Reynolds Price: "Clear Pictures" (1989)

November: the days darken, nights get longer, cold clouds gather. Beyond the warmth and brightness that is Thanksgiving -- the beginnings of a season of sanctioned overindulgence, such an American holiday -- even Louisa May Alcott soured against the cold and dark, writing "November is the most disagreeable month in the entire year." I expect what old and dour Nathaniel Hawthorne might have written about a brittle New England autumn, but such harsh words from the author of Little Women are a surprise. The most optimistic of us are bound to be flattened by a nighttime's darkening before 5 o'clock in the afternoon, even with the prospect of a dressed twenty-pound turkey on the dining-room table as a leavening agent to our gloom.

What to read in a month like November? I tried settling in with some of the things I had been promising to read (and putting off reading) since summertime when flies were buzzing at the screen door. No luck with such good intentions; old books, new books -- nothing stuck. November, it turns out, is a tough read. (Should I really open Gustave Flaubert's November this month? The title alone puts me off. I still haven't found the right time of year for it, after I found this copy for a quarter at the library two years ago. I haven't tried January yet, though.) I got 50 pages of Junot Diaz and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) behind me, and that still wasn't working, either. Eh -- maybe I'll find it's a springtime novel.

There is Reynolds Price, however. Years ago I discovered Clear Pictures, his memoir of a North Carolina boyhood in the 1940s. Wit, sharp detail, youth observed as translucent as if it happened yesterday, and memories plucked up from the stream as by a hawk. Here he is describing his father's "welcome scourge" of practical jokes:

"From cradle to grave, Will's practical jokes were the welcome scourge of his friends, kin and in-laws. In that less analytical time, nobody asked if a concealed hostility was at work in his impenetrable disguises, ruses, forged letters and convincing crank-phonecalls. If there was veiled anger in his motive, then it seems realistic to see also what an imaginative and entertaining way he found to vent it -- our own home-theater, complete with regular catharsis. No one was ever so much as bruised; and no one ever expressed resentment, neither on the spot nor in after years. Those were tougher spirits in general then, not trained to expect kid gloves, day or night.

... Everyone was skittishly resigned to a turn as the object of one of Will's long-planned hoaxes. What removed all whiff of cruelty was his clear intention to amuse and everyone's delighted response, even the victims', and the fact that the victims promptly began to plot a turnabout, if he or she had the wits to catch Will unawares. In that crew of expert comedians, some did."

"Those were tougher spirits then": whatever nostalgia remains for mid-twentieth-century America from a childhood in the South, Price is bluntly honest about its bleaker aspects: there was war, poverty, deprivation. There's also surprise in the black humor of an early holiday memory: I can also see our black terrier, dead under the tree on a Christmas morning (the only explanation I ever heard was that Will dropped a laxative pill the night before and was unable to find it; but the dog succeeded, ate it, lay down to rest in the tree's cotton snow and died in the midst of my Santa Claus)."

Price, 65, continues to teach at Duke University after being diagnosed with spinal cancer in 1984, and continues to write; he's another in the lengthening line of "regional writers" who have made prolific writing careers, although he's careful about placing too much emphasis on being a Southern writer: as he says, "I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern." Still, he's been in some good company; Eudora Welty helped get his first books published. Like many writers, he's made a public career without much public ado -- an observation he would find dryly humorous if it weren't for the literary accolades his work has received. Clear Pictures was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1989; in 1986 his novel Kate Vaiden won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and there have been many others.

Reynolds Price

Price has a wry sense of writing's place in American culture, or the very lack of one. In Feasting the Heart, his 2000 book of essays for National Public Radio, he writes about the growing number of British adaptations of English novels on American television and the movies, while noting our country's own "baffling neglect ... of the waiting riches of American literature." From his essay "Native Orphans":

"Look down the American fiction and drama shelves of your nearest library; locate the absolute first-class titles from James Fennimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, on through Willa Cather, Eugene O'Neill, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald to Tennessee Williams, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and their live-and-kicking peers. Search your memory for a single example of a first-class film adapted from any classic American novel or play -- a first-class film, now ...

My own recent search turns up only three such unassailable achievements -- Sidney Lumet's version of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), John Ford's version of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Michael Mann's recent version of Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1992). Period.

Oh, I may have forgot a contender or two ... I'm well aware of the many dozens of films made from lesser novels -- films like Gone With the Wind and The Big Sleep -- but I don't expect to hear a chorus of reminders of the brilliance I've neglected to mention."

He goes on to a list of intriguing contemporary possibilities, from Robert Stone's "parable of American havoc overseas," A Flag for Sunrise, to William Kennedy's Albany novels, "onward through a multitude of stories for the next millennium." These films will not be made, at least not by Americans. What causes this neglect? For Price, it's a familiar and disheartening litany that includes minuscule arts budgets slashed ever further in every legislative session, school systems without the arts, a failure of nerve in the face of popular culture. He -- and we -- wait.

Meanwhile, Clear Pictures remains on the bedside table, good enough as holiday reading to keep me awake propped up in bed until at least 10 at night -- a respectable enough hour to call it a day in late November, even if that's an hour considered too early in summer. Since I first read Clear Pictures ten years ago I've discovered Price's other writing, a prolific output of novels, short stories and essays: there's an over-abundance of Price's 23 novels and collections, going back to 1962. That is certainly something to look forward to during fall's dark and stormy nights.

A poem for Thanksgiving: "Chores"

Fallmoon (photo from awrungsponge.blogspot.com)

Chores

M. Bromberg

Here in the last week of November 2008
the leaves have fallen from the trees
time to get out the rake
and comb the lawn's long grass
the sky is blue and cold as marble
it's turning colder by degrees
but the chores still have to be done

Thanksgiving's almost here
in the turning of a torturous year
that can hardly stand to watch the eleven o'clock news
the faces cracked and blue as stone
say the country's sinking by degrees
but the bills still have to be paid

How can anyone read a paper
listen to a radio watch the news
and endure what remains?
It's been eight long years
but these last few months before Inauguration
seem the longest of all
with change waiting in the wings

What happened to the twenty-first century
all its promise subtracted by war and deceit
cover-ups and denials
an administration enamored of its own mistakes
willing to let the future wait
while they calculate the final bill

but not the cost of what remains
war debt encircling loss
dark despair in a cold month
How different it all will seem
in January 2009 on the Capitol's marble steps
to stand in the wind on a winter's day
and see the chores ahead to be done

Gary Snyder and "Poets on the Peaks," John Suiter (2002)

As the anniversaries of the Beat movement roll on (Kerouac's On the Road turned 50 in 2007) and its participants recede into American history -- if not its folklore -- there is something comforting in the fact that poet and lifelong Zen student Gary Snyder is still here, still with us, still quietly reminding the reader that Beat ideas of individual freedom and personal experience continue to have resonance in our daily lives as well as in art.

Although he has been linked with the Beats since the mid-50s, Gary Snyder is less the shaman or the showman than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and his writing shuns the wild word-is-a-virus pyrotechnics of William Burroughs. He shared the Beats' post-war restlessness: he studied in Japan, and learned Japanese and Chinese and traveled to India; his interest in Buddhism was coincidentally shared with Ginsberg and Kerouac when they came to San Francisco in the mid-50s, meeting up with poets Kenneth Rexroth and Philip Whalen. That became Beat poetry's East-meets-West moment, New York-to-San Francisco's transcontinental linkage. He was present at the Six Gallery when Ginsberg read "Howl" in October 1955, the first Beat cannon shot across the bow of 50s conformity.


Yet Snyder's individual impact on twentieth-century poetry and ecology -- the actual sinew, flesh and bone of man's place on the planet -- has been considerable, and has continued so for more than 50 years. Reviewing The Gary Snyder Reader in 2000, William Pitt Root puts Snyder's contribution pretty nicely: "Except for Gary Snyder, post mid-twentieth century American poetry might never have gotten further out-of-doors than the nearest garbage dump, golf course, or catfish farm." And Snyder's essays on nature (Earth House Hold, The Practice of the Wild) prove that these ideas are not the stuff of airy, lost-Edenic poetry. To the careful reader, his essays reveal exactly what America is losing more rapidly with every passing season.

Writer and photographer John Suiter trekked to the mountain lookouts where Snyder and others spent several summers in the mid-50s and captured images of the western mountains that inspired them. Poets On the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades (2002) is a literary and photographic recreation of the Beats' original sojourn in the wilderness. Snyder began his long poem, Myths and Texts; Kerouac found inspiration for The Dharma Bums (Snyder was the model for the book's main character, Japhy Ryder) and Desolation Angels; Whalen's Sourdough Mountain Lookout was published in 1957. Suiter pulls together the books, notebooks, letters and diaries of poets and writers creating a wilderness ethic in mid-century America, away from the cities and highways that were beginning to mark the country, and into one of the last great wilds on the continent.



When The Dharma Bums was published the year after On the Road, Suiter writes, Jack was tremendously excited and wrote to Snyder that 1958 would be "the Year of the Dharma." Snyder, in his fashion, was planning another trip to the wild, but wanting to include Jack in his plans. Returning from sea aboard the oil tanker Sappa Creek, Snyder wrote:

"Maybe this is the Year of the Dharma. Now Arabian Sea and heading in for last load and trip home. Tiger, if you like, join me in the mountains this summer. I mean to wander the Sierras and Cascades both. Also, bhikku cabin around SF area -- we'll look into it."

To Whalen, Kerouac wrote that Gary's arrival would spark big changes:

"With Dharma Bums I will crash open the whole scene to sudden buddhism boom and look what will happen closely soon ... everybody going the way of the dharma ... then with the arrival of Gary, smash! Watch, you'll see. It will be a funny year of enlightenment in America."

It was telling of them both that Kerouac's comments envisioned a grand change in American values, while Snyder was planning a return to isolation and the high mountains. For Snyder, there was the real work to be done of living, creating and conserving. Kerouac's wild enthusiasm was not bound to last; within ten years he was disillusioned and drunk, full of despair -- even if his roman candle of a book inspired a generation, he was not part of the social revolution it created, and he despised the unintended counterculture that came up around On the Road.

What a contrast to the ecological awareness Snyder's work has encouraged. His poetry and essays have been enjoying a rediscovery, with a lengthy appreciation in the October 20 issue of the New Yorker ("Zen Master") being the most recent. Snyder's long career as a poet, his translations of the Cold Mountain poems by Han Shan and others from the Japanese, and his ecological essays have made him, in a way, the remaining Beat presence. It's ironic that his quiet and unassuming poetry (and his life away from the literary spotlight) would continue to give meaning to Kerouac's "rucksack revolution" and its subsequent 60s fireworks.

Now 78, after a lifetime of writing and contemplating what he once called "the real work", Snyder is still at it -- though his tools have changed from those he used at his Sourdough Mountain lookout in 1953. Here's an excerpt from "Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh Computer":

... Because its keys click like hail on a rock
& it winks when it goes out,
& puts word-heaps in hoards for me,
dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds,
identical seedpods strong on a vine,
or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly layed out
and then highlighted, & vanished in a flash at "delete"
so it teaches of impermanence and pain ...

Suiter's book is a valuable (and very beautiful) addition to Beat literature, putting into pictures as well as words what made this brief period of 1952-1956 so important to the scene that followed. He is currently at work on the first full biography of Snyder, to be published in 2010.

The Right (Wing) Stuff: Everyone's grouchy uncle has an internet site

How I spent the 2008 elections: When I wasn't reading Das Kapital by Karl Marx (not yet, anyway ... I have to save something for my old age), or buffing the tin hat I use to get marching orders from the Democratic Party, I was stuffing the ballot box: that is, voting as early, and often as possible, in the presidential election. Now, I'm fiddling while Rome burns to ruins in the new shadow of Obama's rigged victory. At least, that's what World Net Daily and its right-wing companions claim I was doing. And who knows? I did have a lot of time on my hands this summer.

Yes, there's really nothing quite like reading the (possibly) made-up rants like those posted at the ultra-conservative World Net Daily website, especially in the wake of the Democrats' convincing sweep of November 4. Forget the GOP-sponsored celebrity of Joe the Plumber and his subsequent charges of being "used" by the McCain campaign -- for shame, McCain! -- it's letters from readers like Bob in Chicago that really reflect the right's change in national mood that night in Illinois. While the crowd in Grant Park saw the real beginning of America's 21st century aspirations, Bob saw "death", "tragedy," and "carnage" in the celebration after leaving a concert nearby. He labels the Obama victory "a sin against God and country." There's no telling if he witnessed the '68 Democratic Convention riots in the same location, or what he thought of them -- but his letter to WND about November 4, 2008, titled "the day my country died," is below.

I write this letter with a heart heavy beyond words. I am almost half a century old and have cried for my country only twice in my life. The first time was during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The second time was on Nov. 4, 2008, when Hussein Obama won the presidential election. Of those two times, the latter was by far more disturbing and depressing. It will also prove to be more damaging to America.

I cast my vote for the Constitution Party that morning, went to work and then came home praying that perhaps Obama would not win. I am not one who is deluded by the false argument of voting for the lesser of two evils, hence my vote for Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party. However, that does not mean I did not understand clearly that while McCain would be bad for the country, Obama would be far worse.

So, I decided to attend a concert in downtown Chicago to get my mind off the election. By the time I left for the concert, the writing was on the wall. Obama was far ahead in several battleground states. I reasoned that since even the bravest soldier will tend to shut his eyes if only for a moment to block out the horrors of war, surely no one would blame me for closing my mind for an hour or two against the horrors of the election reality. Indeed, the lead singer
of the band admonished us to let go of everything else, forget our worries and the election specifically, and just enjoy ourselves for that short time. I tried to block it out, but my mind kept wandering to the mythological story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Indeed, I sent a text message (tinged with guilt) to a good friend after the concert, saying, "I was attending a concert while my country died."

While the concert was indeed enjoyable and took my mind off the outside world to a large degree, the moment I walked outside I could feel a change. The Obama rally was still in full swing not far from the concert hall, and yet there was an uneasy, unnatural quiet in the air. It was a feeling similar to that which comes after a death, or after a tragedy or carnage. It was as if the world had changed in those two hours while I was secluded in the concert hall. It no longer felt like America. It was like being in a foreign country where people have different values, different perceptions, different lifestyles. I felt alien for the first time in my life. I felt nothing but anger, disappointment and contempt for so many of my fellow Americans who voted for and elected a socialist enigma for reasons I cannot possibly comprehend.

The Republican Party was so relaxed and laid back about the whole affair (despite all the under-reported fraud issues on the other side) and rolled over so easily that it was as if they were accomplices in this sin against God and country. I actually felt physically nauseated. I felt much the same as I have in recent years immediately following the death of beloved family members, only this time I was mourning an entire country and way of life, as well as my own faith in our system.

What is most disconcerting now is listening to fools babble on about how "historic" the moment was, in a manner that serves only to expose their ignorance. Historic? Yes, in the same manner that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were "historic." Not something sane people celebrate. It feels as if a great percentage of the population have collectively lost their minds.

So the question now is what to do? Where to go from here? I'm not sure I know. Looking at the percentage of college students and younger people who voted for Obama, it seems more unlikely than ever that there is any hope of instilling in this generation (or the next) the sense of pride in America that I felt at their age, or the respect I held for the Constitution, or the love of an America envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Instead, our children are being indoctrinated into a socialist agenda, and their parents have now elected a socialist president. What hope is there of restoring America as a constitutional republic when those who are the future are programmed subjects, servitors of the state, as opposed to free-thinking citizens?

Mr. Farah, I beseech you. Please start supporting the Constitution Party. Not before the next election, but today, immediately. You have repeatedly stated that adherence to the Constitution is the gold standard for a presidential candidate. Apply that standard to political parties and you get only one that reaches that standard – the Constitution Party. History has shown us that the Republicans have taken us as far from the Constitution as the Democrats have. Both parties are morally, ethically and constitutionally bankrupt. The only way to reverse the course of this country, if such a thing is even possible now, is to elect the Constitution Party into power. No other party is going to move us closer to the Constitution and an America as envisioned by the Founding Fathers. True, patriotic Americans need to turn to the Constitution Party if they want America to survive. We need people like Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and others to wake up, let go of the wreck known as the Republican Party and turn their support to the Constitution Party. Otherwise, there may soon be no right to vote left in this country.

Bob in Chicago


Well, it's no wonder Bob's so upset. After a two-year election process, in which WND and editor-in-chief Joseph Farah wrote regularly to confirm that Obama is Muslim, Obama pals with terrorists amid the ads for "Nobama" bumper stickers, it's possible that Chicago Bob may just have a bit of ... misinformation about America's first African-American president. That's hardly surprising in an online "news organization" featuring Ann Coulter and a mohawked "Christian libertarian" blogger named Vox Day. Here's an excerpt from Day's column following Obama's July appearance in Berlin:

What is the connection between Italian indifference to dead Roma girls and European indifference to the nebulous HopeChange pushed by Barack Obama? It is that Europeans previously bought this same pig in a poke. The fluffy promises of progress, change and unity Obama makes are all too similar to those made by a previous generation of European politicians, promises that have resulted in the importation of a foreign criminal class, fewer jobs, fewer families, a vastly increased cost of living, limited economic prospects for the future and the loss of democratic rule.

Europeans have recognized Obama for a fraud even without being privy to his frequent misstatements of fact; the magical negritude that has so dazzled the superficial American press no longer disguises the fact that Sen. "57 States" is little more than an empty-headed newscaster with a nice voice who is skilled at reading the teleprompter. No wonder the American media likes him – he could easily have been one of them.

What doesn't get said anywhere on World Net Daily is that "Vox Day" is the son of Robert Beale, who is on the site's board of directors. (Vox does have a bitchin' mohawk, though -- call it what you will, it's a stunning statement of his "caucatude.") From WND, here's something titled "Is this Obama's real birth certificate?" Funny, funny stuff.

In the meantime, news reports -- real ones -- claim that sales of personal firearms have increased in the midwest states since November 4. It won't be long before the Republicans will finally be able to claim the forbidden word recession as their rallying cry and work the new threat of a Democratic "Obamalypse," putting the 2012 election cycle in play before "that one" even gets to the Oval Office. Until then, let me feel the burn of a Democratic wildfire ... and where's my fiddle?

"Calm Panic Election Promise," Allen Ginsberg (1992)

From "The Republican Rump," Paul Krugman, The New York Times, November 3:

... the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat. This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.


End of Millennium
Earth's decay
Fire Air Water tainted
We're the Great Beast--
Dark bed thoughts,
Can't do anything to stop it--
Denial in Government,
in Newspapers of Record--
Like watching gum disease
& not brushing teeth
Getting heart failure,
no rest much stress
Putting salt
on your greasy Pork
Putting sugar in coffee
you're diabetic

Dysesthesia on foot soles
Poor circulation, smoke more cigarettes

Kick your son under the table have another beer
Need President who'll reverse the denial --
The Calm Panic Party
to restore nature's balance.

Allen Ginsberg, 1992
from Cosmopolitan Greetings (1994)