on the second Tuesday of each month after my book club dispersed. Although he no longer works there, what distinguished the Rue from any of the other bars was Mr. Steve Smoak, a world-class bartender who on a busy night moved with the grace of Nureyev as he glided over to grab a bottle and in one fluid motion scooped ice and poured while seeking eye contact with the next customer. When things weren’t busy, he was a witty raconteur, a cat who knew his way around, a latter-day Bosie, if you will.

Of course, the so-called City of Folly Beach probably has more bars per capita than any other municipality in the Palmetto State. I suggest the Surf Bar for visitors and the Jack of Cups for beer connoisseurs, the Sand Dollar for Saturday Night dancing, the eponymous Sunset Cay for marsh vistas, but, by far, my major hangout is Chico Feo, an outdoor Caribbean bohemian confab of the homeless, the homely, and the hip. The superb bartenders reach for an All Day IPA, which costs a mere 3 bucks, when they see me at a distance parking my bike.

Some of the clientele are down and out but seem happy, like characters from a Jerry Jeff Walker song. When I was teaching, I’d grade essays there on fair-weather Saturdays and Sundays. Once, my friend Greg, who was at the time homeless, chided me for grading my essays at the Jack of Cups when the temperatures were what I’d call uncomfortable. “You should grade them outdoors,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll ever sleep indoors ever again.”  He said it as if sleeping under a roof was somehow inhibiting.

“What about the winter,” I asked. “Don’t you get cold in the winter?”

“I have a sleeping bag,” he said and smiled and ordered another PBR.

The Struggle Itself

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Each weekday morning when Judy’s getting her 96-straight hours of EPOCH at Roper, I pull into the Doughty Street Parking Lot around 7,  just when the hospital staff switches from day to night shift. As I cross Doughty on foot, Judy’s morning paper in hand, I work against the oncoming pedestrian traffic of off-duty nurses, technicians, engineers, many in their uniforms. Nurses in their navy blue combinations and high-priced athletic shoes seem especially happy.  I see them walking in groups of three, smiling, chatting, heading to their cars. They work 3 day-12 hour shifts in a fulfilling profession; nevertheless they’re delighted at the moment to be free.

(Now, what do they do? Devour a delicious breakfast and slurp down a bloody mary before drifting off in front of the Today Show?)

Going with my flow, the on-coming staff marches in, but, even though they seem relatively eager to start work, their affect isn’t nearly as upbeat as their departing colleagues. Then again, we aint talking all doctors and nurses here. Some of these people’s jobs don’t seem fulfilling at all, like those men awkwardly manipulating box-stacked carts into narrow elevators, like those cafeteria workers breathing for hours the odor of hospital food, like the crew out front dealing with valet parking.

Their minutes probably crawl by.

MC Escher: Convex and Concave

MC Escher: Convex and Concave

Of course, I’m on the way to work myself to shift through dozens of emails before advisory, and if I’m brave enough, to peek at the day’s school calendar, an absurd, way-too-busy color-coded chart of lines and rectangles that look as if they could be the work of MC Escher. We ride a rotating schedule – either Week A or Week B — and when I arrive at work on a Friday morning, people often greet me with the salutation “Happy Friday” or comment sunnily “it’s Friday.” Some time during the day I’ll receive an email inviting me to a “happy hour” in some conveniently located spirit-stocked decompression chamber.

TGIF!

Mythically speaking, labor is one of Adam’s curses, punishment for his uxoriousness, his casting his lot with Eve instead of Yahweh, which brought death into the world and all our woe, e.g. work — in Adam’s case tilling “cursed ground” that produces “thorns and thistles” — in my case dealing with an educational agenda that might be likened to a jewel box of tangled necklaces — academics, sports, service, chapels, assemblies, advisories, peer reviews, study halls. Or think of circus clowns, not leaving a car one after another after another, but entering a car one after another after another.

Actually, I interpret the Eden myth as a story about the shift from hunting/gathering to agriculture, the shift from running around half naked to the natural pulse of the earth’s heartbeat to our settling down to the soul-crushing repetitiveness of the punch clock.  Thus, the knowledge of good and evil becomes the knowledge of how to cultivate plants from seeds, which many scholars believe was a discovery made by women, the gatherers of edible plants. And, of course, settled communities brought us the establishment of property and its evil twin poverty.  I maintain that Amazonian tribespeople untouched by Western civilization live more meaningful lives than the average American who watches five hours of TV a day.

There’s a cool Philip Larkin poem about what a bitch work is called “Toads.” It goes like this:

Toads

Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life?

Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork

and drive the brute off?

 

Six days of the week it soils

With its sickening poison-

Just for paying a few bills!

That’s out of proportion.

 

Lots of folk live on their wits:

Lecturers, lispers,

Losels, loblolly-men, louts-

They don’t end as paupers;

 

Lots of folk live up lanes

With fires in a bucket,

Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-

They seem to like it.

 

Their nippers have got bare feet,

Their unspeakable wives

Are skinny as whippets-and yet

No one actually starves.

 

Ah, were I courageous enough

To shout Stuff your pension!

But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff

That dreams are made on:

 

For something sufficiently toad-like

Squats in me, too;

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,

And cold as snow,

 

And will never allow me to blarney

My way to getting

The fame and the girl and the money

All at one sitting.

 

I don’t say, one bodies the other

One’s spiritual truth;

But I do say it’s hard to lose either,

When you have both.

 

I’m with you, Philip. After listening to my litany yesterday about how frustrating teaching has become in the age of technology,  a colleague asked me why didn’t I retire.  A reasonable question given the frustrations I had just catalogued – parents having access to the grades I post on the website, shooting me emails that proliferate like mushrooms while I’m bouncing from meetings to covering detentions or contacting the help desk because the projection wire in one of the rooms where I teach doesn’t work.

Why don’t I retire?  Because I don’t want to. I eventually get bored in the summers if I’m not traveling or working on a project. I like interacting with students, instructing them about the bane of unnecessary linking verbs and the sloppiness of the “naked this” — not to mention the fun introducing them to the Wife of Bath or riding with them up the Congo with Marlow as we steam towards Mistah Kurtz.

It’s like what Camus says in “The Myth of Sisyphus.” –

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Sisyphus-e1298413740742

A Reluctant Grammarian Goes Over to the Dark Side

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imagesBecause I was dream-ridden, impractical and enjoyed reading, I majored in English without giving future employment a nanosecond’s consideration. Not adept at linear thinking (or delayed gratification), I floated day-to-day through the eight seasons of my undergraduate career bullshitting, wooing, drinking, reefering, eating cafeteria food, listening to and talking about music, reading, writing papers, and studying (not necessarily in that order).

Something would come up or happen or not.

No way did I ever envision myself as a future high or middle school teacher. I recall my pre-undergraduate days, not with nostalgia, but with a feeling of good-riddance, like Japanese Californians might look back on their internment during WW2.

Ironically, my English class in the 8th grade was what I dreaded most each day: constructing mobile-like diagrams of stilted workbook sentences or splashing misspelled words between prim blue lines as I stacked one atop the other five mechanically engineered paragraphs.

Sometimes I foolishly envied my teachers because I thought they didn’t suffer the anxiety I did (they seemed to have their shit together), but no way did I ever even remotely consider expending

hours . . .

days . . .

years . . .

decades . . .

in concrete-block enclosures forcing kids to read the Fireside Poets.

Nevertheless, I am an English teacher, which means, alas, people who don’t know me well think I might judge them on the standardization of their grammar, whether spoken or written. I try to reassure them that I digs the vernacular, that they can feel free to split infinitives, confuse lie with lay, end sentences with prepositions. It’s all good/well with me.

I could [not] care less (unless they confuse number with amount [petty] or use literally to mean figuratively [deadly]).*

Nevertheless, me, myself and I-and-I hesitate to violate grammatical rules in written language, even though I know the best prose sounds as if like someone’s talking to you.

See what I mean? Grammar books teach that one in written language should not introduce a clause (as in the sentence above) with the preposition “like,” but you sound like some stilted schoolmarm if you use “as if,” not to mention, one. In fact, I violate the subordinate pronoun rule in the last clause of the last sentence of paragraph 3 – like Japanese Californians might look back on their internment during WW2.

Truth be told, I had to spend some time getting that clause right. I’d prefer a singular antecedent – a Japanese Californian – but I didn’t want the clutter of singular gender specific pronouns like his and her  – however, I also didn’t want to drop the pronoun altogether as in like a Japanese Californian might look back on internment because the rhythm wasn’t quite right. After a bit of praying and fasting, I ended up opting for a plural antecedent Californians so I could correctly use “their.”

In fact, I’m almost at the point of endorsing plural neuter pronouns like they and their as a practical, ear-pleasing alternatives to cluttering sentences with hises and herses.

Compare this cliché with its politically correct alternatives:

A measure of a man is his

A measure of a wo/man is his or her

A measure of a person is his of her [or his/her]

A measure of a person is their

I’m thinking the last one might be best. It doesn’t suggest that women are subsets of men, it doesn’t bring attention to the differences between the two, and it doesn’t clutter/ruin the rhythm of the sentence. Obviously, it’s grammatically wrong, but to most people it doesn’t sound wrong.

After all, the construction “I’m a good ventriloquist, ain’t I” makes more grammatical sense than “I’m a good ventriloquist, aren’t I?”

After all, I are a ventriloquist extraordinaire.

*”I contradict myself?  So I contradict myself.  A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” sez Ralph Waldo.

Cliffs of Fall, Frightful

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Not surprisingly, Robin Williams’ death has ignited a war of words between those who believe that suicide is a selfish act of cowardice and those who believe that it is a regrettable symptom of mental illness — that the suicide is in essence innocent of his own murder by reason of insanity.

Among the former is Shepard Smith who observed on Fox News:

You could love three little things [Williams’ children] so much, watch them grow, they’re in their mid-20s, and they’re inspiring you, and exciting you, and they fill you up with the kind of joy you could never have known.’

‘And yet, something inside you is so horrible or you’re such a coward or whatever the reason that you decide that you have to end it. Robin Williams, at 63, did that today.’

What do you have to say to that, Gerard Manley Hopkins?

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

"The Dark Mountains" by James Craig Annan (1864 - 1946)

“The Dark Mountains” by James Craig Annan (1864 – 1946)

Obviously, Shep Smith “ne’er hung there,” and though Matt Walsh, self-professed “professional sayer of truths” claims to have “struggled with [depression] his entire life,” he’s obviously “ne’er hung there” either:

So I’m just like you, then, because I can’t stomach the thought of [suicide]. I’ve seen it in the neighborhoods where I’ve lived and the schools that I’ve attended. I’ve seen it in my family. I’ve known adults and kids who’ve done it. I’ve seen it on the news and read about it in books, but I can’t comprehend it. The complete, total, absolute rejection of life. The final refusal to see the worth in anything, or the beauty, or the reason, or the point, or the hope. The willingness to saddle your family with the pain and misery and anger that will now plague them for the rest of their lives.

It’s a tragic choice, truly, but it is a choice, and we have to remember that. Your suicide doesn’t happen to you; it doesn’t attack you like cancer or descend upon you like a tornado. It is a decision made by an individual. A bad decision. Always a bad decision.

Hmmmmm.

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,

The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,

The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

 

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.

One hundred and forty-six died in the flames

On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

 

The witness in a building across the street

Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step

Up to the windowsill, then held her out

 

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.

And then another. As if he were helping them up

To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

 

A third before he dropped her put her arms

Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held

Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

 

He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared

And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,

Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

 

Triangle Factory Fire

Triangle Factory Fire

Obviously, depression is an existential, individual disease that manifests itself in different individuals in different degrees. I’m assuming that Mr. Walsh hasn’t suffered Gerard-Manley-Hopkins or David-Foster-Wallace-grade depression, endured those hideous nightmares that plague the sufferer, who pulls down the comforter to discover the rotting corpse of his mother, nightmares that slaughter sleep, which further exhausts the sufferer, who now shuffles blank eyed through a bleak day where nothing – no thing – will bring him joy nor alleviate his excruciating pain.

Yes, suicide is a horrible act, an act that plagues family and friends with sorrow and perhaps guilt; however, if someone’s psyche is a Triangle Factory on fire, I can understand and forgive his or her leaping.

 

Robin Williams, Maria Bamford, and Shamanism

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Last night CNN’s Errol Barnett and Larry King pondered why someone like Robin Williams, a man whom they claimed had everything — genius, riches, awards galore – would take his own life.

King went on to paraphrase EA Robinson’s famous poem “Richard Cory,” the one Simon and Garfunkel put to music; only King misidentified Richard Cory as “Mr. Blackwell” and embellished with extra info like “he had parties on every Halloween.”

Here, look at it yourself. (And also enjoy the dulcet tones of Judy Birdsong yakking on the phone in the background)

Here’s the poem “Richard Cory”

Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,

We people on the pavement looked at him;

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean-favored, and imperially slim

 

And he was always quietly arrayed.

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

“Good morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

 

And he was rich — yes, richer than a king —

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

 

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, on calm summer night

Went home and put s bullet through his head.

Here is Errol Barnett extolling the nuanced wisdom of Larry King.

Now, dear reader/viewer, take a look at Robin Williams’s first appearance on Johnny Carson.

Nancy C Andreasen’s article “Secrets of the Creative Brain” in the July/August Atlantic explores the connection between creativity and mental illness.  According to her 15-year study of participants of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop that included the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Yates, John Cheever, “and 27 other well-known writers,”  Andreasen writes that her “writer subjects came to my office and spent three or four hours pouring out the stories of their struggles with mood disorder — mostly depression, but occasionally bipolar disorder.  A full 80% percent of them had some kind of mood disturbance, compared with just 30% of the control group.”

Although Williams never acknowledged that he suffered from bipolar disorder, his manic highs certainly seem to suggest that a BPD diagnosis is reasonable, and if we can imagine lows that counterbalance the highs on display in the clip above, those those lows would be Marianas-Tench-like, bottomless.

Coincidently, just last week I caught the comedienne Maria Bamford being interviewed on NPR describing a visit she received from a Whole Foods aficionado while Bamford was in a mental hospital.  Bamford, who’s famous for channeling voices, echoed the all-knowing tone of a Californian new ager as she impersonated the visitor.

Visitor: Look, Maria, you need to, like, get into nature.

Maria:  You mean like Virginia Woolf and the river?

old pictures 004Even before yesterday’s dismal news, I wondered in a different culture if Williams might turn out to be a shaman, and watching Bamford’s most recent special (see trailer below), it’s almost as if she’s possessed, not by demons, but by a number of different personalities.  Here’s Joseph Campbell explaining the difference between a Shaman and a priest:

There’s a major difference, as I see it, between a shaman and a priest. A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman’s powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.

To become a shaman or shamanka (the term for a female shaman), one must undergo a psychological crisis.

Here’s anthropologist Douglas Mackar’s description of the shaman state:

The most basic aspect of how we are Shamans is the experience of the trance state.
 All creation occurs in a trance state. In trance, your old attitudes can’t disrupt creation and evolution. It’s only when you release from that trance state that you fall back into your old mind state. It’s always a temptation to go back to the familiar. True change- transformation- is incorporating new knowledge into your psyche and holding it there long enough for it to become a permanent part of your thinking. (Douglas Mackar)

Of course, the 20th and 21st Century LA was Williams’s and Bamford’s milieu, and I don’t mean to imply that they literally were sha-people, only that they share some similarities, and a trance state is not a bad way to describe some of their comic performances.

And also we shouldn’t conflate Williams with Richard Cory.  Cory “glittered when he walked” and Williams bounced around whatever room he was in like an Indian rubber ball.

His suicide didn’t surprise me.

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Sons Grow Up to Be Poets or House Painters

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Thanks to a steady intake of fumes from solvents, house painters suffer a greater susceptibility to alcoholism than any workers except for maybe poets.[1]

You think you got it rough, surveyor, roofer, house painter, Mr. Sisyphus?

Dig this poetic whining:

A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.’

Not to mention that you also have to teach college to pay your bills.

The horror! The horror!

Yet, you could — and I do — argue that house painting is more dangerous to your health than banging out villanelles.

the good life

For example yesterday was, in the words of a house painter acquaintance, “paycheck Friday,” which brought him to the bar at Chico Feo with more than enough cash to tie one on. HP — as I will call him —  is a rather handsome but unkempt 40-year-old who sports shoulder-length brown hair, a greying beard, and a number of eclectic tattoos, including the dog Odie of Garfield fame, tongue out, panting on his left bicep. HP hangs with Gregory, a gentlemanly toper who also sports shoulder-length hair and a Whitmanesque beard.

Bespattered with paint and suffering from a case of psoriasis on his arms and legs worthy of an illustration in a medical encyclopedia, HP took a seat a couple of stools to my right. In between sat at my pals Jim Crow and John Harvey Rogers. Across the bar from us were a young, wholesome couple from Asheville who happened to have been married by a former student of mine.

joker club

Anyway, somehow the conversation turned to the Wild Wild Joker, Charleston’s most famous but now defunct strip club. Before I go any further, I guess I should admit that I once visited the Joker in the late ’70’s when I was being groomed for management in a company that sold safety equipment. Part of the job entailed entertaining out-of-town customers, many of whom, not surprisingly, would rather take in a strip show than a Chekhov play. Anyway, I have a vague memory of the joint. It had a stage, booths, tables, and women who walked around offering to let you buy them a bottle of $100 champagne.

As it turns out, HP worked as a DJ at the Joker as a 22-year old.

“DJ?” I asked. “You spun records there?

“No, I would introduce the acts, do some bouncing.”

“MC, not DJ,” I wondered.

A smile suddenly brightened HP’s face. “If there wasn’t a lady present,” he said. “I could tell you a great story about one night when me and the girls and the manager and bouncer stayed up till eight in the morning partying at the Joker.”

I gently chided him, informing him in so many words just how insultingly sexist his statement was because the “she” he referred to was a grown woman and probably as interested in a tale of Chaucerian bawdry as we.

I asked him if I could record the story with my phone, and he said no. Who could blame him? Maybe this story would rival the one I recently heard about a pal who had worked his way through college picking up bodies for a funeral home, and who had, when tripping on acid in the funeral home’s morgue, accidently shot an old-lady-viewing-ready corpse in the face with a .22.

“Okay,” HP said, “I’ll tell it.

We all leaned toward him as he lowered his voice. “That night I’m talking about. We did lines off the bodies of the girls.”

He wore the grin of a former athlete reminiscing about a touchdown of yore. Just sat there grinning.

“And?” I said.

“That’s it.”

“That’s it? That’s the story?”

“That’s the story.”

The End

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1012122/

Cancer, Camaraderie, and Clichés

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Unless you’re atypically morbid, like David Sedaris, who whiles away his time in airports “wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what,” chances are you’ve exiled the thought of your own mortality to the deepest, remotest outpost in the penal colony of your consciousness. And nothing screams mortality like a bald, cadaverous middle-aged woman sporting a pink baseball cap and a tee that reads “I Got Chemo Brain. What’s Your Excuse.”   Encountering her on a sidewalk, you might nod a quick greeting, or if she were preoccupied, avert your eyes.

That is, unless you — or someone very close to you — have/has been diagnosed with cancer. In that case, this plucky woman is a cognoscente, a knower, a fellow sufferer, a sister, so you look her in the eye, smile your most winning smile, and say hello.

Since my wife Judy’s diagnosis of lymphoma, we’ve by necessity been hanging out with cancer patients — at Roper’s/St Francis’s West Ashley Cancer Center, on the fifth floor of the old downtown Roper, and at an adjacent building where nurses administer white-blood-cell-enhancing injections on Sunday mornings to folks undergoing chemo.

Our first visit takes place on a day so bleak weatherwise that I expect to see the words “Directed by Ingmar Bergman” projected on the bank of dark gray clouds squatting over the harbor. There’s a flash flood warning until eleven, and the rain is steady but not torrential at the moment.

We arrive, take the elevator to the fifth floor (what is it about cancer and fifth floors?) to find at least a dozen people waiting for their injections. What strikes me foremost is how cheerful these folks seem to be. At first, the office is so crowded that we stand out in the hall and have a conversation with a robust-seeming but patchily bald thirty-something who is  (cliche #1) battling relapsed colon cancer, a disease first diagnosed when he was overseas on active duty. Obviously, he’s been dealt an unlucky genetic hand; his brother is also battling cancer, a lymphoma. He gives us the name of an author and book about some miraculous diet.

caneAs people exit, we make our way inside and have a seat. I’m across from a large man in his seventies wearing suspenders and holding a hand-carved cane in the shape of an egret in the big paw of his hand. This man’s head looks like a giant flesh-colored bowling ball, and he doesn’t have any eyebrows. As it turns out, he lives in the town of my birth, Summerville, and commissioned some local artisan to carve the cane for him. He says with a smile that his wife was supposed to come with him, but her head was under the covers when he left. “So I’m going to get some breakfast,” he says good-naturedly. “She can get her own breakfast.”

And then there is the smiling, petite, and ever so fragile-seeming older woman who looks as if she might weigh all of her eighty pounds. She’s wearing a baseball cap and speaks in a cheerful, clipped Northern cadence.

She knows things we as yet don’t know and serves as a wonderful role model. She’s come here alone with her (cliche #2) head held high, and seems perfectly happy.

Oh, these cliches! They’re impossible to avoid. When people ask, we say we’re optimistic but (cliche #3) taking it one day at a time, which, if you stop to think of it, is how we should live whether we’re suffering from cancer or just won the Powerball Jackpot. When I walk Saisy now, I take note of what I might have missed before, the smell of lighter fluid, the sight of pelicans in an unbalanced vee overhead, the sounds of squealing little girls dabbling in the waves.

In Defense Of Hipsters

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Background

In the 2014 edition of the United States, prudent people don’t criticize the state of Israel, nor do they praise hipsters.

Certainly, I have no intention of casting aspersions Israel’s way; however, as imprudent as it might be, I have decided to attempt an apologia for hipsterdom, that haven for non-alphas where unconventionality breeds a sort of countercultural uniformity that many find off-putting. What interests me most about this topic is the degree of animus the word “hipster” engenders among several acquaintances and one very good friend, who, ironically, might be the hippest person I know.

A while back, I started to notice a proliferation of on-line deprecations of hipsters, and when the post office version of this month’s Atlantic arrived, I checked out James Parker’s piece “The Twee Revolution” in which he attempts to understand “the strangely persistent modern sensibility that fructifies in the props of Wes Anderson movies, tapers into the waxed mustache ends of young Brooklynites on bicycles, and detonates in a yeasty whiff every time someone pops open a microbrewed beer.”

“Consider the cultural degradation of the ‘hipster’ [Parker goes on to say] — once a jazz-and-orgasms spirit warrior with battle hymns by Norman Mailer, now a dude with a funny hat rooting through a bin of used vinyl.”

What’s so insidious about wearing funny hats or preferring vinyl to CDs? Why so much contempt for someone doing so little actual harm?

Etymology

By the way, if you’re unfamiliar with the derivation of hip, it comes from hep, a jazz term originating in the ’40’s, a term describing an avant garde aficionado of hot jazz and/or bebop (as opposed to swing), in other words. a cat or chick in the know, or as Cab Calloway would put it, a cat or chick who got their boots on. Somehow hep morphed into hip, though I have also read that hip as a synonym for cool might owe its derivation to the posture of the habitués of opium dens who lay on their sides (i.e., hips) as they toked their hookahs.

mid- 20th Century hipsters

mid- 20th Century hipsters

Cab Calloway, who published in 1940 The Hepster Dictionary, would not necessarily physically recognize the person Mr. Parker describes above as a hep cat; however, the hep cat of Cab’s day and Parker’s hipster do share some common characteristics.

Here’s a Wikipedia copped quote from Frank Tirro’s Jazz A History that describes 1940 version of hipster: “He is amoral, anarchistic, gentle, and overcivilized to the point of decadence.”

Anecdotal Evidence

typical Tuesday at Chico Feo (featuring self- portrait by the artist)

typical Tuesday at Chico Feo (featuring self- portrait by the artist)

I brought up Parker’s article at Chico Feo, the hippest bar in the most bohemian town in South Carolina, and wondered aloud why so many people hate hipsters so.

Suddenly, Charlie, the most affable of bartenders (and who sports a Whitmanesque beard[1]) launched into a passionate denunciation of the subculture, of its uniformity, its too-cool-for-you-ness.

John, sitting across the bar from me and rolling a cigarette, joined in on the spirited dissing.

Their antipathy genuinely surprised me. These two rather unconventional-looking men’s animus for hipsters probably rivaled, or even surpassed, your typical frat boy’s.

“C’mon,” I say, “they’re not as nearly bad as your typical, entitled, swaggering Lacrosse jock. I never hear about hipsters inviting strippers to parties where alleged sexual assaults take place. These assholes certainly deserve to be hated more than hipsters.”

As my luck would have it, Charlie played lacrosse in high school.

John’s disgust with hipsters seemed to lie in their lack of utilitarian usefulness. “They’re caught up in this fake world of bullshit,” he said. “They’re not living in the real world; they’re living in the cyber world. When something breaks, they don’t fix it. They throw it away and buy a new one.”

“Plus,” he added, “They’re always multi-tasking, doing four things at once. You can’t multi-task. You can only do one thing well at a time.”

The fog of one too many high gravity micro brews was starting to roll in, so I didn’t do a good job of expressing the sentiment that comes immediately to mind after typing John’s response: so what? It’s not as if they caused the Great Recession through avarice and idiocy and walked away scott free with billions in their offshore bank accounts.

Easter in Brooklyn (from left to right Judy Birdsong, Wesley Moore, Jim Cline, Jim Crow)

Easter in Brooklyn (from left to right Judy Birdsong, Wesley Moore, Jim Klein, Jim Crow)

So I got on my bike and pedaled home to call the hippest cat I know, Mr. Jim Klein, the Abstract Expressionist, who lives in Brooklyn, a subway stop or two from Williamsburg, the Ground Zero of hipsterdom. You can read about Judy and my Easter visit to Jim and his wife Sue’s loft here, but suffice to say, it’s got to be one of the most interesting domiciles anywhere, and Klein possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and the arts in general.

Mr. Klein ended up being just as down on hipsters as my barmates. “Zombies controlled by stupidity,” he called them. Echoing John, he cited their dependency on technology, their exuding a vibe of unearned superiority. In a voicemail he sent the following day, he added their sense of entitlement as a negative; they exude a sense of superiority without every having accomplished much of anything.

Possible Explanations for the Passionate Dislike

As I’m found of saying, even though I am not a psychologist, I do sleep with one, so allow me to posit a possible reason hipsters produce what seems to me such a disproportionate quantity of spleen for the petty misdemeanors of their outré aesthetic, technological proclivities, and lack of productivity.

All I can come up with is that hipsters evoke some aspect of insecurity or some shared but repressed negative characteristic the hipster-hater harbors within his or her own being.

I remember some student back in the day telling me that I reminded him of the asshole comedian Dennis Miller. “What,” I complained, “I hate Dennis Miller. He’s arrogant, sarcastic, flaunts his learning, goes out of his way to use arcane diction to prove just how effing smart he is and is needlessly vulgar.”

The student’s look screamed, “Like I said, you remind me of Dennis Miller!”

What else can it be? Skinny jeans, shitty dyed hair, vintage store dresses, leggings don’t strike me as any more pernicious than Ralph Lauren polos or those garish Hawaiian shirts geezers of my generation sport. Why not hate surfers as much — they, too, lead hedonistic lifestyles, sport their own types of uniform, engage in their own distancing argot.

Surfers tend to be attractive — or at least fit. Maybe, the hipsters’ tendency to flip off fashion also contributes to their unpopularity. Rumor has it even hipsters with 20/20 vision sport clunky horn-rims for effect. Maybe the fact that this dweeby, pasty, pink-haired girl thinks she’s cooler than her bleached blonde beauty queen cousin is what drives some people to foam at the mouth.

Personal History

I attended Summerville High School, an institution where football is taken as seriously as Ayatollahs take Ramadan. Especially, when I was there, if you weren’t a jock, particularly a football player, you were a lesser being. The star players and cheerleaders, on the other hand, were celebrities. Jerry Reese, the starting quarterback, once told me near the school bus line-up, “Hey that little guy just told his friend, ‘that’s Jerry Reese.’” Also, it goes without saying that some of the players (not Jerry) were bigoted, bullying assholes.

In 1969, I started hanging out with an iconoclast named Tim Miskel, swapped out my alpaca sweater for a blue jean jacket, cultivated my anger by straining it through irony, and ended up abandoning my childhood friends for a new set, Summerville’s first hippies, people like Adam Jacobs, Gray Eubank, Jack McDonagh, Christine Richards, Glen Farrah, Margie Bradshaw, Mike Moore, among others. We, too, all more or less dressed alike and received much First World abuse for our unconventionality. Once, my Spanish teacher asked derisively if I had gotten my shirt at the Psychedelic Shack.

Nevertheless, this subculture, I bodily state, was much more interesting than the preppie/jock Green Wave culture where virtually everyone stupidly and reflexively supported the Viet Nam War, preferred Three Dog Night to Jimi Hendrix, and were okay with school segregation.

Although I would have had trouble bench-pressing a broomstick, I could satirize school culture knowing I had a supportive band of renegades behind me. Hipness — knowing the difference between Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman — became sort of cool. After all, it offered others like ourselves an alternative path to popularity, which is what most high school students crave.

Schools desperately need countercultures, and the hipster students at my school also offer counterweights to the cult of the athlete. As it so happens, the hipsters at my school are some of my favorite students — they’re bright, interesting, skeptical, artistic.

Anyway, who am I to criticize funny hats and skinny jeans?

[1] Was Walt Whitman the very first hipster? “The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer,” he writes in “Song of Myself.”

a couple of hipsters

the author at the Poetry Outloud Regional Finals

There Goes Peter Cottontail

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Who was the first to go?

"Tooth Fairy" by Greg Becker

“Tooth Fairy” by Greg Becker

The Tooth Fairy, that’s who, that little fetishist, sneaking into children’s bedrooms, trading money for teeth. I suppose the Tooth Fairy is the least definite of the fantasy commies who distribute goodies among the masses. I can’t even tell you if the Tooth Fairy is supposed to be male or female, old or young, corporeal or diaphanous. As it turns out, virtually every google image that comes up is female. Anyway, I’m not sure I ever believed in her.

Even more preposterous is the Easter Bunny, I remember being about five or so, and my old man telling me that the Easter Bunny wouldn’t be showing up because he’d been hit by a car. Daddy claimed to have seen the rabbit’s roadkill carcass on the side of the highway. Of course, I knew he was kidding by the bemused look on his face; however, his story made me try to visualize the dead Easter Bunny. How big was he?   Was he wearing a bow tie?

8571e424cbad2765eb1500bb3fb6e4f7How idiotic — a rabbit toting a continent’s worth of tooth-rotting chocolate and jelly beans from house to house from Maine to California.

Of course, that left Santa, whom I did believe in until I was nine or so, refusing to heed the cross-my-heart-hope-to-die sworn statements of my more sophisticated buddies. By the time Mama broke the official news, we kids had been scoping out the yuletide stash for a couple of years, sneaking up into the attic when the parents were away, or, when no one was around, peeking under the door of the vacated apartment across the hall from my grandmother’s.

And they are right: Christmas was never the same after that.

Which brings us, as James Joyce might say, past Eve and Adam’s, to Jesus himself, whose legitimacy as the Son of God I also started doubting at a tender age, and as far as believing goes, I’ve given it my very best — took my confirmation classes very seriously, read CS Lewis, studied the gospels — but, alas, I just can’t will myself to believe, and that is that.

So I took up Buddhism instead in the hope of achieving an equanimity with the mysterious universe that can seem so beautiful but also so cruel; however, let’s face it: you can’t pray to Siddhartha, and he certainly ain’t gonna perform any miracles for you.

How wonderful it must be to have a bedrock of faith, to be certain that you are loved and can conquer death, and certainly, in my family’s current situation, it would be particularly nice to be able to “talk” to a greater power and seek solace and strength. Some of my Christian friends have seemed a bit hesitant to share with me after hearing Judy’s diagnosis of lymphoma that they’re praying for us, but as Judy said just yesterday, “I’ll take prayers, vibrations, chi. Bring it on”

“What about sacrificial heifers?

“Those, too”

In other words, we’re not the arrogant Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins brand of non-believers, so please pray if you’re a praying person, and think good thoughts if you’re not.

We’ve been really humbled by the outpouring of love we’ve received so far. Thank you all!