The Lighter Side of the Son of Sam

March 25, 2014March 25, 2014 / wlm3 / 2 Comments

Back in the summer of ’77 when we hepcats were making that awkward transition from lobbing Molotov cocktails to burning our way across the dance floors of disco, David Berkowitz – aka the Son of Sam – killed 6 people and wounded several others. As far as serial killing goes, this paltry total can’t compare to the number of victims dispatched by Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, or South Carolina’s own Peewee Gaskins; however, Berkowitz PRed his way to the top of the nation’s serial killing charts by leaving a series of cryptic notes like this ditty:

What narcissistic nonsense. Of course, alley cats are going to mate and sparrows sing – if the feline and avian survivors of Chernobyl don’t let a cataclysmic environmental disaster affect their reproductive compulsions, certainly a couple of gunshots ringing out in a Brooklyn night ain’t going to affect their behavior.*

Of course, the media didn’t pay as much attention to Peewee as they did to David.** Peewee was no poet, and if he had been, his poems would have sounded something like this:

Whose corpse this is I ought to know

cause I’m the one what kilt it so.

I hope nobody come ‘round here

to watch me in the lake it throw.

*This from National Geographic’s website: On the other hand, Mousseau admits that some birds have thrived [at Chernobyl]: drab, non-migratory birds seem to be doing very well, “possibly because they have no competitors,” he said. These birds don’t use up their carotenoids, which are powerful antioxidants, to create colorful plumage, and they don’t need to spend extra energy on long migrations, so their immune systems may be stronger, Mousseau theorized.

** How many serial killers are you on a first name basis with?

At any rate, during the Son of Sam’s spree, while bartending at the Golden Spur, I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea: to form a comedy terrorist group called “The Lighter Side of the Son of Sam.” These slapstick desperadoes would attack obnoxious celebrities like Tom Snyder of the Tomorrow Show and make him perform demeaning acts on camera, stuff like, you know, like making out with one of Liberace’s exes while David Jones of the Monkees sang “Day Dream Believer” at gunpoint. Nobody would get seriously hurt, and the madcap band of practical jokers would always somehow get away to punk some other obnoxito in the unforeseeable future.

This idea returned to me after I watched the second episode of the Bravo reality show Southern Charm. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some latter day version of the Lighter Side of the Son of Sam could infiltrate the filming and wreck some boomerang karma on the vapidiots appearing on the show? Let’s see. How to punish Shep? I got it! How about updating Sartre with a little No Exit action by locking up Shep, Rosie McDonnell, and Dennis Rodman in a Motel 6 room for forty days and forty nights? [cue demonic laughter]

Rosie and Dennis could entertain Shep by performing a two man/woman show of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf or entertain him by wrestling for the remote that operates a TV that gets only the Lifetime Network and the Shopping Channel.

Just some good old fashioned retributive fun brought to you by that band of lovable losers, the Lighter Side of the Son of Sam!

Time, Time, Time Ain’t on My Side

March 21, 2014March 22, 2014 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near

Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

Eliot, “Prufrock”

Of course, time seems to pass more rapidly as we age because of the forever diminishing frames-of-references that years represent.

For example, when I was five, a student at Miss Marion’s kindergarten, a year was a fifth of my life and seemed as expansive as a continent. The previous Christmas seemed like a far distant outpost several time zones removed, separated by a progression of slow transpiring days that unfurled and closed like lazy morning glories.

[check out the vines on the left as Cat Stevens rejoices]

Now, that I’m 61, a year seems like one revolution on a Tilt-a-Whirl that’s gone haywire in Max Sennett short – each successive whirl faster – last Christmas seeming a day or two ago and the next a day or two away.

But here’s the thing. For the past week it’s as if I exist in a Rod Sterling directed Twilight Zone adaptation of a Kafka short story.

Every time I reach for something, it’s the very last one available! It’s ubiquitous. Uncanny.

For example, the day before yesterday, I had to replace the toilet paper roll in the master bath and the very next day needed to replace the roll in what we euphemistically call “the powder room.” Coincidence – of course – but then last night as I unfurled the dental floss, the spool unwound and spit out the last remaining thread . This morning’s dry dog food scooping found the cup hitting the bottom, the food not completely done, but within three or four days of depletion.

And here’s the clincher: at school, I forgot to hit the staple function on the copier in the work room,[1] so had to staple my Romanticism tests by hand, and guess what, not only did the first stapler I used run out of staples, but the next one did as well!

To be honest, though, there was plenty of looseleaf paper to distribute to my students who are at this very moment in time explaining why this stanza of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” conforms to the subject matter and poetic conventions of Romanticism:

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic[2]

[1] By the way, in those halcyon days before email, the copy room called the Lounge, and perhaps the fact that we in the working world are so busy there’s no time for contemplation may also play a role in the seeming acceleration of time’s passage.

[2] Of course, when I was copying my rubric for grading my students’ responses the copier ran out of paper. I swear!

Why I Ain’t Inviting Jesus to My Fantasy Dinner

March 18, 2014March 19, 2014 / wlm3 / 10 Comments

Once upon the time, our local paper published a Thursday supplement that targeted local geographical communities like “West Ashley,” “East Cooper,” “Summerville,” etc. In those supplements a column called “Do You Know?” featured interviews with faux celebrities like the heads of recreation departments, popular bartenders, and other notable citizens that help make life more bearable for us First World sufferers. We’d learn the towns and cities of their births, their idea of a fun weekend, their favorite dishes, and inevitably, their chosen guests at a “fantasy dinner.”

Without a doubt, the most popular fantasy dinner invite of all time was Jesus. Not Jesus Alou, mind you, but the Jesus, the one from Nazareth. I’ll get into why choosing accompanying guests is problematic with Jesus at the table, but first, let’s address a gargantuan challenge involved with entertaining Joseph and Mary’s first born.

He speaks Aramaic!

If you’re thinking, yeah, but he’s the Son of God, a miracle worker, let me remind you he was also Mary’s son, i.e., half human and sometimes plagued with doubts (cf., Gethsemane). From my reading of the Gospels, it’s not as if he had a clear pipeline to God through which the latter would walkie-talkie-like tell him what to do. Turning water into wine, casting out demons, walking on water seem like veritable pieces of cake compared to mastering a language that didn’t even exist when you were alive.

No, if I had the chance to meet Jesus in the flesh I’d want him all to myself, to be able to look him in the eye, perhaps to pantomime messages back and forth, to have the focus to be only on him. In other words, I don’t want Leonardo or Nietzsche, or Lady Gaga distracting me with Jesus in the house.

C’mon folks, invite fun folk who speak the same language to your fantasy dinners: Groucho, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, or if you wanna get shit-faced with the dead, Richard Burton or Christopher Hitchens.

Oops, this just in from my superego: “It’s a fantasy, jackass, make believe. You can have Jesus speak English if you want.”

Okay, then. What about dress? Nice casual? A clean robe for Jesus, a diaphanous jumpsuit for Lady Gaga? And what to serve? Loaves and fishes? Wiener schnitzel?

Like, I said Richard Burton and Christopher Hitchens . . .

sparknotes: Bravo’s Reality Series Southern Charm

March 13, 2014July 8, 2016 / wlm3 / 2 Comments

General Info

Context

Southern Charm is a reality television show created and broadcast by Bravo, a basic cable satellite channel. Begun in 1980 as a suscription-only platform devoted to cultural programs, Bravo originally featured a PBS-like mix of international and independent films, musical shows such as Jazz Counterpart, and stage productions like the Texaco Showcase presentation of Romeo and Juliet.

Interestingly enough, the evolution of Bravo mirrors the decline of Western Civilization itself. After MGM and GE took over the channel, programming shifted from highbrow entertainment to decadent reality shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the various Real Housewives shows. Bravo’s shift from high to low is a microcosm of a macrocosmic degradation. For example, during the Elizabethan Period, educated people considered Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet pop art, middle brow entertainment that nevertheless enthralled even the rotten-tomato-toting lower classes of London. Now almost 400 years later, even most college educated people consider Shakespeare too highbrow, and theatre goers in London would much rather sit through The Lego Movie rather than a production of Twelfth Night.

It is within this context – the decline of civilization and in this case, Late Empire American culture – that Southern Charm takes its cues. Not unlike Petronius’s skewering of the excesses of Nero’s Rome, (e.g., the Romans’ obscene ostentatious consumption of food; their round-the-clock drunkenness; their loveless, indiscriminate sexual couplings), Southern Charm documents the decadent and extravagant lifestyles of a group of Republicans who live in the most glamorous city of a state that refuses to expand Medicaid.

Oh, yeah, there’s one significant difference: whereas Petronius mocked the excesses of decadent Roman culture, Southern Charm celebrates it. It would appear that people’s lives are so impoverished that they would rather live vicariously through vacuities than engage with other humans in bars and restaurants. Academics disagree as to whether Bravo’s management is cynically exploiting the “stars” of their shows in a post modern commentary on the poverty of contemporary culture or simply stuffing their pockets with money and not giving a shit.

Plot Overview

Set in the tourist and retirement mecca of Charleston, South Carolina, Southern Charm follows former South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel as he readjusts to life outside of prison after doing 10 months for buying and distributing cocaine. Although the show purports to explore the life of Charlestonians, Ravenel is the only local featured (see characters). Besides Ravenel, the show focuses on five other main personalities, two women, and three men, all white and seemingly a couple of decades younger than 50-year old Ravenel. The cast also consists of minor characters: mothers, fathers, hook-ups, carriage tour horses, polo ponies, etc.

Essentially, the show explores the main characters’ interactions as they engage in tedious conversations in ever shifting scenic spots as they eat, drink, woo, reject, seduce. As in most other “reality shows,” the viewer peeks in on the principals’ daily routines, in this case at their plantations or town houses or out on-the-town in swanky shops, restaurants and nightclubs. In addition viewers also get to hear the characters’ personal takes on the events as they smugly backbite into the camera.

Character List

Thomas Ravenel – the son of successful politician “Cousin” Arthur Ravenel and a graduate of the Citadel, Thomas himself aspired to be a politician, unsuccessfully running for the Republican nomination in South Carolina for the US Senate but later being elected as State Treasurer. A backer of Rudy Giuliani in the 2008 Republican nomination battle, he supported Ron Paul in 2012. Of course, Ravenel’s 2008 coke conviction brought his political career to a screeching halt.

A hedonist, polo player, and wealthy man about town, Ravenel feels pressure to settle down, marry, and sire male heirs. Here’s Thomas on his way to his plantation on Edisto talking to his father about what Thomas hopes to be a bourgenining romance:

Cameron Eubanks – a native of the Palmetto state but not of Charleston, Cameron likes, according to Bravo’s website, “boating or laying (sic) on the beach with a good book.” (The Carpetbaggers perhaps?) So far on the show, she parties with the boys and engages in non-witty repartee. Having just turned 30, she offers subtle hints of her biological clock’s ticking as she shifts careers from cosmetics to real estate.

Craig Conover – Drawn from Delaware to the College of Charleston, 25-year-old Craig has stayed on in the Holy City (don’t they all) to attend the troubled Charleston Law School. The spawn of an incredibly athletic family, Craig seems more down-to-earth than other cast members, perhaps because he “finds meditation in diving, golfing, and shooting guns.”

“Om, Fore, Boom!”

Jenna King – Aspiring fashion designer Jenna hails from Sumter, South Carolina and manages somehow to be simultaneously country cute and avant garde cool (see hair). This globe trotting graduate of Trident Tech has a passion for animals, especially horses.

Shep Rose – Listing his profession as raconteur, Shep nevertheless ends each sentence with the interrogative lilt made famous by Vally Girls. He’s a man of many diverse interests, like drinking, dressing like a preppy, talking, fornicating, listening to the Grateful Dead, and hanging out with Republicans. Perhaps not the most perceptive of raconteurs, Shep describes his friend Whit (see below) as “an elitist hipster” despite the latter’s penchant for wearing pajama-looking shirts and silver chains around his neck.

Whitney Sudler-Smith – Self-proclaimed composer of “brilliant screenplays and ingenious independent films that few will see” (it appears that he and your humble sparksnote reporter have something in common). Despite having directed a film about Halston that has been “screened” on Showtime, Whit lives with his hideous mother in what the producers of the show call an “urban plantation.” He and Shep are “partnering” to open just what Charleston needs – a sophisticated rock-n-roll bar.

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes:

Not unlike The Great Gatsby, which doesn’t have a likable character in the entire novel, Southern Charm centers on the privileges and decadent lifestyles of a cast of wealthy characters; however, unlike Gatsby, not one of the characters in Southern Charm is even vaguely interesting. A quote from the National Lampoon’s parody of “Desiderata” comes to mind:

Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls
Would scarcely get your feet wet.

Major themes include the tension between enjoying a hedonistic lifestyle and settling down, the difficulties of maintaining successful bromances when libidos get out of hand, and lastly, how cool everyone is because they live in Charleston.

Motifs – the need to procreate, lavish dinners, hangovers, hooking up, unresponsive women turning down swashbucklers accustomed to bodice-ripping, Ravenel’s tarnished reputation. Old buildings. Nice things.

Symbols – Charleston = Rome. Whiteness is also a symbol. African Americans are virtually nonexistent. Maybe that’s why no one smokes weed.

Quotes

“I am a cunning linguist.” – Thomas Ravenel, putting the moves on Catherine.

“I don’t like Brandy [her seemingly closeted gay son’s romantic female interest]. I don’t like Brandy. I don’t like Brandy. Have I made myself clear? I don’t like Brandy” – Whit’s mother.

“I often wake up drunk,” – Shep.

Discussion Questions:

Discuss the title. Is it serious or ironic? Identify elements that one might find charming.

Compare and contrast Shep and Craig. What do they share in common? How are they different? Which one would you murder first?

Mothers and fathers play an important role in the series. Given how their children turned out, why do you think they’re so eager to have them replicate?

Whom do you hate least and why?

House of Cards = Small Batch Bourbon

February 28, 2014February 28, 2014 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

Television and film tend to caricature Southerners. We’re all familiar with the types – the drawling sadistic sheriff who looks as if he has swallowed a sack of horse feed whole; the I-do-declare coquettish belle all aflutter, the tart-tongued steel magnolia, the wiser-than-he-lets on Negro manservant, etc.

Yawn.

Therefore, when I finally got around to peeking in on House of Cards for the first time last weekend, what a pleasure to witness Kevin Stacey’s portrayal of Congressman Frank Underwood, who not only sounds like a real Southerner but who also rises above the stereotypes non-Southerners generally associate with someone from Dixie – rightwing politics and racism – which is not to say that Frank is an admirable character. Part Richard III, part Iago, he’s the apotheosis of Machiavellian machination, a son of a bitch who makes the historical LBJ seem like Atticus Finch in comparison.

Frank not only sounds like a Southerner, but he has a way with words reminiscent of those who have grown up in the oral tradition of story telling, a tradition that appreciates a clever, alliterative turn of phrase. Here he is provoking NEA union boss Marty Spinella into assaulting him: “I’m a white-trash cracker from a white-trash town that no one would even bother to piss on. But here’s the difference. I’ve made something of myself. I have the keys to the Capitol. People respect me. But you, you’re still nothing. You’re just an uppity dago in an expensive suit turning tricks for the unions.” Some of my favorite moments occur when Frank turns directly to the camera in Shakespearean asides looking you, the viewer, in the eye and saying shit like this, “Every Tuesday I sit down with the speaker and the majority leader to discuss the week’s agenda. Well, ‘discuss’ is probably the wrong word… they talk while I imagine their lightly-salted faces frying in a skillet.”

Frank hails from Gaffney and represents South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District, a district that just a few years ago had as its representative courtly Democrat Congressman John Spratt, Davidson-educated, a man of immense integrity, as unlike Frank as Henry V is from Macbeth. Of course, now the district has fallen in Republican hands. It would appear as if Democratic elected officials in South Carolina like Spratt and Fritz Hollings have gone the way of the Carolina parakeet – that is, offstage forever.

At any rate, if you like small batch bourbon, chances are you’re going to like House of Cards. Although occasionally you may find your suspension of disbelief in peril, in fact, on the verge of Hindenburging, but the characterization is superb, complex, including Frank’s ruthless, insecure, profoundly unhappy wife Claire and his doppleganger of a mistress Zoe; even his chief of staff comes off as an authentic human being.

The series is strong, tasty, addictive, and capable of knocking you smack dab flat on your ass, like Jefferson’s Reserve, a great small batch bourbon that I wish I had some of right now.

The Delicate, Censorious Damsels of Wellesley

February 24, 2014February 25, 2014 / wlm3 / 4 Comments

In case you haven’t heard, a number of delicate damsels and/or censorious puritans at the so-called liberal arts college Wellesley have gotten their granny panties in a knot over a temporary outdoor installation of art by Tony Matelli entitled The Sleepwalker.

Warning: the image below may be offensive to you, especially if you’ve been sexually assaulted by an older male somnambulist undergoing chemotherapy.

The account below comes from the “Globe,” the newspaper, of course, no stranger to controversy having covered in its day the banning of many works in Boston including Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and the Everly Brothers’ Wake Up Little Susie.”¹

Anyway, “Zoe Magid, a Wellesley College junior majoring in political science, started a petition on Change.org with other students asking college president H. Kim Bottomly to have the statue removed.” The petition in part reads

[T]his highly lifelike sculpture has, within just a few hours of its outdoor installation, become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering (sic) thoughts regarding sexual assault for many members of our campus community [. . .] While it may appear humorous, or thought-provoking to some, it has already become a source of undue stress for many Wellesley College students, the majority of whom live, study, and work in this space.

Here’s a thought, Zoe. Given that you’ve only been out of high school for 3 years, why not leave the selection of temporary art installations to professionals who know what they’re doing and stick to those skills you’ve mastered, like Tweeting (#philistine), You’re following in the footsteps of Jesse Helms and John Ashcroft, the latter who famously had the piece of filth below covered with curtain in the Robert F Kennedy Department of Justice Building because exposure to an aluminum breast is, well, um, not necessary.

Not only are poly sci majors down on The Sleepwalker, but art history major Annie Wang² also wants the statue removed because she sees it as an “assault”.:

“I think art’s intention is to confront, but not assault, and people can see this as assaulting,” Wang said. “Wellesley is a place where we’re supposed to feel safe. I think place and a context matters, and I don’t think this is the place to put it.”

I just don’t get it. The statue ain’t exactly Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, and I believe my 83-year-old mother could out run the poor [pardon the tautology] unhip, unattractive, tightie-whitie wearing somnambulist. I suspect that what really offends these young ladies is that the statue embodies unbeautifully the thing they most fear: growing old.

___________________

1. I shit you not.

2. By the way, I’m offended by Ms Wang’s surname because it brings to mind verbal assaults I suffered in locker rooms after PE in junior high school.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Asshole

February 22, 2014February 28, 2015 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

the author circa 1976

I was such a loser in the mid-Seventies [see above photo] that I actually failed at dropping out of grad school. That’s right. Talking about the epitome of incompetence, failing at dropping out of school ranks right up there with attempting suicide by swallowing a handful of artificial sweeteners.

It’s not all that long of a story. After getting dumped by an ex-fiancée in July of ’76, I said to myself, “This here grad school thang ain’t working out.”[1] I decided to go back to Summerville and tread water because, after all, home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.[2]

Impoverished, I had been working two jobs (tending bar in the University Union, washing dorm dishes). Unable to afford textbooks, I checked Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Epson, Yeats, and, Auden out of libraries, racking up fines as fast as empty beer cans. In the wee hours, I slapped together underdeveloped essays on manual typewriters. When I made it to class, I shuffled in sporting pre-grunge grunge and reeking of cannabis. Occasionally, I might manage an insightful comment in class or turn an arresting phrase in an essay, but, that ain’t gonna get you a tenure track job, much less a degree.

On the plus side, my fellow students treated me deferentially because not-seeming-to-give-a-shit somehow had come to be – maybe always has been – an admired American trait; on the minus side, my professors were absolutely immune to my slouching charm.

So, on the sunny Monday morning after my revelation that my learning to read and write in a foreign language, passing comps, and writing a board approved dissertation was not likely to occur in the next academic year, I informed my bosses I was quitting, dropping out of school, going home. I blamed my sudden departure on a family emergency, which was true in the sense that a series of family emergencies over the course of my young life had jangled my nerves. I was having what was called in those days “A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.”

Of course, I didn’t bother to inform the University of my departure.

* * *

Three weeks later I very slowly came to consciousness in a hospital in Hilton Head. To this day, I have no idea how long I was there or how I got home. I do know that no charges were filed and that I had stitches still in my back, sutures I assumed were self-dissolving but weren’t.

I had forgotten how much Summerville sucks. My landlady/mother insisted that I participate in cattle calls for manual laborers at temp agencies, which got real old real fast even though they never chose me. [again, see above photo].

So I called my pal Jake-the-Snake, who had been placed in a managerial position at the Golden Spur, the Student Union bar, and his boss hired me on the condition I could cop work study status, hoop jumping I resented, especially since there was a whole slew of new bartenders who had been hired straight up, people like Veda Smith and Judy Birdsong, legitimate graduate students with assistantships who didn’t need jobs in the first place.

Nevertheless, I successfully accomplished the task of being officially classified as financially challenged, and found myself once more racking up student loan debt, tending bar, and slapping together underdeveloped essays on manual typewriters in the wee hours.

But I vowed to myself that I would never ever fail at dropping out of grad school again, and indeed, at the end of the spring semester of ’77, I successfully pulled it off!

[1] I speak to myself in the vernacular.

[2] Frost’s publisher insisted he drop the subsequent line although they wish you’d stay the fuck away.

Judy Birdsong Moore 4 February 1978

Miming Poems for Scholarships

January 28, 2014February 11, 2014 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

Every year on a Sunday in mid January, I drive to the Stern Center at the College of Charleston to support my school’s representative at the Regional Poetry Outloud recitation contest, and every year I drive home disgruntled because the judges – no matter who they are (politicians, poets, professors) – confuse recitation with acting, valuing gesture more than intonation, cadence, timbre.

One of this year’s winners literally beat her fist against her bosom as she screeched

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.

She delivered the last line of the poem, on the other hand, with pleading melancholy, in a ridiculous diminuendo, which snuffed out the concluding iamb, turning it into a trochee, her voice falling ever more silent:

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The irony that the poet is essentially asking God to rape him did not seem to register at all.

Although one of the three selected to go on to the next round was superb, the other two’s gestures distracted from the aural subtleties of the verse, their voices sometimes eliding syllables to register (literally) high-pitched emotion while their arms fluttered.

Of course, these complaints may strike the skeptic as sour grapes; however, from the official POL website, here’s poet Kwame Dawes instructing judges on physical appearance:

I think the key thing to remember, that we expect students to remember, is the poem comes first. Everything else that you do with your body, with your voice, with your arms, whatever you do, has to be in service of the poem. If your body takes over and becomes the lead in this dialogue, then the poem disappears. The one thing about Poetry Outloud is that the poem comes first. What we want the person to do is to think about the poem when they (sic) leave, and therefore it takes incredible economy of body expression to convey what is happening with the poem. (my bold type)

Here’s another advisor on the link instructing judges on “dramatic appropriateness.”

The student brings – and I put drama in quotes – but brings the drama that is appropriate to the content of the poem. And I also think that it means that the student does not substitute what I would consider artificial emotion for the poem’s appropriateness. If the poem is dealing with difficult subject matter, the student should maintain his or her poise and not let the content of the poem to give him or her license to become an actor or theater performer. (again my bold)

Does it not strike the judges that the so-called professional poets who read at the event stand essentially still and let their voices do the work? I’ve seen masters like Archibald MacLeish, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop (among many lesser lights ) read in person, and none of them mimed the meanings of the poems as they recited them.

As I was listening to my student’s beautiful rendition of “Dover Beach,” her clear, sad voice articulating every syllable, pausing at each caesura – “[b]egin, and cease, and then again begin” – her own cadence “tremulous” and “slow” – I thought to myself, “If only the judges could hear recordings of these recitations.”

If only they checked out the linked video above before they whipped out their scoring sheets.

God, Why Did You Let So Much Shit Go Down on Me Today?

January 25, 2014January 25, 2022 / wlm3 / 1 Comment

Justin: God, can I ask You a question?

God: I don’t know. Can you?

Justin: I mean, May I ask you a question?

God: Shoot.

Justin: Promise You won’t get mad.

God: Son, have you read Job 38, 1-41? Genesis Chapters 9-6? Genesis 19?

Justin: [lying]: Yeah, sure.

God: I promise not to get any angrier than I did back then.

Justin: Why did You let so much shit go down on me this week?

God: What do u mean?

Justin, Well, I got popped for egging my neighbor’s house.

God: Yes?

Justin: Which led to my bro, Lil Za, getting busted for coke.

God: Okay?

Justin: Then I got pulled over for drag racing doing 60 in a 35 zone. Like, I had my dad and a couple of Escalades blocking traffic so nobody would get hurt. Seems real unfair.

God: Huummm.

Justin: And then for the mug shot, the pigs wouldn’t let me put on no make-up or put on my shades, and a couple of zits show up for all the world to see.

God: And?

Justin: And on top of it all off, when I got to the hotel, there were only about 30 chicks camped out there. Nothing’s gone right this week! Why did You do that?

God: Let me see. Well, first, I let Satan tempt you into egging the house to let the world know just how childish you are so tweens will still identify with you and buy your records.

Justin (humbled): OH!

God: I had Lil Za, like an idiot, leave the blow out in plain sight so you could bask in big boy trouble without your actually getting into serious legal trouble. So you’re still appealing to tweens and the older crowd.

Justin: (17 watt light bulb illuminating above his head): Oh.

God: Hey, look. I could have had u drag-racing out in Salinas like I did your previous incarnation James Dean, but I had u in the streets of Miami where it’s virtually impossible accelerate fast enough to receive fatal injuries. So now you’re copping prehumous press, unlike JD, whose posthumous academy award nomination didn’t do him personally a whole lotta good. Look, compare his Porsche with your Lamborghini.

Justin (quizzical): Okay.

God: Hey, sorry about the zit, but u ain’t the only peep I’m taking care of. Some kid’s parents were praying that he make a free throw when your arrest was going down.

Justin (softly): I see, God.

God: Oh, and those chicks. I kept the numbers down so you could sleep off your hangover without a muffled roar going down outside your window.

Justin: I’m Sorry, God.

God: Don’t be sorry, just learn to Trust Me…. in All things , the Good & the Bad.

Justin: I will trust You.

God: And don’t doubt that My plan for your day is Always Better than your plan.

Justin: I won’t God. And let me just tell you God, Thank You for Everything this week.

God: You’re welcome, child. It was just another day being your God, and I Love looking after My Wealthy American Children . . .

On Nervous Breakdowns

December 29, 2013January 11, 2024 / wlm3 / 3 Comments

Back in boyhood I’d occasionally hear my parents in hushed tones discussing so-and-so’s nervous breakdown, a mysterious condition that baffled me. I sensed through those half-heard conversations a nervous breakdown didn’t entail the wild spasmodic movements I had seen in a documentary about Huntington’s Chorea, but rather a nervous breakdown’s pathology resulted in some sort of behavioral outrageousness that brought to mind the phrase “at the end of your rope.”

It wasn’t until I saw John Huston’s film of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana that I got a clearer picture of just what a nervous breakdown might look like:

Here’s Daniel K. Hall-Flavin, MD of the Mayo Clinic’s website’s explanation:

The term “nervous breakdown” is sometimes used to describe a stressful situation in which someone becomes temporarily unable to function normally in day-to-day life. It’s commonly understood to occur when life’s demands become physically and emotionally overwhelming. The term was commonly used in the past to cover a variety of mental disorders; it’s used less often today.

Victims of nervous breakdowns tend to be high strung. The term comes from archery. A high strung’s person’s nervous system’s akin to a bow whose string’s high tension tends to shorten the life of the bow, which explodes at some point in the hand of the archer.

Richard Burton’s character in Night of the Iguana, Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon, certainly seems in the following clip to qualify as high strung. His definition of statutory rape is especially noteworthy.

Interestingly, as Night of the Iguana was being shot,

Diazepam (Valium) was approved for use in 1963. … Chemist Leo Sternbach made the discovery that led to Valium while working for Hoffmann-La Roche. Sternbach had created an entirely new class of tranquilizers named benzodiazepines, which were safer and more effective than previous treatments such as barbiturates, opiates, alcohol and herbs. His other breakthroughs would include the sleeping pills Dalmane and Mogadon, Klonopin for epileptic seizures and Arfonad, for limiting bleeding during brain surgery. (49)

Of course, creative types like Tennessee Williams are notorious for being high strung, if not bipolar, and have sought self-medication via demon rum and other numbing agents, which almost invariably lead to more stress. In fact, this morning’s NY Times has a book review on a study of Williams, Hemingway, Cheever, Fitzgerald, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver as rummies, a book I intend to check out.

illustration by John Cuneo

The 12-Step people claim that there can be no cure for substance abuse except through a religious belief of some sort, whether it be as stringent as Hasidim Judaism or as vague as Steve Earle’s “I know there’s a God, and He ain’t me.”

Alas, however, the path to Enlightenment is much longer than that trip to the liquor cabinet.

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