EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 THE SOUTH

Novels and films set in the American South, take lower Arkansas (LA) for example, love to picture southern neighborhoods as containing one eccentric but colorful character. It adds color and commands attention to the dull parts. Those who have lived in such places know better but take it in stride.

It’s better to laugh with than acknowledge being laughed at.

If I, though, were to be able to write a novel about such places, I’d try to include at least one person partially based on reality.

Take “Turnrow Thompson” for example. I’d say of him that he was known for his concentration. His acquired middle name honored, as Jimmie Buffet said of a character, his ability to "stick right to the task." It made him popular with football coaches, young women, sergeants, and bosses.

Folks claimed that the attention to duty was inherited, even resulting in the name Turnrow carried through life. Rumor had it that his mama was so dedicated to helping produce a bale of picked cotton a day that she had delivered him on a turnrow, deposited him under a cotton trailer and had gone right back to picking. No one had ever gotten her to verify the rumor. She would just answer inquiries with, “He never was no troublesome baby.”

A child with a reputation like that never found himself destined for greatness.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

 HOLDEN CAUFIELD

“I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.” - Holden Caufield

It's good to re-read books from the past. Perspectives change. Situations change. Even memories change. We realize that the two motorcycle riders we thought were so cool back when financed their journey by selling dope that destroyed individuals, families, and even entire neighborhoods. Here are some present-day thoughts on a seminal book from the 1960s, The Catcher In The Rye.

Maybe one reason for the book’s continuing population is that it nails the pains of adolescence so well. The fact that Holden didn’t handle it well doesn’t make the act of growing up any less real, or as John Steinbeck put it: “Just because something didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” We have, each of us maybe, wished on more than one occasion that our lives could have been frozen like a museum tableau at some less painful stage in our life.

But then we reach our "golden years."

We find, and "give with brief thanksgiving" a blessing for the fact, that we have come through it all, and most of it we wouldn’t have missed for the world. That a brief dream about a face from 40 years ago can break our heart one more time simply reminds us that once upon a time we loved that hard and hopelessly, not a bad thing. And though the deck may heave beneath us, we’ll always find a welcome port.

 As a lesson, the perspective of years says to me that the tough part of life is the living part. The things of value for me have always come hard: education, patience, empathy, perspective, and on and on. One can’t become an adult simply by being able to purchase cocktails in a bar. One doesn’t truly set one’s self apart from his peers by wearing an oddball hat. One doesn’t become a protector of the innocent by daydreaming. It all comes hard, some of it damned hard.

But hard as it was, it has been worthwhile. I treasure the acquaintance and I will see you later Holden, my old friend. You’ve been instructive through it all, even through the war and all the other dark times. Thanks for teaching me, way back then, that bemusement was okay. I’m not sure I could have made it through some of the times without that. Making it through has always been important to me. Oddly enough, making it through was the one thing you seemed never to get a handle on yourself. Maybe you did eventually

I hope so. I really do.

Boundaries

Art connects itself, at least it does for me. That’s why I have problems with many modern novels and films. I gravitate toward the old. Take photography and literature, for example.

Ansel Adams is widely considered one of the finest photographers ever, along with Dorothea Lange, Carol Highsmith and others. Let’s take Adams. One of the striking things about his work, as he processed it, was the gradation of tones from solid black to pure white. They set the perimeter for the multitude of shades between. Then he dazzled us with the glorious interplay of those tones.

It provides one a footing from which to enjoy the totality of his art, at least it does for me.

Now take Charles Dickens, one of my favorites since a seventh-grade teacher, Mildred Truelock, suggested that, at age 12, Jimmie give Mr. Dickens a dry. It’s been a life-long adventure, though I think perhaps I should have put A Tale of Two Cities off a few years.

What did Dickens do that makes me think of Ansel Adams? His characters matched the tones in Adams photography. Consider David Copperfield. Our protagonist therein faces life framed between the purely good figure of Peggotty and the abysmally bad Uriah Heep. There young David roams with some good but prone-to-backslide characters such as Steerforth and Mr. Micawber. Then there’s the flawed perfection of Mr. Dick, Aunt Bessie, and Dora, their near-goodness shining alongside the ideals. His characters cavort freely between the moral perimeters of good and bad.

Compare that with a popular movie, one that I’d rather spend a week in Branson Missouri than have to watch again. That would be No Country For Old Men. Try as hard as I might, I see no shred of purely good in any character. The same holds true for so many novels. I invariably turn back to my old pal.

We need boundaries for our scales in our life, black and white so to speak, whether we’re taking photos, telling stories, or playing the piano. True artists can make beautiful music between the extremes.

Yes, I know there are exceptions. You can search a Philip Roth novel with a magnifying glass and not find a consistent set of redeeming qualities.

But unless you are Philip Roth, why not stick to classics?

See? No muddy imagery here.

Friday Fiction

Here's one that started me off on writing a book.

JURY DUTY

By Jimmie von Tungeln

            “How do you like jury duty so far?” the man next to Clyde Olsen asked. They had been cleared for the next case and were waiting in the Jury Room—a narrow space stuffy and thick with cigarette smoke. A ceiling fan swirled the smoke around in the heat, and Clyde could hear the sound of chairs scraping and people talking in the courtroom. It was still early in the morning but nearing time for the trial to begin.

            “Oh I like it fine,” he said. “I don’t get out much—gives me a chance to get away from work and do something useful.”

            “Tell you the truth,” the other man said. “I’d rather be fishing.”

            They both laughed. Clyde eyed the man. He was trim and well-dressed. His suit was cheap but new and the man was clean-shaven and short-haired. Clyde saw the Service Pin in the man’s lapel. “You been in the service?” he asked.

            “Seventy-ninth Infantry. Landed at Normandy on D-day plus four. With it all the way to
Germany.” He paused. “How about you?”

            Clyde smiled and looked away. “Had two kids, one of them just a baby, so I was exempted until the last few months. They finally called me in January and I was set to be taken but then Germany surrendered. This your first jury duty?”

“First time. Hope it’s the last,” the other said.

“Oh, I’ve been here before,” Clyde said. “During the war they were short of men to choose from so I got called pretty often. Armistead, Arkansas ain’t a big town, you know. Myself? I kinda enjoy it. Mostly bootleggers and wife beaters so far.”

“This your first murder case?”

“Yep, and I understand it’s an open and shut affair.”

“Open and shut. That’s what I hear.”

Just then, the bailiff walked through the door and announced that it was time for the trial and asked if anyone had any questions.

“Will they feed us dinner?” asked a thin young man with a large Adam’s apple.

“We may be through before noon even gets here,” the bailiff laughed and said.

“Shucks,” I’m already hungry,” the man said to a ripple of laughter from the group.

The jury filed out and Clyde found himself looking down the row of attorneys’ tables. At the farthest one sat a man in a wrinkled suit and next to him another who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, wearing khaki pants and a white shirt and looking for all the world as if he might bolt for the door at any moment—the defendant.

The crowd was small, basically divided into two groups of five or so each. Clyde noticed a couple of children but movement drew his attention back to the defendant. He had turned in his seat and was looking into the crowd, his neck pulsing from the effort. The man in the suit nudged him and nodded toward the front as the Judge entered the room. The crowd rose and remained standing until the Judge sat and the bailiff announced that court was in session. After those in the room had seated themselves, it became quiet except for the clicking of ceiling fans. The judge nodded and the trial began.

As had been predicted, it appeared to be a simple affair—a case of a tragic set of circumstances and a youthful and horrible lapse of judgment. There was first a bar, where a young married man should never have been in the first place. Then there was an argument over something so silly and meaningless as to almost make the jury laugh. There were threats and, later—after feelings should have cooled—there was violence on a man who was walking home alone.  Through the morning, there was enough evidence and testimony to convince any juror that the defendant had caused the death of an innocent man.

The only balancing weight would be the sincerity of the youthful defendant when it came time for him to testify. Though he swore his innocence, he had no way of proving it. The jury watched without emotion as the prosecutor destroyed, one by one, his protests.

Then it was noon and the Jury was escorted to a local diner to be fed. They were instructed not to talk about the case until they returned but there were few who didn’t whisper about the scope of the tragedy.

Clyde sat next to the man with whom he had talked earlier. Clyde expressed his opinion that a man would stay out of trouble as long as he minded his own business.

“There ain’t a thing outside a man’s family that ought to concern him,” Clyde said, then added, “Unless it’s something like this that somebody has to do.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” the other man said. “I don’t much care for being on a jury.”

Clyde seemed surprised. He lit a cigarette and said. “Why, we are making sure justice is served. Don’t you think it’s our duty?”

“I reckon. I’ve just had enough of duty to last me awhile.” The man rose and headed outside to take the air.

Clyde turned to the man seated on his other side. “Ain’t he the one, though?”

After lunch the man in the wrinkled suit questioned two people that had been in the bar when the argument started. He seemed to be building up a case that the defendant had been goaded beyond some human breaking point. Then he produced a short parade of witnesses who swore to the goodness and honesty of the defendant.

After that, each lawyer gave a speech, both of which the jurors seemed to find boring and it was over.

Back in the jury room, the heat was intense and none of the jurors seemed energetic about discussing what they had just heard. Most of the conversation centered on the tragic waste and the role of circumstances in a person’s life. On the first vote they, one and all, found the man guilty of murder. It was second-degree murder, but still murder, and the jurors were solemn as they waited for their decision to be delivered to the Judge.

Clyde didn’t look at the defendant when he was seated again in the jury box. He and the other jurors stared at the judge without moving. It was now late in the afternoon and time for them to go home, having done their duty in the only way possible.

Shortly, the ceremony was over. The jury foreman announced the verdict. The defendant declined to speak, simply lowering his head and waiting for the announcement. The judge handed it down and two bailiffs appeared from nowhere to handcuff the prisoner. The judged thanked the jurors and dismissed them.

Clyde had begun to stand when it happened.

It was just a sound but one like he had never heard. Vicious and unreal, it pushed him back into his chair. He almost threw his hands to his ears but this wouldn’t have stopped it. Nothing would have. He turned toward the back of the room, jerking his head like the first movement of an animal in danger.

From the crowd a woman was screaming. High and piercing, it was first just a sound of anguish torn from an unimaginable depth of feeling like someone had punched a hole in a pressurized tank. Then it formed along “Nooooooooo…” A quick breath and then again, “No, no, please God no.” The sounds tore past Clyde like winds in a storm.

They were from a woman dressed in a shabby, floral-patterned dress. She was thin, and wore a pair of glasses that dominated her face. She kept screaming and tried to move toward the prisoner but she was being held by the group of people who had sat with her during the trial.

“Oh God… don’t let them take him,” she screamed again, trying to break loose from those who were holding her. They held her, though, and her screaming turned to wet sobs as arms closed around her.

            The arms didn’t stop a boy of about five years of age.  He tore from the group and, vaulting a low partition, raced to where the prisoner stood and wrapped his arms around one leg.

            “Daddy, daddy,” he yelled. The sound echoed from ceiling to wall and seemed to be strengthened and spun by the ceiling fans. “Please don’t take my daddy. Please, please!”

            He sobbed into the khakis of the prisoner who stared at him with surprise. The entire courtroom stopped. Even the judge had turned to see what was happening.

            One of the bailiffs who had been holding the prisoner’s arm let go and said to him, “Don’t move.” He moved around the man and began pulling the boy loose.

            “Oh daddy, don’t, don’t, daddy don’t,” the boy said. The bailiff wrenched him free from the man’s legs and dragged him backwards, the little arms flailing in circles like the blades of a windmill, as if he might generate enough wind to unite him with his father.

            “Daddy, daddy,” he sobbed. His entire head had turned red and tears flowed through the redness and then were slung away as he shook his head from side to side to emphasis the “No, no” he voiced. His cries joined those of the woman to form a sound that flooded the room.  “Don’t take our daddy,” the woman yelled, but the strength was going from her. There was a rough sound as the bailiff and another man, each holding an arm, dragged the young boy backwards along the hardwood floor with the heels of a ragged pair of brogans scraping the floor.

            Through it all, the prisoner had not moved, nor had the judge or the jurors. They all watched the scene as if it were occurring in some strange theatrical performance. They kept watching as the woman and boy were led from the room, their faces still turned toward the prisoner and still entreating someone—the judge, the jury, the bailiffs, maybe God himself. It was a general and non-directed plea for mercy.

            Then the courtroom was quiet again. Still no one moved for what seemed like minutes. Then the bailiffs began leading the prisoner toward the side door. Just when the jurors thought the spectacle might be over, the young man broke the silence with a series of hoarse and guttural sobs that sounded as if they were erupting from the bowels of the earth itself. It was as if the shaking of his body might cause the entire building to fall.

            “Come on now,” a bailiff said. “Don’t let these folks see you like this.” The man tried to nod but the sobs conquered him. They led him from the room in that state.

            Now the jurors stirred, as if they belonged to one great organism, and filed from their seats. As they moved toward the door, Clyde’s companion turned to him.

            “Maybe I’ll see you again some day… at another trial.”

            Clyde’s eyes seemed to be trying to focus. His face was pale and slack, like a balloon from which the air had been released. His mouth moved several times before sound emerged.

            “Never,” he said. “Not me, never again. No… not ever.”

Started me on a book.

Sunrise With Schubert

Off to earn money today and time just fugited away, Here's a harmless little literary fancy designed to annoy a Dame Daphne du Maurier fan I know.

Last night I dreamed I went to see Ernest Hemingway again. We had drinks. He had a chilled Vermouth. I had a Four Roses. It came ice cold, with three large ice cubes bobbing in the amber liquid. We talked. Our conversation originated in an animation born of enthusiasm but calmed as the night grew silent. I nodded as I filled his glass. Next I freshened mine, placing the warm glass of the bottle against the still-chilled top of the glass and listening to the clink of two disparate elements like two minds meeting for the first time. I raised it and gave thanks for the time spent together.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools,” he said.

“And,” I said.  “for your wisdom.”

“What wisdom?”

“The wisdom to sit with a stranger and talk.”

“I never had to choose a subject,” he said. “My subjects chose me.”

“It must involve trust.”

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

“Have you, from where you dwell now, heard of the strange state of our country?”

“America is no moveable feast.”

“It seems we trusted the wrong person, or people. There was no intent to destroy. Many people simply believed.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.”

“What do you think of courage?”

He raised a hand and examined it. He turned a finger so that he saw the nail first and then the print. He moved it to and fro, as if to concentrate his being on the most singular of places. “Courage is grace under pressure.”

“To move without talking about the movement?”

“Never mistake movement for action,” he said.

“No, of course not.”

He thought and added another to his first. “Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.”

I thought, then said, “The man so many worship now claims courage.”

“Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?”

This stopped me and I stared at my glass as if were a cauldron of wisdom. “He says now, and his followers believe him, that he would brave if the chance arose, that he would, as an old warrior once said, ride to the sounds  of the cannons.”

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Eeew.

Morning Thoughts: January 16, 2018

Mornings I wander the net, landing on interesting places at times. Today I hit Dick Cavett’s interview of the writer Eudora Welty. One comment that Cavett allowed her to make stuck to me like a snowflake to a leaf. She was talking about being in Paris and he asked if she wrote while she was there (and not in Mississippi). “I didn’t mean to write there, because I was too busy looking,” she said. How illuminating.

Could something a Southerner saw in Paris contribute to Why I Live At The P.0.? (Read it before you do anything else). Maybe, just maybe.

The only thing I see so many people looking at these days is their cell phone. If we lose the eyes of a Eudora Welty, will we lose the voice of a potential William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, James Baldwin, Kazuo Ishiguroor, or other? Hard as one might look, there is no material, or inspiration, for Snow Falling On Cedars inside the soldered guts of a cell phone.

Perhaps that is why I, personally, find modern fiction so hard to plow through and so tiresome to read. Mostly, they are balls of angst wrapped tightly with the life-strands of weak and helpless characters who are being “borne ceaselessly” into their own Purgatory. Many read like a bad PBS mini-series (not the many excellent ones, but the ones that go from one case of human frailty to another). One will find neither a Barkis who “is willin,’” nor a Peggotty who is amused and amenable, therein.

One thing Welty did, and she did so many things well, is to set the tone for the colorful southern character. I’m not sure Southerners, if we can lump their vast diversity into one definition, are any more colorful than anyone else. But, like the image of the empty-spirited Vietnam Veteran with his broken wings, Southerners are forever stuck in society’s stereotype.

Yes, Eudora Welty helped to form the Southerner’s image. But she did it so well, and without apparent malice aforethought.

Widening our lens, Southerners, as I say, are like everyone else. I used to think they differed in that the white ones hated African-Americans more than their “other-world” counterparts. The presidency of Barrack Obama disabused me of that notion.

Next, I thought that maybe Southerners, who do tend to express themselves well, could articulate their hatred of other races more adroitly than big-city northerners. Then, Donald Trump came along.

I guess the lesson is that each of us mentally, or actually, visits our own personal Paris from time to time. Some look and see. Some don’t. Those who look may see things that, though never outwardly manifested, may inspire and help them gain immortality.

Oh yes, those who don’t look while in their particular Paris may also gain immortality. Too often, though, it results in placing them on the wrong side of history.

Miss Welty: Definitely on the right side of history 

Morning Thoughts: November 5, 2017

I was in an ugly frame of mind this morning: another year older, eye swollen shut from a wasp sting, and a list of “must do” items a mile long. The bi-annual ordeal with time change has begun, and, furthermore, it’s Sunday.

On top of all that, I’m scheduled for an overnight trip this week. That means I’ll have to pack a bag, wear a suit, and sleep alone in a galaxy far away.

If that doesn’t suck enough, I need to patch a hole in the roof of one of the buildings at the farm. Along with the “year older” bit, the height at which I become debilitated from fear of heights is a foot lower, now standing at six feet—two feet lower than the roof.

Just thinking of the national news creates ten percent rise in my blood pressure.

The devil on my left shoulder began to list my shortcomings.

- I’ll never write like John Steinbeck.

- I’ll never play guitar like Steve Davison or Mike Benetz.

- I’ll never create woodworking masterpieces like the fellows at the hardwood store.

- I’ll never be elected to the Piddlers’ Hall of Fame unless I drop my remaining consulting work.

- I’ll never finish Finnegan’s Wake.

- I’ll never convince some of my friends to use The Sermon on the Mount as a voter’s guide.

- I’ll never give Scarlett Johansson a case of the vapors.

Wait a moment!

That's when I woke up. I looked into the sleeping face of the prettiest woman in my world. A soft glow surrounded that face like a thin gauze pressed from fairy dust. She smiled in her sleep and whispered "Matthew McConaughey" but I knew she was thinking of me.

I smiled. Another year older and another year wiser and less likely to panic over what someone possessing high power tweets. America has survived worse.

Music? If it still makes you smile, to hell with fame and fortune. And the most important thing about woodworking is not making masterpieces, but not cutting off your fingers.

Voting? The arc of history will flow back to justice, peace, and compassion, just you wait and see.

Another year older, but not another year deeper in debt. Our investment portfolios have risen steadily since the Great Recession and we’re currently taking profits in prep for the next GR, or, as we financial gurus put it, “when the chickens come home to roost.”

I’m too old for the draft, but also more advanced in my knowledge of avoidance should we actually achieve the current goal of a two-front war. The bone spurs only bother me at heights above six feet, and helicopters go a lot higher than that.

The three of us are in good physical condition for our ages, and we all still enjoy a glass of wine, a good laugh, and happy music.

With these thoughts a’swirling, I went to the bathroom and stared at my swollen face. It stared back and said “Just remember, this face once snared one of the most beautiful girls in Arkansas."

True that.

Then I walked to the table and fired up the trusty old computer. Lo and behold! That great teacher and writer: The Journalist Sonny Rhodes, had lauded something I wrote.

Suddenly, I was beautiful again.

When you're loved by
someone like this, you
have a damned fine life.

Book Review: October 31, 2017

At my age, I don’t have the time to study all the great books I cherish. But I may spend more time on Giovanni’s Room. One of only two novels by James Baldwin, it can break the heart of anyone who cherishes the right of people to live in freedom.

By “freedom,” I don’t believe in freedom from incarceration or freedom from tyranny, but in the complete freedom to live as one’s physiological genetics would have them do, as long as that freedom didn’t harm another.

Of course, people are harmed in Baldwin’s book. The narrator, David, is a severely damaged man who damages others. He is a gay man in an era in which the shame heaped upon him and those like him stifled and contorted every emotional impulse. His tormentors weren’t necessarily open and visible, like that poor, demented, homophobic county clerk in Kentucky of today’s headlines. No, at the time covered by the book, prejudice and punishment flowed over the likes of David as some dense, impenetrable fog, silent, pervasive, and unyielding. That fog of torment created a self-disgust that caused its victims even to despise their own fellow wanderers, even their own lovers, even humanity in essence, and worse, even themselves.

One struggles to imagine what it must be like to have the world stifle one’s emotional feelings to the point of harm against humanity or against one’s own person.

Readers have treated the book as a study of shame, and it is. Moreover, it is a book that rips away scabs and displays the raw damage done to society by hate and homophobia. The festering sores flow from the narrator to others, mostly the innocent who, themselves, struggle to find the freedom to love in a society given to hatred.

Would that it could be required reading.

A life burned out too quickly

Growing Up Southern: October 17, 2017

I started writing things down about 30 years ago. I haven’t changed the world or produced greatness. But it’s been rewarding.

For one thing, it makes me happy. I love the discipline and imagination required. Two, it keeps me out of the bars. Three, it gives me a change to remember things I’ve done as well as things that other people have told me. I think that last thing is the most important, that and the supper table.

The supper table was the place where I heard my late father-in-law tell the stories of his life as a farmer and former rifleman with the 79^th Infantry Division in World War Two. It was also where he inserted stories about growing up in the rural South, like being a child and having an old, old man tell him about remembering the last indigenous Indian Family living along Baker’s Bayou not far from the family’s farm. How they lived all alone along at the edge of the forest, and one day were “just gone.”

Around a meal, we learned how farmers in the area used to put skulls of long-departed hunter-gatherers in their chicken nests in hopes of scaring away snakes and varmits. We heard the sad story of a teenaged girl, known only by the name “Geehaw” who once became so frightened of something after dark she ran over a harrow-handle and flattened it, apparently without lasting harm.

It was at that supper table we heard about artillery bombardments during which “you just wanted to live one more second, just one second.” We heard how, during the last days of the war, it was mostly quiet except for an occasional round falling as the Germans lazily depleted their munitions, and how one round landed near a chow line and killed the shortest man in the squad.

We heard, more than once, of how a young soldier, discharged from the horrors of war, came into town on the late-night train and walked the five miles to his family’s farm, arriving just as his parents were sitting down for breakfast.

We heard how a couple of neer-do-well teenage boys in the community once caught a buzzard in a steel trap and decided how funny it would be to tie a “coal-oil rag” to a rope, attach it to the buzzard’s legs, and set the rag afire. The fire bouncing through the dark night convinced the entire neighborhood that the “Second Coming” had occurred and folks headed for the churches, some still in their bedclothes. We learned how, “They almost sent those boys to the penitentiary on account of it.”

About my writing? As I say, one day I decided that I would use some of these tales, heard around the supper table, as inspirations for short stories so that the memories shouldn’t be lost. That got me started and I’m still pecking away in my spare time.

I’ve always felt that one of the reasons the South has produced so many fine writers—such great story-tellers—goes back to the supper table. It’s largely disappeared in this age of fast foods and, anyway, those stories could never compete with a cell phone. Hell, we don’t even call it “supper” anymore. In a great cultural transgression, we began to ignore the traditional stricture that "one has supper at home and dinner away from home." Decorum has fled our modern world.

And who would care to record a story heard around a “dinner” table?

Could this table have produced
a William Faulkner or aWillie Morris?

Morning Thoughts: September 30, 2017

Our perspectives on some things in life change as we age. Books and movies do for me. A friend started me thinking on this.

I had posted an ending of a movie I liked and said it was my favorite. He voted, instead, for the ending of the film that brought Dustin Hoffman into fame: The Graduate. It wasn’t a bad choice, but would not have been mine.

The director produced a well-crafted ending for a well-crafted film. It started me along this line of thought, though. That film represents one of what I call “age-perspective” works.

I’ll explain.

When I first saw that film, I had just returned from overseas duty in the United States Navy. Respect for others was not high on my list of worthwhile endeavors. I watched the film at the time, marveled at its “groovy” music, and said to myself, “Yes!”

Years passed. I watched it again not long ago, marveled at the timeless music, and said to myself, “That young woman just ran off with the biggest loser in the state of  California.”

That’s just me. But I wonder if other people have similar reactions to works of fiction as time goes by. Do you reckon?

A book that has that effect on me is Catcher In The Rye. After its publication in 1951, it became the icon for teenagers feeling alienated and disaffected. Of course, I fell in with the angst-ridden. As the years have progressed, I continue to respect the superb writing for its rhythm and style, unmatched, in my opinion, in American literature. Old Holden Caufield, however, has seemed a bit more insane each time I have read the book, which is maybe 20 times or more.

I do think Salinger left a lasting influence on American literature. It remains as a lasting axiom that almost any novel since “Catcher” is filled with angst-ridden characters bent on self-destruction. They aren’t teenagers, though, but adult characters that become tiresome two pages after they appear in a book. That’s why I read so few of them, modern novels, that is.

Ahh. The great ones don’t change. Tortilla Flat , The Brothers Karamazov, and Heart of Darkness still ring with the same epic themes as they did on first readings decades ago. The heart still floats on their clouds of majesty. (How’s that for gibberish)?

Speaking of great themes, though, certain aspects of novels only appeared following careful study, after my formal education. It was only after I undertook a protracted study of Eliot’s The Wasteland, for example, that I began more fully to see the “grail” imagery in The Great Gatsby. Without such study, I wouldn’t have picked up on the marvelous imagery of the actors driving past the local landfill on their way to their various searches.

Oh, well … enough babbling for one day. Think I’ll go start re-reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. Maybe I’ll make more sense out of it this time. Then maybe I’ll watch The Wild One, again. Boy, that Brando character was a lousy creep.

Or was he? I didn’t think so at one time.

Just thinking …

Growing Up Southern: July 29, 2017

No wonder that the South has produced so many fine writers. It also produces fine talkers, like my sainted mother.

She expressed herself with a fluidity of thought and lucidity, laced with colorful metaphors, similes, and analogies, that a Faulkner or a Fitzgerald would have been envious.

For example, she didn’t threaten simply to punish my many transgressions, she promised she would cut a persimmon switch (or worse still, make me cut it) and “wear you out.” Unlike modern politicians, she was not prone to idle threats.

Some of her style of speaking came from the region.

A person didn’t sit with pride or arrogance. They sat there “like Garrett on snuff.”

Something didn’t operate efficiently, it, ran “like a Singer sewing machine.”

A person wasn’t dimwitted, their brain rolled around in their head “like a BB in a barn.”

Someone wasn't driving fast, they were "sacking air."

Faced with an unpleasant task, I just had to “back my ears and do it.” (If you don’t understand, ask a “horse-person”).

Someone didn’t prove annoying, they made one’s a** “crave applesauce.” I ran into a variant of this when I married a girl from Lonoke, Arkansas where “applesauce” was traded for “a dip of snuff.” Same message, regional variation.

Other sayings were unique, as far as I can tell. When I appeared in an unusually disheveled or unprepared manner, she would tell me “you look like someone who was called for and couldn’t come, and when they got there they wadn’t needed.” Now that is someone looking bad.

Sometimes, language seemed home-grown. Running a grocery store along with her husband, she had a chance to connect buying habits with social behavior. When a wealthy person came through, they weren’t simply rich, “they didn’t ask the price of nothin’.” People with poor buying habits didn’t choose poorly, “they didn’t buy one thing they really needed.”

A favorite expression, one that I use a lot, reportedly originated with her father, whom I never met. A high-spirited man, from all accounts, he once vowed, in a huff, to go and tell a neighbor “how the hog ate the cabbage.” Reaching the front door, however, he turned and announced that he’d better not, because, as he put it, “I’ve got my cows in his pasture right now.” You just can’t express things better than that.

Oh, I think about that dear woman a lot, my bother. Standing not much over five feet tall, she could make grown men tremble, fearing an onslaught of her precise and colorful language. I also think about our language skill, and where we are headed with them. People with her language skills are disappearing.

 John Steinbeck, in Travels With Charlie, expressed a fear that technology would erase the variations in dialect among regions of America. I worry, as well, about our skills in basic communication. You only have to listen to young folks these days, and a frightening percentage of adults, insert the word “like” three or four times into one sentence, for no reason that adds meaning or emphasis, to see the danger facing our language skills.

More aggravating still is the replacement of any descriptor of a superlative situation with the single, over-used, exasperating, maddening, annoying, infuriating, irritating, galling, sophomoric, and vapid word “awesome.” It grates.

After all, American English used so endearingly by Wordsworth, Emerson, Twain, Hurston Ellison, Baldwin, Whitman, Cather, and others—this excellent, magnificent, wonderful, marvelous, supreme, consummate, outstanding, remarkable, fine, choice, first-rate, first-class, premier, prime, unsurpassed, unequaled, unparalleled, unrivaled, preeminent language of ours—should not be debased and violated by the lazy and speech-deprived.

It just makes my ass crave applesauce.

A marvelous gift

Reconciliation: Day Four

It is Sunday. Perhaps that’s a good time to talk about religion. I probably shouldn’t, but it is such an overwhelming aspect of American life that any sort of reconciliation that doesn’t consider it would fail at the starting gate, so to speak.

I’ve feelings and thoughts all over the place about it. Raised in a protestant household—Missionary Baptist in fact—I call myself a “Cultural Christian.” To tell the truth, I never liked to go to church. The two weeks I spent in Vacation Bible School as a child still stand as the longest ten years of my life. I began to eschew organized religion when I realized that the so-called “social gospel” that resonated so strongly with me is gone and not likely to return. Then a preacher in a small church we attended began to refer to those who believed in science as sinners. We fled, like Jews leaving Egypt. I’m not being sacrilegious, for those friends who are believers. I’m just being honest, a step I feel is essential if we are to try and understand one another.

That having been said, I will admit to revering much of the music of religion, the masses of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and others are sublime enough to make one spiritual, if not outright religious. On the popular front, I still play, hum, and try to sing the old church hymns. A good old good one, such as “Just As I Am,” has an unearthly power to move. Now … I can’t confess to caring much for the modern stuff, once described as “Jesus Is My Boyfriend,” music. But if you do, that is fine. I just happen to agree with the NPR guest who once said that comparing the old hymns with modern church music is like comparing a Shakespearian Sonnet to a Hallmark greeting card.

Enough of that.

I will also admit that, on most Sunday mornings, I sit with my mother-in-law and watch a televised Methodist service broadcast in our area. It’s the only segment of religious broadcast I watch on TV, other than the second or so it takes for me to change a channel. But, I find the one mentioned so full of grace, peace, love, and joy that I don’t think watching it would do harm to the most hardened atheist.

May we just agree that religion, in whatever form we take it—and there are so many—is so highly personal that a shared relationship is almost impossible? Could we not just leave it at that and allow one another to live her or his personal life accordingly? For me, that means keeping it to yourself and out of politics. Sorry, that’s just my opinion. You are entitled to your own.

What formed my opinion? I am one of the small percentage of living humans that has read the Holy Bible from start to finish, so I’m not illiterate in ecclesiastical matters. I’m one of the extremely few who have read it from start to finish more than once. I once read where Captain Joshua Slocum, author of, “Sailing Around the World Alone,” and the first person to do that, read the Bible numerous times, the exact number escapes me. I have neither that great man’s courage nor spare time. I can’t match his effort at studying the book, but I’ll keep trying.

When I do read it, I find sublime thought mixed with inconsistencies, cruelty, and the illogical. At the same time, I believe it lays bare the complexity of the human spirit, is the most enduring basis of western literature, and a must-read for an understanding of that genre. So, I will continue to read that esteem instrument although I sincerely believe it is both metaphorical and written by men for men. Yes girls. For men.

The point from which I must sincerely, and without malice, express my departure from so many dear friends, is the belief, as expressed in The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky "If God is dead, all is permitted," more often expressed as “without religion, there is no morality.”

I have known saints and sinners on both extremes the belief-nonbelief spectrum. There have been countless books written on the question, and I, personally, stand on the belief expressed by Albert Einstein: "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death."

But if religion truly causes you to be kind, caring, accepting, loving, and supportive of your fellow human beings, by all means follow it with joy and my blessing.

How in the world can we find reconciliation in beliefs so pervasive disagreements? My approach will be a striving for respect and non-judgement. In other words, “judge not.” I’ll borrow that one from the Galilean himself. I only ask my religious friends to do the same.

Meanwhile got to run. The service is coming on.

Just thinking …

Talent

Early in the morning thoughts with Franz Schubert Symphony No. 2 in B flat major:

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.  At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.  Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.” - Ernest Hemingway on F. Scott Fitzgerald from “A Movable Feast,” always one of my favorite passages from the book. (I once asked a young book store clerk if the store had it and she directed me to the cook book section).

The quote has been described as cruelly critical. I see it as praising with faint damnation.

F. Scott and Zelda - a troubled marriage

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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