The Green Pastures of Retirement

March 6, 2025 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

Although I often whine about my chronic insomnia, in reality, it’s not a big deal because I’m retired. Rarely do I have to be at a certain place at a designated time, so I can nap whenever I want, sometimes snatching a snooze as early as ten a.m., so it’s not like stumble about zombie-like all day, sleep deprived.

In fact, it doesn’t make much evolutionary sense to be unconscious eight straight hours. I’ve read that our spear-toting pre-agrarian savannah-dwelling ancestors didn’t necessarily sleep through the predatory night, and during the Middle Ages, people engaged in a routine called “two sleeps,” turning in around nine or ten, slumbering for two or three hours, then awakening around one for what was known as “the watch,” a period in which they’d tend to tasks, socialize, and/or procreate.^[1] Around two or three they’d again hit the literal hay (or if wealthy, a feather-stuffed mattress) and sleep until dawn or a bit later.

However, I don’t want to give the impression that now that I no longer have to battle Folly Road traffic in the a.m. that I dawdle away the day doing crosswords, binging Netflix, or wasting time on the internet. This week, in fact, I’ve been especially busy going through the second proofs of my next book, engaging in a political protest, and most vexing of all, jumping through the electronic hoops of TurboTax. Being retired makes performing these acts much more convenient.

Excuse me; I need to vent. Correcting the proofs on Long Ago Last Summer was much more difficult than it had been with my first book, Today, Oh Boy. This time around, rather than having a human being perform the copy editing phase, the publisher shoved the manuscript’s 62, 327 words through the woodchipper of AI.

The book is a compilation of short fiction, poetry, and personal essays that features a medley of Southern voices. Each piece can stand alone; however, collectively, they form a sort of mosaic with one of the major patterns being Southern Gothic, that literary subgenre that features “incestuous aristocrats, necrophiliac halfwits, sadistic Alabama sheriffs [. . .] the suicide hanging in the attic, the alcoholic great aunt who gave birth to the idiot child buried in the backyard.”^[2]

You know, the human byproducts of the post-Reconstruction South, the folks I grew up with.

Alas, AI wasn’t up to the task of dealing with the book’s cacophony of styles and voices. Not only did it remove double negatives from the foul mouth of serial killer Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins (who picked me up hitchhiking in 1970) and replace them with grammatically correct utterances, but it also altered direct quotes from the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Anyway, on Monday I completed the weeklong task of correcting the corrections. If I were teaching full time, I would not have had the leisure to pick through the rumble and piece back together my original tiles.

Nor could I have attended Tuesday’s anti-Trump demonstration at Hampton Park without having to take a personal day. I had planned on Tuesday to do our taxes, but it ended up being one of those rare days when I had to be somewhere at a specific time. The protest occurred on the very day of Trump’s state of the union address in which he stupidly misconstrued the words “transgender” and “transgenic.”

Trump: Eight million dollars for making mice transgender. This is real.

Jeff Tiedrich: No, no, no, no. Nobody is spending government money to make mice transgender. You low-wattage dolt. The word is transgenic.

Let’s say you’re a cancer researcher, and you implant some human genetic material into mice, in order to better study how cells mutate. boom! — you’ve just created transgenic mice.

Nobody is doing sex-change operations on mice and setting them loose in Nancy Mace’s bathroom.

But I digress. I hadn’t engaged in a public protest since the fall of 1971, and I it looked like many of the protestors in attendance were alive and kicking during the Viet Nam era, which makes sense, given they are past retirement age and free to go wherever they choose midday on a Tuesday in March. I used to tell my students that if the governor told my generation that we couldn’t drink until we were 21, there would have been 300,000 of us on the lawn of the Governor’s mansion every day of the week.

The protest, though somewhat limited in its attendance^[3] and no doubt in swaying public opinion or sending shivers up the spines of Republican representatives, did provide an outlet for our outrage at Trump’s destroying our democracy and cruelly wreaking havoc upon the lives of so many of our citizens, not to mention his abandoning of Ukraine and the rest of our European allies.

It was somewhat comforting to rub elbows with like minded people whose intelligence and commitment was apparent in the signs that they carried.

photo credit Joan Perry

photo credit Linda Bell

Okay, don’t worry about this 5-paragraph essay set up. I’m not going to give you a blow by blow account of my doing taxes, which thanks to my late wife’s assets is complicated by K-I limited partnerships, etc. Nevertheless, I do them myself because nowadays accountants essentially have you enter your financial information into their computer software instead of TurboTax. It ends up being the same amount of work. Using an accountant might save us some money, but what the hay.

Ah, with my daily labors completed, here I sit sipping a Westbrook IPA at Lowlife Bar on a Wednesday afternoon scribbling this down in a composition notebook, happy to have completed the taxes and survived the tornados that never showed up on a day when Charleston County schools were called off.

Cheers! Thanks for reading until the end.

PS. Uh-oh! I just saw on LinkedIn that I appeared in 12 searches, two of which were the State Department and USAID. Yipes.

photo credit Joan Perry

^[1] Since families usually slept in communal beds, having sex could be problematic.

^[2] from the preface of Long Ago Last Summer, 38-9.

^[3] The Post and Courier estimated around 500,

Shape Without Form, Shade Without Color

February 17, 2025February 17, 2025 / wlm3 / 1 Comment

Certainly, as several cultural critics have pointed out, Yeats’s magnificent poem “The Second Coming” expresses powerfully and concretely our current situation, what TS Eliot abstractly described as “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history.”

Yeat’s poem is brief; therefore, I’ll quote it in its entirety:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

***

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Does the description “a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun” remind you of anyone?

Of course, the Founding Fathers feared the rise of an American despot, so they counterbalanced the executive with Congress and the courts. Unfortunately, the lines “[t]he best lack all conviction, while the worst/ [a]re full of passionate intensity” aptly describe the Republican controlled House and Senate, Nancy Mace, full of passionate intensity, Lindsey Graham lacking all conviction.^[1]

The Republican Senate certainly abandoned their responsibility of advising and consenting when they confirmed a vaccine-denying former heroin addict who literally has had worms eating his brain as Director of Health and Human Services and an alcoholic sexual predator who has absolutely no experience running a large enterprise as Secretary of Defense.

This idea of citizens lacking conviction is also powerfully rendered in TS Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” whose final lines have become almost a cliche:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The hollow men of Eliot’s poem are scarecrows, heartless, “behaving as the wind behaves,” going with the flow, their “dried voices [. . .] quiet and meaningless.”

Like Senator Susan Collins, for example.

At any rate, in both poems we see Christianity breaking down, as the Antichrist slouches towards Bethlehem and in Eliot’s poem when the “Lord’s Prayer” breaks down into gibberish.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

^[1] Both hail from a state “too small to be a country, too big to be an insane asylum.” – James Petigru on South Carolina.

Governing as a Performative Art: Nancy Mace Edition

February 12, 2025February 12, 2025 / wlm3 / 2 Comments

It seems to me, an admittedly jaundiced observer, that many of our current representatives are attention-starved narcissists who would rather don costumes and bring attention to themselves than plopping down behind a desk and performing the unglamorous work of governance.

Take our director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem dressing up like a border patrol agent, a cowgirl, and an ICE agent.

Of course, her trendsetting boss is no stranger to dressing up and engaging in make believe.

Unfortunately, this compulsion to commandeer the spotlight isn’t just confined to the cabinet. House Representatives, particularly Nancy Mace, enjoy incorporating Halloween into their everyday comings and goings as well.

Here’s Mace channeling Hester Prynne in a subliterate misunderstanding of Hawthorne’s classic novel, not seeming to get that the scarlet letter stood for “adultery.”

She claimed she was wearing the A because she was a woman being demonized for her “voice” and “vote.” Hester Prynne, on the other hand, stoically bore her persecution silently. Stoicism and silence are certainly not attributes we identify with Mace, who seems to be in the throes of some kind of nervous breakdown, reminiscent of the first scene in Night of the Iguana where clergyman T. Lawrence Shannon goes apeshit in the pulpit and mocks the parishioners, resulting in a mass exit during the course of his rantings.

Here’s a LINK to my post on nervous breakdowns featuring a clip from John Huston’s film Night of the Iguana.

Representative Mace’s venue for her recent Reverend Shannon-like ranting was the House floor of the US Capitol where she flappingly displayed the dirty laundry of her sordid relationship with her ex-fiancé Patrick Bryant for all the world to see, the same fiancé she mentioned at the National Prayer Breakfast a year earlier when she shared with the august worshippers assembled there that she had told Mr. Bryant, “No, baby, we ain’t got time for that,” that being premarital morning sex, because she didn’t want to be late for the Jesus fest.

I’m not going to catalogue the accusations of her screed the other night, which may or may not be true, the hidden cameras, the sexual assaults, etc. but merely suggest we the people would be better served with representatives who focus on our collective good rather than their own personal vendettas, to channel Jimmy Carter as opposed to Caligula, who also had a penchant for cosplaying, who liked to dress up like soldiers, mythological figures, and women.

Oh, Joe Cunningham, our lonely First Congressional District turns its lonely eyes to you.

Elon Musk as Bond Villain

February 8, 2025 / wlm3 / 2 Comments

Oscar Wilde’s counterintuitive observation that “life imitates art” certainly seems a valid observation when you consider that Elon Musk obviously modeled his persona on the Bond Villains he identified with as a child watching 007 movies in his South African enclave.

I asked ChatGPT to create a Venn diagram comparing characteristics of Dr. No, Auric Goldfinger, Ernst Blofeld, and Elon Musk, but rather than creating the visual representation I asked for he/she/it/they came up with this:

“Creating a Venn diagram comparing characteristics of Dr. No, Goldfinger, Blofeld, and Elon Musk could be interesting! Here’s how we might categorize some of their traits”:

Dr. No

Monologuing: Dr. No is known for his villainous speeches and arrogance.
Desire for Global Power: His main goal is to dominate the world.
Tech Savvy: Uses technology for his villainous deeds, such as a secret base and advanced machinery.

Goldfinger

Love of Wealth: Obsessed with gold and wealth accumulation.
Manipulative: Skilled in manipulating people and situations for personal gain.
Planning for Destruction: Plans to increase his wealth by threatening global economics.

Blofeld

Mastermind: A schemer and manipulator who plans complex, worldwide operations.
Philanthropic Facade: Often hides his true intentions behind a charitable or business façade.
Desire for Control: Wants to control global events to advance his personal agenda.

Elon Musk (Common Traits)

Innovative: Known for pushing technological advancements (SpaceX, Tesla).
Wealth: A billionaire who accumulates wealth through various ventures.
Ambitious: Has ambitious goals such as colonizing Mars and transforming energy production.
Public Persona: Often in the media spotlight and makes bold statements.^[2]

Note how ChatGPT avoided portraying any of Musk’s traits as negative, much less as villainous.

Allow me to rectify that failure:

Elon Musk (Common Traits)

Monologuing: an asshole known for his villainous speeches and arrogance.
Desire for Global Power: a megalomaniac who desires to dominate the world.
Tech Savvy: an innovator who builds rocket ships, electric cars, etc.
Wealth: a billionaire obsessed with wealth accumulation

Mastermind: a schemer and manipulator who plans complex, worldwide operations.
Desire for Control: a self-obsessed piece of shit who wants to control global events to advance his personal agenda.

Oh, yeah, what about the autism, the lack of social grace and human empathy, not to mention operating outside the bounds of law? The stilted speech patterns all four share?

On this assignment, I’d give ChatGPT a big fat D if he/she/it/they were my student and myself a C- on this blog post, which has forsaken hard work for expediency.

That said, it’s kind of scary that a Bond villain now has access to my social security number.

^[1] The name Elon Musk sounds like Ian Fleming himself came up with it.

^[2] Not how ChatGPT doesn’t bother with parallel construction. The catalogue he/she/it/they came up with is about as elegant as a Tesla truck.

The Power Has Gone to His Head

February 2, 2025February 2, 2025 / wlm3 / 3 Comments

There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s early movie Bananas that reminds me of Trump’s first two weeks in office.

Here, take a look.

Remind you of anybody?

Obviously, the power has gone to Trump’s thick-as-the-walls-of-Troy skull.

Here’s his first social media message of the day via the Economic Times.

“Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State,” he wrote on his Truth social media platform, claiming the move would bring “much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada – AND NO TARIFFS!”

“Um,” as the cynical sitcom kids sarcastically say, “that’s sure to work.”

And they’re right. Canada has cooked up some retaliatory tariffs of their own, tariffs aimed at red states targeting Kentucky Bourbon and Florida oranges.

So if you voted for Trump because you thought groceries were too high, you’re in for some pocketbook disappointment.

Good thing I don’t like avocados on my pizza.

Good thing there are midterm elections.

Good thing there’s the 22nd Amendment.

But until then, strap yourself in, because we’ve all boarded the roller-coaster from Hell.

Speaking of Hell, I’ll give Milton’s Satan the last word:

But wherefore let we then our faithful friends,
Th’associates and co-partners of our loss
Live thus astonish on th’oblivious Pool,
And call then not to share with us their part
In this unhappy Mansion, or once more
With rallied arms to try what may be yet
Regain’d in Heav’n, or what more lost in Hell?”

Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 264-70.

Of Palsied Eld

January 28, 2025 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

Once a month or so when I was a child, my mother would drive her mother, my younger brother, and me from Summerville to visit my great aunt Ruby, who lived on Warren Street in downtown Charleston. The two older women, the daughters of a prosperous Orangeburg County farmer, were Baptists and considered alcohol Satan’s saliva, the most detestable substance known to humankind. On the other hand, they deemed the painkillers and mood enhancers prescribed by their physicians to be the Balm of Gilead and freely exchanged these brightly colored pills the way we did Halloween candy after trick-or-treating.^[1] I also remember their complaining of their various ailments, an epic catalogue of aches and pains, a tedious topic of conversation for a ten-year-old to endure. I dreaded these visits that took me away from wooded yet-to-be-subdivided acres surrounding our neighborhood in Summerville where we built forts and played Davey Crockett.

On my father’s side, it was my great grandfather and grandmother whose visits I dreaded. My great grandfather, Fleming David Ackerman, had been a pharmacist who owned a drug store on the corner of Spring Street and Ashley Avenue in Charleston during the Depression. He was a hypochondriac extraordinaire who actually slept in a hospital bed. Mama’s daddy, Kiki, a spry bantam rooster of a man, used to say that Grandaddy Ackerman “enjoyed bad health,” which would elicit a smoker’s cackle from my mother, who somehow had managed to grow up open-minded, unlike Aunt Ruby’s daughter Zilla, whose embrace of puritanism would give Carrie Nation a run for her money.

Carrie Nation

Of course, ten-year-olds don’t fret about their own eventual senescence until that distant day in the unreckoned future when they too will stiffen, as TS Eliot put it, “in a rented house.” Alas, for me, that day has arrived, sneaked up on me like ninja, one day my urine jetting in a beautiful arc into an empty Coke bottle, the next sprinkling weakly as if from a watering can.^[2] Rolling over several times a night in bed is necessitated by lower back issues, and to me even more vexing is the tinnitus I’ve recently developed, which in my case isn’t a ringing of the ears, but a frenetic clicking, as if mice are sending out desperate messages via telegraphs, a fitting soundtrack for the insomnia that visits me nightly.

So here I am, like Aunt Ruby and Grandmama Hazel and Grandaddy Ackerman, taking pleasure in complaining about ill health.

Ah, but here’s an antidote:

Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep

Dreaming on both, for all thy blessèd youth
Becomes as agèd and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty

To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this

That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.

Measure for Measure, 3.1 34-43

^[1] I remember in grad school actually copping a tranquilizer from my grandmother to assuage my nervousness before delivering an oral report in one of my classes.

^[2] OMG, TMI!

Eraserhead Revisited

January 19, 2025 / wlm3 / 1 Comment

From Painter to Filmmaker

The death of the brilliant film director David Lynch has spurred my wife Caroline and me to revisit his oeuvre.^[1]

We started with the Jon Nguyen’s 2016 Lynch documentary The Art of Life, the culmination of four-year’s worth of conversations, twenty in all, recorded at Lynch’s home in LA. I had not been aware that Lynch was a painter, a highly skilled and prolific one at that.

Throughout the documentary, we listen to Lynch narrate his life story while watching him in the act of creating paintings and sculptures. Interspersed are 8mm home movies of him and his family from the ’50s and ’60s. If you love Lynch, you’ll love this film, enjoy its leisurely pace and artful presentation.

What struck me most was Lynch’s revelation that “moving pictures” could be “moving paintings.”

So post epiphany off Lynch went to the American Film Institute where he resided in stables owned by the institute, and there he made his first feature film Eraserhead, transforming the narrow halls and small rooms of the stables into movie sets.

By the way, I first saw Eraserhead in 1989 as a refugee from Hurricane Hugo, a dozen years after its original release, the again in the mid-’90s, and for the third time last night with Caroline.^[2]

Dr. Caligari’s Great-Great Grandchild

In the fall of 1973 or 4, at the University of South Carolina, I had the great fortune to enroll in a multi-departmental course on German Expressionism, the prominent artistic movement of the Wiemer Republic. This class really broadened my intellectual horizons. We read Hesse, Kafka, and Bertolt Brecht; analyzed the paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Emil Nolde; listened to the music of Schoenberg and Alban Berg; and watched each week in the student union’s theater an expressionistic Wiemer film. We began with the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and ended with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Murnau’s original Nosferatu was also among the films we saw and analyzed. It was, by far, the most interesting and rewarding course I’ve ever taken.

Obviously, Caligari heavily influenced Eraserhead in its set designs, dark themes, and murky black-and-white lighting. Also, Eraserhead is essentially a silent movie with only four minutes of dialogue in its 89-minute running time. The protagonist Henry, played by Jack Nance, waddles Chaplin-like throughout the film in what amounts to a Kafka nightmare. Though Eraserhead’s billed as a surrealistic horror movie, both Caroline and I found it to be hilariously funny. I can’t remember the last time I saw a film that produced so many out-loud laughs.

On the other hand, one significant way in which Eraserhead doesn’t resemble a silent movie is in its soundtrack. Unlike a silent movie whose soundtrack is more or less pasted on afterward, the soundtrack of Eraserhead consists of irritating sounds arising from the action, sounds like rain hissing, a radiator hissing, the mewling and crying of that abomination of a baby whose arrival marks the turning point of the plot. Caroline aptly described these background noises as “a plaid of sounds,” which provides a sort of underlying mechanical, menacing buzzing.

Caroline also suggested that the central theme lay in Lynch’s hatred of fatherhood, though I saw it more as a strangely puritanical parable about the dangers of premarital sex. Ends up Caroline was correct. Lynch’s daughter Jennifer was born with severally clubbed feet and had to undergo several corrective surgeries as an infant, and she considers her birth defects as the major inspiration for the infant of the film.

At any rate, we had a fun night and look forward to checking out Lynch’s next film The Elephant Man, which, although more mainstream, shares with Eraserhead a very malformed human being at the center of the action.

^[1] Why do I feel guilty using “oeuvre” when EB White would applaud its economical aptness? Perhaps because American anti-intellectualism lurks in the shadowy shotgun shack of my subconscious mocking me like the bully it is?

^[2] Caroline, who minored in art history and has a master’s in psychoanalytical criticism, is the perfect companion and provides a wealth of cogent observations that would have escaped me otherwise.

A Late Night Lament

January 13, 2025January 13, 2025 / wlm3 / 2 Comments

A Late Night Lament

Drip drop, drip drop, drop, drop, drop.

TS Eliot. “The Waste Land”

Our planet suffers from too much sorrow/too many troubles–– fluorocarbons, cows, prequels, Subarus, homo sapiens, ads, tin pot dictators, lone gunmen, South African billionaires, etc., etc. etc.

Earth Mama Gaia seems to be doing all she can to shake off these fleas of infestation.

To wit, in the last four years, we’ve had a plague, Biblical-scale floods in Appalachia, and now these Southern California fires whose widespread devastation makes the great conflagrations of London 1666, Charleston 1861, and Chicago 1871 seem like pep rally bonfires in comparison, at least when it comes to total square miles of smoldering rubble and the billions of dollars of property loss.

Alas, elitists like I-and-I can’t bother to

[…] bear witness

To what each morning brings again to light:

Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment

Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law

Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof^[1]

because we’re too distracted squinting at tiny screens informing us of the latest sorrows/horrors from practically every square inch of the Planet Earth. Hey, our synapses evolved back in those non-agrarian days of yore on savannas rich in birdsong but devoid of the blare of leaf blowers, so our brains are ill-equipped to deal with all this over-stimulation, the incessant din of our ailing empire–– honk, honk, bang, bang, ahooga, ahooga–– and the never ending volcanic avalanche of distressing news.

No wonder so many of us is gone cruzy and taken to self-medication.

Envy the nuns and monks of cloisters and monasteries, Mother Teressa and Thich Nhat Hahn, but come to think of it, they’re dead, and to quote Mary Flannery O’Connor, “you can’t be any poorer than dead.”

Here’s another quote, this one from a poem by my wife Caroline Tigner Moore –– “The Earth will outlive this human plague.”So on that note, “Good night ladies, goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight,

^[1] Richard Wilbur, “Lying”

Uthceare

January 10, 2025January 10, 2025 / wlm3 / Leave a comment

Uthceare^[1]

Please tell me this: is
a mourning dove’s mating call
actually a lament?

To me it sounds like
a woebegone train whistling
on its weary way

through highland thistle
on a sun-starved, loveless day
in late December.

[1] An Old English word that means to lie awake and worry before dawn.

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You Do Hoodoo

bare ruined choir practice