Strange Encounters

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In 1989, the South Carolina Fiction Project selected my story “An Invasion of Tourists” as one of twelve short stories to be published in Columbia, South Carolina’s daily newspaper, The State. The story, written in second person, dramatizes a male twenty-something’s encounter with two very strange bar patrons who seem not only foreign, but downright alien, and by alien, I mean alien in the extra-terrestrial sense:

There’s another woman, but something’s not quite right about her. In a tropical print sundress, she’s practically catatonic. Her eyes are fluorescent green, very far apart and don’t blink. Slowly, she picks up her banana daiquiri, cocks her head, and laps it up with a flickering tongue.

You stare in disbelief. She looks at you and smiles stupidly. “Hello,” she says, “how goes it, amigo?” Her voice is fresh, friendly, but somehow mechanical, like the voice on your Portuguese Made Easy records.

[snip]

“Where y’all from?’

“Q.”

“Queue? Where’s that?”

“Just around the corner from Tri-Alpha 6.”

They’re smiling like his and hers ventriloquist dummies. You manage to muster a fake laugh as the jukebox engages. Pop-a-top, pop-a-top, pop-a-top. Reggae. Bob Marley.

“Excuse us,” they say in unison and head for the small, tiled rectangle that serves as a dance floor. Like exotic birds, they go through elaborate steps, a mirror image mating dance. Then shoulder-to- shoulder, back-to-back, butt-to-butt, they shimmy, like two people with terrible itches.

“What’s the scoop on those two?” you ask the bartender.

“Beats me,” he says, “but they sure can do the Dorsal.”

As the story progresses, the unnamed protagonist sees more and more evidence of an intergalactic incursion. For example, the lead story on the eleven o’clock news is unexplained lights hovering over cars on I-26. After a sleepless night, he drives to the television station to share his story with the anchor. There he encounters a teenager convinced he’s also seen an extraterrestrial. The kid looks crazed, so the protagonist decides to bail.

You’ve called in sick. Deservedly so. You’re shook. You came within a heartbeat of making an utter fool of yourself. You can’t believe that you’d ever fall a victim of mass hysteria. With so little sleep, your memory is even more suspect than usual. Probably her tongue wasn’t as long as it seemed yesterday. Maybe she was wearing contacts that made her eyes that color.

Maybe you’re going insane.

You head out to the beach for rest and relaxation. You’ll swim, exhaust yourself, and go home for 18 hours or so of sleep.

Food. You haven’t eaten. Food will make you feel better. So you pull into Frankie’s Place, a rundown joint on the front beach. Seated on the deck with a salt breeze blowing, you feel better already. Frank, a fat, freckled, tattooed ex-Marine brings you out a cold one.

How’s business,” you ask.

“Great,” he says. “Tourists are flocking in from everywhere.”

“Do you get many from Tri-Alpha 6,” you ask, as if he’s your pal, as if it’s an inside joke.

“Huh?”

“Tri-Alpha 6.”

“What’s that? A fraternity?”

You don’t answer him.

As he waddles off, he shakes his head as if to say, “Give me a break.”

You turn to look out over the ocean, half hoping to see one flashing over the horizon, but there’s nothing, not even a cloud in the sky.

***

Well, brothers and sisters, yesterday I had a real-life strange encounter, though not quite as disorienting as the one in the short story.

I was walking my dog to the end of the unpaved road where I live (see above). A grey medium-sized SUV slowly made its way towards us and stopped. An elderly woman on the passenger side rolled down her window, and the driver, another grey-haired woman, leaned towards the steering wheel so I could make eye contact with both. They didn’t look like aliens from another planet but like characters in a David Lynch movie, corny and blandly friendly in a creepy, Trumanshowesque[1] sort of way.

“We just have a question,” the passenger said in a vowel-deprived Midwestern accent.

“Ask away.”

“What’s behind these houses? Marshes?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Marshes and the Folly River.”

“A river?” the driver asked. “There’s a river back there?” Her tone was incredulous.

“Yes, ma’am, a river.”

“But what are those long things jutting out? Flat wooden things projecting outwards. It looks like you could walk on them.”

“They’re docks,” I said, somewhat taken aback, wondering what planet they were from.

“Docks!” They seemed flabbergasted.

The passenger said, “You mean you can have boats back there?”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s deep water. You could take a boat out of there and sail all the way to Lisbon, Portugal.”

The passenger said, “We’re not from around here.”

I laughed. “I’d never guess with those accents of yours.”

They were beaming.

“Where are you from?”

“St. Louis.”

I mentioned going to see the Braves play at Busch stadium when my boys were young.

“We’re Cardinal fans,” they said, almost apologetically.

“No shit Sherlock,” I thought, but instead said, “I got to see Ozzie Smith do his backflip.”

They both smiled genuine smiles. They knew who Ozzie Smith was, which came as a relief. 

(You may have heard that during the Battle of the Bulge, army units would quiz each other at checkpoints with baseball trivia after they learned that German spies, wearing US uniforms and speaking perfect American English, were attempting to infiltrate the lines.)

I showed them where to turn around (it’s a dead end road) and bid them goodbye. Twenty minutes later, as I was walking to Lowlife for my afternoon constitutional, they passed me without waving, puttering along about fifteen miles an hour.

When I told the tale to my pal Jeremy at Lowlife,” he said. “Haven’t they seen movies? There are docks in movies. St Louis is on the Mississippi, for chrissakes. They must have seen a dock before.”

He added, waving and nodding, “I would have said, ‘good day’ and walked away.

[1] Yes, goddammit, add it to the dictionary.

The Freedom to Offend

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The Freedom to Offend

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.” ― Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“[. . .] and above it the mouthing of orators,
the arse-belching of preachers.” – Ezra Pound, “Canto XIV”

Okay, so we don’t want to ban AK-47s because that would be unbarring the door of tyranny. On the other hand, we don’t want our precious, delicate children exposed to depressing historical events like the Native American genocide, slavery, the Holocaust – perhaps even Sandy Hook – because the truth might make them feel uncomfortable.

I’ll tell you what made me feel uncomfortable when I was teaching: crouching under a Harkness table stifling a fart with my AP Lit students during a live shooter drill.

And, O, my Brothers and Sisters, we read many a bannable book in those AP classes.

Oedipus Rex – parricide, incest, sacrilege

The Canterbury Tales – vulgarity, profanity, nudity, plagues

Hamlet – fratricide, adultery, vulgarity, a corpse-strewn stage

Crime and Punishment – murder, prostitution, crushing poverty, alcoholism

Madame Bovary – serial adultery, suicide, insanity

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – atheism, masturbation, prostitution, adolescent rebellion

The Sound and the Fury – promiscuity, suicide, racial epithets, abject cruelty

The Song of Solomon – premarital sex, vulgar language, murder

The Hand Maid’s Tale – dystopia, sexism, theocratic cruelty

And that’s not even considering the poetry we read.

Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
`Those breasts are flat and fallen now
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’

`Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.

`A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’

~WB Yeats

That’s it.

Thanks for listening to my Ted Rant.

“The Best Bad Dylan I Ever Saw”

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In a not so shocking development, Bob Dylan’s coming to Charleston, South Carolina, in his Never Ending Tour.[1]

The cat’s indefatigable: March 16, Austin, March 18 Shreveport, March 19 New Orleans, March 21 Montgomery, March 23 Nashville, March 24 Atlanta, March 26 Savannah, March 27 Charleston . . . [2]

And the beat goes on, as they say.

I just checked the last set list from December of 2021, and if you’re planning to attend a show, I strongly suggest purchasing the album Rough and Rowdy Ways because a majority of the songs performed (at least in December of 2021) come from the album, his first album of original songs since 2012.

Here’s the first paragraph of Jon Parleles’ review in the Times:

Latter-day Bob Dylan is for die-hards. His voice is tattered and scratchy, not always bothering to trace a melody. His lyrics can be cryptic or throwaway when they’re not downright bleak. His music is adamantly old-fashioned, and he’s not aiming to ingratiate himself with anyone.

And the last:

And in “Black Rider,” a string-band ballad that tiptoes along, pausing each time Dylan takes a breath, he addresses a mysterious figure — Death, perhaps — with alternating sympathy and aggression. “Don’t turn on the charm,” he warns. “I’ll take a sword and hack off your arm.” For all he has seen and sung, on “Rough and Rowdy Ways” Dylan refuses to settle down, or to be anything like an elder statesman. He sees death looming, but he’s still in the fray.

I should add, perhaps, that his shows are for die-hards as well. Sometimes, because he has changed the melodies and his voice is indistinct, you might not recognize a song, even an iconic one like “Blowing in the Wind,” until it’s almost done.

Obviously, I’m one of the die-hards, and I’ve seen some fantastic concerts, one in Columbia, SC, in 1988, one at the North Charleston Coliseum in which he played a killer electric guitar, and my favorite, at the Orange Peel, a bar in Asheville, during the 2004 election campaign.

I’ve also seen some less than stellar shows, the worst outside at the Joe with Willie Nelson as the opening act.

But I’ve never seen one quite as bad as my pal, fellow die-harder, Jeremy Jones described to me last night at Low Life, one of Folly’s coolest spots. Anyway, I’ll let Jeremy tell it.

“The best bad Dylan I ever say was at the Saegner Theater in New Orleans. He was as drunk as a skunk. The band went into the Hendrix version of “All Along the Watch Tower,” and he stumbled to the mike and started singing “Like a Rolling Stone,” and the band was like, what the? I mean it was absolutely fantastic.”

This occurred in the Aughts, so I suspect we’ll not witness something so conjunctificated, but if we do, I’ll be smack dab in the middle of Row A in the orchestra, if Dylan and I are still among the quick, that is.

illegal photo by my son Ned Moore

[1] It began 2 June 1988 and has featured 3,066 shows and counting. Of course, one day it will end, when ol’ Bob succumbs to something or another. Certainly, Keith Richards will be named one of the pallbearers.

[2] No wonder is voice is raspy.

Wintry Mix

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I’m not a fan of the wan light of winter, the weakening light of day, the marrow-penetrating wind off the river, the fallen leaves’ decay. 

I’m not a fan of hypocrisy, the politician’s flipflop, the post hoc ergo propter hoc array of fallacious thinking I hear every day.

I’m not a fan of fantasy, ogres, princesses, dragons, flying carpets defying gravity, flagons containing elixirs, mages with conical caps, sages holed up in caves.

I am a fan of poetry, though, even the darkest of wintery verse, Dylan Thomas’s father’s curse, John Keats’s death lament – that shiny black hearse in reverse.

The Gentrification of Folly Beach

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In the halcyon days of the early century, when people asked me how long I’d lived on Folly, and I’d reply ten or fifteen – depending on the year –they’d inevitably respond, “Wow, you must have seen lots of changes.”

“Actually, not all that much on the East Side where I live,” I’d say. “There’s no sewage, so you can’t build a beach McMansion on a lot that doesn’t perk, or barely perks.”

Alas, however, that assessment predated the proliferation of Airbnbs that are popping up all over the island like irritating internet ads, infiltrating not only the commercial district but residential neighborhoods as well. The unpaved lane where our home stands, once the site of an idyllic neighborhood of mostly unmarried senior citizens, has been transformed into Little Fort Lauderdale. Houses that were zoned for one or two bedrooms now hold as many as fifteen to twenty defecators straining the unseen septic tanks over which they park their vehicles on lawns of well-tended rye. 

And, when night/ Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons /Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.[1]

Why rent your quaint beach cottage to a struggling musician or food and beverage worker when you can make more in three days than you would in a month by renting to bachelor party attendants or untanned wanna-be beachcombers rolling up in their exhaust-spewing Pathfinders?

I walk to the post office every weekday morning, and I’d guess seventy percent of the traffic consists of the white pick-up trucks of subcontractors, the plastic surgeons of construction, engaged in the soul-crushing transformation of gentrification.

However, it’s not really the funky real estate that makes Folly Folly; rather, it’s the long-term renters, the bartenders, cooks, and waitresses, the painters, the musicians, eking out their livings in a soulful setting.

The population of residents of Folly is in decline. Leave it to Springsteen to nail it:

Because there’s just different people coming down here now and they see things in different ways
And soon everything we’ve known will just be swept away.[2]

But look, there’s a conga line of bachelorette party weekenders! Hubbub-hubbub-bubba, swish boom Bah!

art by Wesley Moore III

[1] Paradise Lost, 1.500-3. Perhaps I should have titled this piece “Paradise Lost.”

[2] “Independence Day

Whatchamacallit

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. . . either for tragedy, comedy, 
history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, 
tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral . . . 

Polonius, Hamlet, 2.2

First, as cliché demands, the good news: my novel Today, Oh Boy has been accepted for publication, which, of course, delights me. Already my mind is running riot with unreasonable aspirations. No, I’m not dreaming of PEN awards or Pulitzers. We’re talking commercial fiction here, a narrative devoid of deeper meanings, a plot concocted to distract, not to enlighten. No, I’m not rehearsing acceptance speeches but wondering who is going to play the protagonist Rusty in the Hula Netflix TNT USA Network Apple TV adaptation. 

You know of any skinny redheaded sixteen-year-old actors with acne?

And now the potentially bad news. The publisher (who shall remain anonymous for now) has classified the novel as Young Adult. Here’s a quote from the acceptance letter:

“The characters fit nicely into their setting, embodying the south of the past and making the story stand out against a typical high school drama. The Board was keen to comment on the dynamic writing style and believes the story has the potential to excel within its genre.”

But the thing is, I wrote Today, Oh Boy for literate adults, not for tweens. Here’s a sentence from the novel describing one of the characters, AJ, who has cut school in the middle of the day and just finished smoking a joint with his dropout friend Will Waring:

“While Will has been daydreaming and tuning out his mother, Weeza has been quizzing AJ about his dismissal from school, essentially perp-walking his thoughts right out of lotus land into the dingy confines of a Raskolnikovian closet.”

Of course, I know whoever the editor might be will definitely ax “Raskolnikovian closet” because no tween or teen (or typical adult for that matter) has read Crime and Punishment and therefore won’t recognize the allusion to its agoraphobic protagonist pent up in his impoverished toilet stall of a rented room.  But, hey, I like the way it sounds.[1] Read it aloud: Rask-KOL-ni-KOV-ian closet.

And to add insult to injury, I don’t dig YA novels, have only read a handful because I taught 7th and 8th grades in my earlier teaching career. Although well-crafted, The House on Mango Street and The Giver aren’t up my alley. I’m not an admirer of To Kill a Mockingbird for that matter.

I’ll admit, though, that Today is difficult to classify. In one sense, it’s historical fiction because it takes place in a real place, Summerville, SC, in the year 1970, which in the Hula Netflix TNT USA Network Apple TV adaptation will require period clothing and vintage automobiles.

In another sense, it’s a souped-up Greek comedy sans chorus: it takes place in one day and essentially in one setting with continuous action.

It’s got a gruesome death, stolen goods, drug use, kung-fu fighting, and a highspeed chase.

So, what are we dealing with here? A historical-romance-Greek Comedy-Mystery-Action Adventure?

If it were up to me, and I was forced to ram into a sub-genre, I’d call it Pulp YA.

If I had self-published, I could have had full autonomy, but now my brainchild is under the authority of others. They say they’ll work with me, but the contract also makes it clear that they have the final say-so. Chances are Today, Oh Boywon’t be sporting the cover below when you buy it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or better yet, from your local independent bookstore.

[1] I did read the Classic Illustrated version of C&P when I was ten or so and didn’t enjoy it.

The Joys of Sneezing

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. . . weeds, in wheels shoot long and lovely and lush 



                      		Hot springs’ vented vapors spew skyward 
                   		in cloudy swirling images to be carved in wood
								chiseled in stone, 
			personified.

                                 		
				First Gaia, 
				then Maia,

Oh God, 
	Zeus is on the loose,
		Isis is in crisis, 
                                						Noah drunk and Jonah swallowed, 								
				Jesus, Vishnu, Jah-Jah 

								
				JAH-CHOO! 

				Gesundheit!

Work Stoppage (Or the Wages of Sloth)

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from the Smithsonian Art Museum

In the summer of 1972, I went to work for Flack Jones Lumber because it was one of three establishments in Summerville that hired longhairs. To say I was an unskilled laborer would be an understatement. Driving a nail, much less running a power saw, transcended my meager talents, so I ended up bouncing around the lumberyard on a truck driven by a Black man who went by the name of Hambone.  We performed odd jobs like moving stacks of boards and shoveling sawdust. Hambone, who had crinkly cottony hair beneath his green hardhat, was a man of few words, but I do remember his making this pronouncement one blistering June afternoon: “When I was young, I couldn’t wait to knock off work so I could go fishin’. Now I can’t wait to knock off so I can get me a drink of liquor.”

Surprisingly, my White coworkers were cordial, given that the early Seventies were fraught with clashes between blue collar laborers and longhairs, especially in the Deep South. Once a fellow who looked Scots-Irish asked if I thought a man’s hair could grow as long as a woman’s.

My hair was red, so I stood out like a sore thumb WC Fields’ nose. 

“I reckon so,” I said.

I recall one particularly irksome task. Armed with a shovel blade, I crawled beneath a power saw and filled a plastic bucket with sawdust and then crawled out to dump the sawdust in a designated pile, and then crawled back under to repeat this labor until all the sawdust had been removed. Shortly thereafter, I decided Flack Jones wasn’t for me, though the hours were all right, Monday through Friday from 7 to 4.

I heard that Red and White, which also hired longhairs, had an opening, so I applied and was hired, joining my friends Joey Brown, David Kaczor, and Jim Collins bagging groceries, though actually Joey and David had worked their way up to stocking shelves. 

On my very first day, I got yelled at by the owner’s son for overloading a bag with canned goods, and twelve hours later, when tasked with mopping the floor, the owner’s son chided me for my poor technique and demonstrated how to move the mop head in circles. So, of course, I followed his lead, only to be confronted by the produce man John Henry who told me I was doing it all wrong and modeled for me an alternate technique. moving the mop in S-like patterns. As I’d move up and down the aisles mopping, I’d keep a look out for my two instructors and switch back and forth depending on who was passing my way, though I preferred John Henry’s method.

“Now, that’s more like it,” one or the other would say.

Working at Red and White was less grueling than working at Flack Jones, but the hours sucked – two twelve hour shifts on Fridays and Saturdays and every other Sunday with afternoon shifts on the other weekdays with Mondays and Wednesdays off.

So, I quit to take a pay cut to work at Carolina Home Furnishers, the third place that hired longhairs, where I mostly sat in a recliner and watched daytime TV with my boss Weeza, a benevolent overseer who called me “darling” and sent me to the liquor store around the corner in the afternoons.

It seems that she and Hambone were on the same page.

Yes, I was lazy that summer, not to mention vain, and unaccustomed to working, but my leisure days were over. At USC, I worked at Capstone cafeteria after classes on weekdays and on Saturday mornings and bused tables at the revolving restaurant Top of Carolina during Sunday Brunch. The pay was $1.15 an hour, but I got one free meal. After I graduated and entered grad school, I stopped working at the cafeteria to tend bar at the Golden Spur but continued to bus tables on Sundays until I dropped out to seek my fortune in the Lowcountry.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The Harlequin Globetrotters

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In 1994, I had a short story published in a journal that no longer exists, the fate of virtually all my published works. I’ve decided to reboot it here instead of allowing its yellowing pages to languish unread in my drafty garret’s file cabinet. It’s a silly story, a mash up parody of sports fiction a la Boys Life magazine and Harlequin Romances. 

So, as they say, without further ado.

The Harlequin Globetrotters

Although Skylark Keats despised Catrina Piedmont with all the hot fury of his competitive passion, she nevertheless fascinated him by being a devastatingly beautiful woman yet the pickiest basketball official that he had ever encountered. Throughout the first half, as he bounded up and down the court, Skylark could feel her eyes on him, surveying all six feet eleven inches of his muscle-ripped frame, searching eagerly for the slightest infraction so she could blow the whistle on him. In fact, this was the first time all night that he had been at the foul line. The other ref had called the opposing center for delivering a blatant karate chop on Skylark’s right wrist as he lofted a jumper that somehow had found its mark. Catrina had had a clear view of the play, yet her whistle, nestled in her beautiful full lips, remained unblown.

As Skylark’s hand gently cupped the circumference of the ball, his fingertips encountered gooseflesh, the grain of the leather seeming to prickle in anticipation. His brown almond-shaped eyes narrowed as they focused on the hoop that hovered ten feet away. If he could sink this free throw, the Globetrotters would even the score.

“We would be up by ten,” Skylark thought, “if it weren’t for that female ref.”

Determined not to let her rattle him, he cocked his elbows, then catapulted the ball in a soft, graceful arc that culminated in the sweet swish of success, the sound of petticoats rustling. Seconds later, with the score knotted at 69, the buzzer ended what had been a frenetic, high-scoring half of basketball. 

As he lumbered towards the locker room, Skylark cursed himself for desiring to feast his eyes on Catrina’s delicious smorgasbord of feminine allure. A trace of her appeared in the outskirts of his legendary peripheral vision, and he felt the muscles of his neck surrender to temptation as he turned to face her, to encounter those intelligent sea-green eyes fringed with sable lashes. Catrina’s petulant mouth quivered as she met his gaze, and as her sensuous lips parted, the whistle they had caressed fell across breasts that heaved, straining against the taut black-and-while stripes of her jersey. 

“Ha,” Skylark thought, fighting off the ferocious dogs of desire that hounded him, “she winded. There’s no woman who can keep up this pace for two halves. I’ll pick up the tempo in the second half. She’ll keel over, and we’ll get an alternative ref, a male, someone who isn’t so doggone onery.

Chapter Two 

Coach Krings’ kindly but faded blue eyes crinkled concern as the players huddled around the green chalkboard of the locker room. The tapping of the chalk on the slate sounded like an SOS as he furiously scrawled X after O. The Globetrotters had never lost a game. Not ever. And here they were struggling for their life against an unheralded two-bit college team from the Midwest. Obviously, these collegians had cut classes to ogle game films, and Coach Krings was setting up a new offense to throw them a loop. As important as he knew it was, Skylark had a hard time concentrating. He couldn’t get his mind off that female ref. He imagined her in the ladies’ room sponging her hot alabaster flesh with a water-soaked sponge, first daubing the high cliffs of her cheekbones, then down the face of her collarbone, ever so slowly sliding between her pert, rose-tipped-

“Keats, what in the heck is the matter with you. Pay attention!”

The fantasy burst, and Skylark was back in the locker room facing the crumpled brow of a frustrated Coach Krings.

“I don’t know, Coach. It’s that female ref. She’s thrown me off balance. She’s calling every picky ol’ thing.”

“Keats, I’ve noticed, but there’s nothing we can do about that.”

“What if we cranked it up a notch?” Skylark suggested. “I mean what if we were to really go all the way? We’d wear her out.  I mean she’d be so exhausted she couldn’t muster enough wind to rattle her whistle.”

“You know,” Coach Krings mused, “you just might have something there.”

Chapter 3

And what a second half it turned out to be. The Globetrotters and the Battling Baptists traded baskets in a frenzied orgy of slam dunks and three pointers. Ten – count ‘em – ten wide-shouldered torsos tapering into flat stomachs, slender hips, and long muscular legs galloping back and forth across the court like gladiators engaged in a life-or-death struggle, and right smack dab in the middle, Catrina Piedmont, matching the men step-for-step, her body bathed in perspiration, her referee’s jersey soaked, clinging seductively to the rise and fall of her luscious curves.

Chapter 4

This was a heart-wrenching game for Katrina. For years she had been in love with Skylark Keats. Ever since he had visited her dying brother at Children’s Hospital. As the years rolled by, she followed Skylark’s career and sought vicariously to be near him by taking up basketball as a hobby, a hobby that soon became an obsession. At college, she got her feet wet reffing intramural games. She loved it – the power and the glamor – but above all, she sought to excel, and that meant being in superb physical shape, concentrating with all her penetrating mental prowess, and above all, being absolutely, incorruptibly impartial.

Quickly, after graduation, she rose to the highest echelon in the ranks of basketball officials nationwide, and now, as fate would have it, she was reffing a Globetrotters’ game. What a tug-of-war of conflicting emotions she had endured. How could she possibly be disinterested in a game in which the man she loved, the only man she would ever love, played? How could she be sure that her abiding devotion wouldn’t mist over her vision and color her split-second decisions? There was only one solution to her dilemma: She would bear down hard on Skylark to compensate for her adoration.

Catrina had prayed for a patented Globetrotter blowout, but no, that was not to be. It was nose to nose, neck and neck, breast and breast, flank and flank as the clock ticked down, from seven minutes, sliding smoothly and expertly over six minutes, down to four minutes, then to two minutes, to the very cusp of 60 seconds. Skylark was burdened with four fouls, so he played tentatively on defense, allowing the opposing point guard to dribble past him for a driving layup to put the Baptists up by one with only 24 seconds remaining. 

Coach Krings called a timeout. The Globetrotters would play for the final shot. If they made it, they would win; if they didn’t, they would have lost for the first time in the history of the franchise. No telling what that would do to their revenues, most of which went to charities, to ailing little children across the country. 

As Coach Krings mapped out strategy, Skylark flicked a glance Catrina’s way. Where had he seen her before? She was ever so hauntingly familiar. And so, so beautiful, so, so beautiful that he could almost forget those questionable travelling calls, those unforgiving lane violations she had charged him with.

The horn signaled the players back onto the court. Catrina held the ball in her gorgeous, delicate hands, so beautifully proportioned that it seemed a Renaissance master had painted them on the basketball.

She could not escape Skylark’s open frank gaze. She felt herself melting, but suddenly tensed, shaking off the languor. She tossed him the ball and backpedaled to get a more comprehensive view. Certainly, she could hold off for another 24 seconds her mad compulsion to stop play, take him in her arms, and force him to surrender to her throbbingly passionate yet absolutely pure love.

Stalling was something new for the world-renowned Globetrotters, yet they were gifted physical specimens, perhaps fifteen years older than their competitors, but more experienced and still lightening quick. They passed the ball with dizzying speed, whipping it around in the gravitational field of their expertise, as the seconds ticked off 12, 11, ten, nine . . . 

With four seconds remaining, Martinique lofted an alley-oop rainbow pass, and Skylark broke for the basket, leaving the floor as he soared gracefully to snatch the ball and stuff it through the awaiting hoop. As he rammed home what might be the winning basket, he knew it must pay for it in a crunching collision with the defender.

He glanced down right before impact, and there she was, too, in their path, striving for the optimum vantage point. The collision produced a swirling kaleidoscope cartwheel of arms, legs, and zebra stripes as their bodies rolled across the padded out-of-bounds.

Somehow, he had ended up on top of her; the other player, knocked cold, lay by their side. Miraculously, the whistle had not been jarred from Catrina’s mouth. Would she call charging on Skylark, negating the winning basket and ending what might be the most phenomenal streak in the history of statistics?

His face hovered mere inches from hers, and as she inhaled, perhaps to blow the whistle, Skylark remembered where he had seen that face.

“You’re that little Piedmont boy’s sister,” he whispered, and no sooner than he had said it, the whistle fell harmlessly from her lips. 

“Yes,” she moaned, “and I love you. I have loved you since that day. I shall always love you.”

Skylark studied her face as she uttered those words, and he saw there absolute sincerity, a sincerity that melted his own heart.

Oblivious to the hubbub that surrounded them, they allowed their lips to touch, at first tentatively, a gentle fluttering butterfly of a kiss. He knew he had to get up, but he couldn’t. He could feel her arms encircling his back, her tongue flicking across his earlobe, darting its tip into his ear. He crushed her to him and started to kiss her eagerly, his tongue exploring, then plundering the warm, wet cave of her mouth. 

Swept away in absolute abandon, they surrendered to the tidal wave of their pent-up passion as the roar of the crowd surged over them like the sea.

Wesley’s Lost Land of Academics

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Puttering around in the repository of my computer this morning, I opened a folder labeled “Academics” where I have stored materials I used in my English classes, some of which date back to the previous century. I opened a few quizzes, lecture presentations, essay assignments, etc. and thought to myself, what a waste to have these documents lying dormant, as it were.

When I taught, I often found professional educational materials lacking, so I created my own. One such production was a 15,000-word primer entitled How to Write a Research Paper: A Hermeneutic Tale.

Rather than dryly explaining the process of researching, writing, and documenting sources, I created a narrative featuring two students, Bennington Rhodes and Flip Burger, who take very different approaches in tackling their research projects, which at Porter-Gaud included choosing the primary source. 

The primer’s utility lay in its adaptability: I could update the ever-changing MLA protocols and save the school a ton of money in MLA handbooks, which become obsolescent in no time flat. 

The primer includes explanations on choosing the primary source, amassing a preliminary bibliography, creating both a topic and sentence outline, and citing sources. I actually ghost-wrote Bennington’s paper on Chronicle of a Death Foretold, attempting to parrot the thinking and prose of a sixteen-year-old.

Obviously, the primer, which I assembled in 2012, is itself obsolescent given the MLA’s ever-evolving (devolving?) citation procedures; however, the basic information stands the test of time in my unhumble opinion.

Reproducing the entire document would be cumbersome in a blog format, but I thought I’d include here the last four pages to offer an idea what the primer was like.

If any of you lit teachers out there would like a complete copy, contact me, and I’ll send a pdf version. By the way, it’s not copyrighted.

So here are the last four pages of the text (the document actually ends with an appendix explaining how to document various sources). I’m critiquing Bennington’s essay, which comes a few pages before.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Structure of the Paper

By following his outline, Bennington insured that his paper would be well unified.  He has, as curmudgeonly Dr. Crabapple puts it, “a multi-tiered thesis,” which simply means the thesis is broken into multiple parts that form the sections of his actual paper.  

Each section of the thesis – the detective genre aspect, the tragic conventions, etc. reemerge in the topic sentences of the paragraphs devoted to them. 

Again, here’s Bennington’s thesis:

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Garcia Marquez parodies several different narrative traditions – particularly detective fiction, Greek tragedy, and commercial romance – all the while subverting those genres to underscore the immorality of Macondo’s culture of machismo.

When shifting from paragraph to paragraph, it’s important to create smooth transitions, to refer ever so briefly to an idea expressed in the previous paragraph in the topic sentence of the next paragraph.

For example, Bennington’s second paragraph, the one devoted to the detective genre, ends with this sentence: 

 “Perhaps Gabriel Marquez is suggesting that the answer to the question of ‘who done it’ is everyone.”

His next paragraph, you’ll remember, is devoted to how Garcia Marquez incorporates elements of Greek Tragedy into Chronicle.  Rather than immediately changing the subject from the detective genre to Greek tragedy, Bennington briefly refers to the detective genre as he begins the paragraph on Greek drama”:

“Garcia Marquez adds depth to the detective genre by superimposing upon it characteristics of Greek tragedy, and in doing so, he further underscores the dysfunctionality of machismo.”

Note how each of the emphasized words in the above quote plugs into the thesis.  Pretty nifty, Bennington!

Style 

A research paper, unlike an informal essay, should be formal in style, which means you should avoid using the second person pronoun “you” to refer to “everyone,” as your omniscient narrator just did, and you should also avoid contractions so that your style is somewhat elevated.  It’s a dinner at a snooty restaurant with your Great Aunt Gertrude, not a chilidog gobbled down with Flip at the pay counter at Bert’s on Folly. 

Note that this primer is informal. Your beloved omniscient narrator is writing as if he is talking to you.  If this were a formal essay, the above might be rendered like this:

A research paper, unlike an informal essay, should be formal in style, which means one should avoid using the second person pronoun “you” to refer to “everyone,” and one should avoid contractions so that one’s style is somewhat elevated.

Nevertheless, you should try to create a style that comes across has “heightened conversation” rather than dry analytical soullessness.  For example, the off-putting formality of the above could be softened to this:

A research paper, unlike an informal essay, should be formal in style, which means writers should avoid using the second person pronoun “you” to refer to “everyone,” and should avoid contractions so that the style of the essay is somewhat elevated.

One last note, during your research, you’ll discover some writers refer to themselves in the first person.  In other words, they throw around the pronoun “I” a lot.  You should avoid doing this yourself because you aren’t a tenured professor sporting a wool blazer with patches on the elbows.  In other words, you’re a sixteen-year-old who doesn’t bother to look up the words you don’t know in the dictionary.

A Critique of Bennington’s Paper

As Ms. Newspeak grades Bennington’s essay, she has four tasks to perform.  First, she needs to determine how well Bennington’s essay conforms to the dictates of the MLA/ Porter-Gaud process.  Then she needs to judge the essay’s content and style.  Finally, she needs to subtract any grammatical or mechanical errors Bennington has committed (up to twenty points).

Ms. Newspeak takes Bennington’s process grade 98 and his content grade 90 and divides it by 2, so he ends up with 94.  Then she subtracts his grammatical/ mechanical errors.  Because Bennington’s a senior and has more or less mastered the mechanics of writing (and also because his fussy conservative Charlestonian bow-tie wearing father proofread the paper), Bennington received no deductions for grammar or mechanics.  By the way, Bennington’s father caught a comma splice and a couple of other comma errors saving his son an overall 9-point deduction [5+ (2 x 2)] for you math people.

Nevertheless, Bennington’s essay is far from perfect.  Let’s spend just a couple of minutes critiquing it before we bring this primer to a happy close.

Bennington’s title is a bit much; however, it’s better than a bland title. It does grab the reader’s attention.

By far, the weakest paragraph in Bennington’s essay is his introduction. The sentences don’t come together fluidly.  He starts with Faulkner, then shifts to magic realism and then to different narrative techniques.  There’s little continuity here.  It would have been better to begin with a generalization about narrative techniques and to then narrow those generalizations using that one thread. 

Also, Bennington’s essay would have been better if he had chosen only one narrative approach instead of three and had gone into more detail about how Garcia Marquez parodied that technique.  If Bennington had spent more time on his research, he could have written a richer analysis on any one of the three techniques he discusses rather than touching upon each in a rather cursory fashion.  

Bennington’s organization makes essay is somewhat quilt-like.  There’s the detective square that’s sewn to the Greek tragedy square that’s sewn to the romance novel square.  In addition, his paragraph division is somewhat dubious.  For example, rather than including “omens and foreboding” in the paragraph on the classic unities of time and place, Bennington would have been better off creating a separate paragraph on omens and expanding that paragraph to flesh it out more.  However, he does “weave” the idea of machismo fairly well throughout the essay, so there’s at least a pattern or motif running through his quilt.  The very best essays, however, like valedictorian-in-waiting Connie Cerebrowski’s, interweave their arguments to create a seamless tapestry of quotation and analysis. Her essay on a Freudian reading of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers had AP professor Mr. Aridwitt, PhD flipping through “the book and [Thesaurus] of [his] brain” for superlative synonyms. 

Bennington is, however, a capable stylist, having dutifully done his Wordly Wise lessons with dictionary in hand and having read his assigned novels word for word.  Unfortunately, or fortunately, whichever be the case, a well-honed style can sometimes soften (at least) somewhat the heart of a English essay assessor, even one as gnarled and cynical as Dr. Crabapple.

Springtime    

As the research paper rapidly fades into a fond memory in Bennington’s consciousness, he looks forward to his last trimester of high school with a sense of anticipation and freedom.  In fact, he’s looking forward to his free period so he and Andrea can perch like a pair of parrots on a bench outside on this mild, sunny day and mimic routines from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a movie that they’ve seen forty-seven times between them.  As he’s headed through the S&T Lobby, Bennington runs into a rather downcast Flip Burger bent like a hobo beneath the burden of his LL Bean bookbag.

     “Hey, Flip,” Bennington says, “Andrea and I are headed outside to catch some rays.  Wanna join us?”

      “Can’t, dude.”

      “Why not?”

      “Dude, I got study hall.”

      “A study hall?  Why?”

      “Dude, I failed English last term.  It’s, like, so unfair.”

      “I’ll say.”

      “Gotta split, dude.  I got old man Crabapple for study hall.  If I’m late, he’s liable to make me copy out sentences by Immanuel Kant or something.”

      “Okay, later.”

      “Later, dude.”

Perhaps, uncompassionately, Bennington has already forgotten poor Flip’s troubles as our hero pushes open the double doors and trots down the stairs to the balmy breezes and melodic birdsong of a glorious spring morning.

       Halleluiah! 

Botticelli: The Rites of Spring