non-fiction

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!

Fragments from a Southern Gothic Childhood

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Fragment 1

I’m two or three swinging in a backyard swing and am attacked by an angry rooster. (Escaped cock fighter? Demented sufferer from bird fever?). I pump my legs to swing higher to escape the onslaught, though, of course, gravity sweeps me down across and up through the pecking zone. I’m screaming at the top of my little lungs. Mr. Long, a neighbor, runs over to my rescue.

Fragment 2

I’m six or seven. My mother, grandmother, and Aunt Vee (who is only six years older than I) are traveling by car through rural Dorchester County to visit my Great Aunt Creesie, my paternal grandfather’s sister. My grandfather, whom we call Kiki (short for his Christian name Kistler) is not along. According to Mama, Kiki hasn’t been “right” since a Greyhound bus door smashed closed on his head and fractured his skull. By being “not right,” they mean that Kiki gets mean as hell when drunk and spends his days under voluntary house arrest holed up in his room listening to the radio and playing his ukulele. (You can read about one of my visits to see him here).

Mama explains as she drives past corn fields that Aunt Creesie is “very poor” and that her son Trim is retarded — the word in those days preferable to the less scientific but often used “half wit.” She tells me that Trim is an epileptic and could have a seizure while we are there.

spursWe eventually arrive at Aunt Creesie’s unpainted shack. Beautiful oaks surround the house, but not a blade of grass grows from the dirt yard, which is crawling with hens and a couple of roosters. Aunt Vee informs me that roosters have spurs on their legs and that they can attack. I’m, of course, terrified. The spurs look downright lethal.

Inside the house the most conspicuous piece of furniture is a player piano on which are arranged gaudy, orange-colored pitchers and vases. Trim shambles in, a bear of a man whose mouth is always open and twitches.

He sounds like this:  

I don’t want to go outside and play as instructed. Rooster-phobia. But I do. The roosters don’t attack.

Later, I poo poo in an outhouse, my tiny butt positioned over the hole. I have no memory of wiping.

Fragment 3

I’m thirteen or fourteen and visiting with Mama, Daddy, and my brother David our Great Aunt Ruby, my mother’s mother’s sister. There is also an aunt Pearl, and my grandmother’s name is Hazelwood, but all of her people call her Saisy.

Aunt Pearl lives on Warren Street near Condon’s Department store in a downstairs apartment. She lives with her daughter Zilla, who is one of the founders of the New Republican Party in South Carolina. She is a Bircher, claims Lucille Ball is a communist, and entertains us with comic books depicting Kruschev banging his shoe promising to bury us. Not only has Zilla never married; she’s never been on a date.

Sallman JesusThe house, which reminds me of a train — one room lined up after another — is Jesus haunted. Warner Sallman’s painting of Jesus (see left) hangs over the bricked in fireplace in the living room. Arts and crafts from vacation summer Bible school are displayed all over the place.

On this particular visit, there’s an inflatable man sitting on the sofa. David and I start smacking him as if he were one of those bottom heavy clowns you punch that falls over but returns to the upright position for more punishment.

We’re told to stop. As it turns out, Zilla is afraid of being raped. If she has to go out at night, she rides with the inflatable man next to her.

Sardonically, my father reassures Zilla that she needs not fear being raped.

 * * *

My own children have enjoyed essentially Gothic-less childhoods. No visits from Daddy’s aunt, my Great Aunt Lou, tipsy on sherry, telling us about the time that her in-law Sarah locked herself in a bedroom with a gun threatening to kill herself, then opened the door, put the gun to her temple, and fired.

“I don’t think she knew it was loaded,” Aunt Lou said with a twinkle in her eye. “I’ve never seen a person with a more surprised look on her face when the gun went off.”

My boys do, however, eat some holiday dinners with their Great Aunt Vee, who was once diagnosed as schizophrenic because she thought she was Queen Nefertiti.

So their childhoods haven’t been completely deprived.

Folly Beach, East Coast Macondo

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chico feo in the morning 1.0

Chico Feo in the Morning, original art by Wesley Moore

A decade ago, sick of the blood-sucking capitalists at the MLA changing their research paper guidelines every other year, I decided to create my own how-to guide, something I could run off and hand out to students but also update whenever some OCD sufferer at the Modern Language Association decided that placing periods after abbreviations was so last century.

I decided that rather than writing a dry, clinical exposition, I would make this how-to-guide a narrative featuring two fictional Porter-Gaud students, Bennington Rhodes and Robert “Flip” Burger. Bennington, a good student but not particularly interested in literature, goes about the process systematically whereas poor Flip waits to the night before due dates, which, as the omniscient narrator points out, is not the way to go. Not only could I provide students with a handy guide, but I could also mock their fads and peccadilloes.

Here’s a snippet to show you what I’m talking about, the protagonist Bennington going through the process of selecting a novel for his research paper project:

macondoEven though White Noise looks interesting, Bennington is going ahead to see about Chronicle of a Death Foretold while he’s at it. He types in “garcia marquez literary criticism bibliography,” and presto, right away the number one hit is applicable: “Garcia Marquez – Criticism.” Once again this site yields a plethora of potential sources including one of those handy Harold Bloom anthologies. Although he’s leaning toward White Noise, a painting on the Garcia Marquez site catches his eye. It’s called “Macondo” and features a Latina sleeping with her hair in her hands next to two oranges that are about to be scaled by a trio of ants on a dish next to her bed.

To save time, Bennington logs onto the Porter-Gaud Library page and discovers to his delight, that not only does the library own White Noise and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, but also that both books are available. He punches the call letters into his cell phone and heads to the library before the bell rings. As he passes the back entrance to the S&T building, he sees his friends playing hackysack. One of these, Robert Burger (aka Flip) is going to wait until the last minute and choose on a whim Henry James’s The Ambassadors because he’s heard of Henry James and thinks being an ambassador would be a great job because you have diplomatic immunity and can park anywhere you like. Not until it’s too late he discovers his error as he attempts to read the fourth sentence of that novel:

“The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive–the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange or this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first “note,” of Europe. “(9)

Not only is the novel virtually unreadable, the criticism might as well be rendered in Sanskrit for all of the sense it makes to Flip. Even Pink Monkey and Spark Notes summaries are way over his head. If only he had taken his sage teacher’s advice and devoted the time to select a book more to his liking!

Gabo and Clinton

Gabo and Clinton

As part of the process, I decided to have Bennington compose a high school research essay on Chronicle, which, of course, meant I actually had to do a bit of research.  I discovered a fascinating piece from Salon by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez about his first meeting Bill Clinton at a dinner party at William Styron’s on Cape Cod that also featured Carlos Fuentes.

When [Carlos and I] talked about Latin America in general, we realized that
[Clinton] was much more interested than we had supposed, although he
lacked some essential background. When the conversation seemed to
stiffen a bit, we asked him what his favorite movie was, and he
answered “High Noon,” by Fred Zinneman, whom he had recently
honored in London. When we asked him what he was reading, he
 sighed and mentioned a book on the economic wars of the future,
author and title unknown to me.

“Better to read ‘Don Quixote,’” I said to him. “Everything’s
in there.” Now, the ‘Quixote’ is a book that is not read nearly
as much as is claimed, although very few will admit to not having
read it. With two or three quotes, Clinton showed that he knew it
very well indeed. Responding, he asked us what our favorite books
were. Styron said his was Huckleberry Finn.

I would have said Oedipus Rex, which has been my bed table
book for the last 20 years, but I named The Count of Monte
Cristo,”mainly for reasons of technique, which I had some
trouble explaining.

Clinton said his was the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and Carlos Fuentes stuck loyally to Absalom, Absalom,
Faulkner’s stellar novel, no question, although others would
choose  Light in August purely personal reasons. Clinton,
in homage to Faulkner, got to his feet and, pacing around the
table, recited from memory Benji’s monologue, the most thrilling
passage, and perhaps the most hermetic, from  The Sound and the
Fury.

Faulkner got us to talking about the affinities between
Caribbean writers and the cluster of great Southern novelists in
the United States. It made much more sense to us to think of the
Caribbean not as a geographical region surrounded by its sea but
as a much wider historical and cultural belt stretching from the
north of Brazil to the Mississippi Basin.

Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and so many
others would then be just as Caribbean as Jorge Amado and Derek
Walcott. Clinton, born and raised in Arkansas, a Southern state,
applauded the notion and professed himself happy to be a
Caribbean.

* * *

As I was sipping on an “All -Day IPA” at Chico Feo in those amiable days before the pandemic, a polite young couple plopped down next to me at the bar. The male was unusually clean cut for the clientele, with short well-kempt hair and sporting some subdued ink on his right arm. His lovely companion spoke with a slight accent, so I asked her where she hailed from.

“Colombia.”

“Ah ha,” I said, “the homeland of the great Gabo – Gabriel Garcia-Marquez!”

“He is dead, you know,” she said with a rueful smile.

So we shot the mierda about the great man’s canon, of which she was very familiar, and that wonderful little magical village Macondo, Gabo’s Yoknapatawpha County, and I mentioned that even though Ronald Reagan wouldn’t give Gabo a visa to visit the US , he and Bill Clinton ended up being drinking buddies. I mentioned Gabo’s comment about Southerners and Caribbean folk sharing folkways and attitudes.

Given that probably most people associate Colombia with drug cartels, I suspect it was nice for her to hear praise for her homeland, and suddenly it occurred to me that Gabo was right, that the eastside of Folly was Mercondo-like. I have Folly friends with a parrot who tortures their dogs by mimicking both the owners’ accents, asking the dogs if they’d like to go for a walk, and then the parrot does a dead-on sound effect of a screen door creaking open. Magical realism right here in the Lowcountry.

“Especially this place,” she said, talking about Chico Feo. It reminds me of home.”

No roof, beers sold out of coolers, the aroma of curried goat wafting from the kitchen inside, free music, day and night . . .

Oh me oh my oh, Chico Feo.

I shook hands with them both and waved good-bye

My Colombia sister

My Colombia sister

 

True Detective: Existential Nihilism for the Masses

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In his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace has a seventh grader, Hal Incandenza, write an essay contrasting Hawaii Five-O and Hill Street Blues, an essay that ponders the evolution of American television heroes.

Remarkably observant, young Incandenza underscores sociological differences in the programs. For example, Five-O’s Steve McGarrett has the luxury of working on “one case per week” in an office that resembles “the libraries of the landed gentry, hushed behind two heavy doors and wainscoted in thick, tropical oak.” On the other hand, Hill Street’s Frank Furillo, a precinct captain, juggles several cases at once in the chaotic confines of a cluttered cubicle-crammed station house teeming with clashing personalities. Essentially, “McGarrett is not weighed down by administrative State-Police-Chief chores, or by females, or friends, or emotions, or any sorts of conflicting demands on his attention” whereas Furillo “is beset by petty distractions on all sides [. . .] with suspects and snitches and investigating officers and angry community leaders and victims’ families all clamoring for redress.”

Colbert Root in his Summer of Jest, a handy on-line scene-by-scene summary and analysis of the novel, recaps the essay for us:

Where McGarrett exemplifies the modern man of action, Hal argues, Furillo typifies a man of postmodern “reaction.” Both protagonists are heroes of their own show’s culture, but both are also ill-equipped for the other’s world. McGarrett, as the modern man of action, is single-minded, acting to “refashion a truth the audience already knows into an object of law, justice, modern heroism.” Contrariwise, Furillo succeeds because he is cast within a large system; he excels at being a cog in a very large and bureaucratic machine [. . .] That Furillo comes after McGarrett as a typical US protagonist reflects a shift in US cultural preferences. Audiences, Hal says, want the stoic bureaucrat. His successes and shortfalls more closely align with their own. But, Hal ponders, what comes next? What hero will succeed Furillo?

from left Rust (McConaughey) and Marty (Harrlesson)

from left Rust (McConaughey) and Marty (Harrlesson)

Well, if we look to the current HBO crime drama True Detective, the answer is Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey), a nihilistic metaphysician, an agoraphobic detective who considers human consciousness “a tragic misstep in evolution” that enables us “to labor under the illusion of having a self” when we’re merely “accretions[s] of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.”

This cat makes Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Mike Hammer seem downright dewy in comparison. His partner Marty Hart (played by Woody Harrelson) considers Rust “the Michael Jordan of being a son-of-a-bitch,” and when Rust says shit like, “It’s all one ghetto, man, a giant gutter in outer space,” Marty virtually begs him to shut up. You see, despite having kinky handcuffed sex outside of his marriage, Marty is a family man, a Christian who holds essentially a Medieval view of the cosmos, a belief that divine reward or punishment keeps folks (though obviously not himself) in line. Rust responds, as you might expect, with scorn:

If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward then, brother, that person is a piece of shit. And I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible. You gotta get together and tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day? What’s that say about your reality?

Set in the semi-industrialized backwoods of Louisiana, the narrative features superb characterization and brilliant acting as the two detectives try to solve a series of grisly ritualistic murders. So many symbolic crosses (e.g., aerial shots of perpendicular lines of trees) sneak into the story I can’t help but wonder if its creator, Louisiana fiction writer Nic Pizzolatto, is making some sort of statement.

Whatever the case, Rust is not the fellow you want your sons to grow up to be. He’s a bit of a throwback, a cross between Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man and a Zen Buddhist.

He’s also about as fascinating a character as television has ever produced.

A Pat Conroy Family Reunion of Sorts

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An acquaintance, the poet Cathy Smith Bowers, once told me something that should be obvious but had never occurred to me: The adrenal glands of children who grow up in chaotic households pump Vesuvian eruptions of the hormone epinephrine when their parents (or their parents’ boyfriends/girlfriends) hurl invectives and/or furniture at each other.

In plainer English, growing up in fucked-up households tends to fuck you up, not only mentally, but physically as well — as if there is a difference anyway.

Cathy Smith Bowers

Cathy Smith Bowers

Cathy went on to say that once these children leave the war zones of their childhoods, they often develop a need for high levels of adrenaline and a hankering for jangled nerves, for that elevated heart rate, that feeling of excitement, and, of course, there’s nothing like a little snort of cocaine to replicate that bodily high, and nothing like a drug habit to create chaos, and thus, to bring the family melodrama back full circle.

Cathy, like many of us, is no stranger to the toll of growing up in an unhappy home. Here’s her poem “The Boxers” that makes manifest her point:

When my father, after twenty years, came home

to die, circling, circling, like an animal

we believed extinct, it was my crazy aunt

who took him in, who told later

how the taxi had dumped him

bleached and whimpering on her porch.

And she who had not lived with him

thought his sons and daughters cruel

not to come when he began to call our names.

He died, and soon after, a package in brown wrapping

arrived at my address. My sister, who did not

attend the funeral, kept urging me to open it

and I kept saying I would, soon. Every day

when I came home from work, there it was

sitting at my back door, the remnants

of my father’s life—years in the mill

spinning and doffing, then drinking into morning

as he railed at the walls, the cotton

still clinging to his fists. Weeks had passed

when finally my sister and I, after two stiff bourbons,

began to rip the paper, slowly in strips

like archaeologists unclothing a mummy.

And all that was there were a few plaid flannels,

the jacket to a leisure suit, and a pair of boxers,

white and baggy, Rorschached in urine—a smaller size,

my sister said, than the way she remembered him.

Then she offered to drop the things at the Salvation Army

store she passed on her way home. In July

we went shopping for swim suits and I could

see her in the curtained stall across from mine.

She was pulling her slip over her head when I saw

she was wearing them, her thighs like the pale stems

of mushrooms emerging from the boxers’ billowy

legs, whiter, softer now, washed clean. I still

can’t say why my sister, that day in the Salvation

Army store, glanced up, as I’ve imagined,

to see if anyone was watching

before she slipped those boxers from the soiled heap

of our father’s clothes. Nor why

I took so long to open that package, both wanting

and fearing whatever lay inside. Like a child

huddled by the campfire who cries out in terror

at the story someone just told

and, still weeping, begs for it again.

“The Boxers” by Cathy Smith Bowers, from The Love that Ended Yesterday in Texas. © Texas Tech University Press, 1992. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

* * *

When we look to literature for examples of dysfunctional American families, we immediately think of Faulkner’s Compsons, any number of Tennessee Williams’ people, the Tyrones of Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into the Night, and the tortured families who inhabit the pages of Pat Conroy’s novels.

Our friend Megan Conroy sometimes stays with us for a few days in July when she travels from California to visit her famous father, stepmother, and aunts and uncles at Fripp Island. Unfortunately, this year she couldn’t make it up to Charleston, so she invited us down to Fripp to her father’s beach house.

back yard

back yard

Situated on a lagoon, the Conroy beach house is the antithesis of gothic — open and airy and looking out onto a backyard where practically tame deer feed. When we arrived, Megan greeted us and introduced her uncle Mike, who bears a remarkable resemblance to his older brother and who can give him a run for his money as a raconteur. Also there were Mike’s wife Jeannie, his sister Kathy, Megan’s sisters Jessica and Melissa, their husbands, and a host of grandchildren too numerous to name.

Pat and his wife the novelist Cassandra King arrived after a midday dinner of fired chicken, macaroni and cheese, red rice, cantaloupe, and coleslaw. The older folk traded stories in typical Southern fashion in the open family room while younger members of the clan watched Germany battle Algeria in another space.

Rather than what you might expect, hanging out with Pat Conroy on that day was more like hanging out with Sam Clemens than Eugene O’Neill.

A few excerpts:

Pat: [My arch-conservative ex-father-in-law] makes Rush Limbaugh look like Chairman Mao.

Megan: I didn’t want a fancy wedding dress until I tried one on.   I didn’t want a veil until I tried one on. When they told me don’t you want to take off your veil after the ceremony, I said, “No, when do you ever get to wear a veil?”

Pat: That dress cost a million dollars. Cassandra, remember when you opened the closet door and found it standing up by itself? Horrifying!

***

In other words, the Conroys seemed like one big happy family and that at least the youngest have broken the dysfunctional cycle of self-generated misery that dysfunction tends to generate, which is remarkable given the scorched earth of the Great Santini’s children’s childhoods. To wit an excerpt from Pat’s memoir The Death of Santini:

When I was thirty years old, my novel The Great Santini was published, and there were many things in that book I was afraid to write or feared that no one would believe. But this year I turned sixty-five, the official starting date of old age and the beginning count down to my inevitable death. I’ve come to realize that I still carry the bruised freight of that childhood every day. I can’t run away, hide, or pretend it never happened. I wear it on my back like the carapace of a tortoise, except my shell burdens and does not protect. It weighs me down and fills me with dread.

The Conroy children were all casualties of war, conscripts in a battle we didn’t sign up for on the bloodied envelope of our birth certificates. I grew up to become the family evangelist; Michael, the vessel of anxiety; Kathy, who missed her childhood by going to sleep at six every night; Jim, who is called the dark one; Tim, the sweetest one – and can barely stand to be around any of us; and Tom, our lost and never-to-be found brother. My personal tragedy lies with my sister, Carol Ann, the poet I grew up with and adored…

I’ve got to try and make sense of it one last time, a final circling of the block, a reckoning, another dive into the caves of the coral reef where the morays wait in ambush, one more night flight into the immortal darkness to study that house of pain one final time. Then I’ll be finished with you, Mom and Dad. I’ll leave you in peace and not bother you again. And I’ll pray that your stormy spirits find peace in the house of the Lord. But I must examine the wreckage one last time.

Yet they appeared to me one big happy family!

from left to right Pat's feet, his sister Kathy, wife Cassandra, brother Mike and sister-i-law Jeannie

from left to right Pat’s feet, his sister Kathy, Cassandra King, brother Mike and sister-in-law Jeannie

 

Fútbol, Football, WWI, and Me

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I’m sincerely glad to see that so many of my compatriots are giddily suffering the delirium associated with World Cup fever.

I’ve witnessed hordes of them on television, men and women, boys and girls, painted like patriotic Comanches, flag-draped, chanting USA-USA-USA. I’ve seen my countrymen go apeshit over a USA goal, and after Portugal’s last minute score, I’ve seen them wear the horror-stricken dazed looks of family members gathered at an airport after a plane crash.

undistraught fansweeping americanPerhaps, the number of North American fútbol fans will increase through extended exposure to the balletic-Bataan-death scramble of a soccer match, learn to appreciate 90-plus minutes of virtually non-stop action, understand the arduous difficulty of netting a goal, and so will become more tolerant of low scores and tied matches.

Let me hand the mike over to my pal Charlie Geer who offers this unflattering description of the other American football:

Visitors to the US should understand that American ‘football’ is a game in which ‘foot’ and ‘ball’ have very little interaction with each other. This is but one of the many mysteries surrounding the popular American sport, which requires (metric) tons of equipment, dozens upon dozens of players and coaches, innumerable false starts and sudden stops, as well as an unending stream of television advertisements to move a ball from one end of a field to another. Because of the beastly amount of time and crap required, a team that successfully moves the ball from one end of the field to the other is awarded not one point, but six. Some Americans, it seems, like their scores the way they like their houses, their cars, and the egos of their professional blowhards: overinflated.

Of course, ideally, one can appreciate both, as, in fact, Charlie does, though unfortunately in the guise of a Florida Gator fan.

Another thing, however, that distinguishes fútbol from football is that the latter is essentially a North American peculiarity whereas fútbol enjoys world-wide popularity. In American football, we don’t even have a professional North American championship game between the Canadian Gray Cup and USA Super Bowl champions, no epic battle between the Miami Dolphins and Edmonton Eskimos, much less a world wide championship.

On the other hand, in international fútbol, any number of nationalistic matches can take place, for example, games pitting Koreans versus Venezuelans, Algerians versus Finns, or, good old fashioned shootouts like the upcoming match between France and Germany.

Which brings me to my final point: the 2014 World Cup tournament coincides with the Centennial of WWI, a conflict I never quite understood the origins of, despite my university education. Take it away Mr. Dylan:

Oh the First World War, boys,

It closed out its fate.

The reason for fighting

I never got straight.

The best that I can tell the assassination of an Arch Duke sparked unstable, combustible European nationalism into a horror show to end all horror shows, which, of course, didn’t end up being the case at all. But what has struck me watching several of these games is the frenzied nationalism that is apparent as the camera cuts to public squares around the globe.  Negative social critic that I am, I find all of the flag waving and screeching sort of creepy, unsettling, especially given the above-mentioned coincidence.

The truth be known, I have never been much of a patriot. Perhaps my lack of patriotism stems from hearing as a young boy the unreconstructed rantings of great-grandfathers or my coming of age during the Viet Nam War or the general misanthropy that makes me a non-lover of my fellow man. After all. most people I encounter happen to be fellow Americans, and I hate it when we change the name of French fries to freedom fries or when Waffle House stops selling Belgian waffles on game day. (They’ll take away my high-gravity Belgian beer when they pry the can away away from my stiff dead fingers).

On the positive side, perhaps Konrad Lorenz was correct, that sport provides a substitute for humans’ innate drive to wage war, and the World Cup affords a vicarious opportunity to channel that animus into non-destructive avenues.

At any rate, today I plan to venture from the bobby-trapped carapace of the Moore/Birdsong compound (beware the Burmese tiger pit, solicitors, the Malay man-catcher, Jehovah Witnesses) to enjoy the game at my favorite watering hole, Chico Feo, where I’ll try my best to pull for Clarence Thomas’s team.