In one image

 

 

 Why is Western civilization and the people who created it so bitterly hated, cursed and damned?

This is why.

Envy. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's happened to me

 
Dislocation

by Marge Piercy

It happens in an instant.
My grandma used to say
someone is walking on your grave.

It's that moment when your life
is suddenly as strange to you
as someone else's coat

you have slipped on at a party
by accident, and it is far
too big or too tight for you.

Your life feels awkward, ill
fitting. You remember why you
came into this kitchen, but you

feel you don't belong here.
It scares you in a remote
numb way. You fear that you—

whatever you means, this mind,
this entity stuck into a name
like mercury dropped into water—

has lost the ability to enter your
self, a key that no longer works.
Perhaps you will be locked

out here forever peering in
at your body, if that self is really
what you are. If you are at all. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long time passing

 

The Viet Nam War still looms large in my family’s history, as I’m sure it does in very many others.
It’s coming up on the 58th anniversary of my mother’s older brother’s death in that war. He would have been 77 this year. The other day, she was looking at some old photographs of him with his high school sweetheart and realized that she couldn’t remember what her name was. That really bothered her. She spent some time digging through old letters and papers trying to find it or jog her memory. It was important to her to remember it, but…nothing. One more link to him and his life gone.
I don’t think she’s ever gotten over his loss. She joined the Army herself as a nurse and served at Cu Chi because…she had to do something. She just couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t let him go.
Sometimes casualties didn’t reach the hospital till days after they were hit, and when she removed the bandages the wounds were seething with maggots. I know that because I have read letters she wrote home. She’s never spoken of her experiences beyond saying that she thought she would never be able to get the blood out from under her fingernails.
Another of her brothers served much later in the war as an Army helo pilot, and was involved in Lam Son 719, where he was shot down while trying to take off from a hot LZ. He only spoke about his experiences to me once when I was a kid, after an off-roading accident that totaled his old IH Scout and left us upside down with the engine roaring and gasoline pouring on us. He got us out of that with cool efficiency and on the long walk back instructed me on how to manage your emotions and do what you have to do to survive when you find yourself in hell.
My dad flew F4Js with TF77 in the early 1970s, a genuine Yankee Sky Pirate. Hundreds of missions over the North, and into the South during the Easter Offensive. He flew missions during Linebacker II, attacking targets in and around Haiphong.
MiGs and SAMs and AAA, friends being lost over and over again, sortie after sortie until they mounted into the hundreds. And what did he ever say about any of it? Nothing.
Well, once he said it was the most useless war in history. Otherwise, if you asked him, he would tell about this time on liberty…, or some funny stories, or maybe he would discuss some technical aspects of flying the old bird. But that’s it, and don’t push him for more. You wouldn’t get it.
Well, here’s to you, my very dear male parental unit, my wonderful mother, my uncle and all the other Viet Nam vets; that war is a very long time passing.

 

Crash!

 Hey, you guys, remember when I wrote about Dolton, Illinois, in the good old days and my relative the news man who reported on crazy police car chases after bad guys that wrecked lots of police cars and ended up in spectacular crashes? And you all said, oh, will you just get out of here with that, cops don't do stuff like that!

Well, they sure used to, and here's a news story from 1973 to prove it.  I was nosing around in a storage shed and this time didn't disturb a shoe effer but did find some old news clippings, one of which was -- ta da! -- this one:

 Popeye Doyle and Bullitt didn't have nothin' on these suburban cops back in the day. I can imagine that they were all Viet Nam vets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Freejacks and snobs

I uploaded my image and asked Grok to render it in the style
of Edward Hopper. I don't think Hopper need worry about AI.

 “I wish to Heaven I was married," she said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing. "I'm tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I'm tired of acting like I don't eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I'm tired of saying, 'How wonderful you are!' to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it.... I can't eat another bite.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind  

************

“Everyone tells stories around here. Every place, every
person has a ring of stories around it, a halo almost.
People have told me tales ever since I was a tiny girl
squatting in the front dooryard in mud-caked overalls,
digging for doodlebugs. They have talked to me, and
talked to me. Some I've forgotten, but most I remember.
And so my memory goes back before my birth.”
― Shirley Ann Grau 

 “I remember how warm bourbon tasted in a paper cup with water dipped out of the spring at your feet. How the nights were so unbearably, hauntingly beautiful that I wanted to cry. How every patch of light and shadow from the moon seemed deep and lovely. Calm or storm, it didn't matter. It was exquisite and mysterious, just because it was night. I wonder now how I lost it, the mysteriousness, the wonder."
― Shirley Ann Grau 

 “At first glance you would not have thought he had any Negro blood. But if you looked sharper—and if you were used to looking—you could see the signs. It was the planes of the face mostly, the way the skin sloped from cheekbone to jaw. It was also the way the eyelids fell. You had to look close, yes. But southern women do. It was a thing they prided themselves on, this ability to tell Negro blood. And to detect pregnancies before a formal announcement, and to guess the exact length of gestation. Blood and birth—these were their two concerns.”
― Shirley Ann Grau

“The army went home heroes, and even the slaves felt pretty good. There were quite a few of them—Andrew Jackson had taken them along when he marched south, nervous and worried, not knowing the kind of British army he’d be facing. Those slaves went down with the army, served with it, and came back with it. As each man left, he got a bit of paper signed by Andrew Jackson giving him his freedom. Now, the General had a poor hand and he signed carelessly, with only the first four letters of his name showing clearly. On those pieces of paper there was just the word “Free” and a scrawl that looked like “Jack.” So these new freemen and their children for all the years after were called Freejacks.”
― Shirley Ann Grau

 

Shirley Ann Grau, terror of the KKK.

The above quotes are from Grau's novel The Keepers of the House, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965.  I first heard of it when reading a blog post by Ted Gioia, the jazz historian, who so loathed it that he refused to name it, merely implying that it didn't deserve the '65 Pulitzer.  Curious, I looked it up, read it and was captivated by it.  Grau is a wonderful writer and she wrote with sincerity and intensity about her world, the rural South in the middle decades of the 20th century and its centuries of memory, but her themes are transcendent and echo down the decades.  Grau's brilliance as a writer was recognized in her day, her first story collection, The Black Prince and Other Stories,  published in 1955, was a finalist for a National Book Award. Time magazine called it “the most impressive U.S. short story debut between hard covers since J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories.”

About The Keepers of the House, Orville Prescott wrote in a review in The New York Times, “The sounds and smells and folkways of the Deep South are conjured up and the onerous burden of the South’s heritage of violence and of racial neurosis is dramatized in the lives of a few unhappy people. It is all an old and familiar story, but seldom has it been told so well.” Well, yeah, but it's a lot more than that.  Grau immerses you in that world and in that time in a way that only the best writers can do.  When you are reading it you exist in that world.  It's your world, too.  The quotes from it I posted above may give you a sense of it. Katherine Seelye called all of Grau's writing "deeply atmospheric, lyrical" and that it is. It's also so emotionally entangling that you feel as if you are actually living the lives she creates. “Shirley Ann Grau writes of our most sublimated and shameful prejudices, about how miscegenation infiltrates every level of southern society, and about how racial harmony is a pretense that integration alone is unable to address,” Alison Bertolini wrote in Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction. Grau wrote of her own writing, "I try to say that no person in the rural South is really an individual. He is a composite of himself and his past. The Southerner has been bred with so many memories that it’s almost as if memory outreaches life.”

Incidentally, the Ku Klux Klan so hated Keepers that they burned a cross on Grau's front lawn.  Was she intimidated? Nah.  She told the Klan leader in her town that she was a better shot than he or any of his boys were so they better leave her the hell alone if they didn't want to get their britches filled with buckshot. 

Why does Ted Gioia despise Grau so profoundly he can't bear to mention her name?  I don't know.  I don't think he's a klansman, being of Mexican and Italian descent.  Could be the Catholic hostility to Protestants. Then there is her double first name: Shirley Ann, which you can bet she was always called, not Shirley. Double first names -- Barbara Jean, Daisy May, Wanda June -- clearly identify a person as not one of the self-proclaimed elite who lord it over us peons. I have an aunt name Shirley Ann, proof positive that I am white trash, fer shure, just like Grau.  The late-comer-to-America liberal's view of American history as irredeemably wicked and foundational Americans like Grau as evil colonist settler slavers and genocidal killers of innocent natives probably also plays a part.  I know Gioia is a liberal because he boasted that anti-Viet Nam war activists such as he ended the Viet Nam war, which is such an egregiously self-congratulatory load that I can't even.  I just can't even.  Can you? Ask a Vietnamese about that. But be prepared to have your butt kicked from here to Ho Chi Minh City.

Hmm.  What was I talking about? I forget. Oh, well, it don't matter.  Nothing does, does it?

 

 

 

 

Portrait of a Memory

"This portrait is a great work. Did you paint it from life?"
"It is all from memory; it is all from hate."

 Here is a riveting play showcasing the best of what radio once was and very much worth your time to listen to.

"Portrait of a Memory," first broadcast on April 28, 1980, on CBS Radio Mystery Theater. The play is an adaptation of the Henry James story, "The Tone of Time," originally published in the November, 1900, issue of Scribner's.  You can read the story in that issue of the magazine here.

All the actors in this play were once regulars on the Broadway stage, then went into teaching, acting in television, in soap operas or became voice actors and appeared in commercials.

Marian Seldes

Marian Seldes studied under Martha Graham and Sanford Meisner, among other greats.  She first appeared on the Broadway stage in the 1948 production of Medea and went on to win five Tony awards. She was a regular guest star on television's golden age series, The Hallmark Hall of Fame. She became a member of the faculty of the Juilliard School. She is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as "the most durable actress," having appeared in all 1,809 performances of Deathtrap.

Carol Teitel

Carol Teitel studied under Lee Strasberg and made her Broadway debut in 1941's Stage Door.  Over the years she acted in numerous Broadway shows, including appearing next to Richard Burton in Hamlet, and winning two Obies, In television, she acted in the soap operas The Guiding Light, The Edge of Night and Lamp Unto My Feet. She was killed in an automobile accident a few years after acting in this CBS radio play. Her papers are archived at the New York Public Library in the Billy Rose Theater Division.

Norman Rose as Juan Valdez

Norman Rose  studied at the Actors' Studio before being drafted in World War II, where he was a news announcer for Armed Forces Radio. After the war, he began his Broadway career acting in such plays as The Respectful Prostitute, Richard III and St. Joan. He was described as having "the voice of God" during his acting career.  He became the spokesman in television commercials for Colombian coffee, portraying the coffee grower Juan Valdez. He also acted in the soap operas One Life to Live, Search for Tomorrow, The Edge of Night and All My Children. His voice was heard in the movies Love and Death, Radio Days, The Nutcracker, Biloxi Blues, Message from Space and Destroy All Monsters. He was the promotional announcer for both NBC and ABC television.

 

 

 

 

Helter Skelter

Still here, just been busy, running around helter-skelter.

More soon!