February 2013 – The Coming of the Toads

Comments to Flannery’s “Good Country People”

1. Tell that boy to give me back my glass eye!

2. Oh, Flannery! Such a perfectly purply bleak tale of this sad potato sack of a young woman taken every advantage of as she struggles with her permanent defects physical and mental to walk in a world where we may engage and intercourse authentically with others.

3. A hoot and a holler in a hay loft!

4. Kisses sourer than vinegar.

5. I wonst knowd a woman just like that busy body Mrs. Freeman and she warnt free atall but was so cot up in everybody elses bizness but I will say she was probably free of her man but that woman wood knot bee welcome on in my kitchen, no sir we.

6. Poor Joy, I shall pray for you, that you got home safe and sound without your you know what. I do wonder, though, how did you ever get down that ladder? But you are such a strong girl. Keep it up, and you go, girl!

7. It’s about sin and redemption and people who wear their hearts on their sleeves.

8. Who’s Flannery tryin’ to kid here she ain’t never been up in no hay barn.

9. It sounds like Flannery is going to give us some pornography. Well, she does, in a way, with those playing cards of the bible salesman. But it’s all turned around. He’s the one who says she must say how she loves him. That’s backwards from what we are used to. It’s usually the girl must say this, and ask, will you still love me tomorrow? But this is no normal sex scene. What does the leg represent?

10. Yes, the kisses. First like a truck, then like tiny fishes sucking. It’s an absurd view, a distorted view, but the girl does lose it up in that barn.

11. You all missin’ the point here. It is tragic to have such a big nose, so he takes her nose and off he goes. So the tragic becomes comic. We must learn to laugh, even if we must cry to get there.

12. Yes, kind of. Sanctifying grace has fallen, and Joy has received a gift, the gift of grace. But we must be careful what we pray for. She was obsessed with her leg. Her leg was inseparable from her. It was her identity, her self-image, her poor but large and strong picture of herself that no one else saw, and so the gift she got was to be rid at long last of the leg.

13. She is her own antagonist, struggling against her self, but dynamic, for she changes from beginning to end, and all the others in relief remain static.

14. Look at the words, people! Mrs. Freeman’s “neutral” expression as she barrels down the road like a trash truck, Joy Hulga “lumbered” about like bats falling in a dugout, her leg made of wood. This is irony: textual and situational, and the one gives way to the other.

15. I think it’s about how Joy turns so sour on account of the hunting accident. That’s real. But then it becomes unreal, like a bad dream, like a nightmare, when Manley Pointer, the fake bible salesman, comes along. At first he seems real, though obnoxious, but then it’s obvious that he is there to do the devil’s work. He’s a cad.

16. No, no, no! He’s there to do the Lord’s work! For the Lord does work in strange ways in a Flannery O’Connor short story. Don’t you see? He frees Joy from her obsession with her leg.

17. I just want to say that I think Flannery is so courageous to try and write something like this.

18. Tell that boy to give me my glass eye back!

19. We all have our faults, but who would have thought a person can hope too much, and though ever hoping well, come to such ruin.

20. It was a very colorful story. I counted over 30 colors, and then lost count.

21. I’m reminded of the time my great uncle Leroy, this was when we was all still living down in Gulleytown, over the creek bridge and on out Smithy Road, up past the Gilclumps place, before it got so runned down after Olaf passed, and around the sharp curve where the railroad tracks veer off down toward the river where Charlene Apple lost control of her Mustang that year it rained so hard people said it must be the end of the world coming, and Leroy, suddenly one Sunday appears in church, though he had not stepped a foot near it in 40 years, and him with a tie around his big fat neck his face so red and bumpy like a fat spoiled strawberry and he’s holding one crimson red rose on a long stem and he walks up the aisle and you could hear a feather twist in the air as a mosquito flew near it and Leroy he stops at the third row on the left where of course in the aisle spot Mrs. Flanmph always sat, had sat every Sunday for the past 40 years, and Leroy genuflects and pauses and old Mrs. Flanmph won’t look nor budge, but Leroy gently insists his leg into the row and old Mrs. Flanmph she don’t move down but moves back twisting her legs sideways like a body does when someone wants by and Leroy steps over her and plops down and everything is still as a summer creek in the country and then Leroy hands Mrs. Flanmph his crimson rose and she looks at it for a good country moment and then takes the rose, and the uproar in that church like to wake the dead out in their graves and pretty soon people was dancing in the aisles and Preacher Justin he declared a good country pot luck supper later that afternoon back in the church backyard where Leroy cooked up his ribs for the first time in 40 years and all kinds of folks showed up to see what all the commotion was about and were told that Uncle Leroy and old Mrs. Flanmph were finally going to tie the knot. Thank you all for reading and commenting. Comments are now closed.

Related: Flannery’s Joy

February 27, 2013

Beehive Hairdo Bun Doodle; or, Tunnel Window

Friedrich Durrenmatt’s short story “The Tunnel” concerns a young man, a student, on a train, commuting to school. The train enters a long tunnel, longer than the student recalls from previous trips along the same route. The student smokes cigars, stuffs his ears with cotton, his head in a book, and he’s wearing double glasses, clear and dark. He’s dimmed his senses, all but closed his doors of perception (26). The train is crowded. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no end to the tunnel.

I had walked down to Tabor Space Saturday afternoon, but it was closed for a memorial service, so I continued over to Hawthorne, where hangouts are plentiful. I bought a coffee and sat at the rear of the shop, under a window through which I could see the clouds drifting east. I had my copy of John Cage’s “Silence” with me, and I had a small notebook, two pencils and a pen. I had my cell phone, and I had not forgotten my reading glasses. I did not have my laptop with me.

The coffee shop was crowded and noisy. But it was the kind of noise that drowns out my tinnitus. Somewhere, there was music. I sat at the end of a comfortable couch. There was a coffee table, and across the table from me was a young man, perhaps a student, with a laptop and small, white earplugs in his ears. He wore glasses. To my right, at the end of the couch, two more young men sat at a small table, both with laptops, both with earplugs. At the end of the coffee table, a woman sat alone with a laptop at a small table with her back to me, her plush black hair piled on top of her head in a twisted bun. And there were charcoal drawings on the walls, of bees, and one of a rooster. From my view at the end of the couch, the woman’s bun seemed to flair up and blend into the rooster tail drawing pinned to the wall.

I drank my coffee, read some in “Silence,” made some notes, checked my cell phone to see if Susan had texted or called. A guy with a laptop and earplugs across from the woman with her hair in a bun got up and left, and another guy with a laptop and earplugs quickly took his place. That’s when I began to think about Durrenmatt’s short story “The Tunnel.” Then the woman with the hair bun got up, packed her things, and left, but another woman quickly took her place. And this new woman also had a hair bun, identical to the first woman’s, and she sat in the same chair in the same position, her back to me, her hair bun mixing with the rooster’s tail in the drawing pinned to the wall.

That’s all. I read, drank coffee, gazed out the window at the clouds continually changing shape. I made some notes for a blog post with a few doodles. I drew a beehive hairdo that spiraled into clouds above a tunnel.

February 25, 2013

Literary Influences

Count up 12 books from the bottom in the pic to the left (a stack of books mostly from the mid-60s) and you’ll find “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a book of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. I spent a 9th grade weekend copying out longhand Poe’s tale “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Never mind why, but it was a punishment I rather enjoyed.

Six books from the bottom is “The Time Machine,” H. G. Wells’s forecast for long term care for the human race.

Eight books up you’ll find Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird.” I was in 10th grade Home Room class sitting behind a friend who was reading furtively in a paperback I didn’t recognize. I asked him what he was reading. He gave me the book, but asked that if caught with it I would not tell where I got it. We didn’t know one another that well, though later we became good friends. He had substantially more stock with the authorities, was a genius. But he seemed concerned that I might be traumatized by the reading experience. Some critics now suspect that Kosinski was traumatized by the writing experience.

I wrote a paper in 10th grade arguing that Melville’s “Pierre, Or the Ambiguities” contained more social insight than “Moby Dick.” Unfortunately, I can’t fine my 10th grade copy of “Moby Dick”; fortunately, though, I can’t find the 10th grade paper I wrote, either. I still have the Rhinehart edition of “Moby Dick” we used at Dominguez Hills.

That Sherlock Holmes “Memoirs” used to have a partner, “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” It’s a mystery what happened to it.

I remember first reading “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” in high school, but I can’t remember what grade. But I remember wondering about a scene where Leamas is shaken by a near miss on the highway. Is he less shaken by the near miss than by the recognition that the near miss has shaken him?

I can’t find my 9th grade copy of “Two Years Before the Mast.” I can’t imagine anyone wanting to borrow it. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, we were moving some things around, sort of spring cleaning, impatient for spring, and we wound up with a couple of bags of used books we decided to take down to Powell’s. They took about half of them, but I was surprised they took as many as they did. Do literary influences wane over time? What else can’t I find? All the Steinbeck books gone, but I know where they went. All four original Salinger books not to be found, though three have been replaced. The early “Walden,” “On the Road,” but also replaced.

I don’t suppose anyone reads Asimov’s “The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation” anymore. If we want to know something about the human body, we google it. But who thinks of the body as an operating system? It’s like talking about books as physical objects, and as if their mere presence might have an effect on us, like a gravity, the experience of influence.

February 24, 2013

“silent quicksand”

silent quicksand was a poetry and art magazine at El Camino College in the early 70s. I don’t know how many issues came out before folks moved on and it folded, but I don’t think many. I have copies of issues # 2 and # 3. I had three poems appear in the Fall 1973 issue (# 3). When I told my old high school friend Tim at the time about it, he said there was no quicker way to obscurity than appearing in a college literary magazine. That was of course before blogging came along. In any case, I thought it was cool then, and I still do, that two of my poems shared a page with Stephen Jama, one of the ECC English instructors, who became for a time a friend and mentor.

Below is an image of issue # 3 and below that an image of issue # 2:

I was reading, at the time, the Beat poets, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, and of course Ginsberg, and King of the Road Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, and I remember reading Diane Di Prima, and I read Henry Miller and Anais Nin and all along John Cage, and Whitman and William Carlos Williams, and, having started with folk music, I was now getting deeper into jazz, and I read “Blues People,” by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Still other influences included the Rexroth translations, Hugh Kenner’s “The Pound Era,” Donald Hall’s “Contemporary American Poetry,” McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, and de Beauvoir and Sartre, and Camus. In seminars we still read Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Joyce and Beckett.

One night, I went with Jama up into Santa Monica to see a live production of Beckett’s “Endgame” at a small theatre, and another time we saw Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” at a small troupe theatre in Hermosa Beach. I saw the humor in Beckett. I had a sense of humor about it all, the literary quicksand. That was all before my foray into what Han Shan called the red dust. It’s not easy keeping one’s sense of humor where the quicksand is so quiet and deep, but I had my sense of humor there, too, and I hope I still do:

February 23, 2013

“jazzskin”

“jazzskin” is an old, handmade chapbook (1973, 17 pages – click on photos):

The “poetry occurs” idea is a riff off John Cage, whose book “Silence” (1961) begins with “The Future of Music: Credo”: “Wherever we are,” Cage says, “what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” In his essay “Experimental Music,” Cage underscores the idea that noise is everywhere and attempts to control it create other hazards, but, he says, “One need not fear about the future of music. But this fearlessness only follows if, at the parting of the ways, where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend.” When I was working on “jazzskin,” I felt, as I do now, the same about poetry that Cage felt about music. But Cage was not a jazz fan. He apparently thought jazz was about having a conversation, for which he preferred words.

Related: Jazzskin, a post, and “JAZZSKIN” a poem (follow link or see “About” page).

February 22, 2013

Point of View

…from an old notebook, around 1988:

February 20, 2013

Berfrois Tuesday: Satisfactōrum

Our review of our recent Stones experience, “Satisfactus: ‘Charlie is My Darling,’” has been picked up by Berfrois.

Ruby on over there this fine Tuesday and check it out, but still I’m gonna miss you. Get hep, at Berfrois.

February 12, 2013

A Lot Ado About Nothing

I once spent a lot of time going to a lot of meetings where I took a lot of notes but also doodled a lot. Sometimes my neighbors showed an interest in my doodles, but not often. Over time I developed a disregard for the term a lot. A lot is used a lot as support for an argument, but a lot of the time a lot is too imprecise to properly fund a decision. Nevertheless, a lot of people got away with using the term a lot a lot.

Apart from its imprecision, a lot is unpalatable. A lot lifts off the tongue but cuts itself short, unlike alas, aloof, or aloft, which all seem more complete and satisfying. A lot carries no drift.

A lot of people think a lot is one word: alot. What’s a word? Speech flows, a syllable stream, often alotadoo about nothing. Punctuation helps, but punctuation is a kind of stop animation. A lot of the time, punctuation can only approximate the real speed of speech. Writing is divorced from speech. We are taught from a young age to separate our tongues from our eyes, the quicker to read. Poems often use stop animation technique to slow readers down, to get the reader to mouth the words, to taste the words, chew them. Words become salt water taffy in the poet’s mouth. A lot of poets suffer bad teeth, yet poetry is not fast food. A lot of poets are poor.

A lot tells an amount, but how much is it? Lots and lots. Compared to what? A lot of the time a lot is used with the time: a lot of the time. There seems to be some connection between a lot and time. A lot of the time the meaning of a lot is understood from context. It rains a lot in Portland, but still, there are a lot of different kinds of rain. A lot of the time, I think it’s raining, but it’s not wet outside. Those are good days to get a lot of yard work done.

What’s the opposite of a lot? Is there an antonym for alot? Alittle. In “Silence,” John Cage’s book that I come back to a lot, there’s a little story about a couple who live in Alaska. Someone asks them if it was very cold last winter. Not too cold, they respond, only a couple of days, they explain, did they have to stay in bed all day to keep warm.

Then again, a lot of the time, memories go awry, amiss, askew. While I read a lot in “Silence,” I had not recently read the little story about how cold the winter was, so I thought I’d better look it up. I glanced through “Silence” a few times, but I couldn’t find it. I then thought it might be in John Cage’s book “A Year From Monday,” and it is, on page 138, but there’s no mention of Alaska, and there’s no couple, just “a woman who lived in the country,” and there were more than a couple of days, “three or four days,” she says, but she does say “we had to stay in bed all day to keep warm,” so maybe that’s where I got the idea there was a couple. It’s a very short story: 44 words total.

Not a lot, but sometimes (maybe that’s the antonym) a lot is allot, as in allotment. I’ve reached the number of words allotted for this post. Not a lot.

February 1, 2013

Month: February 2013