To ban discussions of uber-scary "Critical Race Theory" is to ban discussions of racism in America and, by necessity, the works of -- Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Langston Hughes.
That's a very cursory start, of course.
And this is America, of course.
"Now the connection you have been waiting for is suddenly made. You can now remember the route from here to the Lexington Market. You can remember the names of streets from here to there. You plan now is to get some crabcakes, and find some way to keep them fresh enough to survive the trip back to Iowa. You will need ice and a plastic cooler. And you will need luck in shipping the plastic cooler on two different flights. There is an element of madness in this plan, but it also contains a certain boldness that you have not felt in many years. You determine to do it."
-- James Alan McPherson, Crabcakes
I've really appreciated the feedback and encouragement on what's shaping up to be -- gasp! -- my first novel, The Give and The Take. I've been writing a lot, much more than I expected, since I got out here in February to take care of my Dad. The subject matter is, of course, pretty damn obvious. But I do feel as if the project has arrived at an important point -- a good point -- where it would be best to keep my first drafts more private, less public. For a while though it really felt good to get something out there, even if this blog doesn't get a whole lot of readers (Quality over Quantity!). It's funny living in the middle of nowhere -- on the one hand I'm surprised, daily, by something, something the Old Man says or does, or talking to a neighbor. But it is lonely out here -- there's no other word for it -- and the gates of my memory are more greased-up than usual, and have been for months. There's no telling what ghosts, friendly or otherwise, will walk out and start yapping at me at any given time.
I was keeping notebooks in South Korea but rarely taking the time to go back and give that material the editorial muscle it really needed to be shaped into something worth sharing. A few good bits of it have made their way into The Give and The Take, and will continue to do so. But while I'm going to keep that stuff "private" for now, I am going to start posting some of my short stories on this here blog. At some point I'll even polish them up and send them out for potential publication, but I know from experience that that whole dance takes work, and you can't half-ass it the way you can popping up an eight page short story online.
For what it's worth, I wrote poetry for many years but basically stopped around the half-way mark of my time in Korea, around 2013 or so. There were a number of reasons, but none more important than the fact that I haven't really read much poetry since then either, and don't miss it all that much.
So my longer work is going into the garage and I'm lowering the doors for now, but hopefully you'll be entertained by some of my recent efforts in writing stories. And, for better or worse, they aren't all about my ten years living in South Korea!
"So I sat at the desk every night, learning less biology, dreaming the dream over and over, until one night I looked at my respectable -- nevertheless Woolworth -- slacks, and realized that the freight trains no longer slowed down at Rock Camp. There was always the bus, but in all three times I collected enough pop bottles for a ticket to where the train slowed down, the pool balls would break in my ears, and quarters would slip away into slots of time and chance.
'You can't see the angles,' Chester said to me one day after he ran the table in less than a minute.
I was in the tenth grade and didn't give two shits for his advice. All I knew was all my quarters were gone, there were no more pop bottles along the Pike, and Chicago was still a thousand miles away. I just leaned on my stick: I was sheared and I knew it."
-- Breece D'J Pancake, "The Salvation of Me"
The former Little Roadside Tavern, Nugent's Corner, Washington.
When my Old Man moved out here to build a house he came across this bar, which closed down a few years ago apparently. Over my visits during the past 20 years I think I was actually in here two or three times total. Our neighbor was a regular ("I just go to play pool," says the functioning alcoholic) and strangely enough it plays a small role in the book Lone Patriot by Jane Kramer, about the right-wing militia movement here in Whatcom County during the nineties.
My Dad likes his red wine, but he isn't very social. He was probably in this place only a few more times than I ever was.
Still, it's kind of sad all the same. I'll be curious to see if someone buys and reopens it.
"At 3:00 a.m. on August 31, planes were heard overhead, and moments later canisters of supplies and weapons began drifting down to the drop zone, followed by Franks and his men. Then pandemonium erupted. One canister filled with ammunition exploded as it hit the ground. The maquis [French resistance] began looting the supplies before teh SAS men [British special operations] had even landed. In the confusion, the captive Fouch seized a Sten gun and rushed off. The Russians, who spoke some German but not French, shouted 'Achtung!' The French, hearing German voices in the darkness, assumed they must be under attack and began shooting wildly. The looters meanwhile were gorging themselves, 'One Frenchman died of over-eating,' Druce recorded. Another of the maquis extracted what the took to be a hunk of soft cheese from one of the containers and devoured it, only to discover it was plastic explosive, which contains arsenic. He then 'died noisily.'"
-- Ben Macintyre, Rogue Heroes
"The world was an ugly place. It was the ugliness of things that had gone crooked and were now twisted out of all meaning. It was a deformity that began with houses that had been badly matched to the bodies they held, being too small, or too windy or cracked open to the rain like the careless laying of an egg on sharp rocks. Then there were the bodies themselves. In the cruel confinements of their lives they had grown awry. The very effort of living was a pain. You could hear it in your bed at night if your ears had been sharpened enough by disgust. The world was one long wheeze and rattle as it laboured uncertainly in sleep. Butcher's hands were another living embodiment of this reality. So too the dead face of Gumboot Dhlamini, the one they had taken on the trains. It was true of all life. The only trees in the township, those around the cemetery, had expressed it in their stunted growth, drawing out the full meaning in their misshapen silhouettes seen against the windy sky. It amounted to the basic horror of existence."
-- Athol Fugard, Tsotsi
"Goody Nelson continued to chortle long after Hazard had gone. It was still a world full of wonder. Wildman, for chrissake! Had he or Clell -- or even Jack, who had been the man's squad leader, after all -- been remiss in not spotting seeds of greatness in the fast little fuck? No. There was never any way to tell beforehand. Courage under fire came from all sorts, the smart as well as the smart-ass, the steadfast as well as the moral coward. Winners and losers. The Army had actually commissioned studies of Medal of Honor winners, their behavior before the act, trying to find patterns or tendencies. It had been a waste of taxpayers' money. Great physical bravery was often nothing more than a nervous response to a desperate situation, the unthinking, impulsive act of a man who thought he had nothing to lose. On the face of it, you'd expect somebody like Willow to be a candidate for heroism, but you'd be wrong. Willow would do fine, he guessed, but Jack was cursed with the worst disease a man could carry into combat: a good imagination. Fear came easiest to those who could clearly imagine all the horrible possibilities. Most heroes were dull clods. People like Clell were the real heroes, scared shitless but still able to function with professionalism, still doing whatever had to be done. Men like Clell, and him, too, had earned their medals the hard way, shaking every step of the way."
-- Nicholas Proffitt, Gardens of Stone
"To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they would hold on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they would camp, here and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through frozen muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by the heat of the fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all according to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting. Summer arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted across blue mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown rivers in slender boats whipsawed from the standing forest.
The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent, where wild-fowl had been, but where then there was no life nor sign of life—only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in sheltered places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches."
-- Jack London, The Call of the Wild
"When young writers ask me, with that starry, glazed look they get in their eyes, What's the most important thing for a young writer to know or do?, I tell them, without exception (unless their daddy owns Macy's), to try and find a rent-controlled apartment.
Unlike the young aspiring artists and writers today, gathering in places like San Francisco's Mission District and Brooklyn back east, working long hours in hateful jobs to make rent, I as able to pretty much fake it through my thirties, grabbing scut work here and there when necessary. Come to think of it, during that decade I spent an awful lot of time digging up blackberry roots and drinking beer in the backyard. I suppose that's the reason, as the trombonist upstairs goes through her scales this morning, a noise most would probably find intrusive or annoying, I find it to be music to my ears."
-- August Kleinzahler, Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs
