Mining Insomnia for Gold

May 23, 2014September 21, 2017 / wlm3 / 3 Comments

[. . . ]But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life.
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Back in the day, when the late great Tommy Evatt suffered even the most trivial of disappointments, he would ironically assume a woebegone expression and sigh aloud, “I’m no stranger to heartache.”

Well, brother or sister, allow me the indulgence to channel Tommy, to assume that same sad-sack expression, and announce that “I’m no stranger to insomnia.”

Not only am I no stranger, I’ve been sleeping with Insomnia – check that – lying with her almost nightly for the past 28 years. The times I have awakened in the fell clutch of dark outnumber the kisses politicians of both parties have bestowed upon the ass of the Reverend Billy Graham, the number of recorded malapropisms uttered by former President George W Bush, the combined number of times the Atlanta Braves and South Carolina Gamecocks have broken my heart.

In other words, even Pieter Bruegel the Elder couldn’t cram the personified nights of my insomnia onto one of his grotesque canvases.

Virtually every weekday morning between 2:54 and 3:57, a circuit breaker trips in the fuse box of my mind, and – zap – I’m wide awake and know immediately there’s no use trying to reenter the dream that has abandoned me, that counting sheep would be the adult equivalent of a letter to Santa, and that I have at least an hour (sometimes two) of wakefulness to endure.

Now, if I were a Northern European, I might very well go all existentialist and project my disability onto the cosmos, but, goddamn it, I’m an American, and Americans are optimists, can-doers, money makers, so, of course, I’ve transformed the water-boarding my mind suffers in the wee hours into something positive. I have alchemized the belladonna of my brain chemistry into an elixir that can cure any disease short of – well, insomnia.

However, even though I haven’t yet found a way to free myself from insomnia’s web-like entanglements, I have developed techniques to transform the excruciatingly slow crawl of minutes into a space where you can do some heavy duty psychic lifting and develop plans for self-improvement.

In other words, I’ve written a self-help book for insomniacs, and because you who are reading this cri de coeur have not abandoned me up to now, I’m going to provide you this sneak preview absolutely free of charge.

Click here for Dealing with Yankees for Dummies.

This self-help bible begins with a personality test to pinpoint the chapters that are going to be most immediately beneficial to you. You know the tests I’m talking about, those fill-in the bubble surveys high school seniors take to determine if they’re better suited for engaging in armed combat or opening an antiques shop.

Here’s an example from the book:

Which one of the following activities is most likely to provide you with the most satisfaction?

1. Taking a long walk with that special someone on a pristine South Sea beach beneath a full moon.

2.Flying in your private Lear jet to address an auditorium teeming with adoring followers.

3. Enjoying a couple of lines of uncut Columbian cocaine.

4. Reorganizing your hopelessly disorganized friend’s lifestyle habits.

5. Reading and correcting reams of inexact writing from entitled adolescents prone to magical thinking.

Just for fun, let’s see if you can match those choices with the chapters most likely to benefit the chooser.

A. Starting up a Televangelism Empire

B. Careers in Pharmaceuticals

C. Overcoming Abusive Diaper Training

D. You, Too, Can Write Romance Novels

E. What If You Had Majored in Business Instead
Answers: 1. D 2. A 3. B 4. C 5. E

Each chapter provides a series of progressive mental exercises that are at once simultaneously mind-numbing but provide a foundation for steps up a staircase that leads to success.

For example, the first step in each of the chapters is “Writing Your Own Obituary.”

The next time you awaken in the middle of the night and realize that sleep, like the proverbial father who goes out for a pack of cigarettes, isn’t coming back, rather than flailing around fruitlessly cataloguing the mundane tasks that must be completed tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, compose in your head your own obituary. This positive exercise not only helps put those mundane tasks in perspective, but it also offers hints as to how you ended so fucked-up that now, even though you possess the godlike power to conjure on a whim whatever movie you want to watch at any moment, you’re so maladjusted that you can’t sleep six hours in a row.

Of course, I provide, an outline for an obituary:

Name

[euphemism for dying]*

cause of death [optional]

spouse if any

date of death

parents

short bio

DOB

education

career and/or marriage

accomplishments

survivors

preferred memorials

and also a model:

After a cowardly skirmish with cancer, Wesley “Rusty” Moore, husband of Judy Birdsong, entered the godless realm of oblivion on Thursday April 1 2023.

A son of the late Wesley E Moore, Jr. and Sue Blanton Moore, Wesley/Rusty was born 25 December 1950 in Summerville, where he attended public schools. Upon earning his BA from the University of South Carolina, unable to find gainful employment, he immediately entered graduate school where he met his future wife Judy Birdsong at a bar where they both worked. It was, as “Rusley” liked saying, “a marriage made in Milwaukee.”

After the wedding, the Moores relocated to Charleston, South Carolina. Although a graduate school dropout with a checkered transcript, “Rusley” was able to secure employment at Porter-Gaud School, thanks in part to his hobby of hypnotism. At Porter-Gaud he spent 30 years reading and correcting reams of inexact writing from entitled adolescents prone to magical thinking.

Wesley never met a stranger he wasn’t leery of and always had something cynical to share with the few friends he cultivated during his life.

Surviving in addition to his wife of Folly Beach are two sons, Harrison Moore of Washington, DC, and Ned Moore of the Khovsgol Province of Inner Mongolia.

In Lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the American Communist Party, 44 Ginsberg Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11209.

Each specific chapter offers exercises that could possibly lull curable insomniacs to sleep but also provides incurables with a chance to turn a typical time of anguish into something positive. For example, an early mind numbing exercise for aspiring romance novelists involves cataloging chronologically people they’ve kissed. One later visualization exercise guides the initiate to imagining cinematically the first kiss of her catalogue blooming into the 52nd shade of gray.

The general idea is to transform wasted hours into time well spent.

Let me seal the deal. This very blog post is the fruit of last night’s insomnia, and, presto, already, I’m climbing that stairway to stardom.

Shakespeare-on-Speed: Titus Andronicus

May 4, 2014May 4, 2017 / wlm3 / 2 Comments

Hello, college student. I can’t believe that slave-driver of a professor of yours has assigned Titus Andronicus. Smart move coming here. Believe me, after reading this summary of the plot, you’ll be praising Jesus you didn’t give the text a try. In fact, the plot is so conjunkificated with murder and mayhem, you might not even get through this easy-to-read amped up version.

Note, I’ve modernized and shortened the names of the characters. Before taking a test or writing a paper, you gotta check out Wikipedia for the real deal on what these fools actually went by back in the day.

Okay, let’s get this over with.

Protagonist Titus sacrifices the eldest son of Tammy, Queen of the Goths, to avenge the deaths of his own sons killed during a 10-year campaign against her people. Titus turns down offer of becoming emperor (bad, if not tragic mistake) and supports the previous emperor’s son Satch’s claim to the throne, much to Satch’s younger brother’s Bass’s chagrin. Satch promises to marry Titus’s daughter, Lavinia, even though she’s engaged to aforementioned younger brother Bass.

You following? Bass done been double-dissed.

Titus’s surviving (but not for long) sons Quinn, Martin and Matt point out to stubborn daddy that Roman Law sez Bass gots first dibs on Lavina, but Titus don’t dig backtalk from offspring and accuses the boys of treason. In the subsequent ensuing scuffle, Titus slays his own boy Matt, which prompts Satch to denounce the crazy-ass Andronicus clan. So he marries Tammy, whose lover, the moor Aaron makes Iago look like Al Roper in evil comparison.

Anyway, Tammy talks new hubby-to-be to pardon little brother Bass and the entire Andronicus family. You’ll see why shortly.

Next day, on a royal hunt Aaron convinces Tammy’s sons Demmy and Ron to kill Bass so they can rape Lavinia. “Sho nuff,” they say, do the deed, dump poor Bass’s body in a pit, drag Lavinia into the woods, rape her, then lop off her tongue and hands so she can’t squeal orally or in writing. Aaron then forges a letter that frames two-thirds of Titus’s surviving sons, Martin and Quinn, for Bass’s murder, so of course, Satch arrests their asses.

Got it?

Okay, Titus’s brother Marcus finds mutilated Lavinia and takes her to Titus, who’s still reeling from the accusations leveled at Martin and Quinn. Enter Aaron the Moor with an alleged message from Satch saying that he’ll spare M & Q if Titus or brother Marcus or remaining son Luke cuts of one of their hands and sends it to Satch. Titus volunteers and lets Aaron hack off his left hand.

What was he thinking? Who knows?

Aaron hacking off Titus’s hand

Is this making sense? You see, it’s all about vengeance.

Guess what? Aaron double crosses Titus. A messenger delivers to Titus the severed heads of his sons Martin and Quinn along with his own severed left hand.

Finally, Titus has had enough, time for revenge. He sends last son Luke off to raise and army among their previous enemies the Goths.

Resourceful Lavinia picks up a stick with her mouth and using that orifice and her two stumps writes the names of assailants Demmy and Ron in the dirt.

Tammy (who seems as adept as Sarah Palin in hiding pregnancies) gives birth to a bi-racial child. Aaron kills the midwife and nurse (after all, cutting off tongues and hands is no guarantee of silence) and flees with his baby, only to get nabbed by Luke with his Goth army in tow. Luke threatens to hang the baby unless Aaron sings, which he does, like a ~~canary~~ magpie, tells all of the above in blank verse.

Aaron and his newborn baby

Meanwhile, back in the Imperial City, Titus pulls a Hamlet and feigns insanity, sort of.

Thinking Titus is insane and might buy a staged visitation of spirits, Tammy, Ron, and Demmy dress up like allegorical manifestations of Revenge, Murder, and Rape and tell Titus they’ll grant him revenge if he talks son Luke out of attacking Rome. Tammy splits, but Titus talks Demmy and Ron into hanging around.

Bad move, boys.

He slits their throats, grinds their bones, and bakes their heads into a cake.

Okay, ready?

Next day Titus throws a feast and asks Satch if a father should kill her daughter if she has been raped. “Of course,” Satch says, so Titus kills what’s left of Lavinia.

When Satch calls for Ron and Demmy, Titus informs him that they’re in the cake mother Tammy’s munching on.

Titus kills Tammy, Satch kills Titus, Luke kills Satch, is crowned emperor, orders Tammy’s body to be thrown to the wild beasts that hang out outside Rome’s city limits, and sentences unrepentant Aaron to be buried up to chest to starve and/or die of thirst.

Aaron rues not being able to live longer because he feels as if he hasn’t done enough evil in his life.

Theme: bad karma breeds bad karma/violence sells.

Serving Tammy sons baked in a soufflé

Channeling David Foster Wallace and Senator Larry Grooms

April 26, 2014April 26, 2014 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

Years ago, I lazily cooked up one last essay assignment for my hopelessly checked-out seniors, an essay that would force them to revisit their time at Porter-Gaud. I say lazily, because it occurred to me that I could have them deliver the essay as a speech. That way, I wouldn’t have to correct it as writing – you can’t hear the difference between a comma and a semicolon; when you’re talking from the heart, you don’t necessarily want to introduce clauses with “as” instead of “like.” Nine months of reading and commenting on inexact writing can get old.

Their last essay would be graded as they delivered it, it might force the unreflective to recollect, and the succession of speeches might reinforce a sense of sharing and camaraderie. But, actually, none of those positive student benefits figured in my thinking. I essentially assigned them a valedictory address as their last assignment for selfish reasons.

Stacks of papers versus mouthfuls of air.

Not surprisingly, given the quality of our students, I’ve amassed some beautiful speeches over the years, and when I assign the project, I include samples from their predecessors. Two years ago I included in my assignment packet a commencement speech that David Foster Wallace had delivered at Kenyon College. This week, I had to abandon one of my block classes for forty minutes to observe a candidate teach a class of sixth graders, so I prepared a short answer reading quiz on the Wallace speech and had my current seniors read it and take the quiz in class while I was gone. This inadvertence also turned out to be propitious, because when I returned, several of the students praised the speech, one saying it was the best essay that she had ever read. [You can read it here].

Essentially Wallace argues that “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” which essentially means switching your mental radio station from its “default mode,” i.e., from “the constant monologue inside your own head” to a station that “[is] paying attention to what is going on right in front of [you].” He goes on to describe himself in his default mode driving home from the grocery store “disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers.” However, Wallace argues that this negative thinking is essentially unproductive. Switch stations, think about what it might be like to be the driver of the V-12 truck emblazoned with NRA stickers, etc. Which, brings me, finally, to the subject of this posting, my least favorite person of the week, Senator Larry Grooms, (R-Daniel Island), who has topped V. Putin and Cliven Bundy in the lowness of my estimation, which, come to think of it, would not matter a jot or tittle to him if he knew, or perhaps, he might even welcome the animus of a leftist old bald-headed hippie like me.

Senator Grooms has kindled my wrath by cutting off funds for the College of Charleston because he disagreed with the College’s choosing a summer reading Fun Home, a novel with a gay protagonist. The novel has been adapted into a musical nominated for two Pulitzers. The College decided to host the show on campus for two performances last Monday, performances that didn’t expend a penny of state funds. Nevertheless, this “giant middle finger to the Statehouse” has provoked the arse-belching consternation of several legislators. This from the City Paper:

And then there’s state Rep. Bill Whitmire (R-Walhalla). Recently, a joint committee of senators and representative interviewed candidates for the CofC Board of Trustees. In a transcript of one such interview, the topic turned to Fun Home, and during that discussion, Whitmire called the book “highly offensive” and “promoting a specific lifestyle.” He even suggested that an individual could be arrested if he or she invited a 17-year-old to read it and encouraged every person interviewed for reappointment to the CofC Board of Trustees to keep something like this (meaning a book that addresses issues of non-heterosexual identity) from being a College Reads! selection ever again.

Senator Grooms, not to be outdone, offered this threat: “If lessons weren’t learned [at the College], the Senate may speak a little bit louder than the House. There would be a number of members in the Senate that would have a great interest in fixing the deficiencies at the College of Charleston.” Okay, my default mode when I encounter philistinism is Mencken-like mockery, Ezra-Pound-like intemperance of language. Here’s a snippet from the penultimate paragraph from Mencken’s obituary of William Jennings Bryan:

He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

Here’s Mencken’s last paragraph: “The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.”

Senator Larry Grooms (R-Daniel Island)

Okay, I find myself in an uncomfortable position. How can I in good conscience after making my students read DFW’s commencement speech revert to my default mode of quoting Pound’s “vice crusaders farting through silk,” splattering the self-righteous senator with vulgarities, and, by the way, am not just as self-righteous as he? Shouldn’t I imagine – as DFW does in his commencement address – what it must be like to be that person whom we hold in contempt?

On the on-line scstatehouse.gov bio site, we discover that Senator Grooms lists his occupation vaguely as businessman, graduated from Clemson University in 1987, and designates his religion as “Christian,” having been “saved by Grace in April of 1987” (which is really good timing: sow those Dionysian grapes, be forgiven, and get righteously on with the business of adulthood). Oh yeah, to slide myself into Senator Grooms’s Bass Weejuns, I would also have to imagine being a proud lifetime member of the NRA.

Okay, here goes. I’m Larry. The Bible is the greatest book ever. Here’s Leviticus 20:13: “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltiness is upon them.”

Jesus is conspicuously silent on the subject, though it’s hard to imagine his condoning an execution of Cole Porter or Elizabeth Bishop for committing the above-described “abominations.”

But Paul isn’t silent on the subject: 1 Corinthians 6:9: “Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor homosexuals nor sodomites … will inherit the kingdom of God.”

Greg Koulkl: “Homosexual desire is unnatural because it causes a man to abandon the natural sexual compliment God has ordained for him: a woman. That was Paul’s view. If it was Paul’s view recorded in the inspired text, then it is God’s view. And if it is God’s view, it should be ours if we call ourselves Christian.”

So, the Larry Grooms I have become accepts premises and reasoning of Koulkl’s conclusion. The novel and musical Fun Home promote a sinful lifestyle (genetics be literally damned!)

Goddamnit , these Weejuns are killing my feet [author removes them and flings them out the window of his drafty garret].

But, hey, Larry – what about that separation of Church and State thing? And if you’re going to go by the Bible, what about Matthew 6:5-6 – “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.…” In other words, remove that “saved by Grace” from your website. After all, you know what Jesus said about casting stones.

At any rate, I’ll leave you with a sentence from Friday’s Post Courier editorial page, and believe me, when the editorial staff of that newspaper and I agree, the Second Coming might truly be at hand!

Sen. Grooms and his meddlesome colleagues have a misguided idea of what a college education should be. In addition to literature, science and economics, it should challenge students with new issues and different viewpoints. A college’s goal should not be indoctrination. And the “academic freedom” espoused by the school’s Board of Trustees should put curriculum decisions in the hands of administrators.

Amen!

Follow on Twitter @ragwatercat

Celebrating Shakespeare’s 461th Birthday

April 24, 2014April 24, 2025 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

Throughout 23 April 2025, the 461th birthday of William Shakespeare, I imagined his actual birth, picturing in my mind’s eye the room where the event occurred. There would have been a midwife there and perhaps some of Mary Arden Shakespeare’s lady friends who might witness the appearance of his bald dome, the final push, the slap and scream – perhaps punctuated in crescendoing iambs. He would have been immediately swaddled.

Not-necessarily-accurate internet sources claim that an Elizabethan birth room would have been decorated with the finest “hangings” the family possessed, and I don’t doubt this superstitious possibility given I know 21st Century football fans who wear the same totemistic socks every Saturday during a win streak. After all, the chances of an infant surviving until puberty weren’t promising.

For example, here’s a list of John and Mary Arden Shakespeare’s children:

Joan b. 1558 d. 1558.

Margaret b. 1562 d. 1563

William b. 1564 d.1616

Gilbert b. 1566 d. 1612

Joan Shakespeare Hart b. 1569 d. 1646

Richard b. 1564 d. 1613

Edmund b. 1580 d. 1607

William himself (often away from Stratford in London) only fathered three children (two of them twins) and lost his only son at the age of 11.

No wonder they farmed infants off-site to (I would lie to imagine) buxom nursemaids. Don’t want too get too attached to something with the life expectancy of a gerbil.

But Will did make it, made it real big, as Eric Burdon said of Bo Diddley, so in celebration of Sweet William’s nativity (as the ladies supposedly called him). I thought I’d share with you a few rather non-famous but killer quotes from the plays.

“Chanting faint hymns to a cold, distant moon.” Theseus to Hermia in 1.1 of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, answering her question of what would become of her if she refused the hand of Demetrius, whom her father demands she marries. Updated Urban Dictionary paraphrase: your ass gonna end up in a nunnery.
“I’ll lug the guts in the neighbor room. Mother, have a good night.” Hamlet to Gertrude in her closet as he disposes of the corpse of Polonious, whom he has slain and who has been lying in a pool of blood for about twenty minutes while the Prince has been royally reaming the Queen. That “have-a-good-night” ranks right up there with “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” A couple of scenes later Hamlet answers King Claudius’s demand to know where the body has been hidden with this: “But indeed, if you find him not within/this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.”
“Here’s Agamemnon, an honest fellow enough and one /that loves quails; but he has not so much brain as/earwax.” Thersites in a soliloquy commenting on Agamemnon’s lack of intelligence in 5.1 of Troilus and Cressida.. This scene has some utterly delicious insults. Earlier Thersites had informed Patrroclus that word on the street was that he was Achilles’ “masculine whore” and lays this curse on Patroclus:

Now, the rotten diseases
of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs,
loads o’ gravel i’ the back, lethargies, cold
palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing
lungs, bladders full of imposthume, sciaticas,
limekilns i’ the palm, incurable bone-ache, and the
rivelled fee-simple of the tetter, take and take
again such preposterous discoveries!

Patroculus counters with “[. . . ] you ruinous butt, you whoreson/indistinguishable cur, no.”

But is bested by Thersites with this venomous tirade:

No! why art thou then exasperate, thou idle
immaterial skein of sleave-silk, thou green sarcenet
flap for a sore eye, thou tassel of a prodigal’s
purse, thou? Ah, how the poor world is pestered
with such waterflies, diminutives of nature!

O my stars!

So let us praise that mid-wife, that plump wet nurse, Will’s immune system/good luck and/or God for the Bard’s survival, for what a gift to all us that birthday boy was!

Oh, yeah, he also died on the 23rd of April.

Hemingway Manuscript Declared Forgery

April 20, 2014April 20, 2014 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

Hemingway scholars seem almost universally convinced that the discovery of the unpublished manuscript The Sun Also Sets is a hoax. The manuscript,

Action Comics 263 Bizarro World

supposedly found in a strong box in Finca Vigia , Cuba, on 1 April 2014, came to light via Hemingway’s grandson, Sean, the issue of Hemingway’s youngest son Gregory, who “suffered” throughout his life from gender dysphoria and also went by the name Gloria.

Also found in the strong box was a well-preserved copy of DC Action Comics #263 (April 1960) entitled “The World of Bizzaros.”[1]

Hemingway left Cuba for the final time in July of 1960, so the issue date of the comic is not anachronistic.

Although the manuscript itself was created on a 1955 Smith Corona Standard Typewriter (Model 88), modern optical brighteners were detected in the manuscript’s paper, which means the manuscript had to be created after 1975. Sean Hemingway, however, contends that the manuscript could have been retyped later to for preservation’s sake.

However, this scenario seems unlikely given that one, not two, manuscripts were found, and certainly whoever supposedly retyped the manuscript would have preserved the original typed by the Master himself.

The story itself is a self-parody of Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises set in Paris and Pamplona in the early Twenties. Taking its cue from the Bizarro World concept, the names of the characters in the parody have been reversed as have been the roles of the characters. For example, the first person narrator of the parody is Barney Jakes, a conscientious objector from the Great War who is gay and possesses super-sized reproductive organs, as opposed to the original, Jake Barnes, a stoic hero who Fisher King like has suffered permanent impotence from a war wound. Other prominent characters include Lady Ashley Brett, Count Maddox Ford Maddox, and Francis Scott, who is obviously a caricature of Scott Fitzgerald and has taken the place of Robert Cohn.

Perhaps the most “bizzaro” aspect of the parody itself is that its prose seems much more Jamesian – as in Henry – than it does Hemingwayesque. In other words, Hemingway’s clipped declarative sentences have been replaced by syntactically difficult rhetorical structures that tax the reader’s patience.

For example, compare the first three sentences of the original with the first sentence of the parody:

Robert Cohn was once the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing. In fact, he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.

Francis Scott, a young man of five-and-twenty, of not more than middle height and slightly more than middle weight, had at his alma mater, the University of Alabama, received accolades in his prowess in forensics as he had captained the Crimson Tide’s nationally acclaimed debate team.

Perhaps, it need not be stated here that the parody – whoever may have written it – is an abysmal failure. All of the innovative aspects that render the original interesting – the crisp imagery, the unadorned dialogue, the lost generational angst-ridden hedonism – have been replaced with turgid descriptions, wooden dialogue, and homoerotic repression.

The question arises – who would waste his or her time concocting such an ill-thought out confection? No doubt some talentless wretch desperate for attention.

Some latter-day James Macpherson perhaps.

[1] Via Wikipedia: In the Bizarro world of “Htrae” (“Earth” spelled backwards), society is ruled by the Bizarro Code which states “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!” In one episode, for example, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling Bizarro bonds: “Guaranteed to lose money for you”. Later, the mayor appoints Bizarro No. 1 to investigate a crime, “Because you are stupider than the entire Bizarro police force put together”. This is intended and taken as a great compliment. In popular culture, largely influenced by the Seinfeld television program, “Bizarro World” has come to mean a situation or setting which is weirdly inverted or opposite of expectations.

Gregory “Gloria” Hemingway

Amphetametic Nation

April 18, 2014April 16, 2022 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

“Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.” ― Thich Nhat Hahn

Ever since the publication of Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat, educational entrepreneurs have been cashing in on the concept of 21st Century Education. These forward-looking ~~wealth amassers~~ thinkers inevitably arrive at the same conclusions and cast their findings into market-savvy alliterative lists, e.g., Tony Wagner’s 7 Survival Skills, Bernie Trilling & Charles Fadel’s 8 Retooling Schooling Reshaping Support Systems, Wesley Moore’s 10 Tiny Tips to Help 21st Century Teachers Identify Clandestine Texting in Technocracies.

As a public service, I’ll summarize the 21st century global educational rap so you can save yourself forty bucks:

The triumph of multinational corporations and the ever-increasing sophistication of computer technology have created a brave new globalism. If students are to be highly successful. i.e., land jobs in multinational corporations, they need to be analytical, collaborative, creative, adaptive, syntactically competent, technologically literate, and culturally sensitive.

In other words, the economy’s done gone global on us; ergo, it’s time to bid adieu to accountants and autoworkers. We won’t be needing them anymore because we got robots and Turbo Tax. The new worker better have his/her left/right hemispheres well-wired because he/she is likely to spend his/her day interacting in various media with far-flung team members solving problems.

Sounds fun, huh?

art by Nick Gentry

What’s different now is the concept of student-centered education, as opposed to adult-centered education, which means, in part, that students utilize the awesome resource of the internet to research topics and then teach those topics to each other. For example, in January of 2012 at a conference I attended, Tom Daccord, an employee of EdTechTeacher, whose “mission is to help teachers and schools leverage technology to create student-centered, inquiry learning environments,” demonstrated how the model works. He manipulated a screen that showed us images of how innovative first grade teachers in Saskatchewan and coastal New England had created interactive websites so that the New England first graders were teaching the Canadian first graders about horseshoe crabs, and the Canadians the New Englanders about Native American cultures. These little ones were not only learning about a subject but teaching it to others in several different modalities, but, also, they were well on the way of becoming successful 21st Century citizens, i.e. effectively exchanging fairly simplistic information through images and words via the internet.

Kind of like me on this here blog.

self-portrait of the author as tech guru

Ironically enough, Mr. Daccord, like virtually all of these 21st education entrepreneurs, delivered this information via a lecture, a keynote address, albeit in a well-wired one in which he strutted across a stage using the intonations of a motivational speaker and the studied hand gestures of an ESPN football analyst. His presentation was not student centered because student centered learning is not an efficient way to relay expertise. Dividing his audience into groups to research various technological innovations and then to regather to have each group teach the others how technology can be “leveraged to create inquiry learning environments” would not only take weeks, but also perhaps be rife with amateurish misinformation.

Underlying these presentations is the concept that the younger generation interfaces with the world in ways that we troglodytes can’t comprehend and that chiding the young for exchanging the heavens above for its image on a 3 x 1 screen is hopelessly naive. We need to be adaptive, to channel their Sesame Street quick-cut edited consciousnesses into small incremental periods of hands-on instruction.

I beg to differ. It probably suits multinational corporations just fine for us to produce highly articulate and analytical non-questioners willing to do industry’s bidding; however, the corporate worldview is not necessarily the best of all human perspectives.

What you never hear about in these educational manifestos is the individual’s place in the cosmos. How cognitively dissonant it must be for students inundated with American society’s corporate messages of cohesion and conformity to encounter the Steppenwolf, Stephen Dedalus or Caddy Compson in my AP classroom.

After all, the history of the West is the story of the heroic individual – Prometheus, Milton’s Satan, Hester Prynne, Martin Luther King. Although we don’t envy Job’s suffering or Oedipus’s fate, we sure as hell don’t admire their mealy-mouthed counsellors and chorus.

“Job” by William Blake

The world is too much with us late and soon, but it’s sweeping past much more quickly than it did in Wordsworth’s day. Video games, smart phones, tablets, the pinging of emails, the flashings of voicemails, the dizzying editing of movies all feed the fragmentation of attention to the detriment of the rich introspection that only deep silence can accommodate. Even college football games transpire in huddleless supersonic speeds. In this year’s Orange Bowl the announcers couldn’t keep up with the frenetic pace that seemed better suited to a professional basketball game than it did to football.

Perhaps an alternate, innovative 21st Century school might provide students with the best that has been thought and said and discovered with time to reflect on what they have learned. They certainly don’t need me to show them how to incorporate technology into their inquiries.

But as citizens, they certainly need to know our Constitution, the scientific method, the patterns that history provides, how art can provide beauty and mirror a culture’s preoccupations. To accomplish this education, it just might be necessary for an adult to tell a child what the adult knows about chemistry, the Russian revolution, or Irish history’s influence on the novels of James Joyce. Certainly, we can enhance this instruction through computer-generated multi-media presentations and deepen students experience through projects; however, in high school we need to teach them a little about a lot, and you can’t beat lectures (and reading) for providing a lot of information in s short amount of time. Just ask Tony Wagner.

Sweet Home South Carolina

April 12, 2014April 12, 2014 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

The wooly mammoth can’t bare to look at Eve offering Adam the apple

It’s been a memorable year for South Carolina’s state government. Nikki Haley has staunchly blocked the expansion of Medicaid to help spur the shiftless into seeking gainful employment, so rather than leeching our tax dollars to deal with their health and dental problems, the poor can suffer the wages of their sloth. If their unemployable children suffer as well, so be it.

Call it “natural selection at work.”

photo shot in SC by NY Times

Oops, check that. It appears that some of our legislators don’t believe in natural selection.

First, Senator Mike Fair R-Greenville took issue with the following clause in new state science standards and had it removed:

Conceptual Understanding: Biological evolution occurs primarily when natural selection acts on the genetic variation in a population and changes the distribution of traits in that in that population over multiple generations.

Sez the Senator: “To teach natural selection is the answer to origins is wrong. I don’t have a problem with teaching theories. I don’t think it should be taught as fact.”

Not to be outdone, Kevin Byrant R-Anderson essentially derailed a bill that would have designated the Carolina Wooly Mammoth as the official state fossil¹ by adding an amendment to the bill that adds this modifying clause ” [. . .] Carolina mammoth, which was created on the Sixth Day with the other beasts of the field.”

You’ve got to wonder given their non-evolving protective fur, if both the wooly mammoth and polar bear were thrilled to see the Fall given the 72 degree F. temperature that allowed our grand sire and his mate to loll around paradise naked.

¹It seems as if our representatives spend a great deal of time designating state shit: State horse: Marsh Tacky; State grass: Indian grass; State language: English; State spider: Carolina wolf spider; State insect: Carolina mantid; State popular music: beach music; State snack food: boiled peanuts; State STD: gonorreah . . .

Carolina Mantid

In other noteworthy legislative events, only a mere 15 years after legalizing interracial marriage, the state looks as if it’s no longer going to go after retirement home canasta clubs. Senator Tom Davis R-Beaufort introduced a bill that would legalize card playing in the Palmetto State:

“Davis, an attorney, said he developed the bill after state police warned a manager at Sun City Hilton Head last May that the bridge and canasta social clubs advertised for residents violated state law. That prompted management of the 14,000-resident retiree community to remove all signs and tell the clubs they could no longer play in community game rooms.” – The Columbus Republic

At this rate of progressive progress, our dying great grandchildren may one day be able to legally use medical marijuana!

The 5 Greatest Rock-n-Roll Covers of All Time

April 5, 2014August 26, 2017 / wlm3 / 7 Comments

Willie Mae “Big Mama Thornton” by Nick Young

A couple of weeks ago when I was luxuriating in vast open freedom of spring break, the musician Howard Dlugasch and I sat at the bar at the newly opened Jack of Cups Saloon (nee Brew Pub) on Folly discussing the difficulties local musicians face in performing original compositions at bar gigs. “No,” he said, “They don’t want to hear originals. They all want to hear covers. They all want to hear Journey.”

Howard Dlugasch

Howard’s lament got me thinking about covers themselves, and I began cataloging what I consider the greatest covers of all time, a Herculean task if you stop to think about it. I immediately jettisoned jazz, decided to limit my purview to rock and folk. After racking my brain, I decided to limit my list to five, and certainly many will disagree with the following choices.

Before I announce my top five, though, I ought to provide the criteria I used in the construction of this pantheon.

1) The original song had to be significant in both its music and content. By content I mean both the degree of significance of the lyrics’ poetic purpose and the poetic quality of the lyrics themselves. Alas, this criterion eliminates Hendrix’s great cover of “Wild Thing.”

2) The cover of the song had to make the song, as Ezra Pound would say, new.

3) The musicianship had to be first class.

Rather than attempting to rank the covers from “grooviest” to least “groovy,”¹ I’ve copped out by presenting the 5 Greatest Covers of all time in chronological order from oldest cover to most recent.

¹I retrieved these vintage terms from the Teen Beat files located in the adolescent wing of my memory museum.

Elvis Presley’s cover of Big Mama Thornton’s recording of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Hound Dog” Thornton’s 1953 recording is killer, backed by badass bass and drumming and some imitative barking. Hit the arrow for a 20 secondish listen:

Before Presley, others had recorded the song, and some critics claim that Presley was actually covering a Bob Wills cover or a Freddie Bell and the Bellboys cover. Nevertheless, Presley was aware of and liked the Thornton original, and so I contend he’s covering the original, not a covering a cover. At any rate, Elvis and his producer Steve Sholes have twanged the tune to rockabilly with some aggressive drum rolling.

Next comes the Animals cover of the traditional folk song “Rising Sun Blues,” a song whose roots go to 18th Century England and a popular genre called “the Unfortunate Rake.” Immigrants transported the song across the Atlantic and transplanted the setting to New Orleans. Some contend the song’s narrator is a woman turned whore after being abandoned by a rake, which is the scenario Dylan employs in his cover, a recording that precedes the Animals’. The earliest recorded version is by Clarence “Tom” Ashley in 1934, which tells the tale from a male perspective. Here’s a snippet from an early ’60’s version by Ashley and the great Doc Watson. Note the featured lyrics are much different from the Animals version.

Ashley/Watson:

The Animals:

Electric guitarist Hilton Valentine’s minor key arpeggio and Alan Price’s organ transform the song into what the critic Dave Marsh called “the first rock folk hit.”

Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 recording of Bob Dylan’s 1967 release “All Along the Watchtower.”

Dylan:

Hendrix:

Now, that’s what I call making it new.

The Doors 1970 live version of Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” This selection is perhaps the most controversial. However, I’m going with it. Listen.

Bo Diddley:

The Doors:

Also, perhaps, controversial, I rank Patti Smith’s 2007 cover of Nirvana’s 1991 “Smells like Teen Spirit” in the top five. Here Smith substitutes banjos and fiddles for electric guitars and replaces Cobain’s solo with a poem that elevates the song from an anthem of teen angst to some sort of post apocalyptic nightmare.

Nirvana:

Patti Smith:

Well, there you go. Would love to hear some comments. Obviously, I also stayed away from soul music because rating covers there would be almost as hard as jazz. Also, I’ve dissed Janis, whose cover of “Piece of My Heart” should probably bump Morrison and Smith off this list.

Vulgarity as Poetry

April 3, 2014March 24, 2021 / wlm3 / 1 Comment

Let’s say you’re browsing Twitter and run across a sponsored post by John Bolton, the former UN Ambassador, one of the architects of the second Iraq war, that invasion launched by Bush and Company to purge non-existent weapons of mass destruction from Saddam’s non-existent stockpiles because, despite Iraq’s not having an air force or a navy that could deploy those non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Saddam posed a “present and growing danger.”

And let’s say that rather than financing this ruinously expensive, absolutely unnecessary war through raising taxes, the Bush Administration introduced legislation that slashed taxes, which depleted Clinton’s 280 billion surplus that cratered into a 1.2 trillion deficit under Bush.

And, finally, let’s say that besides virtually bankrupting our nation, this absolutely unnecessary war resulted in 4.488 American deaths, 500,000 Iraqi deaths.

Oh, yeah, the John-Bolton-sponsored post on Twitter that triggered the above screed:

“Barack Obama. Worst president ever? Vote here.”

Obviously, my first three paragraphs exceed Twitter’s 140-character limit; plus, let’s face it, the explanation is tediously verbose and doesn’t even address the outrageous hubris that Bolton exhibits, this man who has made a mistake so grievous that he ought to have blinded himself Oedipus-like and be tapping his staff across the Arabian Desert in an attempt at expiation.

How, you ask, can anyone successfully address the outrageousness of Bolton’s question in the constricted medium of Twitter?

Here’s how:

Andrew Otis Weiss ‏‪@ThatWeissGuy‬ Mar 21 .‪@AmbJohnBolton Go back to selling oatmeal and diabetes meds, you blood splattered fuck (emphasis mine).

Colonel Kurtz, what do you have to say about Andrew Otis Weiss’s response to Bolton’s tweet?

Yes, it is genius, a perfect putdown, more graphic than even a photoshopped picture. Weiss has melded sound, sense, and image into a barbarous haiku: you blood-splattered fuck.

The introductory “you,” accusatory, echoing that expletive for disgust we emit when coming upon fresh roadkill -eww – the adjective “blood-splattered” with its connotations of careless butchery, the onomatopoetic splat, the thudding consonance of the terminal D-sounds (plus the word turd imbedded in splattered subliminally adding shit into the mix).

But then the clincher, the noun fuck. No, not dick – dick won’t do – no, not prick – prick won’t do – the vowels too short, too effete – but fuck – the abyss. You blood-splattered fuck, you casual slaughterer of half a million human beings.

Bravo, Andrew Otis Weiss, def poet of the absolutely perfect insult!

First Sentences, First Impressions

March 29, 2014February 9, 2021 / wlm3 / 2 Comments

We’ve all been told of the importance of first impressions, which are particularly crucial when trying to publish a piece of fiction. Stephen Corey, former editor of the Georgia Review, once told me that if a story didn’t grab him by sentence three he chunked it into the rejection pile. He said he received approximately 300 manuscripts a month, which meant that to get a story into that quarterly publication, you were going against 1200 other combatants.

I suspect with novels the pressure isn’t quite as intense; nevertheless, certainly a rollicking good first sentence has to be advantageous.

Take Jay McInerney’s first from Bright Lights, Big City, a sentence that falls beneath a chapter title that reads “It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are”

You’re not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time in the morning.

It certainly hooked me, as I found myself all-coked-up in “either the Heartbreak or Lizard Lounge” – my second person narrator wasn’t sure which – “talking to a girl with a shaved head.”

Of course, some writers don’t opt for the old in medias res commencement but take us way back in time, as Thomas Sterne does with Tristan Shandy’s contemplatiion of the act of his procreation:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;— and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions that were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded that I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.

Others attempt to establish mood:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

Or to encapsulate theme like this:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a good wife.

Or this:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Nor does the quality of first sentence, I might add, signify the over all quality of the work as a whole. Certainly Joyce’s first sentence of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there wasa moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . .” is more arresting than the first sentence of Ulysses – “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” – but few would rank Portrait over Ulysses in overall quality. And certainly, George Eliot’s first sentence of Middlemarch – “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” – though interesting, doesn’t even begin to signal the grandeur that is to follow.

Well, you wonder, what is the greatest of all first sentences written in English? “Call me Ishmael?” Or “A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes?”

No, by my reckoning, the greatest first sentence of any novel anywhere came from the typewriter of Nabokov.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

After reading that, would not be compelled to read on?

Vladimir Nabokov

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