Vaudeville Meets William Faulkner Meets The Hallmark Channel

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Vaudeville Meets William Faulkner Meets The Hallmark Channel

On Friday, I had my first interview involving my new book Long Ago Last Summer.  Lorne Chambers, who owns the Folly Current and has an MFA in writing from the College of Charleston, met me at Chico Feo where we chatted about creative writing in general and Long Ago in particular over a couple of beers. 

Occasionally, I didn’t know how to respond to Lorne’s excellent questions because Long Ago is such a strange book that it can’t be easily categorized.  When you’re trying to sell something, it’s helpful to have a clear, simple message like it’s “a coming-of-age novel” or a “dystopian sci-fi epic” or “a romantic comedy.”  With Long Ago Last Summer it’s more like Vaudeville meets William Faulkner meets The Hallmark Channel.

In essence, it’s a memoir, which is embarrassing enough because of the egocentricity inherent in thinking my life is so noteworthy that it warrants being shared with others.  And in many ways, my life has been unadventurous. I enjoyed a long lasting, loving marriage for 38 years, a stable teaching career for 34 years, reared two successful sons, owned a succession of dogs, remarried as a widower and gained a remarkable stepdaughter. I’m well-travelled, I guess, but that’s not unusual in this day and age.  To adapt a cliche: my adulthood has not been much to write home about as far as excitement goes.

On the other hand, I grew up in the segregated South, a very dark, fascinating place, a fallen civilization forever picking its scabs but then licking those newly opened wounds.  The little Lowcountry town of Summerville where I grew up had two (what I’m going to uncharitably call) village idiots, among other eccentrics, like the old crone Miss Capers, religious fanatics galore, creepy good humor men, and more alcoholics per capita than most places this side of the Betty Ford Center.

Much of the book deals with an awakening consciousness that develops in a Southern Gothic setting, or, as the back cover puts it, Long Ago Last Summer “embodies the profound paradoxes of Southern culture against a landscape dotted with antebellum plantations, shotgun shacks, suburban subdivisions, Pentecostal churches, and juke joints.” 

However, Long Ago is not a typical memoir in that it’s fragmentary, a collage of sorts, a mosaic, a smorgasbord or gumbo that runs the gamut from lighthearted vignettes to bleak accounts of terrible wrongdoing.  If I were going to wax hyper-pretentious, I’d call it neo-Modernistic because like Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” it pieces together fragments to create a narrative held together by recurring themes.  In this case, Sothern Gothicism, alienation, insomnia, and the vagaries of memory and reality. 

Short fiction, verse, essays, and parodies that can stand alone out of their context occur chronologically to trace my life from its beginnings in 1952 to the present. Long Ago is, as stated in the preface, “a guided tour of the haunted houses and cobwebbed attics of my youth” followed by my college experience, my meeting and falling in love with Judy Birdsong, her illness and death, and my finding new love after her departure.  In fact, included in the collection is a villanelle written by my wife Caroline that deals with Judy’s lingering presence in our marriage.  In some cases, fiction is juxtaposed with non-fiction so that it’s not necessarily clear which is which. 

In other words, Long Ago Last Summer is really weird, like its subject matter. 

I’m appearing next week on Fox News 24’s midday show to attempt to explain all of this to viewers who may or may not have heard of TS Eliot and/or Modernism or vaudeville for that matter.

Also, weather permitting, I’m reading brief samples Monday, May 26 around 7:20 at George Fox’s open mic Soap Box at Chico Feo. 

So, thoughts and prayers, y’all. I need them.

Little Baby Blues: 1953 Edition

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Little Baby Blues: 1953 Edition

On 14 December 1952, a rare snowy day in Summerville, South Carolina, Dr. Howard Snyder, aided and abbeted by forceps, yanked me from my mother’s womb into a world of relative woe.  The procedure flattened my head, which resulted in cephalohematoma, a condition in which blood pools under a newborn’s scalp. My father had to leave that afternoon to return to Clemson via a Greyhound bus.  When the lady sitting next to him asked why he looked so sad, he replied, “My wife just gave birth to a seven pound, eight ounce monkey.”  

As a child and teenager, I heard this anecdote on more than one occasion, which would elicit a cackle from my mother, who in so many words agreed that indeed I was a hideous newborn. However, she was quick to assure me that in a couple of weeks I was so beautiful that when she pushed my stroller around Colonial Lake, strangers stopped her to admire my beauty. 

I took solace in my mom’s stroller story as a child, not realizing that praising a baby’s looks is a common practice of adults when they run across almost any infant. On Facebook, I often encounter the red puffy yet wrinkled faces of newborns who are deemed “beautiful” or “adorable” by scores of friends of the parents. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg sat in a courtroom being grilled by Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor.  My first full year, 1953, marked the feverous height of the Red Scare, back when the Russians were our enemies rather than our friends (or at least our President’s friend).[1] This collective commiephobia spread, appropriately enough, during an epidemic of polio. 

Trump and Cohn

In 1953, R&B had not made it to the mainstream, and rock-n-roll was in utero.  Every artist but one in Billboard’s top 30 singles of 1953 is white, mostly male crooners and female sopranos. Overly orchestrated instrumentals were also popular. The number one hit that year is “The Song from the Moulin Rouge” by Percy Faith and His Orchestra, a song so saccharine sounding that your ears might develop diabetes if you listen to more than twice. 

I’ve never heard of loads of these hitmakers like Pee Wee Hunt, Frank Chacksfield, Richard Hayman, Joni James. By far, the coolest song in that top 30 is from the one Black performer, South Carolina’s own Eartha Kitt, singing and purring “C’est si Bon” en francais.  She later was cast as Cat Woman in the Batman TV series. 

On the other hand, I have not only heard of but seen all of the top movies of ‘53, except for The Naked Spur. I’ve seen From Here to Eternity and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at least twice, I’ve also watched Roman Holiday and Stalag 17.  Disney’s Peter Pan was one of my favorite movies in childhood, especially because the leader of the Lost Boys was, like me, a red head.

Nevertheless, despite the general awfulness of 1953, being born around then ended up being a propitious time to begin life’s journey. My parents, who had grown up during the Great Depression, wanted my siblings and me to have a better life than they suffered yet didn’t monitor our every move, allowing us to roam freely, unencumbered with water bottles or walkie talkies, the ’60’s equivalent cell phones. 

And by our adolescence in the mid ’60s, the music got ridiculously good, though we feared getting drafted and going to Nam, but by then the war was winding down and a draft lottery was in force. Compared today, college tuitions were dirt cheap. I could earn enough money in the summers to cover tuition.

However, I must say, for me at least, it’s a melancholy situation in my twilight years to witness the spectacle of lawlessness and corruption foisted on the Republic by Roy Cohn’s mentee, who obviously, as far as Machiavellianism is concerned, was an A+ student. 

C’est la vie, as Eartha might sing.

I’ll leave you with the number 1 hit of 1953.

[1] Fun facts to know as share: Roy Cohn, who in addition to being one of the prosecutors at the Rosenberg trial, also served as chief counsel for Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts, a term Donald Trump appropriated during his first term to describe investigations targeting him for such acts of malfeasance like storing stolen classified documents in bathrooms and paying hush money to porn stars. 

Yesterday, Oh Boy

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Yesterday, Oh Boy

When my friend David Boatwright, who produced the cover of Today, Oh Boy, approached me about adapting the poolroom chapter from the novel into a fifteen-minute film, I jumped at the chance.  David whipped out a script, which I approved, then later made some significant changes. 

Near the end of the novel, which is set in 1970, Rusty Boykin, an ADD-riddled hippie-wanna-be from Summerville, South Carolina, and Ollie Wyborn, a straightlaced, straight-A transplant from St. Paul, Minnesota, join forces in thwarting an attack from a pair of rednecks whose favorite pastime is, to use the Lowcountry lingo of the day, “cutting ass,” i.e., beating up people they don’t cotton to.  

David’s major change in the second draft of the script was fusing Rusty and Ollie into one character, which I again approved, given I had complete confidence in his intelligence and talent, and because as a practical matter, there’s virtually no room for character development in a fifteen-minute movie.  Another significant change, which added gravitas to the film, David created a new character, a Viet Nam vet who relates a harrowing account of wartime mayhem to the bartender, played my former student, David Mandell. 

So anyway, David Boatwright and his producer Paul Brown raised the needed money and assembled a crew of costume designers, cinematographers, assistant directors, sound people, make-up artists, art directors, property managers, actors, a stunt coordinator, a basset hound, etc. and shot the film in four days. 

The exterior shots, which included fisticuffs and car chase, were filmed on bucolic Wadmalaw Island and the interior shots at the defunct West Ashley restaurant Bearcat, which has been transformed into a ’70s era bait and tackle shop/bar complete with pinball machines and a functioning jukebox on loan from my friend Thom Piragnoli.

I asked David if I could have a cameo, and he said, of course, so yesterday I spent twelve amazing hours on the set being part of an incredibly complicated matrix of moving parts. 

When I arrived at seven, an actor was seated having his hair tended to. One of the make-up women said she would do my hair next, and I explained, “But I have no hair,” removing my hat, and she said, “Great!,” meaning, I take it, less work for her.  After I introduced myself, another woman said, “Oh, these young actors can’t wait to meet you. They’re walking around with the book.” 

Indeed, they were incredibly appreciative. Each one sincerely thanked me for writing the novel.  Two actors, twins brothers playing rednecks, asked me why their characters were so angry. When the actor Logan, who played the Viet Nam vet, thanked me for, in his words, “creating all of this,” I told him that, in fact, David had created his character and dialogue. He said yes, but I had created the world around him. To my mind, his performance and speech are the climax of the film. 

I abstractly knew that it would be cool to see characters I had created “come to life,” but had underestimated how gratifying it ended up being.  It was especially moving to see Jill Birdsong, modeled on the high school version of my late wife Judy Birdsong, performing her role, and I especially enjoyed the actor Patrick Basquill, who brought the bully Bobbey Ray Bosheen to life. The creepiness he brought to the role reminded me of William Dafoe’s portrayal of Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.

Also, it was really weird to hear the name “Rusty,” my childhood nickname, called out throughout the day. Sometimes, I thought they were referring to me. And Thomas, the actor who plays Rusty, looks a lot like I did in high school, except he has blue eyes, high cheek bones, brown hair, and isn’t riddled with freckles and acne. 

In other words, he’s skinny.

from left to right, Thomas Beck, Rusty Moore, and “Rusty Boykin”

It was such a wonderful day, the best ever in my life as a writer, and I can’t wait to see the finished product, entitled Summerville 1970, which will make the festival circuit and premiere sometime in the fall at the Terrace Theater on James Island.

Before I end this way too egotistical account, I want to acknowledge my wife Caroline Tigner Moore, without whom the manuscript of Today, Oh Boy would have been found in a drawer after my demise, rather than becoming a published novel. 

Caroline has encouraged me throughout but also has bravely said, “Un-uh, that doesn’t work, why don’t you do this instead.” She’s tactfully guided me through the interviews and the whole befuddling process of my post-teaching career, including offering encouragement in my avocation of creating “fake paintings.” 

After my beloved Judy Birdsong died, I imagined the lonely life of a wounded epicurean, but Caroline has enriched my life in ways I could not have imagined, especially in establishing a loving family that includes my wunderkind stepdaughter Brooks, who is as kind as she is brilliant, and a trio of pets, KitKat, the demi-mutt, and our blue-eyed ragdoll cats, Juno and Jasmine.

Love to them and to you!

PS. Here’s a link to the Kirkus review of Today, Oh Boy that includes an interview and links to purchase it via Amazon and Barnes and Noble, or better yet, get it from your local independent book store, which in Charleston is Buxton Books.

These Riffs I Have Shored Against My Ruin

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These Riffs I Have Shored Against My Ruin

for David Connor Jones

Outside that rococo room 

in the Waste Land

where in sad light 

a carvéd dolphin swam

the cock crew

                                     co co rico

                                     co co rico

While beneath the laqueraria,

you and I cut the rug  –  jug jug –

u and i

                        travel to the beat of     

Oed’ und leer das meer

                                                            But

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag

It’s so elegant

It’s so intelligent

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

Weialala leia

                                Wallala leialala

Drip 

            drop 

                        drip

                                    drop 

                                                drop

                                                drop                             

                                                drop

Novels Vis-a-Vis Screenplays

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Novels Vis-a-Vis Screenplays

At the request of an actor who’s interested in pitching my novel Today, Oh Boy to producers he’s worked with, I’ve written an adaptation of the novel for the screen.[1] It’s not an official screenplay per se, but a roadmap for the actor to determine what scenes he will use to produce a short “teaser” reel consisting of would-be shots from the would-be movie. I have no idea how this is done. Via AI I suspect.  Anyway, with the final proofs from the novel to the right of my iMac’s screen and a blank Word document on the left, I began writing and cutting and pasting.

The good news is that originally, using present tense and employing crisp visual imagery, I consciously composed Today, Oh Boy to read like a movie progressing. For example, here’s the opening of the novel.

A mango-hued, pockmarked bulletin board hangs on a classroom wall of pale lime green concrete blocks, the bulletin board pencil-stabbed and compass point-gouged. Among the graffiti are the names of the star-crossed lovers: Sandy + Tripp. Tragic Tripp, whose body was found last week tangled in blackberry bushes along the banks of the Ashley River, his skull smashed after falling off Bacons Bridge.

S-A-N-D-Y + T-R-I-P-P.

Rusty Boykin, a skinny, freckled redhead sitting on the bulletin board row in Mrs. Laban’s homeroom, traces his index finger in the depression of Sandy’s name. He supposes it’s Tripp’s work – the letters inartistic, juvenile. Sandy hasn’t been to school since Tripp’s death, four class days ago, and now it’s Monday, and she’s still not here. She should be sitting right in front of Rusty, her honey-colored hair hanging like a curtain to her waist. 

How to adapt this for the screen?  One way, you could have Rusty tracing his finger in Sandy’s name and then suddenly cut to Tripp falling off the bridge, or you could begin with Tripp’s accident. What I did was to begin with Tripp’s last meeting with Sandy, a conversation through her open bedroom window, his leaving in a rage, jumping into his GTO, pealing off, and ultimately driving his car off the road at Bacons Bridge into the Ashley River.

Actually, Tripp’s death is what Hitchcock called a McGuffin, a misleading device that’s irrelevant to the overall narrative.  After all, Today, Oh Boy is a comedy. Its title comes from the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life.”

I read the news today oh boy

About a lucky man who made the grade

And though the news was rather sad

Well I just had to laugh 

So, by having Tripp drive off the bridge rather than falling off the bridge, what I gain in cinematic excitement, I lose in the comic pairing of his first and last names. As it turns out, Tripp was a bully, a high school version of Trump.  At one point in the book, Alex Jensen, a junior at Summerville high, says to a friend Will, “Your last name is Trotter, you name your son Tripp, and he falls off a bridge to his death. What a surprise.”

In addition, the novel employs a great deal of what critics call “indirect discourse,” a device that allows a narrator to report what someone is thinking without using his exact words. For example, in the above excerpt, the sentence, “She should be sitting right in front of Rusty, her honey-colored hair hanging like a curtain to her waist” is rendered second-hand through Rusty’s consciousness. In a screenplay, you have to “show” rather than tell “tell,” which can lead to really awkward exposition, like you find in bad fiction like “The Most Dangerous Game”:

You’ve good eyes,” said Whitney, with a laugh,” and I’ve seen you pick off a moose moving in the brown fall bush at four hundred yards, but even you can’t see four miles or so through a moonless Caribbean night.”

That I couldn’t use direct narration or indirect discourse meant I had to omit some characters, like Camilla Creel, the impoverished girl who lives in an abandoned school bus with her mother and sister, and Weeza Waring, Will’s mother, who added several comic touches throughout the narrative.

So, overall, the script is much tidier than the novel, much more streamlined, yet not as rich in my attempt to capture the zeitgeist of Summerville, South Carolina in 1970, during integration, the beginning of the counterculture, and during an influx of Northerners moving to what at the time was a staid, conservative community.

Then again, I’m sure a professional screenwriter could do a much better job.

[1] By the way, it’s on sale at Amazon for a mere $10. 

Nothing Orange Can Stay

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Although spring offers rebirth, for example, dollar weeds resurrecting, azaleas ablaze, etc., it also has its downsides.

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

                                                Robert Frost “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

OMG! My life is slipping through my fingers! Nothing good ever lasts for long!

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

                                                Thomas Sterns Eliot “The Waste Land”

Same ol’ same ol’, death and resurrection, death and resurrection, death and resurrection . . . 

Here on Folly Beach, springtime attracts sybarites of all stripes, like those 25 cent beer nights in the 1900s, those days of yore. 

Today at Lowlife, on my side of the bar, a crew of northern males in their early sixties sported expensive haircuts, retro bowling-like shirts, and satiric lanyards celebrating impending inebriation. Maybe it was a college alum get-together. Who knows?  I asked one of them what was up, but he was not forthcoming. 

Meanwhile, inside the restaurant, across the bar from where I sat, a bushel of bachelorettes were doing something similar in the team party department, dressing alike, engaging in one last bacchanalia before the sacred vows.

Hubba hubba hubba, shish boom bah! “Do you?” “I do.” “I now pronounce you.”

Elsewhere (all over the world, in fact) more serious folks were amassing to protest the hare-brained economic and geopolitical executive orders of a leader who always wins golf tournaments held on courses he owns. 

Here’s the White House’s official announcement: “The President won his second round matchup of the Senior Club Championship today in Jupiter, FL, and advances to the Championship Round tomorrow,” 

To quote Bob Dylan, 

I couldn’t help but feel ashamed

to live in a land

where justice is just a game.

But here’s the good news (and the bad news). Trump and his cabinet are too slapdash careless to topple our democracy. Their idiotic unprovoked trade war is sure to produce a blue tsunami in the midterms next year.

Pity the poor Nancy Maces who’ll have to choose between getting primaried a year from now or continuing to vote for destruction.

Trump’s insanity will lead to failure. People will pretend they didn’t vote for him. 

So don’t despair. Nothing orange can stay. Spring leads to summer, summer autumn, fall winter.

Around and around we go, and where we end up is in the rat’s alley where the dead men lost their bones. so I say, to quote the late great Warren Zevon, “Enjoy every sandwich.”

“Go Away, Lindsey; You Bother Me.”

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Let me say right off that I’m an avid admirer of WC Fields, who, in fact, is the inspiration for Colonel Duckenfield, the amiable but drunken calculus teacher in my novel Today, Oh Boy.[1]

Here he is in action:

Colonel Dukenfield has charged his minions with two in-class problems using the squeeze principle, so he has excused himself, ostensibly to use the restroom. A huge veined bulbous nose dominates his round, puffy, flushed face, though there’s still a gleam in his squinty blue eyes, especially when he’s talking to a pretty lady. His knees, though, are killing him, along with his corn-riddled toes stuffed into a pair of scuffed wingtips, the only dress shoes he owns. Once he reaches the faculty men’s room, he closes the door and takes out the pewter flask that bears his name and the name of his plane, the Flying Fortress, etched handsomely in ornate, old-fashioned cursive. He sloshes the Jameson’s whiskey around before taking a long, hard draw. Carefully, he screws the cap back on and places the flask in the right pocket of his blazer.

I mean, what’s not to love?

So I don’t intend any disrespect to Field’s surviving progeny (his great granddaughter’s wedding picture appeared in the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 2018) when I suggest that Lindsey Graham could be plausibly cast as an older Fields in a biopic once his political career is over, which may be sooner rather than later, given that he could get primaried on the one hand, and the country is on the road to economic and geopolitical ruin under our unhinged Dear Leader on the other.

What a great pairing of buffoons, Fields’ cinematic persona with Graham’s real life personality!

I know you might be thinking that Graham’s a little long in the tooth at 69 to embark on a new career; however, look at me at 72, getting ready to make a cameo in an upcoming short feature based on a chapter from Today, Oh Boy.[2]

So, Lindsey, see, it’s never too late to segue into something new. Look, man, you’re addicted to the limelight, and look, even if there’s not a Fields biopic on the horizon, maybe some enterprising filmmaker will buy the rights to Today, Oh Boy, and you can end up playing the Colonel himself.

As my wife Caroline says, “We can hope. We can dream.”

[1] You can read a review and purchase it here.

[2] I’ll be sitting at a bar, sipping a PBR, a role that I was born to play.

Failed Poems, Fake Art, and Commerce 

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I subscribe to an internet entity called “Poem of the Day,” which provides me each a.m. with a dollop of verse to go along with a cup of whatever ground coffee is on sale at Harris Teeter on the previous Senior Citizen Discount Thursday.

This morning’s poem, Copyright © 2025 by Jessica Abughattas, has a title guaranteed to perk the interest of anyone interested in verse. It’s called “Failed Poems.” It’s one of those works where the title serves as the subject of the first sentence. To wit:

            Failed Poems

            will crawl out of the drain and try to kill you
            like some 80s horror flick.[1]

I like the poem, its witty catalogue of unpleasant analogies. Bad poems are like “a black widow creeping/from the mound of linens still warm from our bodies.”  They “steal your breath/ when you wake parched, hungover, emptied,” etc.

What really caught my attention, being a fake artist and all, were these lines describing another, much more successful fake artist:

Once, in Zurich, we were served rabbit paella at a party 
celebrating an exhibition of an artist from Venice Beach 
who used to be homeless but drinks $25 Erewhon smoothies and paints 
hundreds maybe thousands of happy faces with his feet. His canvasses 
go for $25,000. Toe paintings are better or at least significantly 
more profitable than failed poems.

This really hit home because the day before yesterday I got a text from a number I didn’t recognize with this message:

“Found some ‘fake’ art at goodwill today. I’m going to buy it as an investment.”

I responded, “Who in his right mind would give a masterpiece like that away?”

But to be honest, I did know. It was the fellow who won it at Chico Feo’s annual Canine Halloween Costume Contest. Harlan, the organizer, asked if I would donate a print, and I thought it was one of the better prizes, but as luck would have it, the winner is an actual artist who upon receiving it asked me if I’d seen any of his works.  

I hadn’t.

But I’ll also admit it would take a certain, rare art lover with a funkadelic sensibility maximus to want to hang the print above the mantle.

Anyway, the poet nails it when she whines about the unprofitability of writing poems vis-à-vis creating pictural art. In fact, believe it or not, despite receiving a rave review from Kirkus Reviews and having appeared on a local television show and several national podcasts, my novel Today, Oh Boy has provided me with less income than my fake paintings.[2]

Already this month, I’ve received two commissions and sold another print, not including the secondhand Good Will purchase. 

Anyway, I’d say that creating these canvases is more fun that writing fiction and certainly more fun that going over the “corrected proofs” of a manuscript that soon will be bound and sold in bookstores and online, which I have been doing of late.

I don’t  have a pub date yet for Long Ago Last Summer, but I’m guessing late spring or early summer.

PS. Speaking of commissions, Caroline and I have commissioned the unfake funkadelic artist Thom Piragnoli to create a sign for our driveway to alert visitors where our hidden house hides. 

You can check out Thom’s art at Chico Feo. The one above is called Galaxy Gals. Check out this LINK for more on Thom. 

[1] Rather than cutting and pasting the entire poem, I’ll provide a link because non-poetry lovers, i.e., 99.97% of people, would abandon this post for the greener pastures of a TikTok video. Here’s the LINK. You can read along while Jessica Abughattas reads it in a rather pleasant regionless accent.

[2] To be honest, this was not the case in 2023, the year Today, Oh Boy was published.

My MAGA Sermon: Tent Preacher Edition

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It’s way past time for true-believing, well-educated evangelists to hit the missionary road and scare the unholy shit out of these deluded MAGA worshipers who have rejected the love-thy- enemy theology of their would-be savior and instead have embraced the hate and revenge ideology of the false prophets Elon Trump and Donald Musk. 

For what is a MAGA profited, if he shall gain the owning of the libs, but lose his own soul?

Here, let me have a go at it:

Oh my children, you know not the jeopardy into which you’ve placed your immortal souls.  Why have you turned your back on the teachings of the Prince of Peace who bade you “love thy neighbor as thyself” but instead you worship a “man of lawlessness ” a “son of perdition?”  (2 Thessalonians 2:3). 

Pasteth the following descriptions into a search engine:

“male global leader”

“a deceiver who uses signs and wonders to mislead people”

“seeks to establish a global power structure”

“speaks arrogant words and blasphemies”

“an earthly tyrant and trickster”

Oh, I have saved you the trouble. These descriptions will leadeth you to the 13th Chapter of the Book of Revelation, which describes the Antichrist.

O, my brothers and sisters, repent before it’s too late. Oh, how you will lament upon the Judgement Day when your undying soul will be cast into the flaming cauldron of everlasting perdition, an eternity of suffering because you chose hate instead of love.

But, hold on, it’s not too late. Reread the Gospels, casteth away your Maga merch for God’s sake and your own!

Amen.

A Renewed Awareness of the Wonderous 

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A Renewed Awareness of the Wonderous 

“Its only boundary was the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine.”
                                                                        ― Barry Lopez, Horizon

At the moment, thanks to my pal Bill Thompson, I’m reading Horizon, Buddha-like Barry Lopez’s fascinating memoir, a meditation on nature, human cultures, capitalism’s role in the secularization of society, language’s function in altering the world we perceive, the poisoning of the planet, among a host of other fascinating topics. 

Lopez is difficult to characterize. For example, he was an explorer, having travelled to over 80 countries. His National Book Award winning work Arctic Dreams details five years he spent in the Canadian Arctic as a biologist.  Lopez possessed, among many other virtues, a profound patience that allowed him the peace of mind to observe over hours, days, and weeks phenomena like light changing in the passage of time from dawn to dusk over the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Though married twice, he seems monkish in his seeking solitude, and indeed, after his Catholic education, he flirted with the idea of becoming a Trappist monk. Instead, he became a novelist, a painter, a landscape photographer, and philosopher. These hours of observation and solitude engender philosophical observation:

During certain periods of uninterrupted vigilance at the edge of the sea, I’ve also had the sense that there is some other way to understand the ethical erosion that engenders our disaffections with modern life—the tendency of ruling bodies, for example, to be lenient with entrenched corruption; the embrace of extrajudicial murder as a legitimate tool of state; the entitlement attitudes of those in power; the compulsion of religious fanatics to urge other humans to embrace the fanatics’ heaven. The pervasiveness of these ethical breaches encourages despair and engenders a kind of social entropy; and their widespread occurrence suggests that these problems are intractable.

Lopez is particularly interested in how commercial enterprises like logging transform forests from diverse ecosystems to tree farms. Clearcutting disrupts the natural order as invasive species displace native plants and animals, so rather than the terrain boasting a variety of different trees, the denuded landscape is replanted with one type of commercially profitable tree, e.g. Douglas firs or loblolly pines. A clearcut,” he writes, “is not the outward sign of a healthy economy but of an indifference to life.”

In a similar light, he laments Colonialism’s obliteration of native people’s cultures, the loss of native languages, and drives home the point that advanced technology does not make a culture superior to a less technically advanced culture, especially if the happiness of a culture’s people is a gauge of success:

The seductive power of this system of exploitation—tearing things out of the earth, sneering at the least objection, as though it were hopelessly unenlightened, characterizing other people as vermin in the struggle for market share, navigating without an ethical compass—traps people in a thousand exploited settlements in denial, in regret, in loneliness. If you empathize with the Jaburrara over their losses, you must sympathize with every person caught up in the undertow of this nightmare, this delusion that a for-profit life is the only reasonable calling for a modern individual.

Sounds a bit like the current ruling US regime.

On the other hand, the contrarian in me wonders how Lopez could afford to circumnavigate the planet, exploring exotic locales like Australia’s Outback and Afghan villages. Where did the money come from to bankroll these expeditions?  

Capitalistic enterprise, I suspect. 

Modern living is incredibly complicated, which, to be fair, he acknowledges, but whether you agree with him politically or not, Lopez provides, not only food for thought, but a feast for contemplation.

Reading this book has in a sense made me more alive in jarring me from my inwardness to seek out wonder outside the Self while seeking is still possible.  

I’ll give him the last word:

Exposure to an unusually spectacular place in conducive circumstance, the thinking goes, can release one from the prison of one’s own ego and initiate a renewed awareness of the wondrous, salutary, and informing nature of the Other, the thing outside of the self.