JOHN FRUM'S GALACTIC GAZETTE

WHEN I HAVE FEARS THAT I MAY CEASE TO BE

2011-11-29T02:51:00.004-05:00

"October had come again, and that year it was sharp and soon: frost was early, burning the thick green on the mountain sides to massed brilliant hues of blazing colors, painting the air with sharpness, sorrow and delight - and with October. Sometimes, and often, there was warmth by day, an ancient drowsy light, a golden warmth and pollinated haze in afternoon, but over all the earth there was the premonitory breath of frost, an exultancy for all the men who were returning, a haunting sorrow for the buried men, and for all those who were gone and would not come again."

Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

* * *

3 October 2011 was the 111th anniversary of Thomas Wolfe’s birthday. I was reminded of the occasion by my friend Todd who is a lawyer and litterateur and man about town in Asheville. By happenstance, I was meeting with Todd on the morning of Wolfe’s birthday in order to return a few books he had lent me earlier in the year, and the subject of Wolfe came up.

I knew Todd to be a long-time Thomas Wolfe aficionado, and I asked him if any sort of ritual occurred to mark the anniversary. Customarily, he said, he visited Wolfe’s grave in Riverside Cemetery in the fading light of the October afternoon to share a bottle of Scotch with Wolfe and read a few selections of Wolfe’s infamously expansive writing.

I do not know why Scotch, in particular, is given to Wolfe in this postmortem fashion, and foolishly I failed to ask. According to the controversial biography of Wolfe written by David Herbert Donald (Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1986)), in the days of delirium and disease immediately preceding Wolfe’s death, Wolfe “muttered irrationally several times, once calling out for ‘Scotch!’ . . . .” This dubious story is reason enough, I suppose.

I consider myself a writer first and a lawyer second, but the latter trade is the only of the two which has paid me anything thus far in terms of money. It was in this lawyerly capacity that I was in Asheville that day—the anniversary of Wolfe’s birth—for the purpose of trying a real-property case between two old men who were as stubborn as a couple of old tree stumps. After seeing justice done and promptly giving my notice of appeal in open court, I sent Todd an e-mail saying I was finished for the day and would gladly accompany him to the gravesite for Scotch and literature in memoriam for the great Mr. Wolfe.

I waited a while but did not hear from Todd, so I drove downtown and walked over to Malaprop’s Bookstore. After a brief tour at Malaprop’s, where I found an excellent Kathe Kollwitz collection, I made my way over toward the Haywood Park Hotel, which is where I usually stay when I’m in Asheville. From the hotel, I walked south onto Wall Street and passed there at the corner a small group of hirsute musicians playing a melancholic Celtic dirge.

I walked past the Early Girl Eatery and stopped briefly outside the Market Place restaurant where I had eaten once before. Making a tent with my hands, I peered through the glass door and saw no one inside, either in the dining room or at the bar, so I continued down the street. I was pleased to find several people in the Laughing Seed Café, so I went in and ordered a beer. After I had started my second, Todd responded to my e-mail: “I’m here. Are you still in town?”

“I’m sitting at the bar at the Laughing Seed having a beer.”

“I’m at the condo. When you’re done if you want to pick me up, we’ll pay homage to Mr. Wolfe.”

“I’m almost finished. I’ll wrap up and come get you. Do you have the Scotch?”

“I’m prepared. I’ll get it from the car and be sitting curbside outside the building.”

I cashed out of the Laughing Seed and walked back up Battery Park and then up to Page to the Captain’s Bookshelf to quickly peruse their exemplary collection of works by and about Wolfe. Damnably, this extraordinary bookstore—easily the best in the state for rare, expensive books—is closed on Mondays, a fact I always forget. I cut through the alley next to the Captain’s Bookshelf down to Haywood and finally made it back to my car. I found Todd sitting outside his condo as promised with an old bottle of Scotch and a first-edition signed copy of Wolfe’s novel Of Time and the River.

* * *

Riverside Cemetery is in the northwestern quadrant of Asheville, off Montford, Pearson, and Birch in that order if you are coming from downtown. There is a gate at the entrance to the cemetery on which the Thomas Wolfe Society (presumably with the permission of the municipal authorities) has placed a bronze and gold plaque which reads:

IN MEMORY OF

THOMAS WOLFE

OCT. 3, 1900 - SEPT. 15, 1938

“WHEN HE CAME TO THE GATE OF THE CEMETERY HE FOUND IT OPEN . . . AS HE APPROACHED THE FAMILY PLOT, HIS PULSE QUICKENED A LITTLE.”

LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL

THE THOMAS WOLFE SOCIETY

MAY 14, 1988

The cemetery itself is beautiful as far as cemeteries go. It is green and rolling with ancient trees throughout. To be sure, there are worse places to be buried. Its grounds hold the decayed remains not only of the great Thomas Wolfe, but also William Sydney Porter (known in some circles as O. Henry), not to mention Zebulon Vance and a host of other persons of marginal historical significance.

Todd and I found two other (living) people at Wolfe’s grave when we arrived. Consistent with the aforementioned ritual, they had come with a bottle of some alcoholic beverage discreetly wrapped in a paper bag, and between wince-inducing pulls at the bottle, they were taking turns reading passages from O Lost, the original and therefore expanded version of Look Homeward, Angel (2000, Arlyn & Matthew J. Bruccoli, eds.). Todd knew them both; they had met at the grave the previous year. Two empty bottles of wine rested on Wolfe’s headstone already.

Someone had left colored plastic flowers on the ground just in front of the headstone. Others had left pennies and odd change scattered about the top of the monument. Later, I noticed that the same had been done on William Porter’s grave marker. I have seen this, too, in other places, but I am unfamiliar with the origins of this solemn practice. An obolus for Charon to pay transit across the underworld rivers of death, perhaps.

The ground had been trampled so frequently by visitors that no grass grew on Wolfe’s grave except in sparse clumps. A small section of dead sod was still visible, and a few handfuls of inert grass seed lay scattered on the hard-packed ground.

Wolfe’s headstone itself is a curiosity. It is of modest size and is quite plain. There is a humility to it that seems simultaneously contrary to and yet somehow strangely befitting the profusive and elegiac Mr. Wolfe. Still, it is a bleak irony that this lost boy who heard the departing trains and longed for the golden and unvisited world far away was to become part of the soil of the very mountains he once found so oppressive.

In faded lettering below the names of his parents, W. O. and Julie E. Wolfe, and in the shadow of his father’s larger and more prominent death monument, Tom’s headstone contains two terse epitaphs that were taken from his most notable literary works.

The first comes from Look Homeward, Angel, and it reads simply: THE LAST VOYAGE, THE LONGEST, THE BEST. This passage was selected for the headstone by Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe’s editor for Look Homeward, Angel, and his longtime friend and mentor.

The second comes from The Web and the Rock, the first of two novels which Edward C. Aswell edited and prepared for publication following Wolfe’s death in 1938. It reads: DEATH BENT TO TOUCH HIS CHOSEN SON WITH MERCY, LOVE, AND PITY, AND PUT THE SEAL OF HONOR ON HIM WHEN HE DIED.

Aswell was asked, along with Perkins, to select an epitaph for Wolfe’s headstone by the Wolfe family, and the preceding passage is what Aswell chose. To those familiar with the rhapsodic and lyrical Wolfe, it does not sound particularly like Wolfe, and indeed according to one source this passage may not have been penned by Wolfe at all.

One biography of Wolfe suggests instead that it was written into The Web and the Rock by Aswell, whose overreaching editorial decisions with respect to Wolfe’s posthumous works have been criticized by numerous Wolfe scholars (see, e.g., R. Kennedy, L. Rubin Jr., C. H. Holman, & c.), making its inclusion on the headstone as questionable a decision by Aswell as so many of the meddling edits he made to The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again.

Ironically, the most fitting and truly moving sentiment on Wolfe’s headstone is contained in three simple unattributed words:

A BELOVED AMERICAN AUTHOR.

* * *

According to my friend’s version of the Wolfe Graveside Ritual®, you pour a Scotch for yourself and one for Tom, and whatever Tom doesn’t drink, you drink. So we stood for a while in the increasing cold and dark of the early October evening drinking Tom’s Scotch, and Todd read from his first-edition signed copy of Of Time and the River, which must have cost a fortune. The girls there ahead of us then took turns reading their bookmarked selections in O Lost, and after each one we would all toast solemnly to Wolfe.

Tom wrote often of mortality and the tragic brevity of life. He was always mindful of death, and this condition common to all men was a frequent theme in his writing. Wolfe, like Keats, maintained a not-irrational fear that the dark curtain of time would close his eyes too soon, before all he had to say about this life had been written.

Illustrative is a passage from You Can’t Go Home Again in which the narrator, George Webber, watches as the casket holding his Aunt Maw is lowered into the earth:

“And as the black lid disappeared from sight George felt such a stab of wordless pain and grief as he had never known. . . . It was an aching pity for himself and for all men living, and in it was the knowledge of the briefness of man’s days, and the smallness of his life, and the certain dark that comes too swiftly and that has no end.”

Even in Tom’s spirited months in the spring of 1938, well before he became aware of the illness that would take his life, Tom spoke of the “fatal impingement of time” and of the sense of urgency this notion engendered in him with respect to his writing. And indeed, his time came too soon.

When Wolfe was 37 years old, before he could complete or even coherently organize the sprawling material that would become The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again, he became ill on a summer trip to the west. He developed a cough, a fever, and debilitating headaches. Instead of promptly returning to the east, he remained in Seattle under dubious medical care for several weeks.

When it became clear that Wolfe’s condition was not improving, he was transported by train to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. At Johns Hopkins, according to one account, Wolfe was diagnosed as suffering from “acute pulmonary tuberculosis, with a cerebral tubercle or possibly tuberculous meningitis.” (D. Donald, Fawcett 1988, p. 461.)

On September 12, 1938, in light of Wolfe’s grave and deteriorating condition, and with the permission of Wolfe’s family, his physician performed an “exploratory operation on his cranium.” Id. What he discovered there were “myriads of tubercles.” Id. at 462. The medical report of the operation stated simply: “Obviously, nothing could be done.” Id. Wolfe died three days later, his work on earth unfinished, and his life unwritten. He was 37 years old.

Several members of Tom’s family are buried in Riverside Cemetery, including Tom’s older brother Ben, who died in 1918 during the influenza pandemic. Wolfe later dedicated his seldom-read work, From Death to Morning, to “Benjamin Harrison Wolfe” and “to the proud and bitter briefness of his days.” Ben was 26 when he died.

I always experience a profound sense of sadness upon revisiting this dedication, but my sadness is more for Tom than for Ben. As a current but temporary member of the living class, I understand all too well the fleeting nature of time. When I see that which is death and turn inward to confront my bodily circumstance of clay and ash and nothing more, I can reach but one honest conclusion, and that is a never-ending darkness where all departed souls reside. In this bleak light, all deaths are unwanted and untimely, save but a few. For that singular man we do not know but only admire for some extraordinary gift granted to but one man among all, the sting of loss is more bitter and more acute, for we have seen his struggle with time, and we have witnessed a life impossibly rare fall away into unbeing. And so it is with Thomas Wolfe. In my mind, therefore, this dedication—“to the proud and bitter briefness of his days”—is for Tom.

As the others waited for me to read from O Lost or otherwise compose an appropriate toast, I thought of Tom there beneath the dying grass, silenced as he was by unrelenting time and disease long before he was able to give voice to all that surged and roared chaotically inside him. I imagined briefly that I could be his living eyes and ears; that I could see and hear in his stead on this cool October night; to breathe in the wood smoke from the first fires of the evening; to feel the lonely excitement of nightfall in the city; to taste the honeyed warmth of Scotch on my tongue; to know life and the ephemeral joy of all things living, just for a moment, for Tom. To allow him to see and feel again, through my eyes and body, the exquisite autumn of October in the mountains of old Catawba.

At last the words came to me, and I made my toast: “To the life of Thomas Clayton Wolfe, and to the proud and bitter briefness of his days.”

Fn. This article shares the title of a poem by John Keats (ca. 1818; pub. post. 1848).

A HORNBECK CHRESTOMATHY

2011-10-10T17:45:00.000-04:00

The Eternal Silence of These Infinite Spaces: a philosophical tour de force that so inflamed one member of the Cormac McCarthy Society that he sought to have this article removed from the Internet, this penetrating review of McCarthy's epic novel The Road reveals surprising parallels to George Gordon Lord Byron's Darkness and Albert Camus's The Stranger.

The Puzzled Penis: this irreverent review of Philip Roth's prurient Portnoy's Complaint contains several clever euphemisms, the correct pronunciation of Zooey, and a box of Kleenex(TM) with vaguely anatomical features. This article was rejected by Good Housekeeping and Reader's Digest on what I consider to be highly dubious grounds.

The Old Man and the Sea: a book review of the novella that preceded Hem's Nobel Prize in Literature (1954), along with a photographic tour of the writer's Key West Home and musical accompaniment by my favorite artist, Dan Bern. Find the hidden photograph of the naked Russian girls and win an autographed copy of Bryan's Blood People II (see infra).

From Hell's Heart I Stab at Thee: from the creators of Star Trek: Wrath of Khan comes an iconoclastic new look at Herman Melville's wildly discursive novel Moby-Dick and a bit about anguish, madness, and the tyranny of time. Naturally, the words "seaman" and "sperm" also appear frequently herein.

You Can't Go Home Again: originally posted in August 2006, this article visits the childhood home of Asheville native Thomas Wolfe and declares the author of Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again to be the tallest of the American writers, if not the greatest. Dedicated to rose-lipt maidens and lightfoot lads.

Bryan's Blood People: an endearing short story about the struggles of a suburban South American family facing disease and mortality. Awarded First Prize for Realism in a Short Story by the Literalism in Fiction Council, Summer 2007.

Beware the False Prophet: an exploration of mass hallucination in the religious context, along with several elegant lithographs of Yahweh communing with startled humans and various plants of antiquity. Also reveals for the first time what the abbreviation I.N.R.I. means (in case you ever wondered).

The Age of Reason Lost: continuing with our theme of religious appreciation, this charmingly esoteric piece of delicate philosophical writing probes with great subtlety the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything. Spoiler alert: this article answers the ultimate question.

The Scarlet Letter: examines in excruciating detail the "partial-birth abortion" debate and concludes that Congress is a collection of pandering, scientifically illiterate troglodytes. I predicted in this piece that the Supreme Court would declare the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act [sic] of 2003 unconstitutional, but I was dead wrong.

This View of Life: a tribute to one of my favorite scientists, Stephen Jay Gould (R.I.P.), and some inebriate musings about The Tap Room in Hickory, North Carolina where my inebriate friends go for pub chips and Brown Mountain Light.

The Perils of Vegetarianism: truly, a diet without meat is worth aspiring to, but believe me that shit is difficult. In part three of our series on special dietary concerns, we explore the life of the fast-food vegetarian and discover what it is like to have no meaningful options.

Blue Ridge Mountain Blues: a biographical piece about bluegrass legend Doc Watson and old-time music from the mountains of North Carolina, where few people can read and even fewer people can spell.

Bessie Crim and Walter and Charles: this is a short story written by my father in 1994 that should have been published somewhere but wound up folded into an old book and forgotten for 13 years. Sadly, he no longer writes; the world has lost a great storyteller.

MEMORIAL SERVICE

2011-05-05T23:12:00.000-04:00

The Honorable and Most Worthwhile James Harlan (1820-1899)

"Let us summon from the shades the immortal soul of James Harlan, born in 1820, entered into rest in 1899. In the year 1865 this Harlan resigned from the United States Senate to enter the Cabinet of Abraham Lincoln as Secretary of the Interior. One of the clerks in that department, at $600 a year, was Walt Whitman, lately emerged from the three years of service as an army nurse during the Civil War. One day, discovering that Whitman was the author of a book called "Leaves of Grass," Harlan ordered him incontinently kicked out, and it was done forthwith. Let us remember this event and this man; he is too precious to die. Let us repair, once a year, to our accustomed houses of worship and there give thanks to God that one day in 1865 brought together the greatest poet that America has ever produced and the damndest ass."

- H.L. Mencken

From Prejudices: First Series, 1919, pp. 249-250
First printed in the Smart Set, June 1919, P. 45

This rather terse little squib, which was penned by H. L. Mencken in 1919, defends the incomparable Uncle Walt and impugns rather admirably one James Harlan, the former being one of America's greatest poets, the latter being a tit of the first division who dismissed Walt from the government's service presumably because he found Whitman's poetry to be morally questionable, and no doubt also because he suspected the hairy bard to be an authentic pole-smoking queen. Mencken, who is on my short list of men I'd let sleep with my fiancée if they were still alive, sought to memorialize Harlan's transgession against the poet by publishing the above-printed piece once a year in the Smart Set.

Mencken, RIP

Because that poor bastard Mencken is dead, I thought I'd continue the tradition, just in case the Harlan line managed to extend into this generation. No doubt they'd benefit from a pleasant reminder that their ancestor in lineage was a homophobic Puritan with a comb-over.

THE GOLDEN PARADOX

2010-08-04T08:53:00.032-04:00

* * *

In the more recent history of that homely and hirsute hominid known as Man, we of the genus Homo have oft peered wide-eyed in marvelous contemplation of the mysterious lacuna between that which is known, and all that which remains unknown.

To find answers along the way, we have sought dialog with the winged chariot of light, the Sun, and his cold white mistress, the Moon, as they moved distantly along the ecliptic plane. We have appealed with palms uplifted to our several retreating gods and goddesses, nearly all of whom now have proven to be extinct.

Increasingly, we have employed Almighty Science to divine the true nature of our curious existence, as our smallish blue-green planet, indifferent to our perils, surfs the vast and inscrutable fabric of the space-time continuum.

In what dark corner of the world will the answers be found, lurking and waiting to be discovered?

Indisputably, the disciplines of science and mathematics have made grand advances in understanding the clockwork mechanisms of the universe since Claudius Ptolemaeus (d/b/a Ptolemy; f/k/a Claude) etched out his first naively concentric celestial ring.

We have learned much; we have traveled far on our journey of discovery. The sweeping scythe of erudition has cleared much of the dark wilderness of the unknown.

We now know, for one truly astounding example, the time that has elapsed since our universe was born from a white-hot singularity 13.75 billion years ago.

We know and understand the origins of life on Earth (more or less).

We wield subatomic particles like jacks on the playground.

We have sent rockets to planets throughout our solar system. Our men have walked on the moon, and our robots have analyzed soil samples on the surface of Mars.

Yet damnably–and undeniably–there remain a handful of scientific riddles that many scientists fear may hide forever just beyond the grope and grasp of study and cognition.

* * *

Some scientists have been known to wonder, particularly after a sufficient quantity of nicely bracing mint juleps, whether the physical makeup of the world around us–i.e., space and time and all its multivalent constituent parts–may preclude a complete understanding of the expanding universe(s) and our place in it (them).

For instance, it has been theorized that something as seemingly insignificant as, say, the mass of the Higgs boson (patent pending) may dictate whether human intelligence can accumulate the critical mass of insight necessary to span the abyss of our most mercurial mysteries.

Perhaps the most well known and sweeping scientific question is the odd discordance between relativity theory–which pertains to the physics of big-ticket items such as black holes and gravity–and quantum mechanics, which applies to the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles. Coalescing these theories into one cohesive mathematical model has proved, shall we say, maddeningly elusive.

Other daunting scientific enigmas include: how human consciousness arises (nobody’s quite sure), whether Fermat’s cryptic marginalia was a red herring (probably), and whether intelligent life has arisen on Earth (probably not).

But these classic conundrums pale in comparison to what has surely become science's true test of worth in the 21st century.

THE GOLDEN PARADOX®

Heralded like a royal throne amidst the rubble of this graveyard of comparatively trivial perplexities is perhaps the single greatest challenge facing mankind’s bold pursuit of knowledge today: an exotic puzzler known to scientists and mathematicians the world over as The Golden Paradox®.

Resolution of The Golden Paradox, which in recent decades has become the whipping boy for naysaying theologians everywhere, represents nothing less than the battle for the preeminence of science as the discipline of ultimate knowledge and understanding.

In its simplest terms, the mathematically impenetrable Golden Paradox predicts that no matter how far one stands from an American Standard™-brand porcelain urinal, a roughly equivalent amount of urine (or “urine mist”) will deflect out of the urinal and strike the feet and/or legs of the “urinator,” which is the industry term for the person using the particular urinal.

It is no mere hyperbole to say that this daunting problem has been a plague on civilized peoples everywhere since man bravely dared to release his uretero-vesical sphincter indoors for the very first time.

David H. Smith, a molecular physicist working in American Standard’s research and development facility, explains:

“At first blush, urinal mechanics appear to be squarely rooted in simple geometry, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is no mere pool-table trigonometry here. The complexity of the fluid dynamics involved in predicting the urine rebound effect is akin to the physics involved in time travel and/or manipulation the Grafenberg Spot, processes not well understood by most scientists at the present time.”

THE GOLDEN PARADOX EXPLAINED

In cultures with running water and a reliable electrical grid, it is typical for the urinator to stand with the working end of his penis more or less directly above the inside lip of the outside edge of the urinal, which places the urinator close enough to comfortably hit the urinal with a modest stream of urine, while maintaining a distance that allows any low-momentum vertical trickles falling from the penis at the end of the evacuation to also be caught by the urinal, provided the penis is not shaken violently, whipped around like a lasso in an attempt to disgorge shy or “hidden” drops of urine, or stretched to scare competitors.

However, standing in such close proximity to the urinal results in a significant amount of fine urine mist and the occasional large droplet of urine being deflected back onto the body of the urinator (the “urine rebound effect”), an unpleasant fact that is especially noticeable during warmer months when flip-flops are worn with greater frequency.

But where does the paradox come in?

Again, David Smith:

“Common experience tells us that backing up a few steps from the urinal would decrease the amount of urine mist that comes in contact with the urinator. This is not the case.

“In fact, due to certain not-well-understood equivalencies that are generated by the increased distance of urination, the level of urine mist that comes in contact with the urinator remains roughly constant regardless of one’s distance from the urinal. Thus, the paradox.”

Early classical models attributed this effect to the increased gravitational kinetic energy experienced by the arc of falling urine as a urinator moved farther from the urinal. But that’s not even close to the whole story.

As it turns out, to even scratch the surface of The Golden Paradox, one must tackle little-understood physical principles such as the continuum assumption and other cryptic formulas governing fluids (e.g., Navier-Stokes equations) that when applied in the urination context have been known to blue-screen a TI-84-Plus Silver Series Graphing Calculator out of pure mathematical fear.

For a better idea of what’s at work, see the following outline taken verbatim from an internal memorandum prepared by Smith in 1981 when his R&D team first seriously assessed the problem.

INTERNAL MEMORANDUM

* * * DO NOT COPY * * *

TO: R & D URINAL TEAM, DIV. I

FROM: DAVID H. SMITH, G.E.D., B.S., Ph.D.

RE: URINAL REBOUND PHYSICS / ADDRESSING THE "GOLDEN PARADOX"

DATE: CLASSIFIED

As R & D Urinal Team leader, I have been charged with carefully examining the frontal-lobe-mincing physics of urine spray and distribution associated with our Class-A series of wall-mounted porcelain non-sit operator-flushed urinals as part of a broad feasibility study currently underway at Am/Std aimed at reducing the amount of urine rebound presently generated in the typically prostrated American male.

As part of my examination, I have compiled a brief and certainly non-exclusive list of factors that must be scientifically considered as part of this effort, each of which will be assigned to individual groups for further study. These factors include:

1. Fluid Mechanics:

• Although well understood in an idealized setting, fluid mechanics a/k/a fluid dynamics is often charitably referred to as a black art, and I’m not talking about Horace Pippin.

• The underlying equations often assume extremely unlikely confluences of idealized parameters.

• The equations are nearly always expressed in the language of differential calculus (gradients, divergences, and curls), all of which is non-intuitive to anyone but a Hawking-level savant.

• Small variations in input parameters can have large, unintended effects on macroscopic quantities of interest, e.g., flow velocities.

2. Surface Tension.

• A ‘ribbon of urine’ is not actually a ribbon. If it were, the situation and accompanying equations would be much simpler.

• In actuality, surface tension causes your urine stream to dissociate into a large array of smaller droplets.

• Many components in your typical urine sample can significantly alter the surface tension: (i) ammonia content; (ii) sugar; (iii) asparagus.

• Different-sized droplets will respond differently to wind and gravity. Caveats: (i) you cannot automatically assume that gravity will contribute significantly to the equation; (ii) small droplets achieve terminal velocity relatively quickly; (iii) the kinetic energy of the stream may be at a maximum right at departure from your sadly shriveled unit.

3. Exit-flow Characteristics.

• Exit-flow ratios can vary dramatically on a continuum from “leaky faucet” to extreme urgency or “12-pack” a/k/a “liquor piss” pressure flow, or during an interminable “whiskey dick” piss break from tantric sex.

• The condition of the conduit, i.e., the status of your sword, is certainly important, but differences in penises across cultures and particularly races is hard to account for in the laboratory.

• The more laminar the flow upon exit, the longer a coherent stream will be maintained. Relevant considerations include: (i) ambient temperature and shrinkage gradients (is it cold?); (ii) whether the urinator is sporting a chubby a/k/a morning wood a/k/a a woodie; (iii) type of underwear (boxers, briefs, or commando?); etc.

4. Impact Physics.

• Droplet sizes and momentum considerations.

• Target conditions: (i) is there a brown trout present? (rare for a urinal, but not impossible – seen in field trials); (ii) urinal mints; (iii) toilet paper; (iv) whatever other fetid mass lurks in the bottom of a your standard-issue gas-station urinal.

5. The AIM Quotient.

• The industry acronym for much of what goes into this analysis stands for Accuracy/Impairment/Member control.

• All urinal designs must account for the likelihood that many if not most American male users will: (i) fail to aim properly; (ii) be legally impaired when they try to urinate; (iii) have oddly shaped penises that result in unpredictable and errant initial trajectories; (iv) be too rotund to visibly see their penises; (v) attempt to fart audibly while urinating, resulting in increased penile pressure and a greater spray radius; (vi) have lint or Kleenex fragments left on the tip of their penis following a wank-session clean-up, causing a “split stream” effect or general “loose fire hose” craziness; (vii) etc.

Assignments for research projects will be handed out at the next meeting.

[END OF MEMORANDUM]

* * * * * *

The Famous Dual Wall-Mounted Urinals At He's Not Here In Chapel Hill, NC. If There Were To Be A Lawsuit Against The Urine Rebound Effect, This Would Be Attached As Exhibit A.

CHAOS THEORY / BROWNIAN MOTION

Chaos theory also figures predominantly into the mix. All other things being equal, probability and experience suggest one of two basic urination scenarios.

With the urinator standing directly in front of the wall-mounted urinal, either (1) the majority of the urine strikes some part of the back wall of the urinal and then cascades irregularly down into a shallow waterless drainage area (in theory); or (2) the urinal contains a pool of collected water in the throes of Brownian motion, not unlike a toilet, and the urinator evacuates directly into the pool of water.

In the first case, the variability of the urine stream, the imperfect surface of the urinal, and macroscopic objects in the urinal itself, such as globs of greenish coagulated phlegm, the plastic cages of urinal deodorizer pucks, and (god help us) the stray but ubiquitous pubic hair, make the likely trajectory of the rebounding urine droplets impossible to predict with reasonable geometrical certainty.

In the second case, pounding the pool of milky urinal water with a rope of hot uretic waste likewise creates an uncertainty that defies computation. At any given moment, when examined at a level of sufficient magnification, it is apparent that quantum indeterminacy governs this set of collisions and moves it well out of reach of most classical models.

Add a recalcitrant early-morning erection to the mix and all bets are off.

Every urination is essentially an experiment in complex physics and trigonometry, with the urinator coming no closer to understanding how to solve the urine-rebound problem upon his next visit.

“It’s anybody’s guess,” says Smith, whose mind wanders to 5:00 when he'll depart for Windy City Sundries where he now receives mail.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE URINAL PARADIGM

With a few notable exceptions, the urinal paradigm has remained fundamentally unchanged for nearly 150 years.

According to dubious sources, the urinal was first patented in 1866 by Andrew Rankin, an inventor and lawyer from New York. As far as I can tell, Rankin’s version was basically just a box with a hole in it. A slop jar, if you will.

Dr. Andrew Rankin, ca. 1866

Pioneer, Inventor, and Urine Freak

Thereafter, numerous attempts were made to improve upon the urinal, many of which are excruciatingly detailed on the United States Patent and Trademark Office website if you know where to find them.

In 1882, E. Francis Baldwin wrote in his patent application that “terminal drippings of urine continually fall on the edge of the bowl and run down the outside . . . . The nature of this deposit, owing to its consistency and adherence, and from its pervasive, pungent, and foul odor, renders it exceedingly offensive, and is the chief cause of the offensive smell in hotels or other public places where urinals are constantly in use.”

Baldwin’s solution was to add a flange to the urinal basin such that (I swear to god) “any drip falling on the top of the flange . . . will run down the front of the same, and, being prevented by gravity from running up the back of the flange, will thence drop from its lower edge directly onto the floor, or into a box of earth, sawdust, or disinfecting material that may be placed on the floor to receive it.”

Thus in 1882 we may conclude that urine on the floor was simply accepted as a way of life, much like small pox and erectile dysfunction. Think how far we’ve come.

Baldwin’s diagram of his proposed urinal looked oddly like an underwater diving helmet of the Jules Verne variety.

The E. Francis Baldwin

Underwater Urinal, ca. 1882

Two years later, in 1884, Albert B. Pullman of Chicago submitted a patent application with this introduction:

“A fault of all urinals as now constructed is that the basin is placed too high, rendering a drip-pan upon the floor necessary to prevent the fouling of the apartment. This is especially noticeable in railway cars, where the unsteady motion greatly increase the difficulty of using, though it exists in a greater or lesser degree under all circumstances.”

Pullman’s urinal had lovely sea-shell geometric lines, was detachable so that “it may readily be detached from the wall and carried out of its apartment, and after cleansing be readily replaced in position,” and basically sat on the floor to catch the drips. By the looks of it, I’m sure it sent piss absolutely everywhere.

Albert P. Pullman's

"Sea Shell" Urinal, ca. 1884

When water-flushed urinals became in fashion, it was common for the “flush water” from urinals to leap out of the basin and onto the urinator, an experience that was surely more dramatic than the unpleasant but sometimes subtle effects of the urine rebound effect.

Unblinkingly targeting the fears of the day, Thomas H. Hutchinson of Brooklyn developed a “Urinal-Pan” in 1898 that “provide[d] for so flushing the urinal-bowl that all danger of splashing on the clothing will be avoided.”

Sixteen years later, in 1914, Stephen D. Baker of New York submitted a patent application with this telling recital about extant urinals and the disappointing failure of the Hutchinson “Urinal-Pan”:

Baker’s urinal bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a vulva, and doubtless it was never taken seriously by the urinal elite. It strikes me that its principle flaw lies in its failure to consider the AIM Quotient (see sec. 5 of Smith Memorandum, supra). Just as God managed to do with the vagina, the first step is to make the hole big enough for what you’re trying to do with it.

Stephen D. Baker’s

Anatomical Urinal, ca. 1914

* * *

Remarkably, in 1938, a full 33 years after Einstein penned the special theory of relativity, and approximately 139 years after the invention of the cotton gin, the tantalizing problem of the urine rebound effect remained unsolved.

* * *

That year, a stunning convergence of geometry, fate, and porcelain vaulted a young man from Detroit onto the black-and-white tiled stage with a urinal design that modernized bladder evacuation for decades to come.

The young man was Harry G. Coordes, and he revolutionized the urinal with a specially designed parabolic back-splash area he called a “splash back” that, combined with border flange around the sump, “effectively prevented [urine spray] as well as [flush-water] splashing over the rim or side margins . . . .”

Harry G. Coordes's

Parabolic Back-splash Design, ca. 1938

Coordes’s urinal model is basically what is used today for most urinal designs. Yet, while Coordes certainly improved upon prior designs, no self-respecting man with half a penis would say that the urine rebound effect has at all been ameliorated to any reasonable degree.

Herbert V. Kohler, Jr. designed a contemporary-looking urinal circa 1988, but it did not improve upon early models as far as I can tell.

In 1994, a team of scientists from Cal-Tech used declassified stealth technology as a model for the back wall of the toilet, reasoning that an irregular geometrical surface of the type that would reduce the deflection of radar waves could be useful in deflecting urine in directions other than back at the urinator. This turned out not to be the case and the project was scrapped.

* * *

THE SPLATTERLESS URINAL: A CHIMERA

Four years later, in 1998, which was like forty million years after the first human ancestor pissed upright in the grassy plains of the African savanna, Roger H. Tilton and Robert Hayes, both of Seattle, Washington, were awarded a patent for a “Splatterless Urinal.”

Patent Abstract for the "Splatterless Urinal"

The patent application reads:

“As a natural consequence of [standard urinal] designs, there is a splattering of the urine streams due both to the geometry of the wall which is the natural target of the urine stream and because conventional urinals do not have adequate means to confine the urine to the flushed area. The resulting splattering produces unclean, unsanitary conditions in and around the urinal area and on the body or clothing of the urinator.”

While Tilton and Hayes clearly understood the problem, their urinal design looks like Artemus Gordon’s umbrella. Sadly, it is a creative effort of profound idiocy.

The Tilton & Hynes "Splatterless" Urinal, ca. 1997

These men did not comprehend what even the earliest urination experts have understood, which is that the AIM Quotient and actually hitting the f*cking target to begin with is inherent in the problem. If aim were not an issue, the Tilton and Hayes design would be ingenius.

Unfortunately, a urinal consisting simply of a modest hole three feet off the ground would have disastrous results. If you hit it–fine. If you missed it, you’d need a mop. Truly, the ideal back-splash basin for a urinal is probably something akin to the width and the “give” of an elephant’s ear with a trough the size of a basement freezer.

Today, many new urinals come with fascinating features designed to flush automatically, or save water, or talk to you during urination, or read you the news while you are peeing, and some new urinals even indicate a small target for the urinator to shoot for to reduce the urine rebound effect. However, in general, the shape and basic geometry of the urinal has not evolved dramatically since the time of Abraham Lincoln, who according to his wife’s memoirs, absolutely refused to do any manscaping whatsoever.

Outside of the Coordes parabolic backsplash, about the best any urinal scientist has been able to do to reduce the urine rebound effect is to recommend the placement urinals at varying heights from the ground to accommodate urinators of all sizes.

My Workplace Urinals.

I Use the One on the Left.

THE URINAL: A FAILED EXPERIMENT

In the final analysis, it may just be time to concede that the urinal is simply a failed experiment in the wet and tacky history of indoor bodily-waste evacuation.

Absent an unforeseen advancement in our understanding of particle physics and fluid dynamics, the obstacles facing the development of a truly splatterless urinal may in fact be insuperable. And this perplexing failure in the golden realm of human urination indisputably has broader implications on humanity as a whole.

“Our inability to resolve The Golden Paradox® is a sad commentary on the ability of science to address our world's deepest problems,” said Smith--who then lifted his leg slightly, adjusted his hairless testicles, and coughed dispiritedly into his fist.

Indeed, it has become apparent that the ultimate success of science in its quest to discover and comprehend all the physical processes of the universe will in fact be predicted in large part by the success of those elite few, the proud and undaunted, the tireless, the slightly moistened, the venerable Urinal Physicists of Earth, on their lonely journey to solve The Golden Paradox®.

THE STORY OF HENRY SMETH

2010-05-18T09:59:00.010-04:00

* * *

This story was told to me about 10 years ago by my father. It is set deep in the mountains of northwestern North Carolina, way to the north of Smethport and old Claybank Road. He told the story like it was a true story, almost as if he were repeating a known historical account, like maybe he’d heard it possibly second- or third-hand from someone who might have had actual knowledge of it. Well, I doubt the veracity of the account; it seems just a tad far fetched to me. But I guess you never really know.

Anyway, I wrote the story I’d heard my father tell all those years ago as well as I could remember it, and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature was kind enough to publish it for me in their online journal. It is reprinted here in basically the same form.

* * * *

Henry Smeth lived in the old, wet holler of Little Horse Creek, where his deddy and momma had grown up, and where six of his brothers and sisters now lived, and where four of his infant brothers and sisters were buried near an old creek bed.

Henry’s momma, to be such an unsightly woman, round and hirsute, bow-legged as a split-rail fence, was apparently a frequent object of sexual interest for Henry’s deddy, who weighed near 300 pounds. The mind strains to imagine such a union.

Henry lived apart from his deddy and momma in a two-room wooden house on a shaded patch of land near a cold spring at the northern end of the holler.

By some enigmatic mechanism as timeless as the land itself, Henry identified a young lady on the other side of the mountain whom he wished to court and marry.

His enthusiasm for her was obscure, but he was persistent and perhaps in the absence of other identifiable competition he managed to achieve her romantic attention. He’d walk a mile or so to her house over the shoulder of Three Top Mountain on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons in order to sit with her on her decaying and mossy front porch, rarely speaking a word the whole time he was there.

Her name was Madgeline. She had a sister named Madeline. Around town they went by Madge and Maddy. Madge and Maddy resembled in figure and complexion the trunk of a black walnut, ‘cept Madge’s hair was more brown and Maddy’s was more black. Otherwise, it was hard to tell them apart.

After courting Madge suitably, Henry Smeth walked eight sloping miles into town along wet dirt and gravel roads to the courthouse, where he had it in his mind to buy a marriage license. The license cost $1.00.

“Henry, what can I do for ya?” Henry had been into town twice previously: once to buy boots, and another time to buy long socks to go on his feet ahead of the boots, a necessary that he did not divine until after getting back home the first time. His other socks weren’t long enough and fell down inside the boots, causing discomfort.

“Reckon’ I need to get a marriage license.”

“You marryin’ that girl from up Horse Creek?”

“Yup.” Henry’s implacable beard hung down in front of his overhauls. His hair was dirty, and faded particulates of food hid in his beard. He reached up and scratched his head for a long time.

“Well, I had a heard that y’all were courtin’.”

“Yup.”

“Now she’s got a sister, don’t she?”

Henry squinted his eyes and picked at his ear. After a moment he retracted his hand and examined something on the end of his forefinger before flicking it audibly away with long, dirty nails, the clerk’s eyes following the parabola of flight of the unknown object. Possibly a bug, the clerk concluded.

Henry’s attention returned to the clerk. “Yup, she shore does. How much is a license?”

“One dollar.”

“How long’s it been a dollar?”

In answer, the clerk turned and looked at the sign on the wall behind him, as if it might contain information that he hadn’t ever seen before.

It read:

Marriage Licenses . . . ~~25 cents~~ ~~50 cents~~ $1.00 effective immed. per county ordinance

Birth Certificates . . . 50 cents

Death Certificates . . . 25 cents

After taking a moment to appreciate the contents of the sign, the clerk turned back to Henry Smeth as if that just answered the question.

Henry thought about that for a minute. The clerk cocked his head and crossed his arms. Then Henry reached deep into the pocket of his worn overhauls and brought out a handful of coins.

“Looks to me that it costs more to be born than to die, and more to get married than anything,” said Henry to no one in particular as he handed over the money.

“You don’t pay now. Pay when you pick it up. Come back next Wednesday.”

Henry turned and walked the eight sloping miles back to the holler, his boots wet and his feet cold.

The next Wednesday, Henry returned to town to pick up the marriage license. He picked it up, read it, and something about it struck him as odd. Handing it back to the clerk of court, he said, “Does this say Madgeline or Madeline”?

“Says Madeline. Thought that was who you were a marryin’. Is it not?”

“No. I’m marryin’ Madge.”

“Well, shit. We’ll have to make you another one.”

“How long is that gonna take?”

“You’ll have to pick it up next week.”

“Will I have to pay another dollar for it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, just gimme that one, then.”

“Henry, that one won’t work to marry Madge.”

“Well, then, I’ll just marry the other one.”

“Will she do it?”

“Don’t see why not. I’ve got a license for it.” Henry pointed a dirty finger at the license.

“Well, Henry, it’s just another dollar.”

“The way I see it, there’s not a dollar’s difference between ‘em.”

Henry Smeth turned and walked the eight sloping miles back to the holler, his boots wet and his feet cold.

THE ETERNAL SILENCE OF THESE INFINITE SPACES

2008-07-30T02:24:00.016-04:00

* * *

"They followed a stone wall past the remains of an orchard. The trees in their ordered rows gnarled and black and the fallen limbs thick on the ground." Cormac McCarthy, The Road (First Vintage International Edition 2006)

* * *

In Albert Camus's The Stranger (orig. L’Étranger, 1942), the book's intrepid protagonist, Meursault, faces the guillotine in the book's final pages. He is to be executed for murder.

Moments before his execution, Meursault looks to the heavens and finds an existentialist refuge in the ultimate inconsequence of human existence. In my tattered paperback version of the book (Eng. trans., Gilbert 1946), he confides:

[G]azing up at the dark sky . . . with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.

I grew up in a rural patch of the continent from which the "signs and stars" were still visible in the night sky. As a child, I spent hours in the meadows outside my parents' home at the top of Dogwood Hill, staring up at the enigmatic sky beneath the wheeling stars and wandering planets that rose like fireflies from the timeless gray shoulders of Mount Jefferson.

On a dark night, you could see that the sky had depth; it was no mere canopy. To the mind of a child, it went on forever with no end.

A view of Mount Jefferson from the south as shown on a postcard printed by Ray Drug Company, West Jefferson, circa 1937. At the time, Mount Jefferson was known as Negro Mountain.

This epiphany of the infinite has come to me again and again from childhood into adulthood; it is my sense of the ineffable. It is my context for understanding the universe, and as I have learned more, I have concluded that a proper consideration of our place in the universe should be simultaneously comforting and terrifying.

It is comforting to conclude, as Meursault does in The Stranger, that there is no significance to human existence in the broad context of the indifferent universe, its spatial and temporal dimensions exceeding our ability to comprehend, its apathy to the value of life apparent in the the cold empty spaces between the impossibly distant stars. The systems of the universe reflect no purpose or desired end; the fixed laws and mechanics of space and time, of gravity, are supreme and inexorable. You can take no action that is of consequence against this infinite landscape.

It is nevertheless starkly disconcerting to consider our frail, tenuous existence at the unmerciful hands of nature. It is remarkable, indeed, that life has existed continuously on Earth for millions of years without interruption as she has spanned the crushing black vacuum of space, a solitary ship, the Sun and Moon her lanterns, traversing the vast, empty seas of the universe without map or compass.

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy depicts life in this latter, gravely tenuous sense. He tells of the struggle for life after global holocaust, a man and his child searching for moral understanding in a world destroyed in the fires of nuclear war.

Yet The Road could easily have described a world rent asunder by an unmerciful act of god, such as a planetary collision with a wayward asteroid, or an earth-shaking eruption of a volcano whose ash takes to the sky and separates the Earth and the Sun, leaving our world dark, cold, and dying. This has happened before; it will doubtless happen again.

* * *

A Day in Pompeii

* * *

Eight hundred miles east-southeast of Djakarta on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, a somnolent giant rises 14,000 feet above the ocean waters below. It is Mount Tambora, an immense volcano that in April 1815 filled the sky with ash and vanquished the eternal Sun. The year following this eruption became known as "the year without a summer," as volcanic dust cast a curtain about the world and precipitated a subsistence crisis of global magnitude.

While tens of thousands are believed to have died in the eruption, thousands more perished in the ensuing volcanic winter that brought famine to a Europe already enervated by the Napoleonic Wars.

It was during this bleak period below the darkened skies of Geneva that Lord Byron (poet &c., 1788-1824) envisioned a world for which:

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.

Byron memorialized his vision in a macabre poem titled Darkness (reprinted here). In Byron's unending darkness, "all hearts were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light," and "the meagre by the meagre were devoured."

The dead became the fuel of funeral pyres, and the dying "looked up with mad disquietude on the dull sky, the pall of a past world; and then again with curses cast them down upon the dust, and gnash’d their teeth and howl’d . . ."

McCarthy's vision of ashen skies made permanently gray by nuclear winter and the "cold relentless circling of the intestate earth" in the "darkness implacable" are reminiscent of Byron's Darkness in ways that are not likely to be coincidental.

* * *

Wilmington, NC circa 1863

A few weeks ago on a weekend trip to Wilmington, I found a used copy of The Road high on the shelf behind the small, one-person desk that serves as a make-shift sales counter just inside the door at Old Books on Front St. As the name indicates, the store is located at 22 N. Front St., one street up from the inscrutable waters of the Cape Fear, and it is evident from the vantage point of the street that it is a real bookstore.

Inside, books are stacked from floor to ceiling in every part of the store, such that one is always in danger of stumbling over a stack of books on the floor or being crushed to death by forgotten tomes and treatises falling from precipitous heights. Most of it is not wheelchair accessible; it is undoubtedly a fire hazard. It has thin, rusty-looking carpet and it smells a bit like old laundry.

Cell-phone picture taken in the "L" section of Old Books on Front St.'s fiction section. This picture is almost to scale. Most aisles are not wide enough to pitch a cat through sideways.

On weekends at least, a girl named Gwenyfar (not making it up) sits at the desk just inside the door and greets visitors to the store. It was while I was engaging Gwenyfar in vague persiflage that I happened to notice a fairly new copy of The Road on a shelf behind her head. A friend had recommended that I read the book, and my younger sister had lent me her copy with a similar recommendation, but I needed my own copy so that I could mark it up as is my custom.

Pointing to The Road, I asked Gwenyfar if she had read it.

"He was on Oprah," she said with a dramatic raising of her eyebrows, as if that would make the matter clear to me. I gathered that Gwenyfar was likely suspicious of all writers of recent popular appeal. It's the mark of a purist, I suppose.

"Oprah? Really? I didn't know that."

"Yes," she said. "I haven't read anything by him. I don't read Oprah books," she said with friendly sarcasm. "Since he was on TV, everyone in the world has been asking for them. We can't keep 'em in the store."

"Well, you managed to keep one." I laughed uncomfortably. She didn't.

"Yeah, a guy just brought that by this afternoon. Traded it for something, I can't remember what." She looked around briefly as if the answer might come to her, then just as quickly abandoned the effort to recollect. Meanwhile, the book remained on the shelf behind her.

"Is it for sale?" I said, unsure if it was ready for sale or if it needed to be properly inventoried or something. I suspected the bookstore had no such inventory procedure. Plugging in a computer in this store would probably start an electrical fire.

Eventually she handed me the book and I bought it along with a hardback Thomas Wolfe compendium that I had never seen before and did not know to exist. I finished The Road before leaving Wilmington that weekend.

* * *

The Road is a well-told, painfully grim post-holocaust story about a man and his young, terrified son who trudge across miles of scorched highway (thus, the title) in snow and endless rain in search of the coast where they hope without reason to find food and sympathetic life.

The father and son have almost no food; they must scavenge like wild animals, and they are in a state of constant starvation. The son's "candlecolored skin" is "all but translucent" due to malnourishment, and they must wear facemasks to filter the ubiquitous ash from the air.

The cold is ungodly because sunlight cannot penetrate the ashen sky. They can rarely build fires for warmth, for this would alert other scavengers who might come and try to rotisserie the boy.

The father has a gun with two bullets, a shopping cart with "a tire that has gone wonky," and the damn kid has intimacy issues - which is stressful. The only people left alive on Earth have been reduced to absolute savagery. Life has become a ghastly competition for dwindling, non-regenerating resources.

The boy is forced to develop his sense of morality in this world of death and terror, and the most compelling aspects of the book concern the boy trying to square his naive (and apparently innate) sense of right and wrong to a world in which it no longer finds application and altruism has died with the disappearing Sun:

The boy lay with his head in the man's lap. After a while he said: They're going to kill those people, aren't they?

Yes.

Why do they have to do that?

I dont know.

Are they going to eat them?

I dont know.

They're going to eat them, arent they?

Yes.

And we couldnt help them because then they'd eat us too.

Yes.

And that's why we couldnt help them.

Yes.

Okay.

The story is one continuous, mostly linear narrative. With few exceptions, the language used is simple, stark, and at times profound.

As an example, on pages 146-47 McCarthy describes a scene in which the father, after happening upon what is apparently an unused underground bomb shelter, makes a warm bath for his son who is "shivering like a dog."

They took the little stove with them and a couple of pans and he heated water and poured it into the tub and poured in water from the plastic jugs. It took a long time but he wanted it to be good and warm. When the tub was almost full the boy got undressed and stepped shivering into the water and sat. Scrawny and filthy and naked. Holding his shoulders. The only light was from the ring of blue teeth in the burner of the stove. What do you think? the man said.

Warm at last.

Warm at last?

Yes.

Where did you get that?

I dont know.

Okay. Warm at last.

The story by itself would be effective if McCarthy told the story of the wandering father and son without any injection of philosophical content. However, what makes The Road exemplary is McCarthy's ability to be reflective and express simple, profound ideas within the context of the work. In this passage, the father contemplates their hopeless condition in the changed world:

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

Another effective passage appears on page 58, when McCarthy reveals that the boy's mother ended her own life in the hopelessness of the destroyed world:

She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. She would do it with a flake of obsidian. He'd taught her himself. . . . And she was right. There was no argument. The hundred nights they'd sat up debating the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall.

In the morning the boy said nothing at all and when they were packed and ready to set out upon the road he turned and looked back at their campsite and he said: She's gone isn't she? And he said: Yes, she is.

* * *

The observant reader should have already noted that while the content may be quite good, McCarthy employs several unusual conventions in his writing that are akin to the orthographically challenged E. E. Cummings whose typewriter apparently did not have a SHIFT key.

The portable typewriter used by Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962)

McCarthy never uses quotation marks, and, frustratingly, he intermittently omits apostrophes in conjunctions. Thus he writes don't as dont (which I have a tendency to pronounce as daunt), but then inexplicably employs the apostrophe in I'm and they'd. I had hoped that this was something that was specific to The Road, but my limited research has revealed that this is apparently his "style," such that all or most of his books are written in this fashion.

He also seems to enjoy making compound words out of words that are not truly compounds, some of which produce Faulkner-esque compound adjectives that are fairly effective, such as sweatblackened (p. 51) and ruststained (p. 108). Other examples are more mysterious, for their use seems to add little to the story: oilbottles (p. 7), pumporgan (p. 22), foldingtable (p. 26), woodsmoke (p. 31), and gaslamp (p. 151), to name but a few.

Along the same lines, McCarthy sometimes seems to just invent words entirely, which is just bizarre. I came across the word parsible on page 88, and naturally I went to look it up because I did not recognize the word or know the meaning.

Now, if I have nothing else, I have dictionaries. Large ones, small ones; old, dusty ones; new, shiny ones. Dictionaries of old, archaic words; dictionaries of rare words. On the dictionary front, I've got it covered. Parsible does not appear on the pages of any dictionary that I own. I am therefore bewildered by its use in this story; it does not and cannot lend meaning to the text. (I am aware that parsible has some meaning in the programming context, but obviously that is not a meaning relevant to The Road.)

Similarly, McCarthy sporadically and inconsistently employs a vocabulary of recondite terms that: (1) detract from the otherwise very simple, elegant story; and (2) are not always in the dictionary.

A few of the words I circled in the text with an accompanying question mark include: discalced (p. 24), rachitic (p. 63), siwash (p. 68), catamite (p. 92), chert (p. 129), and patterans (p. 180).

[Incidentally, I got into some trouble for my opinion on McCarthy's use of parsible with the friendly folks at The Official Website of the Cormac McCarthy Society in regard to this article and related comments I made in the forum section of the aforementioned C. M. Web site that some overzealous disciples of Mr. McCarthy were quick to perceive as unforgivably critical of their infallible literary hero. A gentleman with the handle peterfranz who had an obvious blind spot in regard to McCarthy's minimal shortcomings wrote this in response to my point that no one could possibly know what McCarthy meant by parsible because, quite simply, this is not a defined word in the English language: "Those readers, to whom this board by its very existence has a responsibility, are not helped by EK's post, which I would delete were I in a position to." I should note that peterfranz later backed off the censorship angle, but did suggest that I should "self-censor" and remove my critical comments myself notwithstanding the fact that I was entirely correct on this point. To his credit, a bona fide McCarthy scholar named Rick Wallach who was more or less kind to me and fair in his arguments conceded finally that parsible as it appears in The Road "could be a typo - but in McCarthy, how the hell do we know?" - Ed. 12 Oct 2010]

* * *

Nevertheless, McCarthy's vision of the end of civilization is chilling, plausible, and probably accurate. As noted at the outset, The Road simultaneously recalls Byron's Darkness and refutes the benign nature of the universe perceived by Camus's Meursault, while still finding disquiet in the indifference of the heavens.

In Darkness, the Sun has gone out and "the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space," while "the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air."

McCarthy echoes this vision of the Earth and Sun divided. He writes: "Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."

In another passage, McCarthy again parallels Bryon's Darkness; departing from the gray roads and withered forests of the Earth, he looks godlike upon the Earth as a lost child of the Sun: "[T]he bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."

* * *

Blaise Pascal once remarked that he found terror in the "eternal silence of these infinite spaces." Hearing this for the first time as a much younger man, I was perplexed by the expression. For as much of my life as I could remember at the time, I had been deeply moved in contemplation of the vast, immortal skies. It was a religion to me.

As a boy, lying outside under a starlit summer sky on the green army blanket my parents dedicated to my use as an amateur astronomer, I viewed the infinite heavens with hope and warmth and optimism.

As I grew older, I frequently turned to the heavens for comfort, and being reminded of my slight significance within the context of the benign and indifferent universe, I was comforted.

As an adult, I continue to find comfort in such thoughts, and seeing the eternal Moon ascend in the arms of Orion over the North Carolina mountains will always bring me solace as one fortunate traveler on Earth's solitary ship through the infinite, rolling oceans of space and time.

Yet, I now have learned enough about the world, and the universe, and our place in it - so fragile, so brief - that Pascal's remark is no longer quite so mysterious to me.

* * *

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. . . . Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

From Dogwood Hill, the Moon rises over the old gray shoulders of Mount Jefferson.

THE PUZZLED PENIS

2008-04-29T20:20:00.039-04:00

* * *

Portnoy’s Complaint (port’-noiz kəm-plānt’) n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: “Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient’s ‘morality,’ however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.” (Spielvogel, O., “The Puzzled Penis,” International Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.

And so begins Philip Roth's 1969 masturbatory thriller, Portnoy's Complaint, with what is perhaps the single greatest prologue in the history of the written word.

This little introduction is not even on a numbered page in the edition that I purchased; it is not found on one of the pages marked with lower-case Roman numerals usually reserved for prefatory information (i, ii, and so forth).

It just appears, intrepid, indifferent, staring up at the unsuspecting reader on the unnumbered page opposite the copyright information and foretelling the coming of a very strange story.

Inquisitive and attentive readers will discover from information found opposite this preface that in 1956 Georgie Yeats renewed the copyright to Simon and Schuster's The Poems of William Butler Yeats: A New Edition, out of which was taken an excerpt of everyone's favorite bestiality poem, Leda and the Swan, for use by Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint.

Standing in Blue Bicycle Books at 420 King Street in Charleston (where they “buy books, sell them, and occasionally, when circumstances are just right, have been known to read them”), with sand and ocean salt from Folly Beach comfortably between my toes, I picked up Portnoy's Complaint, opened it to the copyright page, and in an nanosecond without having to actually read the text, the words

penis

Yeats

Leda

Swan

perverse

sexual

auto-eroticism

coitus

castration

bypassed my cerebrum, briefly toured my cerebellum, and then hit that ancestral part of my brain responsible for base libido functions like a lawn dart covered in blowfish poison.

I'm not going to lie to you; this is my kind of literature: introspective erotica that simultaneously reminds you to feel guilty for even thinking about getting a hard-on; the kind of literature that any self-respecting mother who came of age before the sexual revolution would admire.

If you are not familiar with Philip Roth, he's an impressive and accomplished writer. He has won innumerable awards for his literature, including the coveted and elusive Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for American Pastoral, a book which I have been told that I need to read. I knew these things, and thus I was somewhat surprised (pleasantly, I'll concede) to find Portnoy's Complaint to be so openly salacious.

Philip Roth (1933 - )

In Portnoy's Complaint, the story's narrator and chief protagonist is Alexander Portnoy, a Jewish kid born in New Jersey to a chronically constipated father and an overbearing mother who informs Alex's entire life sexual experience in not a good way. The story can be summarized as Alex Portnoy's sexual pilgrimage to hell, and parts of it are fucking funny.

The second chapter of the book, which begins on page 17, is titled “Whacking Off.” It commences thusly:

Then came adolescence - half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into the soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out.

He goes on:

Or else I was doubled over my flying fist, eyes pressed closed but mouth wide open, to take that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my own tongue and teeth - though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstacy, I got it all in the pompadour.

And this continues for several pages, including one hi-larious scene in which he orbits a load into the air and part of it sticks to the single naked light bulb illuminating the bathroom:

So galvanic is the effect of cotton panties against my mouth - so galvanic is the word “panties” - that the trajectory of my ejaculation reaches startling new heights: leaving my joint like a rocket it makes right for the light bulb overhead, where to my wonderment and horror, it hits and hangs.

After delicately cleaning the light bulb, Alex is terrified that he is going to leave some trace of his illicit activities behind for his mother to find. He says, “I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off - the sticky evidence is everywhere!” Tell me that's not funny.

Родион Романович Раскольников
(Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment makes a rare appearance in a book about jerking off)

Historically, the cleaning-up phase after masturbation is closely associated with the guilt phase, where if you are going to feel any sort of remorse for tethering the blimp, it will occur most acutely during clean-up rather than during the act itself. Your psychologist will explain to you that this has something to do with our fear of “making a mess” - an idea as anathema to the traditional American mother as molecular biology is to a Free-Will Baptist.

My favorite line in chapter two of the book is “LENORE LAPIDUS'S ACTUAL TITS” (all caps in original; p. 21). You'll have to read the book to see what that is about. I almost changed the name of the blog to LENORE LAPIDUS'S ACTUAL TITS, and I still might. We'll see.

Later, Alex gets his first hand-job from a girl named Bubbles Girardi who he describes as “weighing a hundred and seventy pounds and growing a mustache.” After the application of duress from one of Alex's friends, Bubbles reluctantly agrees to the task and before Alex can get his pants all the way down, “suddenly she has hold of it, and it's as though my poor cock has got caught in some kind of machine. Vigorously, to put it mildly, the ordeal begins.”

We've all been there.

As a college student and later as an adult who is superbly successful with his career as a lawyer fighting for the rights of the downtrodden, Alex has several different relationships with various women (The Pumpkin, The Monkey, The Pilgrim, &c.), all of which end in miserable failure.

In one case, Alex discovers that one of the girls, The Monkey - who is spectacularly hot - is functionally illiterate. He arrives at her apartment early one night while she is in the shower and finds a nearly illegible note on the coffee table and reads it. “Has a child been here, I wonder,” he says.

He is horrified to discover that the note was written to him by The Monkey. Despite the fact that The Monkey is two fathoms out of his league in terms of physical attractiveness, the fact that she cannot spell essentially ruins the relationship for him.

I had a similar situation with a girl from northern Minnesota that I dated for a while. English was like a second language to her, which would have been ok if there had been a first language.

She spoke and wrote a Scandinavian-English hybrid that to anyone familiar with either appeared to be an altogether unfamiliar third language invented by a set of deaf illiterate twins. A love note is just not quite the same with shit spelled wrong in it. It's just not.

Overall, Portnoy's Complaint has no discernible plot progression; it is fundamentally a stream-of-consciousness work in which the impossibly randy narrator describes simultaneously his indefatigable lust and the inescapable sense of shame that accompanies every gooey nut he blows.

There are no groundbreaking literary techniques in the book, and the writing style is fairly familiar if not overused. Roth's protagonist comes off sounding a lot like Holden Caulfield, a character who doubtless would have talked more about beating off if he had been invented in 1967 rather than in 1951.

Legend has it that J.D. Salinger got tired of saying,
"Zoo-ey. Franny and Zoo-ey."

The storyline does move around in time quite a bit, and that is probably the best aspect of the book. Roth flashes backward and forward and sideways, and I imagine it was difficult to put together a seamless story like Portnoy's Complaint with so much temporal manipulation.

The idea is that Alex is recounting his puzzling past to his psychiatrist, Dr. Spielvogel, so the story necessarily jumps around a bit in the telling as different memories resurrect other associated memories out of the obscurity of the past. In this way, Alex is kind of like a brainy, Jewish Benjy Compson who, after realizing that Caddy doesn't smell like trees anymore, tries to fuck her in the ass.

Roth does not disclose to the reader right away that the book is in fact a one-sided dialogue between Alex and Dr. Spielvogel (the latter does not speak until the very last line of the book); however, this fact is enigmatically revealed fairly early in the book by Alex's offhanded and obscure references to the doctor, somewhat reminiscent of Nabokov's “ladies and gentlemen of the jury” asides in Lolita. (Picnic, lightning.)

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) liked to invent chess puzzles.

While much of the book is quite funny in the same way that a good comedy routine is funny, there are two jokes in the book that Roth sets up expertly and makes the reader wait for the punchline long enough to make them really worthwhile. One has to do with why Alex's second girlfriend is given the nickname “The Monkey.” I can't remember the other joke right now, but I'm pretty sure there was one.

The edition that I have is 274 pages long, and I doubt there is a red-blooded American male (or female) who would not relate to at least some part of the book. It is, at bottom, a grimly uncomfortable yet humorous commentary about our inability to become completely comfortable with our own sexuality. This fact has long baffled me.

Why? Because single-celled organisms first engaged in honest-to-god sexual (not asexual, but sexual) reproduction just short of a billion years ago. (For you Young Earth Creationists out there, the conversion ratio is 1/160,000. Please modify your texts accordingly.)

Going even further, somewhere around 100,000 and 200,000 generations of our ancestors have been the product of reproduction and have reproduced since the time of Australopithecus anamensis, one of Homo sapiens' earliest ancestors. That's - a lot - of the ol’ in-out in-out.

(An interesting aside is that it took that many generations before it ever occurred to anyone to “Superman a ho,” an obvious product of the enlightenment.)

Prior to the end of the last Ice Age, despite the fact that nearly every organism born as a result of sexual reproduction had a mother, I doubt it ever occurred to anyone that what they were doing was anything at all to be ashamed of. They probably didn't even know precisely which holes went with what, and if someone felt like rubbing one out, it is unlikely that they felt guilty for doing so.

Indeed, modern scientific literature indicates that sex and the birth of offspring were not even causally (not casually; causally) associated by our earthly predecessors until relatively recently in human evolution. Hell, there are still “modern” humans alive today (the Trobriand Islanders) who have not yet grasped the connection between sex and childbirth, but somehow they manage to keep reproducing - which is not a mystery to anyone.

The point: you can thank our sexual proclivities for the fact that you are here today reading this blog. If our ancestors were not willing to indiscriminately mount anything with a nervous system, we would never have survived as a species.

Recall also that 40,000 years ago, the “Brazilian” and the electric toothbrush had not yet been invented, and women were basically indistinguishable from trees.

It's not like there were hot chicks walking around. Imagine Hillary Clinton without soap, dental hygiene, or nail clippers. Say it with me: Wookie.

Yet still our ancestors, early and recent, reproduced with such extraordinary ferocity and determination that billions of us happened to survive into the present day while millions of other species did not.

So don't be so damn hard on yourselves if you feel a twinge of shame when, like Onan, you throw a load into a Kleenex and wonder when polymer chemistry will catch up to the disposable-tissue industry so that the damn things can be made not to adhere to your dick like Elmer's wood glue when you try to dry off. Sex is a fundamental part of who we are as a species. Embrace it. Enjoy it. Don't puzzle your penis. Just make sure to clean up the mess.

Brought to you by your friends at Kleenex®.

BEWARE THE FALSE PROPHET

2008-02-24T01:54:00.118-05:00

* * *

When I was midway on the mountain, I heard a voice from heaven saying, "O Muhammad! thou art the apostle of God and I am Gabriel." I raised my head towards heaven to see who was speaking, and lo, [it was] Gabriel in the form of a man with feet astride the horizon. - Ibn Ishaq, Sira, in Guillaume, trans., A Life of Muhammad

The world was full of gods, who could be perceived unexpectedly at any time, around any corner or in the person of a passing stranger. - Karen Armstrong, A History of God

Part I: The Demon-Haunted World

When I was a child, I believed in flying horses and the sorcery of wizards. I believed that goblins and witches flew wicked and dark in the night sky beneath the benevolent Moon, while ghosts languished eerily in graveyards and the deserted houses of the dead. My parents, who were - and still are - very sensible and practical people, never taught me otherwise.

They read to my siblings and me a great deal of wonderfully imaginative literature, but I do not recall any meaningful disclaimers from them that the monsters and magic in those stories were matters of fiction.

I imagine it never occurred to them to do so. Certainly my parents didn't believe in fairies or monsters. They were merely reading us the stories that we loved and breathing life into the embers of our nascent imaginations.

The Silver Pony by Lynd Ward was one of favorite books as a child.

While inadvertently teaching us that the world was full of magical things by reading us those wonderful stories, they deliberately taught us to believe in an omniscient, corpulent bearer of gifts (the jolly old elf, who sees you when you're sleeping and who knows when you're awake), a nymph with a creepy obsession with discarded teeth, and an enormous magic rabbit who, being confusingly in league with Jesus, went around depositing candy in secret places. I'm sure there were more.

At five years old, an age at which I still thought the universal solvent was Sherlock Holmes, I could have taken a lie-detector test about any of these benevolent supernatural holiday beings and passed with flying colors because my parents and relatives so enthusiastically advocated their existence.

We've all heard it a hundred times: "If you don't go to bed now, Santa is going to know it and you are not going to get any presents!"

Of course, all these sentiments were lovingly expressed in the spirit of the holidays, and without the benefit of some of my present reflections I did the same thing to my daughter when the time came.

For some reason, people find it endearing to tell extraordinary falsehoods to impressionable children about such things, which I believe tends to cultivate misunderstandings about the nature of the world that regrettably survive in one form or another into adulthood.

It is during this period of impressionability that we also teach children about God and all those fantastical stories from the Bible as if every bit of it were wholly true.

If that last sentence strikes you as odd, and you still believe in the literal truth of the events of the Old Testament, such as that Adam and Eve were the first-ever humans or that God purposely killed nearly everyone on Earth in a great flood, it may be past time to revise your understanding of reality.

Nevertheless, I'd be willing to bet that most young children of Christian families roughly equate Santa and God in their meager understanding of the world.

The tradition in this country is to disabuse our children of their belief in the holiday fairies at some point during their childhood, but the simplistic notion of a personified God that is taught to most Christian children is left unrevised.

In A History of God, Karen Armstrong writes:

My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I had revised simplistic childhood views of Father Christmas; I had come to a more mature understanding of the complexities of the human predicament than had been possible in kindergarten. Yet my early, confused ideas about God had not been modified or developed.

The same was true for me, and I imagine that most people who were raised in Christian households would say the same.

It turns out that this simplistic notion of God as basically an omniscient human superhero is characteristic of western Christianity, but many other cultures and ethnic groups hold a more complex, abstract notion of God.

My family attended a local Episcopal church with marginal regularity. My parents have never been extremely religious people, but they would take us to church occasionally and it was very much a part of my upbringing.

Acolytes retreat into the church after an uplifting sermon out of doors.

Just behind the alter in our old wooden church was an immense fresco of a shadowy figure - who I took to represent God - standing ominously behind Jesus hanging dead on a wooden cross. This portrayal of the crucifixion of Christ graphically depicted the iron bolts through his hands and feet and Pilate's darkly sardonic titulus - INRI - above Jesus's lifeless head.

The fresco was a work of extraordinary beauty and power, and it mesmerized me as a child. It seemed almost magical, and I often thought I could see the faces of angels (or ghosts) in the mist lingering in the gloom behind the fallen son of God.

This haunting portrait of the violence of the crucifixion and, importantly, the anthropomorphized portrait of God behind the crucified Christ, informed my early perception of the nature of God.

This fresco still hangs in St. Mary's Episcopal Church in West Jefferson, North Carolina. Biblical accounts of the crucifixion indicate that Pilate wrote the phrase Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum - which means approximately Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews - and attached it to Jesus's cross in three languages. It is common for artwork depicting the crucifixion of Christ to abbreviate the expression to "INRI."

In Sunday school, to accompany my personified notions of God, I developed a vivid image of the devil (or Satan, or Lucifer). In my mind, the devil was a blood-red winged and deceitful half-man, half-beast who scratched and salivated for my soul at the black gates of Hell.

The devil and his soul-stealing mischief were chillingly described by my Sunday-school teachers as quite real, and the whole thing was indeed very frightening to me as a child. In my mind, these perceptions of God, the devil, and Hell were as real as my own parents.

Mihaly Zichy's Lucifer (ca. 1887)

It is interesting to consider, therefore, how a child who has been taught from his earliest memories that the world is filled with gods and demons and magical things might interpret the world around him when presented with certain stimuli of unknown origin. By rearing our children in this fashion, do we not predispose them to see angels and demons when in fact there may be none at all?

* * *

Part II: The Vision of Ezekiel

The Vision of Ezekiel by Raphael. "Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord, And when I saw it, I fell on my face and heard a voice speaking." See generally Ezekiel 1:1-28.

One night, as I lay in bed at four or five years old contemplating my mortality, I noticed a faint, ethereal flash of light that appeared to hover briefly in the middle of my room before quickly disappearing.

Wide-eyed, I blinked through the darkness trying to make out what I had just seen. Seconds later, the apparition reappeared. It seemed to glide through the air; it seemed to move like mist.

I was terrified. I truly do not recall a more frightening experience in my life. I wanted to yell for my parents, but I was choked and strangled by fear.

Utterly paralyzed, I considered making a mad dash for the door (which was inconveniently closed at the time) while I scanned the room in a panic for my ghostly visitor. Again, the mysterious light appeared and moved vaguely about the room.

Jacob wrestles with God. "For I have seen God face to face." Genesis 32:21-32.

After a minute or two of abject horror, the feeling of which still chills me to this day, it occurred to me that the flashes of light were fairly regular in interval and duration.

I breathlessly began to count the time between flashes along with the hollow ticks from the old clock on my nightstand: 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8 (flash). 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8 (flash).

I counted again and again to make sure that I was not imagining the regularity. After a prolonged period of time, my adrenalin began to dissipate and the regularity of intervals suggested to me, even at that age, that perhaps the source of the light that had so terrified me was not supernatural after all.

Gabriel shows Muhammad the city of Madinah.

Having theorized a natural origin for the ghostly flash, although still being unable to fathom what could be causing the phenomenon, I cautiously pushed back the covers and - still with no small amount of terror - made a break for the only light switch in the room - which was inconveniently located next to the door where the apparition first appeared.

Turning on the light seemed to cause the ghost to flee; I felt safe again, and I stood for several breathless seconds looking about the room for evidence of the enigmatic specter. Turning up nothing, I gathered the courage to turn off the light again to see if it would reappear. Almost immediately the apparition appeared and washed across the wall in front of me just as it had before.

Looking back toward my bed, I noticed a sharp pinpoint of light quickly flash and disappear outside my window. Again, I counted and saw that the light outside the window flashed at the predicted interval. At five years old, this was my very first "what in the fuck?" moment.

After further investigation, I belatedly discovered that the mysterious light was coming from a newly installed airport beacon at the town airport five miles away. The beacon turned 360 degrees and the light from the beacon came through my eastern window once per revolution every eight seconds.

Yet, it could have turned out differently.

I might have scrambled out of the room, consulted my parents, and, if they had been susceptible to such notions, they might have confirmed for me what I first suspected: that I had seen a ghost, perhaps a dead relative who had slept in that room once upon a time. I might continue to believe to this day that I had truly seen a ghost, and I no doubt would believe it no matter what anyone tried to tell me given the searing nature of the experience.

Had my upbringing been slightly different, perhaps instead of a ghost - which was an idea that truly fascinated me throughout my childhood - I might have seen a religious icon; perhaps the Virgin Mary or the angel Gabriel that visited Muhammad and directed him to recite. Perhaps I would have seen a great chariot as imagined by Ezekiel. Or I might even have perceived a vision of God or his angels there in the dark above my bed.

This dubious portrait has been alleged with excitement to be an actual image of Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of Mormonism. Described by biographers as a "religious genius," he founded Mormonism after receiving multiple revelations by the angel Moroni and transcribing the chief Mormon text on the basis of these revelations. After some research, it is apparent to me that he made up every word out of whole cloth. I find it doubtful that he even believed it himself.

* * *

Part III: The Graveyard of Dead Gods and Angels

For time out of mind, human beings have seen angels, gods, and demons in their midst. Until comparatively recently, humans lived and walked with a panoply of gods and angels, and demons and fairies were blamed for the world's mischief and misery.

As the second opening quotation indicates, in the days of antiquity "[t]he world was full of gods, who could be perceived unexpectedly at any time, around any corner or in the person of a passing stranger."

This was certainly true at the time of events of the Old Testament, but even today there remains a marked credulity among humans in regard to visitations from angels.

As described above, Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-1844) purported having many encounters with an angel (circa 1830) that led to the sacred text and rites of Mormonism.

Despite innumerable anachronisms and other ridiculous falsehoods in the divinely inspired text, millions of Americans are of the Mormon faith today and sincerely believe in the authenticity of the revelations given to Smith, who by all credible accounts was a pathological, self-serving mountebank of the first division.

Curiously, because one of Smith's revelations included the idea that men (but not women) can receive revelations directly from God, numerous others in the Mormon faith have come forward claiming to have received divine revelations through encounters with angels or direct communications with God, and many of them have started new sects of Mormonism.

Muhammad is of course another notable example of a historical figure who received revelations from God after being visited by an angel. Muhammad could not read or write, so he dictated the Qur'an (literally, the "recitation") as the revelations came to him. It is no secret that this religious text, like the Bible, has been used to justify bloody atrocities in the name of God.

Westerners tend to reject the proposition that Muhammad was actually visited by an angel bearing revelations from God. Why is this? Is Muhammad's account of his terrifying encounter with Gabriel less credible than Moses's similar encounters with God?

God appears in shrubbery and instructs Moses to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. Exodus 3:1-21. Some religious scholars have argued that God's revelation of himself through a burning bush is a metaphor for hallucinations achieved by smoking the reefer.

The Bible is a superb compendium of stories of angels and deities revealing themselves to the common people for various purposes. In the Old Testament, it was not unusual for God or some random angels to just show up and talk for a while, and in some cases, such as Jacob's wrestling match with God, it was not immediately recognized that God was present until some time later.

In addition to God and all the various angels of antiquity, the Bible describes innumerable other gods with which God (a/k/a Yahweh) competed for the loyalty of the people. Recall that Yahweh commanded his people not to worship these other gods, for Yahweh was a jealous and vengeful god who, by my reading, was scary as fuck.

The Ten Commandments, which are set out in both Exodus (20:2-17) and Deuteronomy (5:6-21), make these other gods a central part of Old Testament theology:

Ye shall have no other gods before me . . . You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Deuteronomy 5:7, 9-10.)

Apart from the sadistic nature of this sort of nonsense (punishing children for the iniquity of their parents, an idea that is fairly central to Christian theology), one can't help but wonder what happened to all these gods that the Old Testament God was so obsessed with.

Did these other gods really exist at all?

If not, why did God make such a fuss about them?

If so, where are they today?

The answer, of course, is that these other gods do not exist today, and they did not exist at the time the Old Testament (or the Qur'an) was written. They have never existed. They were fables, metaphors, parables, and attempts to express the ineffable, but they were not real.

Most westerners have become atheists with respect to all these other gods. We consider the idea of their existence today to be quite silly. Is there one among you who continues to believe such gods exist?

Tracing the visions of Homo sapiens through the ages reveals that we first perceived gods among us, then as time passed we whittled away the excess gods but continued to see demons in the world around us; then witches became all the rage, and lest you think that this was mere fancy, recall that we rounded them up and burned them alive by the thousands.

See this article on the Malleus Maleficarum (the "Hammer of Witches") for a truly frightening example of what human beings are capable of in response to a belief in supernatural (i.e., non-existent) things.

This book (written ca. 1486) is a treatise on the reality of witches and the most effective ways to root them out and burn them in the name of God. In Europe, tens of thousands of women and children were found to be witches and were immolated on burning pyres to the great satisfaction of spectators.

Abandoning our widespread belief in witches, we soon thereafter saw spaceships in the night sky instead of women on broomsticks. Now even the aliens have retreated, leaving only God, and staggering atrocities are committed in His name.

We should be able to learn something from all of our past misperceptions. The lesson is that human beings are too frequently incapable of distinguishing what is real from that which we wish to be real.

The tendency of Homo sapiens to discard reason and adopt myth as reality is an unfortunate legacy for a species that has such extraordinary powers of reason. And there has been a cost.

This notion can be summarized concisely by this disconcerting fact: if someone is going to blow up the building you work in, chances are it is going to be done in the name of God with the dreamy expectation of His heavenly reward.

Ours is not a demon-haunted world. Gods do not walk among us, nor do they loftily reside in the sky or the heavens. They do not interfere with human affairs, or bring rain, or punish us for iniquities, or prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.

Our world is a natural world, unvisited by ghosts and goblins, and unmolested by the magic of witches and wizards. If there are events for which there are not natural explanations, I have not yet heard of them.

If we wish to understand our universe and survive as a species, we must discard mythology and instead practice reason. We must take great care to recognize a nearly universal human weakness: that we humans too often accept as true that which we merely wish to be true, instead of only those things for which there is evidence to believe.

The strength of one's convictions should be proportional to the evidence therefor. In the world of false prophets and revelations from angels, upon which all our modern religious beliefs are based, precisely the opposite has occurred. Too many of us believe most strongly those ideas for which there is the least amount of evidence.

Let us learn from our mistakes, sharpen our powers of discernment, and move away from that marked credulity that beguiles us into perceiving angels and devils among us when in fact there are none.

St. Francis Day at St. Mary's Episcopal Church. Try as I might, I could not hear the voice of God in my ears.

* * *

THE LAST CHRISTMAS TREE

2007-12-16T16:55:00.004-05:00

* * *

What follows is a short story written by my father nearly 30 years ago that went into a collection of children's stories that he called The Cousins' Storybook. This particular story is called The Last Christmas Tree, and it is meant to be read during the holidays to children who still believe in the magic of Christmas.

* * *

From far away came the sound of the last Christmas carols of the evening. The laughter of families gathered for the holidays drifted into the silence of the falling snow.

The holiday sounds added warmth to the cold night air as a burly man with a black beard stood behind a rusty barrel warming his hands over the fire leaping from inside. He rubbed his hands briskly together and looked over the vacant lot that had been transformed for a few short weeks into a place to buy Christmas trees.

Bark-covered slabs of wood clung together to form a makeshift corral around the trees. Around the rough frame, a string of colored lights shone gaily. It was a cold and snowy Christmas Eve, and there were only three trees left who had not found a home for Christmas.

A white car rolled onto the corner lot and stopped. From the car stepped a mother and father and two young children. Frosty laughter spilled out of their furry coats. Crackling over the freezing snow, they hurried into the tree corral. Moving from one to another, they began to compare the few remaining trees.

Little Green, the smallest of the trees, crossed his twigs and made a wish. His heart pounded with anticipation. This little evergreen had arrived on the lot weeks before along with hundreds of others from Christmas-tree farms far away. Among the haughty blue spruces, the aloof firs, and the fancy white pines, he had felt lost and alone.

Day after day, as shoppers picked over the trees, Little Green had arched his trunk and stood as tall and straight as he could. He blushed with shame when children said, "Don't take this tree, Daddy. It's ugly and crooked. We don't want this poor tree in our house."

It hurt to be left behind time after time. But he was a courageous little tree. He never failed to look cheerful and gay for every family. Even now, after so many disappointments, Little Green listened carefully to what this family was saying.

"What do you think, Henry? Do we want a big tree or a small one?"

"You and the kids decide, Laurel. No matter what you want, it looks like pretty slim pickings."

The man with the beard grabbed the few trees and stood them roughly against the slab boards at the edge of the corral. All three were poised on their wobbly trunks. Little Green flexed his needles and tried to appear strong and tall.

Beside him, a crusty old spruce slumped with boredom. He was resigned. He was sure it was the trash heap for him for Christmas.

On the other side prissed a frilly white pine, trimmed and sculptured into a perfect cone. Her nose in the air, the pine harrumphed, "Another family with absolutely no taste!"

"We'll take this one," said Laurel, pointing to the white pine.

The white pine acted nonchalant. She didn't want the others to know that she was bursting with joy. During the past few days, she had begun to wonder if she was as beautiful as she imagined herself to be. Now, her pride was intact. By Christmas morning, who would know whether she was chosen last or first?

Little Green let his little green arms slouch, and his little heart sank.

Moments later, a rusted red pickup truck crunched to a stop beside the tree lot. A young man in cowboy boots leaped from the cab. Hastily, he reached over the top board and grabbed the surprised old spruce from the enclosure. He rushed up to the bearded man and shoved some bills into an outstretched hand.

In a shower of flying ice, the young man gunned his engine and raced into the night. The crusty old spruce peered over the tailgate and waved a tiny goodbye with a fluttering branch.

Little Green smiled. He was happy for his friend.

The wind picked up. The traffic died down. Fewer people passed. Soon, there were none.

The man with the black beard began to count the money he had received during the day. Looking at Little Green, he thought, "Only one tree. Not bad. I'm not staying any longer for just one little tree. I doubt anyone will want that one, anyway."

He rubbed his beard to free it of icicles. After turning out the colored lights that hung around the lot, he got into his car and drove away. Light from the cold winter moon was all that remained.

Little Green huddled in the darkness. His proud heart wilted. A tiny teardrop fell on a quivering branch. A snowflake formed in the cold air.

There was no more traffic; no one anywhere. Everyone is home, Little Green thought, decorating happy trees and wrapping presents and preparing for the most perfect day of the year. Maybe next year, he thought hopefully. He closed his eyes and wrapped his little green arms around himself to stay warm.

A gust of wind swirled his snowflake tears around his pointy top. Looking up, Little Green saw a figure moving quietly down the sidewalk. It was a lady in a bulky brown coat that hid a white nurse's uniform. She wore freshly polished white shoes that became soiled and wet with each careful step as she tried to avoid the murky puddles of slush and ice.

The nurse passed in front of the lot and paused briefly to glance toward the corral. A soft light from the winter moon reflected off Little Green's snowflake tears. She continued on her way.

Halfway down the block, she stopped and stood for several seconds. She then turned and walked with short strides back to the corral. Reaching it, she gently lifted Little Green from his lonesome corner spot.

The nurse moved briskly up the sidewalk. Pulling Little Green behind her, she made her way across the street. Coming to a huge building, she pushed open a side door and entered beneath a sign that read, "Ashleigh-Byrd Children's Hospital."

Clinging to the tree, the nurse pushed a button on the wall. An elevator door opened and the nurse stepped in and stood Little Green in the corner of the elevator. The door closed, and the elevator hummed its way upward.

The elevator opened on a wide white hallway. The nursed turned to her right and walked quietly but purposefully down the hall with Little Green coming along excitedly behind her.

In the last room at the end of the hall, a small boy lay in a hospital bed that sat sturdily in the middle of the room. A tube of clear liquid was suspended on a metal hanger. A faint buzz came from a small machine beside the bed.

There were no colored ribbons or bright packages in the room. There were no Christmas candles in the window. The boy was alone on Christmas Eve. Maybe next year, he thought hopefully. Crying softly, he closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around himself to stay warm.

Holding Little Green by the trunk, the nurse backed into the little boy's room. Standing next to his bed, she smiled down at him and showed him the little green Christmas tree. The little boy's eyes opened wide.

Little Green arched his trunk and stood tall and proud. He knew, suddenly, why he had been chosen to be the last Christmas tree.

B R Y A N ' S B L O O D P E O P L E

2007-10-16T02:20:00.000-04:00

* * *

B R Y A N ' S B L O O D P E O P L E
A Short Story of Delight and Intrigue
by
S i l a s T . C o m b e r b a c h e

Bryan was eleven. He lived in a suburb of Brazil with his mother and sister. They were vicious bitch-cats, and Bryan's life was filled with misery and constant antagonism. Bryan often bled due to a rare pituitary disorder that caused his body to produce more blood than his body needed, kind of like putting five quarts of oil in your car when it only holds four. Once a week, Bryan had to bleed off about a gallon or so of blood through a creaky wooden apparatus like a beer tap that was punched through his epidermis, all held together by big medical rubber bands that were cracked and sticky. Bryan would drip his salty black blood into a shallow ceramic bowl and carry it slick black and wet to his bedroom window. He would place the bowl on the concrete ledge outside his window and peer out in terror from behind thin fabric curtains as the cave bats used their echolocation to find the bowl and swarm in and crawl all over it and into it like so many starving ants.

Bats are, as the name may suggest, related to rats: they are quite capable of learning how to find the cheese at the end of the maze and they will return to a place over and over again with increasing numbers to find food. It wasn't long before Bryan had quite a following -- of blood-slick bats. They would darken the sky like thunderclouds just after dusk, their echolocation noise humming due to harmonic overlap like the low A of a darkly played viola, the bow scratching and dragging across the strings.

Too many bats, not enough blood. What to do? Bryan put his sister in the window. He tied her down screaming and knew he could keep her alive by feeding her his blood -- which he did. For a while. She lived for a few days. His mother was next, that fucking bitch.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

2007-09-23T10:21:00.012-04:00

Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961)

There are times when I think Dan Bern's I Need You is the best real love song ever written, but this usually occurs during moments of weakness and moral depravity when I have temporarily forgotten about songs like Zep's Ten Years Gone and Long Long Long by the Beatles.

So I Need You is not Ten Years Gone, but it is still a great song. The first verse (set on top of a melancholy chord progression of C / Am / F / C), in which Dan is wandering around Key West missing his girl, goes something like this:

Walking around the happiest place in the world,
And all I do is wonder if your hair is still curled.
South of Brownsville, Texas, south of Miami Beach,
And all it means to me is that you're further out of reach.

Everywhere there's sand and sun, blue sky, water, too,
And I need you.

From a purely musical standpoint it is not remarkable; the whole song only has about six chords total and it is nearly all just straightforward fingerpicking or strumming (depending on whether you have the live or the studio version).

Lyrically, however, it resonates with me because (1) it is a great love-is-going-to-end-me song of resigned desperation; and (2) it mentions my boy Ernest Hemingway a few times. And I think we can all agree that a song with a decent, well-placed literary reference is bad-ass.

Last summer my brilliant, literary daughter and I were listening to a lot of Dan Bern, and I had just finished reading The Sun Also Rises (for about the fifth time) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (for the first time) as September came to a close. The end of September and the thought of an approaching bleak and colorless autumn had, as usual, depressed the hell out of me, so she and I -- using Dan Bern as inspiration -- planned a trip to Key West in search of sand and sun and blue sky, and we thought we'd make a pilgrimage to Hemingway's house while we were there.

Upon bad advice, we flew into Miami and drove the rest of the way to Key West. The drive unfortunately was not really as scenic as promised due to endless road construction and significant traffic. I think it took us about 65 hours to get there on the crowded two-lane roads in our sad little rental car. Nevertheless, we finally arrived and made it up to our room at the Crown Plaza La Concha on Duval. It was January but it was still hot and good beach weather.

Interestingly, even in winter in the town where the sun rises and sets on the southernmost point of the United States, beer vendors selling cheap beer out of what appear to be hot-dog carts line both sides of Duval Street (which is essentially the main drag), and the law is such that it is acceptable to carry open containers of beer around outside.

A Key West sunset (cell-phone picture) taken from the edge of Mallory Square.

Most of the bars have broad entrances and windows that open widely onto the streets, and at night as you walk around you'll find lots of the typical shitty cover bands and guys playing and sweating over acoustic guitars, chording mindlessly through Jimmy Buffett and Van Morrison favorites surrounded by excessively tanned rednecks with bad tattoos singing along at the front of the stage amidst dozens of empty Bud Light bottles and ashtrays full of half-smoked cigarettes.

Drag queens stand on the corners in groups and invite passersby to buy advance tickets to late-night drag shows in what are almost always packed houses, and college kids selling bicycle tours swarm around the town. Magicians, escape artists, and acrobats fill Mallory Square at the northern end of Duval Street every night at sunset and work for tips from the crowds that gather to watch.

Key West at some point in the not-to-distant past probably had the charm of Savannah, but no longer. Take away the mindless tourists and I think it would be an extraordinary place, for there is still magic there. The floods of people walking the streets entirely unaware of the hidden magic of the town further obscure it, robbing the town of its real identity and making it like Myrtle Beach and every other tourist town in America. Awash in the obscuration is the house of Ernest Hemingway.

I Need You has a couple lines about Hemingway's house and the "boxing in the back," but that hasn't been the case for decades. Hemingway was not a boxing aficionado (to borrow a word that I saw for the first time in The Sun Also Rises), but he did love boxing, and he did have a boxing ring behind his house in Key West until one of his four wives (don't ask me which one - Pauline, maybe) had it replaced with a swimming pool when Hem was out on an overseas frolic covering the Spanish Civil War.

If I ever make enough money, I am going to try to buy Hemingway's house in Key West, just because I think the pool looks inviting.

Hemingway's Key West house is located at 907 Whitehead Street, and the property is bounded on the north by Olivia St. with trees and a brick wall all around the perimeter of the property. Whitehead runs north and south, parallel with Duval, the latter running the entire length of the island. You can find Sloppy Joe's at the corner of Green and Duval; purportedly Sloppy Joe's opened in 1933 and has been situated at its present location since 1937. Legend has it that Hemingway frequented Sloppy Joe's. I doubt Hem would find it suitable these days. The Key West Sunset Ale they serve there is $4.00 a glass and it tastes like vulture piss.

You can easily walk to the Hemingway house if you stay anywhere on the western part of the island. The house, which consists of two storeys and hell's own amount of expansive porches, is surrounded by palm trees and other rain-forest-looking vegetation that gives the place an exotic Jurassic Park look and feel.

This is a view of the back of the house from the vantage point of someone changing into their bathing suit. The house more or less looks the same from all sides.

Upon entering the front of the house, the first site encountered is the stairway seen below. Note the two "Old Man and the Sea" pictures on the left, with the marlins leaping dramatically out of the water. I did not learn the provenance or history of these paintings, but I think it is safe to assume that they were added after Hemingway's untimely demise.

Center Staircase in the Hemingway House

Downstairs there is a lot of Hemingway memorabilia, and naturally upstairs that is the case as well. There are a hell of lot of books and bookshelves in the place, and I tried to read the spines of each book in there to see if I could recognize anything interesting or pick out any discernible patterns.

I was most interested to see if I could locate a copy of Beryl Markham's West With the Night, because Beryl knew Hemingway in Africa and while they weren't exactly pals, Hemingway read Beryl's book and commented that it made him ashamed to be a writer. I'm pretty sure that if I could have found Hemingway's copy of West With the Night, I would have stolen the fucking thing.

This inscription was found inside Hemingway's copy of Stella Benson's The Poor Man, which was published in 1922. It reads: "For Hem . . . tell me how you like it."

Right next to the Hemingway house stands a carriage house in which Hem reportedly wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Green Hills of Africa, among others. The losers that volunteer at the Hemingway house will tell you that his writing studio (seen immediately below) looks exactly the same today as it did when the old man himself used to sit in at his typewriter and bang out his rather terse but effective prose.

I suspect this is true with the exception of the anachronistic electric fan on the left side of the picture, and maybe even the Thompson's gazelle (or whatever the hell that is) whose decapitated head appears on the far wall and appears to stare inquisitively into the room. Certainly the Escher-like placement of the painting of Hemingway's writing studio that hangs over the bookshelf on the right was added later. A wrought-iron barrier prevents entry into Hemingway's writing studio today. As if somebody would really steal something out of there.

Hem's Writing Studio

When Hemingway was alive, a catwalk of sorts connected the main house to the second floor of the carriage house. The catwalk no longer exists; instead, metal stairs lead to the writing studio, which is not nearly as cool. The picture immediately below shows the view from the entry way to the writing studio back to the main house, which is pretty much the same view from the electrical building where the main breakers were located back to the main headquarters thing at Jurassic Park.

The View of the Main House from the Writing Studio

Among the items of memorabilia are a few paid checks written on Hemingway's account with the National Bank of New York. The check below was made out to Carlos Gutierrez, who I'd be willing to bet is the father or grandfather of this guy. The stamp on the check reads "RECIBIDO - June 14, 1934 - THE FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF BOSTON - SUCURSAL DE LA HABANA," indicating that Carlos took the check and probably deposited it with his bank in Cuba, which was a branch of the First National Bank of Boston.

A check made out to Carlos Gutierrez

* * *

I started reading Moby-Dick and The Old Man and the Sea simultaneously, and while the beginning of Moby-Dick is much more literarily auspicious and seems to foretell the coming of a great sea adventure, it kind of peters out (as discussed in the last post) and leaves the reader ready for voyage but wanting of a vessel.

Interestingly, The Old Man and the Sea is much the opposite. Written exactly 100 years after Melville wrote Moby-Dick (1851 and 1951 respectively), the beginning of Hemingway's story reads like one of those short stories you have to read in 9th grade like The Most Dangerous Game or The Scarlet Ibis or even The Cast of the Armadillo, which is a very touching story about a burrowing Argentinian creature with a broken limb.

The first paragraph of The Old Man and the Sea:

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat."

Hemingway goes on to describe the old fisherman in sadly endearing terms, and one wonders whether there are vaguely autobiographical aspects to the work:

"He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high capes and the brown mountains. . . . He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them . . . ."

The story is simple: the kind and impoverished but unlucky fisherman who hasn't caught a fish in 84 days sets out to sail with courageous but innocent optimism in the hope of finally catching something to eat. Once far out to sea, he snags an immense marlin - whose strength of heart is equal to the fisherman - and the fisherman proceeds to spend the next three days and nights without enough food, water, or sleep, but nevertheless still with a strong heart he tries with increasing desperation to bring in the giant fish as it pulls the small boat farther and farther out to sea.

Essentially, The Old Man and the Sea and Moby-Dick tell very similar tales of desperation upon the sea wherein a desperate man chases a sea creature whose significance may be mostly symbolic. It is astonishing that without the use of a single inkhorn term, obscure Biblical reference, or pentasyllabic word, Hemingway's work manages to be dramatically more effective.

I was saddened when I finished The Old Man and the Sea, and this puzzled me somewhat. While I was reading the story, I kept thinking that it wasn't particularly good. I usually underline sentences or paragraphs that are moving or well written or which contain an aspect of the profound or the sublime, but I'm not sure that I made a mark in the entire book. I did not locate a single sentence worthy of an underline, yet I read on somewhat morbidly enthralled -- I think because the work as a whole is profound in its entirety.

The whole book is only about 110 pages long, double-spaced, with giant margins, as if Hem turned the thing in as a term paper for an English class, making it such that it can be read in absolutely no time and without modification to the reader's contact-lens prescription.

As far as the story goes, the tale is bleak and harsh. Day after day the poor fisherman (Santiago) suffers under the immense heat of the indifferent and unrelenting sun while the fishing line cuts and slices the skin of his time-weathered hands, and day after day the intrepid marlin fights for its life and presents a compelling case for its own survival. Both fisherman and fish fight for their life.

In the end, Santiago summons the strength and determination to defeat the marlin, but the fish is too large to pull into the boat. Santiago is far out to sea, and he is forced to secure the fish to the side of his small fishing boat. On his long and lonely voyage back to shore, sharks tear at the marlin relentlessly while Santiago strikes at them with courage, anger, and then futility. By the time his small boat crushes sea shells beneath it upon the shore, the old fisherman is exhausted and his extraordinary marlin is but a skeleton that will provide the fisherman no sustenance nor reward.

And so the book concludes:

"Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping upon his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions."

As the indifferent sun that is behind me now reflects pale and white in the corner of my computer screen, I remain baffled at the efficacy of this work of literature. In fewer than 130 pages, and in the simplest of language, Hemingway perfectly portrays great themes -- the resiliency of the human spirit and the classic struggle between man and nature -- that so many other artists have required truly epic works to convey. But plainly the book is not a work of triumph or success. It is instead a work of bleak, harsh reality.

Thus, more important in The Old Man and the Sea than the themes of human resiliency and triumph over nature is Hemingway's expression of the universal life struggle borne by every living thing from awakening at birth until the coming of eternal darkness upon death - which by most accounts is a disappointing conclusion to an otherwise largely acceptable existence. I do not believe that Hemingway's depiction of the fisherman's bleak futility was simply for dramatic effect necessarily. I believe, rather, that this futility was how Hemingway had come to view life.

On July 2, 1961, while at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway ended his life by shooting himself in the forehead with a shotgun. There has been (and likely will continue to be) great speculation as to what may have caused or contributed to Hemingway's suicide. There is evidence that for a number of years he fought mental illness that was compounded by alcoholism. And I read once that Hemingway believed that the electroshock therapy he received in his later years in response to his mental illness had stolen him from himself, such that the flesh and blood of the man no longer matched the soul of the person he once was.

I have read no accounts that appear definitive, but surely desperation may be attributed to Hemingway in his final hours and minutes. Still I wonder if, in his last nights and in the hours before he awoke on his last summer morning, he had dreamed about the lions.

FROM HELL'S HEART I STAB AT THEE

2007-09-08T22:52:00.000-04:00

"Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." - Captain Ahab, p. 519 in Herman Melville's aquatic thriller Moby-Dick.

* * *

I finally finished reading Moby-Dick about a month ago, and now I wonder why I ever started the damnable thing in the first place. The text of the edition that I have (Bantam paperback, 1981) spans 521 pages in what is probably size-6 font, which caused my contacts prescription to move 1 1/2 notches during the time that it took me to read the book.

Naturally all of us who have had a modicum of schooling are familiar with the story: It is a tale about a big fucking anthropomorphized white whale to whom is attributed a menacing, violent disposition, and said whale takes a ship captain's leg off at the knee in even retribution for the ship captain trying to kill the whale in order to harvest its sperm oil, and the monomaniacal captain gets all crazy hacked off and spends the rest of his life trying to murder the whale in disproportionate retribution for what was probably a reasonable reaction by the whale in view of the attempt on his poor beastly life.

Basically, it is: (1) whale bites sailor; (2) sailor pursues whale all crazy like. I won't tell you the end unless you e-mail and ask me, but don't bother. You can imagine what happens. (The whale wins.)

There are CXXXV chapters, which by my quick calculation is somewhere between 500 and 1000. Only four (that's right: four) of the interminable chapters actually advance the plot. This I'm not kidding about. Nearly every chapter sets out to explain some highly technical aspect of the whale trade, whale anatomy, what sailors do on ships when they are bored, what tools and implements sailors use, all the neat things you can use whale oil for, and so on, ad freaking nauseam.

Below I have included the first sentences of a few of the chapters that are representative of every single chapter except the handful that actually tell the story about Ahab's pursuit of Moby-Dick (my comments in italics):

1. "Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on shipboard, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers . . . ." (Chapter XXXIII)

2. "Already we are boldly launched upon the deep. . . . Ere that come to pass, at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough and appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow. It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera that I would now fain put before you. (Chapter XXXII)

[A systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera? Stab me in the fucking head.]

3. "I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as actually appears to the eye of the whaleman . . . ." (Chapter LV)

[Please, no! Didn't we cover this in Chapter XXXII?]

4. "With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line." (Chapter LX)

[Melville's description of the "whale-line" was eleven paragraphs longer than Earl Warren's majority opinion in Brown v. Board of Education.]

5. "A word concerning an incident in the last chapter. According to the invariable usage of the fishery . . . ." (Chapter LXII)

[Argh.]

6. "It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France . . . ." (Chapter LXV)

The astute reader will notice that like a million chapters into the book, the author is still having trouble getting to the fucking point.

Now, all this is not to say that there aren't some great aspects to the book. For example, it is, I believe, the world's most complete compendium of whale lore ever assembled. If you want to know what the world knew about whales circa 1851, Herman Melville has compiled it for you within the covers of Moby-Dick.

Also, as an item of interest there is a fair amount of really gay stuff in the book as well. And when I say "gay," I mean really freaking gay. Larry Craig gay. Possibly even Kevin "No Wheat" White gay; hard to tell.

My perception is that the whole thing is a homoerotic allegory for one man's quest to find and land a truly gigantic, angry white penis. Surely it is no coincidence that the whale is named Moby-Dick and he's a sperm whale. (Maybe I'm just incredibly immature; and I'm not even counting all the times the word seaman appears in the book.)

Consider, for example, the following passage, in which the narrator (the ever faithful Ishmael) and others aboard the Pequod squish globules of sperm oil between their fingers:

"Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long! I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; . . . and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; . . . Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm forever!" (Chapter XCIV)

And then another digression: "Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works."

And there are many, many other examples. Early in the book, Ishmael finds himself at The Spouter Inn in Nantucket and rents a room for the night from a bloke named Peter Coffin (heh heh). Due to a dearth of available rooms, Ishmael is forced to share a room and a bed with the harpoon-toting savage Queequeg, the first four consecutive letters of whose name are in common with two other prominent words in the English language, both of which are susceptible of the same connotation. (At this point I'll stipulate that I am perhaps incorrigibly immature.)

As far as I can tell, Queequeg lets Ishmael polish his harpoon and they wake up entangled like a state-fair pretzel. Melville writes:

"Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal . . . sprang into bed with me. . . . Upon waking the next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife." (Chapters III and IV.)

Indeed, there are some historical indications that Melville had the gay DNA, and there are some pretty steamy letters that went back and forth between Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the latter being the author of the well-known works The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), as well as other works of questionable literary significance, such as The Maypole of Merry Mount (1837), The Gentle Boy: A Thrice-Told Tale (1839), and Feathertop (1852), these secondary works all having extremely gay titles.

Here is an excerpt from a letter Melville wrote about Hawthorne:

"A man of a deep and noble nature had seized me in this seclusion. . . . The soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams. . . . But already I feel that Hawthorne had dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil in my Southern soul."

Reading passages such as this, it is hard to escape the conclusion that what Melville really wanted was Hawthorne's strong New England root and germinous seeds in the hot soil of his ass. PA-TOW!

Nevertheless, Moby-Dick does have its moments of brilliance. There are innumerable insightful passages and an abundance of poetic flourishes, all of which reveal that Melville was indeed a brilliant and tortured soul, if a bit long-winded here and there.

Recalling that the book was first published in 1851, the following passage in which Ishmael contemplates the homological similarity of the skeletal fins of the whale and the human hand is fairly prescient from a biological point of view (considering that On the Origin of Species was published in 1859):

"It is also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb."

On a more literary note, one extraordinary passage occurs in Chapter XCVI, when Melville tells of the Pequod sailing in the black of night as the useless remnants of a whale captured for its oil burned red and sinister from the try-works of the ship, its barbarous crew savagely feeding the fire as "[t]he burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed":

"Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in the words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spit round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into the blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul."

(I suspect it may be obvious even from the few passages that I have included herein, but it bears noting that Melville used commas and semicolons almost interchangeably, incorporating both liberally to allow for impossibly long sentences.)

And there is a great deal in Moby-Dick that is of a similar descriptive quality as the last quoted passage.

Unfortunately, much of the book contains little about the adventure and more about whaling and whales in general and in the very, very specific. I believe that the book could have been dramatically improved with a bit of good editing, such that the tale of the pursuit of the white whale would have been expanded, with the technical whaling stuff abridged to some degree. Read it and tell me I'm wrong.

Aside from all that, what is truly the most compelling aspect of Moby-Dick is Melville's characterization of the human condition as depicted in Captain Ahab, who throughout the tale finds himself inextricably impelled by some relentless force or agency that exceeds Ahab's ability to comprehend, much less defeat. Melville depicts Ahab as a man destined, without choice, to pursue the white whale despite the doomed captain's perfect foreknowledge that his quest will ultimately have ruinous consequences. Life, at times, appears to leave us little choice but to pursue that which we know may lead to a ruinous end.

"A strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted. . . . This whole act's immutably decreed."

And so Ahab pursues the whale, and so indeed it was ruinous.

Ahab was consumed as perhaps one would be consumed who once held his one true love in his arms but somehow left her in the past, lost in time already passed, without hope of ever returning to her, unable to return to her, the girl and the love as unreachable as the canopy of stars; a love that would cause one to say, "On this earth, under our one moon and myriad stars, I swear you are the one I love." Such loss becomes madness that consumes; that weighs upon each waking and dreaming thought; such loss turns men to madness. Such is the tyranny of time.

And so Ahab was consumed; and I know his madness.

"Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock . . . ; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another." And I know his woe.

Ahab was "[g]nawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea . . . . He sleeps at night with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms." And I know his anguish.

Such is the tyranny of time. The white whale was Ahab's foe; inexorable time is mine. From hell's heart, I stab at thee.

BESSIE CRIM AND WALTER AND CHARLES

2007-06-27T02:48:00.001-04:00

* * *

Original artwork for A Poor Man's Rain (2005)

* * *

The short story to follow was penned in 1994 by my father. He gave it to me several years ago and I apparently put it for safe keeping inside the cover of Collected Stories of William Faulkner (Random House edition, copyright 1950) because that is where I came across it two nights ago.

When I flipped through the Faulkner book, I discovered that it was at one time a library book of Western Carolina College that had been checked out at various times by Elaine Pruette, Mary A. Shuford, Lois Birch, Nell Robinson, Helen B. Roberts, and Joe Morgan-Rey. It was due to be returned to the library on April 7, 1959. I suspect that if Mr. Morgan-Rey were to return to the Western Carolina library today, he would almost surely be taken into custody and stripped of his possessions in order to bring his account current.

The book must have passed through mesne conveyances from Mr. Morgan-Rey into the hands of my father, for the latter's undated signature appears on the inside cover. It now occupies a comfortable place in my library, and I'll be sure to add my signature to it in order to continue the record of the book's dubious lineage.

I have no idea whether my father would revise this story if given the opportunity today, and I'm not even sure he revised it a lot or at all when he wrote it. Yet, I think sometimes there is a delicate balance with short works like this, such that too much messing around with them after they are written can ruin the beauty and simplicity of the original idea and (worse) turn a good short story into a novella or a novel with excessive development.

Accordingly, I have reprinted Bessie Crim and Walter and Charles here exactly how I found it, revisions and editing be damned. It is, in essence, a story of loss, and it occurs to me now that, even though the events in the story concern a tragic event in 1944, the truths it conveys are no less important today.

One more note: you might have to read the damn thing twice to get it entirely. Perhaps like Faulkner, my father never deliberately made it easy on a reader if doing so would compromise any part of the work. So just plan to read it and then read it again.

* * *

Bessie Crim and Walter and Charles

Kinda cramped was the feeling she had there in the attic room. A mite stuffy, too. Didn't remember, she thought, how the wind could whistle through these heavy oak boards in spite of the newspaper covering most air spaces.

Curious, Bessie peered at the date on a section of yellowed paper. Three years before he went off and two years before he didn't come back.

The old iron bed was still in place. No need to move it even if the mattress and box springs had been taken years ago. Nobody wanted it and unlike the mattress and springs, the frame didn't attract mice and other critters. Mainly, it just sat there and collected years.

Bending now to her task, she felt herself creak like the old house. Digging in first one then another musty cardboard box, she almost gave up. What's the use? Maybe it ain't even up here. Tugging on one box partly full of odds and ends of dishes, Bessie nearly toppled over.

"A fixin' to quit," she told someone later, "I came on a shoe box with the name of a shoe company that I could still read but not pronounce and when I nudged the lid off, inside was several pitchers that I thought back to.

"The second one from the top was the one I'd had in my mind for days upon days. As you can see there on the dresser, I've got pitchers galore but for some unknown reason this particular image wouldn't rest.

"Lookin' down at it, the first vision I had was the July day in 1944. Walter was at work at the floorin' plant. It was late enough in July for beans to be comin' in and I had just sat down on the front porch to snap on a bushel Walter and I had picked the evenin' before when I heard the cough of a car.

"A little dust eddy flared up in the road and I thought how peculiar. First dust devil I'd seen all summer.

"A drop of sweat kinda rolled to the end of my nose and I brushed it back into my hair with the crook of my elbow and looked steady at the two young fellas gettin' out of a brown car with TAXI on both doors. The taller one, the driver, took off his hat first and put it under his arm.

"When they reached the first step of my porch, I could see they both had close-cropped hair and, of course, full uniforms on. Fancier than most, but I knew without thinkin' they were Army men like Charles.

"Walter come home in an Army uniform just before we were married. Slight and handsome, he wore that uniform till I thought for sure he was going back. I told him, Walter, the war is over and you're not a soldier so why you don't take that brown thing off and put on some normal clothes I don't know. Now that I think about it, Walter was kinda proud of that uniform. He wouldn't admit it.

"I think the day he took it off for good was the time my Daddy asked him, said, Walter, just where did you take that uniform, in the war, I mean?

"There wasn't much to talk about after that because Walter never got any farther than Fayetteville. Don't get me wrong, there was nothing wrong with that. Lotsa boys pulled their duty in places that wasn't none too dangerous. I don't think anybody helt that against any of 'em. They went where they was told and done what they was told. That's what Walter said often. Sometimes late at night lying in bed, Walter would want to talk about his war experiences and everything that went on. He never failed to say he was ready to go anytime. Anytime, he'd say. Anytime.

"And, then almost like the feeling was new, looking down at the face of my boy seven, eight years old, I thought the guilt would suffocate me again.

"Law, you don't know how many times I prayed over that in church and sometimes over a pan of cornbread. If I had the tears I've shed in a tub, it'd be as deep as a well.

"Finally, one time, I couldn't take care of it myself any longer and I stopped our preacher one day on the street in front of the old West Jefferson hardware store. I'd gone there to get some thread. I asked him how long a body was supposed to carry the burden of guilt of a terrible, terrible thought.

"It was Preacher Harvey. You know, the one that later ran off and never came back. Then, we had a lot of faith in the man and he said, do you continue to think that same thought, Bessie?

"No, I told him. Not in the same way. I remember thinking it, of course. Who could forget such a thing? But, I said, my feeling about it has changed.

"He looked me dead in the eye and said there on the sidewalk, God has forgiven you, Bessie. Go on about your business.

"See, the porch just seemed to go out from under me when the Army fella began to speak. There ain't no way to use the words God give us to tell nobody what feelings goes with something like that.

"Holdin' on to the pitcher, I eased back down those nary little steps that Charles run up and down a dozen million times and went and sat in the living room. I was there quiet and alone for the better part of an hour. It seemed enough.

"Once I glanced over to Walter's chair just to imagine him sittin' in it and smokin'. But it was dim and I could not hold on to that vision of Walter for long.

. . . shot and killed instantly by . . .

"I'm not sure I heard all the words. In fact, I'm sure I didn't. Couldn't have. It was a sniper, though.

"The sound of that single shot came back to me the day the Army buried Charles. It was the twenty-one-gun salute.

"When I left the graveyard that day, all I had with me was Walter and that flag they gave me and that awful memory trailin' along behind me like a youngin' a pullin' a wagon.

* * *

"I didn't really mean it."

"Mean what, Bessie?"

"I didn't really mean what I thought that day on the porch. What I prayed for . . ."

"Walter knew, Bessie. He knew. You know that he knew. How could a man not know?"

"I never told him. Never."

"I know, Bessie. But when he came home near dark that day from work and you still sittin' there with not a bean touched, he sensed. A change had settled over your house. You looked at Walter different. How you can show a man guilt and give it to him too at the same time is something to be explained. But you did it, Bessie. You did it."

"When my sister and her husband got there, everything was packed for me to go except I carried the pitcher of Charles. I didn't want to take any chances with it gettin' gone somehow.

"Luke - that was her husband. Her second husband, really. Not a lot of people know it but she married first to a man travelin' through and it seemed he never did get over or done with travelin' because he never slowed down. Luke wasn't as interestin' but he didn't like to move much.

"He picked up those old suitcases and carried them out and put 'em in the trunk of his car.

"Em, my sister, got in the front beside Luke. I was already in the backseat by myself. Luke backed up to turn and I told him to stop. I wanted to see my house through the glass.

"A few boxes of quart jars sat on the porch near where I first saw the soldiers drive up. I used them jars to can a many a time. Just needed new lids every year.

"To Em I said as big as day, Em, I was sittin' right there in July of 1944 when I tried to wish and pray Walter off the face of this earth."

"Bessie, you didn't."

"When they read the telegram, I only had one real thought: make it go away. The only thing I could come up with was if Walter had not come back. If he had died in the war instead of Charles, I would not be livin' this moment in this way. God forgive me, but I did."

"You said all that to Em?"

"Don't 'cha see? Walter was already gone. Tellin' didn't matter anymore. I could tell Em was set back some but it didn't slow Luke down any. He drove me straight here and set me and my bags off.

"See this pitcher? It was the only part of my life not sittin' there on the sidewalk."

"Go to sleep, Bessie. Tomorrow will be another day."

"We'll see."

[The painting I have reproduced above in two or three different forms is an original work by Stephen Shoemaker, an artist local to Ashe County, North Carolina who prepared this painting at the request of my father for the cover of A Poor Man's Rain, a novel that was published last year or the year before that.]

DARKNESS

2007-03-15T04:16:00.000-04:00

George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)

* * *

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went - and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires - and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings - the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire - but hour by hour
They fell and faded - and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash - and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless - they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again; - a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought - and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails - men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress - he died.
The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar - place
Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other’s aspects-saw, and shriek’d, and died -
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful - was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless -
A lump of death - a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge -
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon their mistress had expir’d before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them - She was the Universe.

- Lord Byron, 1816

THE SORROW OF LOVE

2007-03-01T03:54:00.000-05:00

* * *

The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves,
The full round moon and the star-laden sky,
And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves,
Had hid away earth's old and weary cry.

And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world's tears,
And all the sorrows of her labouring ships,
And all the burden of her myriad years.

And now the sparrows warring in the eaves,
The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky,
And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves
Are shaken with earth's old and weary cry.

- William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

IT IS BITTER

2007-02-08T09:55:00.000-05:00

* * *

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

- Stephen Crane (1871 - 1900)

* * *

THE PERILS OF VEGETARIANISM

2006-11-12T02:36:00.002-05:00

The hardest part of being a vegetarian is trying to order and obtain actual, honest-to-god vegetarian food in restaurants - particularly fast-food restaurants. Even in the more expensive restaurants, there seems to be a perception among waiters that "mostly vegetarian" is somehow equivalent to "vegetarian."

Exempli gratia: "Our soup of the day is, ahem, mostly vegetarian. It was made with chicken broth, but all the other ingredients are vegetarian, so you should be fine."

You should be fine. That fucking kills me. The waiter thinks it's fine if I get a little meat with my dinner. Awesome.

I also love when waiters give you language of equivocation when you are asking about a particular menu item. Q. "Does your pizza sauce have meat in it?" A. "Hmm, probably not." This is usually followed by, "You should be fine."

And that's what you get in most nice restaurants where the chefs have been to school. The average fast-food restaurant is so vegetarian unfriendly that it is almost not worth trying.

Little-known fact:
Colonel Sanders invented the phrase "mustache ride."

For example, as a little experiment, go into any KFC in America and ask the white-trash 16-year-old behind the counter if KFC has any vegetarian items on the menu. You can bet that this will be the first time the kid has ever heard or contemplated this question.

You will definitely be met with an open-mouthed blank stare and, perfectly executed in accordance with section VII-A, subpart (b)(iii) of the KFC instructional 3-ring binder written entirely by one Harland Sanders (said subpart being titled, "What To Do If Someone Asks For Vegetarian Selections"), the kid running the register will turn and holler for the manager.

And just so you know, KFC is petitioning the US Postal Service to create a postal stamp in honor of the good Colonel. Good fucking god.

McDonald's is almost as bad for vegetarian items, although they do have some salads and yogurt-and-fruit thingies that a vegetarian could eat if she were trapped inside the McDonald's for a prolonged period of time and began to starve.

My grandfather (my dad's dad), who was allergic to cucumbers, used to disparage these phallic green nutritionless vegetables at every opportunity. He'd say, "If you had two hogs, and you fed one of them nothing but cucumbers, and you fed the other one nothing, the one that ate the cucumbers would starve to death first." I feel basically the same way about the vegetarian "options" at McDonald's.

Don't take your cucumber to the airport.

(Although, the last time I was in NY, a McDonald's there was advertising a veggie burger. What they don't advertise is that the veggie burgers are cooked in the same grease and shit that the other "hamburgers" are cooked in. Regardless, I suspect there is very little actual meat being prepared at any McDonald's.)

Taco Bell's Web site provides a decent guide to vegetarian options available at their restaurants, although actually ordering one of these vegetarian possibilities is usually much more difficult in practice.

Asking for a grilled stuft [sic] burrito without the chicken or beef, for example, is usually met with an incredulous, "You don't want any meat?", in the same tone and with the same attitudinal head toss the register operator might use if you asked her to take her shirt off. She will then turn and, in addition to entering the order into the fancy Taco Bell computer system, yell the order to the scary-looking "burrito chef," just to make sure he knows it's not a drill or a joke or something: "Grilled-stuft burrito, no meat!"

This is almost always followed by an equally incredulous shout from the guy in the back making the burrito who has heard the command from the front and simultaneously read the order ("GRILLED STUFT - NO CHICKEN/BEEF") on the Taco Bell order monitor: "No meat?!" Which prompts the reply: "No, he don't want meat on it."

The idea that someone wouldn't want meat on a burrito is simply beyond their imagination. It feels like what would happen if you went to the gas station and asked them to put Dr. Pepper into your car instead of gas. Very awkward.

"Why don't you want any meat?"

"Because I'm a vegetarian."

"You're an animal doctor? Say, sweetie, you want mild, hot, or fire?"

Subway actually has a veggie sub on the menu, and some Subways here and there offer a "veggie patty" sandwich (also known variously as the Veggie Max or VeggieMax in some locales). The Veggie Max consists of a pressed vegetarian patty of unknown composition that resembles in size and texture McDonald's (or is it McDonald's's?) ubiquitous McRib, yet unlike the McRib it is allegedly meat-free and loaded with protein. The Veggie Max is kind of like the Big Foot of sandwiches: there are some very poor-quality pictures of it, but no one is really 100% sure it exists.

Doesn't that look good?! Yeah, I know. Not so much. This was the only picture I could find of the elusive Veggie Max.

Even if a particular Subway does offer the Veggie Max, it will rarely appear on their menu boards and even more rarely will you encounter a "sandwich artist" who has actually prepared a Veggie Max. Apparently it is not something they teach you at Subway training school. And because I am the only person in North Carolina who orders the Veggie Max, I am usually met with perplexed stares when I request it. Here is an excerpt from my most recent Subway visit:

Sandwich artist: "Welcome to Subway."

Me: "Thanks. How're you doing today?"

Sandwich artist [apparently perceiving my question to be rhetorical, he gets right to business]: "What can I get for you today?"

Me: "Do you guys have the veggie patty?" [and then with increased uncertainty]: "You know, the Veggie Max?"

Sandwich artist [turns to look at menu board]: "Uh, no, I don't think so."

[Pregnant pause.]

Me [what I'm thinking is, "Well, can you fucking check and make sure?", but what I say is]: "I think you had some in the freezer the last time I came in. Do you mind checking?"

Sandwich artist [what he's thinking is, "Yeah, why don't you just eat one of my balls?", but what he says is]: "Yeah, dude, I'll check."

Ten agonizing minutes pass and the sandwich artist returns from the bowels of the store with two hard-frozen steaming blocks of vegetarian glory wrapped in wax paper.

And this brings me to another problem with the Veggie Max: because it is so infrequently ordered, the patties themselves tend to languish in Subway freezers for so long that by the time they see the light of day, they have taken on a freezer-burned quality not at all dissimilar to what that poor 5000-year-old bastard somebody found frozen in the Alps probably had when they fished him out of that ravine a few years ago. Freeze something for long enough and shit can happen to the molecular structure. This is true of the Veggie Max as well.

Sucks to be this guy. Wasn't he in The English Patient?

Sandwich artist: "Yeah, I found some, dude. Do you know how long these are supposed to cook?" [He's asking me.]

Me [what I'm thinking is, "You're the fucking sandwich artist." What I actually say is]: I think they usually microwave two of them side-by-side for two minutes."

Sandwich artist [what he's thinking is, "I'd like to put your head in the microwave, you whiny bitch." What he actually says is]: "Ok."

He throws them into the microwave and sets the timer for five minutes. He then says: "What kind of bread do you want?"

Me: "Honey oat. Footlong."

Sandwich artist: "American, Swiss, or provolone?"

Me: "American, please. And can I get extra cheese?" [Protein is scarce when you're a vegetarian. You have to get it where you can.]

Sandwich artist: "Yeah, but it'll be extra."

Me [what I'm thinking is, "Oh, fuck. I'd better check and see how much money I've got. I guess you better leave it off, then." What I actually say is]: "Yeah, that's fine."

He then proceeds to spend five full minutes delicately picking apart the pieces of cheese to put on my sandwich, because he is wearing those ridiculous plastic ill-fitted, unnecessarily large gloves that sandwich artists have to wear at Subway. These gloves do not lend themselves well to precision work.

The next part of the process - where I pick out the vegetable toppings for my sandwich - is equally difficult at every Subway, because veggie patty or no, the sandwich artists usually do not comprehend that a veggie sandwich really needs to be piled pretty high with vegetables or else it is not like a sandwich at all, but rather more like eating one of those starter salads you get at Chinese restaurants that consist entirely of a wedge of iceberg lettuce and about 23 thinly sliced carrot shards. It hits your stomach and disappears like a butter-pecan waffle cone falling into a pit of molten lava. So at Subway, you really have to press them to give you enough vegetables to make the whole thing worthwhile. Accordingly, the next part of the ordering process goes something like this:

Me: "I'd like tomato . . ."

Mr. Sandwich artist picks through what can only be described as 'tomato scraps,' which are the pallid, sad-looking tomato pieces that Subway sells in lieu of actual red ripe tomatoes. He puts like four of them on my sandwich and then looks up at me expectantly.

Me: "Can I, uh, get a few extra tomatoes?"

Sandwich artist: "It'll be extra" [he says in the same tone my grandmother used to use with me when she'd warn me that something was going to ruin my supper].

Me: [involuntarily, first I stare blankly, then I close my eyes in exasperation and nod affirmatively]

He continues making the sandwich. I get two extra tomatoes. At this point, he has correctly discerned that I'm a prick and he's playing passive-aggressive with me.

Me: "Black olives."

He puts 8 black olives on the sandwich.

Me: "Spinach."

Sandwich artist [now tired of the game, he looks absently outside and says through a sigh]: "Uh, yeah, dude, we no longer sell spinach." [Except he pronounces it "spinage."]

Me: "Ok, then, a little lettuce."

He proceeds to put about 2 pounds of lettuce on the sandwich. He buries the sandwich in lettuce. It was like he'd waited his whole fucking life to put lettuce on this sandwich. Apparently somewhere in the Subway 3-ring binder it says "liberally pile lettuce on the sandwich." It probably also says, "This makes the sandwich look heartier and makes up for the lack of other more expensive toppings."

Me: "And a lot of salt and pepper."

He picks up the patented Subway "salt and pepper in one cannister" shaker and gives me two good shakes, depositing on my sandwich a scientifically undetectable amount of either salt or pepper. Realizing now that I have been soundly defeated by the sandwich artist, I relent.

Me: "And I guess that will do it."

The sandwich artist then turns and opens the microwave, producing from it two scorched but now lukewarm vegetable patties of unknown composition and drops them asymmetrically on my pathetic, rather sparse-looking sandwich. He violently folds the sandwich in half - causing 1/3 of the contents to shoot out onto the counter - and cuts the sandwich but stops short of slicing all the way through, such that I'll have to tear the two halves of the sandwich apart once I get into the car, which necessarily will send lettuce all over my lap.

Sandwich artist [feeling conciliatory now that he's soundly defeated another whiny customer]: "I've never had the veggie patty. Is it good?"

Me: "It's not bad. See, I'm a vegetarian . . ."

Sandwich artist [What he's thinking is, "You're an animal doctor?" What he says is]: "I'm not sure, but I think that patty's got some chicken in it, dude. But you should be ok."

And this happens pretty much every single time I go into Subway. It is excruciating. The sad thing is that the Veggie Max, 9 times out of 10, fucking blows. The veggie patty is in fact usually freezer burned to hell, and microwaving something that is freezer burned usually just turns it to shit. I don't even know why I do it. I think I've had my last Veggie Max. Death to the Veggie Max.

* * *

For next time: an excerpt from a new play from Silas T. Comberbache and some interesting facts about Herman Melville that they don't teach you in school (such as, for example, that Moby-Dick is an extended homoerotic metaphor that traces one man's quest to find an inordinately large penis). (Think about it: Moby "Dick" - a sperm whale? And there's much, much more.)

YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

2006-08-13T00:05:00.018-04:00

* * *

Thomas Clayton Wolfe
October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938

If you travel to Asheville and stay in the Renaissance Hotel on 31 Woodfin Street just east of Broadway, and if you look out the unopenable western windows of the hotel, you'll see a yellow and white three-story Queen Anne-style house with a small hand-lettered sign hanging above a rocking-chair porch. The sign illogically reads "The Old Kentucky Home," and it marks the entrance to the childhood home of Thomas Wolfe.

The Old Kentucky Home in Asheville, North Carolina

The house was deliberately burned in 1998, but it was later restored at a cost of $2.4 million and reopened to the public in 2004. Wolfe's mother, Julia, purchased the home in 1906 for about $6500 and rented rooms to boarders for a number of years, many of whom were memorialized in Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Julia lived in the Old Kentucky Home until her death in 1945.

Thomas Wolfe and his mother, Julia, sitting on the front porch of the
Old Kentucky Home.

Wolfe was born in 1900 in Asheville and died unexpectedly in Baltimore in 1938 of tubercular meningitis. He managed to pen only a few major works in his lifetime, of which Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again are the most notable. He is, in my incircumspect opinion, the greatest of the American writers.

Positioned to the west of The Old Kentucky Home is a flat-roofed, unadorned and simple building described uncreatively as the Thomas Wolfe Visitor Center. It consists of about 900 square feet of some Wolfe family relics and enlarged photos of the already gigantic Wolfe, his family, and Asheville in the early 1900s. A self-guided tour of the building, if you stop and read every single footnote and study every picture, could not take longer than 30 minutes (a disappointing legacy for such a remarkable American literary figure).

Note the last entry: it reads "Thomas Clayton Wolfe Oct 3, 1900."

If enough people gather in the lobby of the museum - which I suspect happens infrequently - a museum volunteer will appear and offer a guided tour of the old Wolfe house. Occasionally this volunteer is a pear-shaped, mustachioed, and bespectacled introvert named Ted* who has the Wolfe family history down cold and actually makes for an startlingly informative tour guide.

Ted will lead you, room by room, through the spacious 29-room home, stopping in each room to divulge a bit of family trivia and occasionally reciting an impressive passage here and there from Look Homeward, Angel.

[At the time this article was written in 2006, the author was not aware of Ted Mitchell's acclaim as a bona fide scholar of Thomas Wolfe. Ted wrote numerous books and articles on Wolfe; he was a member of the Thomas Wolfe Society and a past director of the Thomas Wolfe Festival in Asheville. Ted passed away on December 6, 2008 at the JFK Solace Center in Asheville. I am embarrassed that at the time of my first tour of the Thomas Wolfe house, I took him for a mere volunteer.]

Wolfe stayed in this bedroom during his last visit to his home in Asheville 1937. He died the following year.

You might expect to find others at the museum who are interested in American literature, but I doubt this is common. You're more likely to come across old, touristy-looking white-haired people, the men wearing shorts and nurse shoes with brown dress-socks pulled all the way up, and the women wearing above-the-waist '80s jeans that attempt somewhat grotesquely to encompass their expansive stomachs and then fasten several inches above where you would imagine their navels might be located - replete with camera bags, awkwardly folded maps, and fanny packs bulging with calcium chews and the remnants of gum-moistened Fig Newtons. It's likely that Thomas Wolfe's significance to these people exists entirely in the fact that his childhood home is just one of many "Points of Interest" on an Asheville tourism map.

* * *

Wolfe has been accused by many - including those pedantic bastards Strunk and White in The Elements of Style - of "overwriting," a criticism I assume implies excessive descriptiveness or immoderate or unnecessary detail.

I understand the criticism as applied to Wolfe, and I can easily see how one accustomed to reading Hemingway, who rarely piled more than 10 or so words into a single sentence, might balk at the first 50 pages of Look Homeward, Angel (Wolfe's first book), for, by way of example, in Look Homeward Wolfe's introduction of the chief protagonist is preceded by a harrowing description of the protagonist's ancestors, just as one might attempt describe a Chevrolet by giving an account of its earliest and smallest constituent parts, starting with the pieces that make up the spark plugs.

Nevertheless, we recall that Look Homeward, Angel was Wolfe's first attempt at literary accomplishment through the medium of the novel, and thus it is not surprising that it took him a few pages to hit his stride and finally get to the part of the story he really wanted to write. But once he arrived at that point, he truly arrived and wrote as no American writer has ever written before or since.

* * *

A book on the bookshelf that has actually been read is a beautiful thing, and I have always viewed with suspicion those people who gingerly try not to break the spine of a book, or attempt to preserve its pages from the tangy smudges of Cool Ranch Doritos or the subtle welt-like distortions left on an open page by condensation falling from a beer bottle on a humid summer evening. Books are meant to be read, and the reader should leave her mark on a book, so that future generations can behold a tangible artifact of multi-generational shared literary experience. Finding a handwritten note by one's grandfather in the margin of a well-read tome would surely be invaluable.

Thus I am not reluctant to mark up a book. Most often, I underline in red ink those passages that I find particularly remarkable; those passages that, if I had 1000 years to try, I could not have written as well, or as beautifully, or as insightfully. My Wolfe books are filled with red ink.

My copy of You Can't Go Home Again didn't fare as well as my copy of Look Homeward, Angel, even though the latter spent some time at DeBordieu on the beach and its pages were frequently turned with fingers wet with lime.

* * *

Wolfe is not ostentatious in his writing, nor does he write only for effect. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to discover among his pages a single insincere thought or phrase. You'll find no inkhorn terms, and nothing purposefully esoteric. But, one must ask, what is required to make one a great writer? By what criteria is such a determination made?

This is obviously a difficult question - maybe an impossible question - because the reasons for artistic endeavor are truly limitless. An author's goal may be merely to entertain, or the author may wish only to unburden herself of a narrative for purposes of psychological or spiritual evacuation. And there are innumerable other bases for putting pen to paper with an eye toward publishing one's thoughts for public consumption.

If, however, we stipulate the criteria narrowly as pure writing for the purpose of truly capturing the essence of the human experience in America, I know of no other author who succeeded in this endeavor as Wolfe has done: "Not just the facts, you understand - not just the record of my life - but something truer than the facts - something distilled out of my experience and transmitted into a form of universal application." You Can't Go Home Again, p. 299 (Harper & Row paperback ed. 1989). And this he achieves.

Again, from You Can't Go Home Again, Wolfe candidly reveals his true purpose in writing in what is almost certainly an autobiographical passage: "He was sustained and cheered and aided by no party, was given comfort by no creed, and had no faith in him except his own. That faith . . . was at bottom a faith in himself, a faith that if he could only succeed in capturing a fragment of the truth about the life he knew, and make it known and felt by others, it would be a more glorious accomplishment than anything else he could imagine." (p. 387)

* * *

Growing up in Asheville in the early part of the 20th century, Wolfe felt suffocated by what he perceived as the oppressive isolation of the mountains of North Carolina, and his boyhood desire to escape this social and psychological isolation appears time and again throughout his works. To Wolfe, the trains that traveled into and out of Asheville came to symbolize abundant and glorious life elsewhere that he longed for and would eventually find.

In You Can't Go Home Again, Wolfe writes:

"All through the ghostly stillness of the land, the train made on forever its tremendous noise, fused of a thousand sounds, and they called back to him forgotten memories: old songs, old faces, old memories, and all strange, wordless, and unspoken things men know and live and feel, and never find a language for - the legend of dark time, the sad brevity of their days, the unknowable but haunting miracle of life itself. He heard again, as he had heard throughout his childhood, the pounding wheel, the tolling bell, the whistle-wail, and he remembered how these sounds, coming to him from the river's edge in the little town of his boyhood, had always evoked for him their tongueless prophecy of wild and secret joy, their glorious promises of new lands, morning, and a shining city." (p. 74)

"And sometimes, in furtive hallways, doors opened and closed, there was a padding of swift, naked feet, the stealthy rattling of brass casters, and behind old battered shades, upon the edge of [town], the dull and fetid quickenings of lust. . . . And always, through the broken winds, the sounds of shifting engines in the station yards, far off, along the river's edge - and suddenly the thunder of great wheels, the tolling of the bell, the loneliness of the whistle cry wailed back, receding toward the North, and toward the hope, the promise, and the memory of the world unfound." (p. 287)

"And suddenly George remembered who he was, and saw the journey he had come. He remembered . . . the little boy that he had been, with the hills closing in around him, and at night the whistles wailing northward toward the world." (p. 418)

These three short paragraphs are representative of the greater body of Wolfe's work: often sad, entirely real, and profound for the human experience.

* * *

This dedication is found in my first edition of Wolfe's From Death to Morning (1935). Benjamin Harrison Wolfe was one of Thomas Wolfe's older brothers, and his life and death are detailed in Look Homeward, Angel. Benjamin contracted the flu during the 1918 epidemic and died in an upstairs bedroom in the Old Kentucky Home.

Of Benjamin's death, Wolfe wrote in Look Homeward, Angel: "As the wind howled in the bleak street, and Eliza wove a thousand fables of that lost and bitter spirit, the bright and striken thing in the boy twisted about in horror, looking for escape from the house of death. . . . You are alone. You are lost. Go find yourself, lost boy, beyond the hills."

* * *

If you're in Asheville to visit the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, you should stay at the Haywood Park Hotel on Battery Park Avenue, for upon issuing from the front door of said hotel you can walk more or less directly (albeit on a curved trajectory) to the Laughing Seed Cafe on Wall Street. The Laughing Seed is a modern vegetarian/vegan restaurant in the downtown area where you can get "decorative" sushi, a barbecue-tofu burrito thingy that actually tastes like real barbecue - as well as several other creative vegetarian meals (we vegetarians need variety, by god) - and multiple varieties of Green Man Ale, which is brewed downstairs.

The first of many. To rose-lipt maidens and lightfoot lads.

Or you could eat at the Mellow Mushroom on Broadway, where I swear to god the kitchen help looks like the crew of a goddamn pirate ship. The food there is great, and of course hair nets are essential, but they do nothing to restrain sweat-laden beard hair from plunging gravitationally into the middle of your deep-dish 'za, and I'm willing to go on record to say that if facial hair were poisonous, there wouldn't be a pizza-eating person left alive in Asheville today. Beard-hair ingestion aside, it's a great place to eat.

On my last visit, and consistent with my practice of discovering ridiculous signs in bathrooms, I saw the words "Fuck America" scrawled vigorously on the bathroom wall of the Mellow Mushroom.

Such a remarkable and powerful expression, a barbaric yawp, as it were, and perhaps more so due to the fact that these words were surely written by an American who had become disillusioned or disgusted with our government or maybe even the people of this country. Seeing this sentiment after psychologically and emotionally enmeshing myself with Wolfe over the course of the several months it took me to read and digest his works caused me a certain cognitive dissonance that I was unable to quickly resolve.

Wolfe wrote so passionately about America, but his love was not for this country or what he believed it stood for, because its citizens were often cruel or indifferent toward him and he wrote bitterly about this ostracism throughout his life.

Following the autobiographical Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe was effectively exiled from Asheville for a number of years due to his description of many of its residents in what were apparently accurate, but perhaps less than flattering, terms. The exile hurt Wolfe deeply and provoked much of the introspection in You Can't Go Home Again, a work in which Wolfe articulates the searing psychological wounds he experienced from the vicious hometown opprobrium directed toward him in the years following publication of Look Homeward, Angel.

Standing there before the urinal and having time to reflect, I considered the vitriolic expression of disgust before me on the bathroom wall, and I recounted momentarily all of Wolfe that I had read and the feelings of deep sadness I experienced in empathy with this lost and introspective utterly misfit soul of genius who so perfectly and profoundly captured the essence of real American life despite his self-imposed isolation from it; I thought of the bedroom in his childhood home in which I had stood numb just hours before, and the small white metal bed in that bedroom upon which Benjamin Wolfe, who Tom had so dearly loved, had exhaled a final time and thus escaped the house of death, the molecules of his breath surviving the boy and lingering within the walls of the room in which I stood more than 70 years later, breathing the same air; I thought further of whether Wolfe would be revulsed by the ineloquent execration on the bathroom wall, or whether he would concur with its base but meaningful sentiment. What was the source of the dissonance, and why was I discomfited by it? Was the sentiment somehow at odds with Wolfe? The answer to this query would not present itself to me for some time.

* * *

In one of my favorite passages from You Can't Go Home Again, Wolfe casts a cold and discerning eye on man, saying, "He wastes his little three score years and ten in spendthrift and inglorious living; from his cradle to his grave he scarcely sees the sun or moon or stars; he is unconscious of the immortal sea and earth; he talks of the future and he wastes it as it comes."

When is the last time you looked to the stars? To the moon? To the immortal sea? Wolfe, I believe, saw life for precisely what it was and nothing more.

It occurred to me - only much later - that I had so absorbed Wolfe's vision of America that despite his often dark, bitter portrayal of American life and its people, I had nonetheless grown protective of this vision and the underlying reality that formed the basis and the substance for Wolfe's magnificent works. Wolfe had led me to stare unblinking into the sometimes bright but other times cold, uneven reality of life and inevitable death so as to see into the heart of the myriad occupants of this bleak temporal landscape that began well in advance of Wolfe and will continue on long after our own eyes are darkened by indifferent and inexorable time. And despite this grim and unsettling view, I yet remain steadfast in my thirst for knowledge, my love for life, and my optimism for the coming day. Indeed, I have grown in these things immeasurably of recent days.

Thus, inspired by the life and works of Thomas Clayton Wolfe, I will carry on. I will continue to see life for what it is; I will live each waking day, each new turn of the timeless earth toward the sun, with meaning and understanding. My days may be brief and proud, but they will not be bitter, nor will they pass without hope. And until my eyes are darkened, I shall look upon the sun, the moon, the stars, and the immortal sea, and with bursting heart, rejoice in all of life.

* * *

THIS VIEW OF LIFE

2006-07-23T02:37:00.000-04:00

A recent Washington Post article discusses new scientific findings that suggest "evolution is not just real but is happening to humans right now." According to the article, "Signals of natural selection are incredibly widespread across the human genome. . . . Everywhere we look, there appears to be very widespread signals of natural selection in many genes and many processes." So says Jonathan Pritchard, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, which, by most accounts, is a pretty good school.

Pictured at the outset of the article in the clever morphing gif is Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who taught at Harvard for a number of years and wrote prolifically about evolution.

Every month for 27 years Gould published an essay in Natural History magazine under the thematic title "This View of Life," the inspiration for the title borrowed from the last paragraph of Darwin's Origin of Species: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Gould was pretty damn good at identifying patterns and analogues between scientific concepts and other broad or "universal" abstractions that Gould would draw from the limitless diversity of other fields of study and interest. He would then paint elegant parallels between these diverse concepts to illustrate or illuminate often subtle (and sometimes controversial) scientific ideas, most often pertaining to a precise aspect of evolutionary biology.

In one notable case indicative of the breadth of the subject matter from which Gould derived his canvas of ideas, he examines in truly excruciating detail the disappearance of .400 hitting in baseball and then draws some remarkable analogies between this decline in excellence and the development of complex life forms on Earth.

In another essay - in fact, his last essay for Natural History - Gould illustrates a graceful parallel between the miracle of uninterrupted continuity of life on Earth and our personal unbroken genealogical continuity, one commonality being our apparent innate desire to understand the full lineage and history of both.

Bridging both aspects of the continuity of life by an additional parallel to Gould's span of consecutive essays published in Natural History - 300 months without fail - Gould explains his inspiration for this last essay: "If continuity so tugs at our heartstrings and so defines our sense of being within the expanding totalities of a personal family, the full human species, and the entire tree of life—and if unbroken continuity defines both the awe of 'this view of life' and the conceit of a little literary microcosm also called 'This View of Life'—then how else can I end except with a paean to continuity on both scales?"

Most poignant is Gould's conclusion to this last essay in which Gould, perhaps unconsciously prevising his impending mortal exit, recalls words written by his maternal grandfather upon his 1901 arrival in America as a 14-year-old boy after traveling from Europe by ship. He wrote simply, "I have landed." These words of beginning, so auspicious and hopeful when penned by his grandfather 100 years prior, were Gould's humble yet eloquent words of conclusion.

Gould died in May 2002 from cancer at age 60, only 14 months after the printing of his last essay. I remember learning about his death from the front page of USA Today. I was living in Hickory at the time, and I had agreed to meet a friend for lunch at the The Olde Hickory Tap Room, a restaurant and brewery local to Hickory that serves some excellent dark beers, a pretty good appetizer of "pub chips," and a very convincing black-bean burger (I have yet to taste its equal).

I seem to remember that the parking lot outside the Tap Room still offered evidence of an earlier rain, but the sun had arrived before noon and I distinctly recall feeling optimistic about the day and the approaching weekend. I had arrived a few minutes early for lunch, and I needed something to occupy my mind until the arrival of my lunch companion.

The occasions on which I do not have at least two books in my car are extremely rare. (At present I have a collection of Mencken essays in the front seat and my now-tattered copy of You Can't Go Home Again in the back seat.) Nonetheless, on this mixed-weather day in May four years ago, I was without tome or text of any sort, so my neurotic desire to read impelled me to pick up a newspaper.

USA Today is usually my last choice for a paper, so I can only assume that other papers of record were not available. I turned the top section of the paper up to read it as I walked quickly and happily down the brick sidewalk along the storefronts toward the Tap Room. The notice that Gould had died was placed in the upper right-hand corner of the paper, and it stopped me cold. Truly, it shocked the hell out of me. I stood and stared at the paper in complete disbelief.

I never made back to work that afternoon. Instead I remained at the Tap Room with some friends and we consumed a veritable shit-load of dark beers in Gould's honor and memory. As the day progressed and smoke from the afternoon's cigarettes silently augmented the long-fuliginous corners of the bar, my despair waned under the power of the alcohol and Gould's fleeting life and demise seemed to grow more distant . . . yet I retained sufficient presence of mind to remain thankful for the man and the sense of wonder he had reinforced in me with his insight and ardent passion for learning and knowledge.

Gould developed stomach cancer in 1982, but he had overcome the disease, and I knew this because I had read much of what Gould had written in regard to his bout with cancer. I had not heard prior to that day in May 2002 that his malady had returned. Still, I felt a profound sense of loss upon reading of his death.

Of course I did not know Stephen Jay Gould, nor did I ever meet him or even exchange correspondence with him. For all I know, the man might have been a royal ass, and a friend of mine who had occasion to interact with Gould attests that may have been the case. As such, it is perhaps foolish of me to have been so moved upon learning of his death, for I did not know him, and it could be argued that we should reserve such feelings for those whom we know sufficiently well to warrant such emotion.

Yet, I had read most of Gould's books and essay collections (except, most notably, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, a 1400-page treatise that one could more easily find utility for as a tire scotch or bed lift than as reading material given its technical nature and length), and almost without fail I found his writings to be a nearly endless source of magnificent information and wonder.

At some point in my life - when I was still but a boy of 11 or 12 - most of the useful information I had learned up to that time was gleaned from the pages of National Geographic, which my parents kept in disordered stacks in the corners of our upstairs library. Now, having aged slightly since that time, I attribute much more of my knowledge and understanding of the universe - and indeed, life - to the wonderful insight of Gould. We are fortunate that he lived; he left us better than he found us.

Seeing Gould's visage on the Washington Post Web site made me miss him again. I raise my glass - a dark beer, not from the Tap Room, but perhaps close enough - in his memory.

Click here to view a short photo journal about Gould put together by Jill Krementz (author, photographer, and wife of Kurt Vonnegut).

A BIGOT AND INTOLERANT THEOLOGY, PART II

2006-07-23T01:19:00.000-04:00

In the week's news from the world of staggering hypocrisy, our beloved and most erudite leader, President Bush, vetoed Congress's recent attempt to expand federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

Upon signing the veto statement, the President said, "Each of these human embryos is a unique human life with inherent dignity and matchless value. We all begin our lives as a small collection of cells." In truth, we all begin our lives in a sweaty, thrusting union of reproductive lust, but I suppose that's not quite as romantic as how the President put it.

President Bush announcing his recent veto of stem-cell legislation. In the background are pictured five "Snowflake" children, whose parents adopted them as left-over embryos from other couples attempting in vitro fertilization. Not pictured are the 40,000 brothers and sisters of the Snowflake children, all of whom were flushed down fertility-clinic toilets earlier this year.

Certainly one could argue that Bush's veto - the first and only veto of his presidency thus far - was consistent with his 2001 position on this issue, whereby Bush announced limits for federal funding of stem-cell research. In 2001, the Bush administration effectively limited embryonic stem-cell research to "existing lines" of stem cells, i.e., stem-cell lines already derived (as of 2001) from embryos that no longer had any potentiality for life.

The apparent consistency, however, is superficial. Three rather spectacular contradictions exist with respect to the President's stem-cell policy.

Image of a blastocyst, a mass of cells from which stem cells are taken.
See the little babies in there?

A. The First Contradiction

The President thinks it's murder to use embryonic cells for research. Just last week, Tony Snow, the White House Press Secretary, said, "The President believes strongly that for the purpose of research it's inappropriate for the federal government to finance something that many people consider murder; he's one of them."

Yet it is well understood that thousands and thousands of unused embryos are destroyed (or murdered, if you will) by fertility clinics each month. Despite this fact, no effort has been undertaken by the Bush administration to prevent the destruction of these embryos.

Furthermore, despite the White House's description of embryonic stem-cell research as "murder," Tony Snow (in a subsequent press briefing) said that the White House has no intention of asking Congress to make embryonic stem-cell research illegal, presumably even if additional embryonic stem-cell lines are introduced.

Indeed, according to Snow, "[T]here's no legal prohibition against [embryonic stem-cell research]. What they don't have access to is federal funding. And so the idea that the President is standing in the way of science seems to indicate that the only way you do it is through a federal grant. And there is a burgeoning business - as you know, a lot of people getting rich already - in this kind of medical research."

Summary of contradiction number one: unused embryos may be destroyed by fertility clinics, but the same embryos may not "destroyed" by scientists seeking cures for chronic neurological diseases. Also, even though the practice constitutes murder, it is fine to do it and get rich from doing it as long as the money for it doesn't come from the federal government.

B. The Second Contradiction

The second contradiction can be gleaned directly from statements issued by the White House, and I warn you in advance that the following is going to make you say, "Huh?"

As noted above, the President's position on this issue is that each little blastocyst is a potential human life that, if destroyed, constitutes homicide. Yet, astoundingly enough, the White House, in its own press releases, is touting the President as "the first president to provide federal funding for embroyinc stem-cell research." Huh?

A White House document titled "Fact Sheet: President Bush's Stem Cell Research Policy" actually contains the following: (punctuation and bolding appear as in original)

Embryonic Stem Cells Come from Human Embryos That Are Destroyed For Their Cells. Each of these human embryos is a unique human life, with inherent dignity and matchless value.

President Bush is The First President To Provide Federal Funding for Embryonic Stem Cell Research.

When the President Took Office, There Was No Federal Funding for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research.

Under The Policy Announced Five Years Ago, This Administration Became The First To Make Federal Funds Available For This Research. Federal funding was made available for research only on human embryonic stem cell lines derived from embryos that had been destroyed before the announcement of the President's policy. The Administration has made available more than $90 million for research on these lines, allowing important research to go forward without using taxpayer funds to encourage the further deliberate destruction of human embryos.

Summary of contradiction number two: Each human embryo is a unique human life, and embryonic stem-cell research is tantamount to murder. But, since we killed some already, the government is going to give you $90,000,000 to experiment on their lifeless little embryonic bodies and advertise this fact to make the President appear scientifically progressive. This is perhaps the single greatest example I have ever seen of talking out of both sides of one's mouth.

C. The Third (and Most Remarkable) Contradiction

Throughout the Bush presidency to this point, the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress and the state legislatures have attempted to enact a great many laws reflecting a strong conservative ideology, and they have done so in many cases without regard to the Constitution's prohibition against the improper entanglement of church and state and its mandate of equal protection for all citizens, just as they have ignored decades of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that explicitly or implicitly hold that most such religiously and ideologically motivated laws are unconstitutional.

A few examples include the Bush administration's position (which usually correspondes precisely to the Republican position generally) on same-sex marriage, prayer in schools, abortion and other reproductive-rights issues, the Pledge of Allegiance, the treatment of Iraq-war detainees, placement of the Ten Commandments in courthouses and other public buildings, the teaching of evolution and "intelligent design" in schools, and, most recently, flag burning.

Each of these issues have important constitutional implications, in that they trigger considerations of equal protection (same-sex marriage), separation of church and state (prayer in schools and the Pledge of Allegiance), due-process rights of criminal defendants (detainees), and freedom of speech (flag burning).

Additionally, as each of the above links indicate (click on them, or else the rest of this shit won't make as much sense), what is also common to these issues is the Republican stance against so-called "activist judges" that have, on occasion, thwarted Republican attempts to circumnavigate constitutional proscriptions against the infringement of civil rights. (What could be a more plain endorsement of this anti-judiciary sentiment than this?)

The central argument made by Bush and many Republicans is that a democratically elected Congress, rather than the state and federal courts, reflects the will of the people, and that Congress's decisions on these issues should stand unchecked and untarnished without interference from judges that "legislate from the bench."

This basic notion, which cannot be seriously entertained by anyone who has spent 15 minutes in a college-level political-science class, is laughable and ridiculous. Even the most rigidly conservative judge or justice would likely concede (1) that the Constitution contemplates at least a coequal role for the judicial branch among all branches of government, and (2) that the judicial branch's highest responsibility, as enunciated in the Constitution, is to ensure that Congress does not legislate beyond the parameters established by the Constitution.

A good illustration may be found in the First Amendment. It reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Who decides if Congess has in fact made a law that respects an establishment of religion? The President? Congress? This appears to be the position of the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress.

Bush has repeatedly argued that "activist judges" are "overturning the expressed will of [the] people." In the 2004 State of the Union address, Bush railed against this subversion of the democractic process, saying that "activist judges" were acting "without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives." The President went on to say, "On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard."

Most relevant to the present discussion was Bush's remark that judges were "forcing their arbitrary will upon the people."

So, let me get this straight: If Congress passes a law that reflects the will of the people, it is wrong, according to Bush, to force a contrary, arbitrary will upon the people. Thus, the hypocrisy of Bush's stem-cell veto emerges.

Polls show that a majority of the Americans support stem-cell research (by a 2-to-1 margin), and America's will was plainly reflected in Congress's most recent attempt to increase federal funding for stem-cell research. However, Bush vetoed the legislation, an act that can certainly be described as "forcing his arbitrary will upon the people."

When a court strikes down legislation as constitutionally suspect, the ruling can be described as anything but arbitrary, in that judicial decisions by their very nature necessarily rely on prior judicial rulings (see stare decisis) and the Constitution itself. Bush, on the other hand, had no authority on which to rely in vetoing the stem-cell legislation other than his own personal preference and absurd religious ideology.

In the final analysis, Incurious George, who eschews legislating from the bench, is, in effect, legislating from the pew and the pulpit. May God bless America.

ANDROMEDA PUMPHREY SAYS: VIAGRA AS LOW AS $3.00

2006-07-19T23:03:00.000-04:00

I learned a long time ago not to give out my good e-mail addresses to any commercial establishments, whether good, evil, or ambivalent. The quickest way to get spamified and suffocate an otherwise viable e-mail account is to hand out a good e-mail address to some random, seemingly innocuous online company or local business from which you're buying, say, a replacement computer part, or maybe even a few lovely salmon (see previous post).

I can handle 200 shit e-mails a day on the account I use to purchase books from B & N, primarily because it has a pretty good spam filter on it, and secondarily because no one I care about uses that e-mail address, so I know I'm not going to miss the local prayer-chain e-mail (something I take very seriously) or an electronic missive from my mom telling me that she still can't get her AOL instant-messenger program to work.

But what I can't handle is when one of my good e-mail addresses somehow makes its way into general circulation and becomes a repeated target for a barely literate, balding 19-year-old Armenian geek running a spam service with the capability of sending out 2,000,000 e-mails a day advertising some shitty porn site that exploits every type of carbon-based lifeform capable of being exploited for such an undertaking (men, women, children, midgets, cats, ring-tailed lemurs, Carolina wrens, real-estate agents, and pedicurists), and which, much worse, probably doesn't even comply with 18 U.S.C. 2257.

Sadly, this tragic circumstance is all too familiar to me, and I regret to announce that the afflicted e-mail account is my e.k.hornbeck account. When it occurred to me what had happened, at first I wept openly, just like I did when ol' "open-mic" Bush won the last election.

Only much later did I discover some solace in the fact that much of the spamification, if one only takes the time to view the advertised Web sites, is really pretty interesting, as are the spam e-mails themselves. The danger, of course, is that viewing the content of some of the advertised Web sites could get you 120 to 240 months of unconsensual prison sex in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, and parts of Oklahoma. On the flip side ...

Here is a brief sample of e-mails received just today (some of my comments in blue italics):

* From "Verna Oliver": an advertisement for "quality replica timepieces." I do have a watch fetish, but who else would know that?!

* From "Gail Velazquez": it says: "Hi, Dear e.k.hornbeck! Get laid tonight! Meet women in your area!"

* From "Will": "Beauties can't get enough sausages," it says. So I've long suspected.

* From "WhereChristiansMeet": it reads, "The Lord has bigger plans for you than just sitting here reading this email [sic]. Click to find your heavenly match. Let Where Christians Meet take care of that. Just sign up and we will hook you up with hundreds of worthy Christians singles!" The Lord should know by now that "e-mail" is spelled with a hyphen.

* From "Adamdawson@hairdresser.net": the subject reads, "Susan felt her passage polished harsh." Who in the hell writes this shit? She felt her passage polished harsh? That sounds like a bad translation to me, like the type that used to show up in Korean instruction manuals for putting together Wal-mart furniture ("rotate the screw around the clock backwards . . . ").

* From "Alexander Gusinsky," who purports to be the "Franchise Owner of Yukos Engineering." Yukos Engineering, according to the e-mail, is "an international affiliate of Yukos Oil and Gas Company based in Russia." The purported author of this e-mail professes to have esophageal cancer that has "defiled [sic] all forms of medical treatment." Ha. He wants me to help him secure $25,500,000 of his money that has been paid into a secret account with a "Security Company" in France. For my efforts, he is going to pay me 30% of the $25,500,000. Zoinks! I'd be crazy not to do it!

* From "Athelstan Crosbie": this e-mail tells me that I can get Viagra, Valium, and Ambien for low, low prices. Then, even more troubling, it says, "design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious." What the bloody fuck is that about?

(As it turns out, this little partial quote comes from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (or, if you prefer the Spanish version, El Hobbit, or perhaps even the Arabic version, al-Hobbit). Someone please explain to me how a partial quote from this Tolkien classic wound up in an e-mail soliciting black-market erection drugs?)

A BIGOT AND INTOLERANT THEOLOGY

2006-07-11T16:09:00.000-04:00

"Perhaps it came from their old war, and from the ruin of their great defeat and its degraded aftermath. Perhaps it came from causes yet more ancient -- from the evil of man's slavery, and the hurt and shame of human conscience in its struggle with the fierce desire to own. It came, too, perhaps, from the lusts of the hot South, tormented and repressed below the harsh and outward patterns of a bigot and intolerant theology, yet prowling always, stirring stealthily, as hushed and secret as the thickets of swamp-darkness." -- Thomas Wolfe, from You Can't Go Home Again (Harper & Row, 1989, paperback edition, p. 255).

In a very compelling opinion piece published in the Washington Post titled "What Happens When There is No Plan B?", a Virginia lawyer and writer describes the very real effect of the Bush administration's inane conservative social policies on women's basic reproductive rights in this country.

The "Plan B" contraceptive, which doesn't cause abortions, but instead inhibits fertilization of eggs or prevents fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus (just like the regular birth-control pill), has been effectively blocked by the Bush administration, leaving some women in this country with unwanted pregnancies that could have been prevented, some of which are terminated by abortion.

The Bush administration's position on Plan B is representative of the same preposterous logical fallacy that attempts to shield high-school students from sex by encouraging abstinence-only education (supply your own air quotes) and refuses condoms to pubescent boys who sprout titanium hard-ons every 17 seconds in instinctive contemplation of even the most basic sexual attention from any female with active respiration.

To the pathologically conservative, there is no such thing as a balancing of harms. Yet to even a semi-rational, mouth-breathing biped, it makes good practical sense to hand out condoms to teenagers and teach them the facts about tenacious, salmon-like spermatozoa* and other important facts about reproduction if the goal is to prevent unwanted pregnancies and unnecessary abortions.

It also makes sense to make contraception as widely available as possible, because the number of abortions drops as the number of unwanted pregnancies is decreased. But this pragmatic consideration is trumped by the rigid ideology of many conservatives. To them, sex should be avoided at all costs, and every unwanted pregnancy is a reasonable punishment for the godless promiscuity that caused it.

Certainly reducing abortions is a worthwhile goal and it should be accorded a higher priority on God's Continuum of Sin than discouraging people from having sex in the first place. Am I wrong?

Further reading:
Plan B: Ignore the Science? (Wired)
The Facts About Plan B Emergency Contraception (NFPRHA)
Did Religion Play a Role in an FDA Decision? (CBS News)

* I apologize for the link to the "milking the salmon" page, and I concede that it has nothing to do with my attribution of salmon-like qualities to human sperm. It's still pretty funny, though.

I

2006-07-02T03:47:00.000-04:00