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Archived Entries (Septermber 2003)
9-27-03 Mugby
9-25-03 Dear Abby
9-22-03 Buick Le Sabre
9-21-03 Casey County Roots
9-18-03 Chalk
9-17-03 Kitten
9-14-03 Galactic Potpourri
9-06-03 Our Mother's Eyes
9-04-03 Rodeo Clown
9-02-03 Underworld, Part V: Invisible Man
9-01-03 Can I get a Huzzah?
9-27-03
Mugby
God, I love television. It is beginning to sink in just how much crucial stuff I have missed out on by not having cable over the summer—specifically how much exposure to world culture I’ve been deprived. In just the last couple days I have caught women’s World Cup action (fuck a war in the Middle East, these girls play nasty) and several hours of the World Series of Poker (featuring many Asian and Middle Eastern gamblers matching wits against car salesmen from Detroit and accountants from Ankeny, Iowa, dressed as southern rockers, cowboys, and NASCAR drivers.) Most importantly, today I got to watch Scotland play South Africa in rugby.
Rugby is an amazing sport. Talk about sheer violence—Jesus Christ! Regardless of not quite knowing the exact rules of the game, I was glued to the television for a commercial-less half an hour while these thick-necked, 275-lb. brutes—all, strangely enough, dressed like two year old tots in short pants, collared shirts, and beribboned sailor hats—abused one another.
At first, I suspected that there were no rules, but then I saw that there were referees—referees who mostly stood well out of the way and shouted at the players. I guess that means there are rules, but it’s optional whether the players actually have to follow them. I did see one penalty called, however... but I am not sure what it was for. Since the offending player was spitting blood, my guess is that it might have been for biting someone—a no-no in most international sporting events (with the possible exception of lacrosse.) Unlike in American football, action on the field was not stopped for the penalty; the game carried on until enough players were laying semi-conscious on the grass for the penalty to be issued. As in soccer, the ref issued him Yellow Card which is much like a parking ticket in that it can be crumpled up, thrown in the glove box, and easily ignored for six months. A yellow card really has no bearing on the game itself, it is just the ref’s way of saying, “You broke a rule… and, um… by George, I saw it.”
After the penalty, each team lined up shoulder to shoulder and locked arms. Then they rammed into the other team with their heads and tried to push them into the parking lot—this is called the ‘scrum.’ At some point the ball (not exactly a soccer ball and not exactly a football, it looked much like those ragged old basketballs from grade school gym class, the lumpy ones that couldn’t quite be dribbled because of the bubbles of inner tube poking through like aneurisms) got loose underneath the teams ramming into one another. Eventually, when one team had pushed the other far enough, someone picked up the ball and ran for the goal.
And he ran like a motherfucker too, because rugby is an ancient Welsh word roughly meaning, ‘kill the poor fuck with the ball.’ In American football once a player with the ball is tackled, the play is over. You help him up, pat him on the ass, and get ready for the next play. Not so in rugby. In rugby once the player with the ball is tackled, it’s open season on him. You and the rest of your team punch him in the mouth, hit him with WWE elbow-drops, and soccer-kick him in the chomes. Then you take the ball from him and run toward your own goal... until you get mugged yourself, that is. (The fucking game ought to be called mugby, call the ball the wallet.)
When a player has the ball, they are not even safe from their own teammates who will tackle and/or strip the ball from him as readily as an opponent. The best thing is when a player is in the process of being tackled by the other team, his teammates will often ram into the pile trying to push them toward the goal—the tackled player, in effect, becoming the ball. This, methinks, is an innovation American Football needs. I would love to see All-Pro defensive end Jevon “The Freak” Kearse come tearing through the offensive line, sack little Doug Flutie, pick the crumpled body up, and sprint for his own goal line. Touchdown! Ball in one arm, Flutie in the other, an idiomatic touchdown dance follows complete with the spiking of each.
As counter to the concept of team sports as this seemingly runs, it actually works quite well. Not only does it add to the feverish atmosphere of general chaos on the field, it inspires in players a greater willingness to play as a team. Players are more willing to share the ball—and the glory of scoring—out of something of a Here-You-Take-It-Please-Don’t-Hurt-Me-inspired esprit de corps.
It’s a fucking great game. If you ask me, all international problems ought to be settled on the rugby field instead of the battlefield. Just like war, it’s very violent, the rules of engagement are mostly optional, and teammates are likely to fuck their own up. The major advantage of rugby over war is a lot less actual death (regardless of considerably more loss of teeth and eyeballs popped out of sockets.) And the Swiss could be the referees, it would be great.
One year ago today...
9-25-03 Dear Abby
Ah, the soothing background chatter of cable TV, how I have missed you. Welcome back, old friend. Yesterday, we had digital cable installed after going without for the last few months. I don't know who was more happy when the cable guys knocked on the door: Boss (who sprinted out the door when I opened it, tail awag) or me (who had to resist the urge to hug them like the couple in the DirectTV commercials from a few months ago.)
Actually, not having television hasn't been all that rough on us this summer. We have listened to the radio a lot, watched an ass-load of movies on video and DVD (that's a technical term: ass-load,) and done more reading than in previous months. Of course, when we would visit Mom and Dad I would find myself slobbering, playing with the remote, and surfing the channels with an erection whenever I could steal away for a few minutes. To quote, ZuZu Petals in Andrew Dice Clay's debut movie The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, "TV!! Yum-yum!!"
Ironically, yesterday after it was installed and most of today, I spent listening to the radio and reading for class. I made up for it this evening, with wall-to-wall women's World Cup coverage. When The Succubus came home from work tonight, I informed her that—I knew it was going to be hard for her to accept—but, I am now in love with Abby Wambach, a nearly six-foot, elbow-throwing blonde beast of a woman who plays forward for the U.S. squad.
One year ago today...
9-22-03 Buick Le Sabre
It’s always fun to walk Boss because he has so much fun on our trip around the block. After he does his business, he will find a nice clean section of grass to roll around in and snort. He tries to chase any cats or squirrels he sees. [Note: There is one underground apartment on Rose Street with windows at street level. They have a big, mostly white cat who likes to nap and sun himself on the sill among the owners potted plants. Each time Boss sees him lying there he throws himself against the glass barking maniacally. Off goes the cat, ass over furry teakettle, in a mad scramble for safety. I snicker every time.]
It seems that everyone who lives around here knows his name (if not mine and The Succubus’) and those who don’t he makes it a point to walk right up to and introduce himself. Usually they stop to pet him and tell him how cute he is. He loves that; he will arch his head back as they scratch his ears. Whenever they hustle on their way and don’t stop to visit with him, he usually looks up at me as if to ask if he did something wrong (to which I have to explain that everything is alright, they are just dicks.)
Sometimes, though, the unexpected
happens on
our walks. Today when I
walked
him, we were on the far side of the block and I was hoping he would
take a
poo before we got halfway down Lyndhurst so we could shortcut between
the
other two buildings of our apartment complex and come in the backdoor
of our
own. Luckily for me, just before the shortcut, he started sniffing and
waddling
(a sure indicator of imminent poo.) Finally he found just the
right
spot and just the right position and did his thing. His back was to the
street
and this suited me fine because that meant I didn’t have to move in
order
to avoid flying shit if he decided to scratch in the grass afterwards
(as
is sometimes his wont.) When he finished today it was indeed his wont,
and
he did indeed kick turds everywhere; one of which, incidentally, stuck
to
the left front side-panel of the Buick Le Sabre parked there. God, I
love
this dog.
Tonight, when The Succubus got home, he asked her to walk him. As they were using the very same shortcut he led her past a man lying on the ground in the parking lot behind our building. He was lying on his back between a row of cars and a waist-high wall. When she got back to the apartment with Boss, she told me what she’d seen. My reaction: “What? Do you want me to go see what’s up?” She did, and so, I did. He was unresponsive when I called out to him from a distance, so I angled in for a closer look. When I finally pulled focus, I saw that his face was bloodied. The Succubus was watching me from the second floor landing, so I mouthed the words “Call the Police” and gave her International Sign for “Hang Loose” (thumb and little finger extended from my clenched fist.) She disappeared and I went out front to watch for the cops.
Between the time that she called and they arrived, he woke up and split. The Succubus and I stood there watching as he staggered down High Street. When the half a dozen police cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck showed up sirens ablaze a few minutes later, I looked at The Succubus and asked her what she had told them on the phone, that he was on fire? We just waved them in his direction and they caught him two blocks later. Nosy people that we are, we ambled down in that direction and rubbernecked. When the party broke up, we found out from a 15-year old cop that old boy just had a snoot full and had fallen down and busted his melon.
One year ago today...
9-21-03 Casey County Roots
Today, for the third time in the past five or six weekends, I drove down to Stanford to help Mom and Dad put in some wood for the winter. Thankfully, last time Bill and I managed to split and stack the rest of the wood behind the house, so today wasn’t nearly as physically taxing. All we did was drive to Danville and pick up two loads of wood from some of their friends who’d had a tree come down earlier in the year.
[Note: Let me tell you about these people who Mom and Dad have known ever since I can remember. For discretion’s sake I won’t mention their names. She is one of the sweetest, most hard-working people I have ever met; he is a penny-pinching know-it-all who has the worst facial tic I have ever seen. It’s a combination squint/sneer/Siamese-fighting-fish-fin-flair. For the last twenty-five years, while she has worked low-paying shit-jobs (factories, department stores, etc.) to support the family, he has been trying (unsuccessfully, until recently) to get disability from various places. They are die-hard church goers who pride themselves on what good Christians they are and the witnessing they do through song in a traveling gospel group. And every seven years to the day, since everything they own is in her brother’s name, they file for bankruptcy. (I guess that’s okay since Fraud is not specifically mentioned as a no-no in the Ten Commandments they would like to see posted in all schools, government buildings, and restaurant menus.) When we pulled up, he and whatever disability he supposedly has took a break from installing new hardwood floors in their house to come chew the fat with us as we loaded the firewood. (In Bill’s words, the only thing he ought to get disability for is whatever the fuck is wrong with his face.)]
Dad parked the truck in the backyard and turned the radio up so we could listen to the UK-IU football game as we worked. [Note: This game is always a hoot as neither team seems to be able to figure out how to dribble the ball… but they keep trying.] As we pulled the wood out of the overgrown fencerow he—ever wary of Things That Slither—kept a sharp eye out for snakes. I, however, was the only one who ran across any sort of creature. Crawling across a piece of wood I was toting toward the truck, I found a fuzzy black and orange caterpillar. It was black at either end. I held the wood out to Dad. “I guess, we’re supposed to have a winter that’s rough at the ends and mild in the middle,” I said.
“I have been watching the squirrels. The trees are heavy with acorns and seeds. It wouldn’t surprise me if it isn’t a bad one all the way through.” He plucked the bug from the log in puffy yellow work-glove fingers. “Or, well, that’s what my granny used to say.” He held his hand close to the vines in the fencerow and let the caterpillar crawl off.
His granny and her husband could very well have walked off the pages of Harry Crews’ childhood memoir into reality of a tobacco farm Casey County, Kentucky. Grandpa—James Monroe Atwood, called “Pete” for short (don’t ask me, I don’t know)—would be up before sunrise to do the milking; home for breakfast; then, depending on the season, off to work in tobacco, hay, or cattle; home for lunch; back to work until dark and dinner.
She—Ethel Florence Sweeney Atwood, only ever called “woman” by him—had an even longer day than he did, considering hers came without breaks for meals which she had to cook, serve, and clean up after. She had the garden to tend, chickens to feed, eggs to collect, clothes to mend, house to keep tidy, and canning to do. This goes without mentioning helping out with the slaughter and preparation of pigs for meat and lending a hand out on the farm whenever needed, all while taking care of seven kids—the second of which was my grandmother.
The more observant among you will probably be wondering why my last name is Atwood, since that was my grandmother’s maiden name and she was of a generation when it was taboo for a woman to retain that name after marriage. Very simple: she married another Atwood, my grandfather Wince.
Okay, this is where it gets tricky. In Casey County, back in the day, there were several supposedly unrelated sets of Atwoods. I am a little hazy as to the specific number of unrelated Atwood clans in Casey County, but my grandfather and grandmother came from two of them, a little girl I went to grade school with came from yet a third. As far back as anyone could remember the lines hadn’t crossed. We know that Granny’s line of Atwood’s came to the area from North Carolina via the Cumberland Gap, and she, the oldest living member of her line (now age 75,) assumes that all the Atwood clans of Casey County, Kentucky came from North Carolina.
Naturally, based on the sketchy information we have, her assumptions, and the staggeringly slim odds of several sets of unrelated people with identical last names would settle in the same county of Kentucky, it seems to me likely that when traced far enough back (I am guessing sometime in the early 19th Century) I will find that they are related, a Lowest Common Atwood, so to speak. Why should I care, you might ask, considering that neither my father nor I, are mentally retarded, have cleft palates or webbed toes? Well…
Later when we were back home unloading the first load of wood, Dad stood in the back of the truck and tossed the fireplace-sized pieces in the window of what used to be the side porch which, with Bill’s addition of walls, has become the wood room. I stood on the ground next to the truck and split the few larger pieces. As I handed up the last pieces of wood I’d just split for him to toss in the window, I said, “I don’t envy Grandpa and them who had to do this all day long every day. This is some backbreaking shit.”
“Hmm, back when I was growing up and spending summers down on the farm, I didn’t mind it a bit,” he said. “It’s a lot easier when you do it all the time.”
“I think I’d still rather be inside reading a book,” I laughed. That, for a large part, I guess, explains my interest in where we came from, considering what I have chosen to read: the Literature of the South. The more I read in my classes and on my free time, the more I am haunted by the question: Did my ancestors fight for the Blue or the Gray? From which tradition do my people come from?
We all have sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers; surely one of mine took a side. I can immediately strike from my list the eight on Mom’s side of the family, as her father was an orphan and her mother a crackpot who told various conflicting stories about her background—even her original last name; they are dead ends. That leaves me with eight from which to work and—ironically—two of them bore the name Atwood. Bearing that name myself and having a double dose of that blood (if my assumption about all Casey County Atwoods flowing from the same North Carolina spring is correct,) those are the two I am most interested in.
A story I remember hearing as a boy had one of my Atwood great-great-great-great-grandfather (on Granny’s side,) George Washington Atwood, being recruited to fight for both sides, albeit at different times. The first side (I don’t know which) came riding up looking for George Washington; he told them they had the wrong man as he was George Atwood and wasn’t interested in going. A while later the other side rode up looking for George Atwood, to which he again replied that they had the wrong man, he was George Washington and he wasn’t interested in going. Given Kentucky’s general ambivalence as to which side to take in the War and the inborn streak of orneriness in the Atwoods, this family legend strikes me as probably not far off the mark, even if it isn’t actually verifiable.
Still, family legend or not, it doesn’t satisfy my curiosity. Legend only becomes history in the absence (or ignorance) of a paper trail. Sadly, if I cannot find one—and close to 150 years later what are the odds of that?—that might be what I am stuck with. Perhaps, though, I can put this legend in a context that will satisfy some of my curiosity.
What do I know or suspect? Here is what I have recreated through conversations with Granny and internet research:
I have no idea what the personal politics of my great-great-great-grandfather George Washington Atwood actually were, but I can see some of the reasons he chose to stay neutral given what his circumstances might have been.
In a couple weeks I plan to go back to Stanford to visit Granny to dig through her records and, later this winter, I am hoping to convince Dad to drive over to Liberty (the Casey County seat) to search through court records with me. What I would like to find, is that Nathan Meredith was born a couple years earlier than I have surmised, as that would give even more credence to my theory. However, if I find that he was born even a couple years later, my explanation goes right into the shitter because that would place George Washington Atwood in North Carolina during the Civil War and I’d have to start from scratch.
I also plan to pay a visit to my Uncle Lorne, Granddaddy’s big brother, now in his 90s, and the oldest surviving member of that Atwood line. Looking at rosters of some of the Union regiments that came out of Casey County during the Civil War, I have noticed a smattering of Atwoods. I wonder if one of them was the father of Granddaddy’s grandfather Calvin Atwood (or “Uncle Cal Atwood” as Granny calls him?)
9-18-03 Chalk
The very nature of this class tells me that I am not going to have to learn the material by rote; the bitch of it is that it’s a chore to try to assimilate and position the various strands of theory so that I have an idea of what has gone on and is going on, while I determine the best course(s) to take when approaching my own field; a field that I am finding has no distinct theory of its own and whose scholars traditionally have tended to be reticent of applying other theory to for fear that under the microscope it might lose its distinctive “Southerness.”
Of course, Michael Freyling argues that what the Fugitives did in the early part of this century was take “a south” and make it “The South” by anointing William Faulkner’s work the End-All-Be-All of the American South and suppressing the entire female and the African American male voices. As far as I can see, what this portends for the field is the question: If, by being more inclusive, will Lit of the South lose its “distinctiveness” while by becoming, ironically, more universal in nature?
Right now Lit of the South seems to enjoy something better of a reputation than does most regional Lits (Appalachain Lit, etc.) Presumably, Lit of the South has a quality that makes it a more important part of American Lit than a mere regional lit. And, I would like to think that it does, as that is where I find myself drawn. Rather than the overt racism/sexism which could very well be Lit of the South’s “distinctiveness,” I would like to find something else—anything else. Right now I am drawn toward investigating the common myths that underlie all voices of Lit of the South. Is there a primary one, or are there even dominant ones?
Obviously, there is work to be done here.
This is the only class I have exclusively with grad students from the English department. The Lit of the South class is mostly undergrad, while the Appalachian Studies class is (a) sociology and (b) filled with a largely cross-disciplinary field (people from every discipline from English and Sociology, to Economics and Wildlife Biology.) As usual, I leave the class muttering to myself from a combination of equal parts fighting with Saussure, Todorov, and Lacan and hearing (what seems) a majority of my classmates talk about “their students.”
I will not hide the fact that these innocent mentions dig at me like spurs. It frustrates me that I don't have students; it angers me that I feel out of the loop. I don’t feel lesser in any tangible way; I feel I have as good or a better grasp on the material than the majority of my classmates. I wonder about the politics involved. I am acutely aware that I am from an in-state school instead of Syracuse or Vanderbilt, for being a local but not a product of their system. I feel subtle eyes on my T-shirts, cigarettes, and tattoos. It’s the diametric opposite of the overt shit I had to swallow on the ship for reading whenever I got the chance, for toting a book around in the back pocket of my coveralls, but it feels the same. Hunter Thomson via Terry Gilliam writes, “No. Calm down. Learn to ENJOY losing.” Fuck that; I’ll mutter, and stew, and wait.
Leaving my second class of the day this afternoon, I took the chalk from the desk after the prof split. Originally, I thought she’d left it by mistake and wanted to return it, but found that it belonged to the room instead. I held it in a pocketed hand while several of us smoked and talked. One of the undergrads came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be worth it to be an artist because of the sanity one necessarily sacrifices in the process. I built on that by asking if the demons were any different for us who are compelled to do what we do, study their work. In essence, we are, in many cases, searching for the same thing as the artist was in writing it: meaning, order, truth.
After a few butts I didn’t return the chalk, but instead headed on to the Student Center where in less than an hour there was going to be a presentation by Frank X. Walker (a part of the African American Studies and Research Program’s Carter G. Woodson Lecture Series here at UK.) Walker was one of the founding members of the Affrilachian Poets—originally a group of students, faculty, and community-minded people committed to writing here at UK in the early 1980s, it has evolved to encompass the voices of all people of color from the region.
I was early and the first to arrive, so I chose a good vantage point on the right side of the aisle close to the front, but not where I’d be under his nose. While I waited for the room to fill, I read a little extra from the unassigned stories in the Crews book. As I read, the room slowly filled up with, as I’d hoped, a mixed audience—I like harmonious diverse blends. But, I noticed that it wasn’t blended very well. Most of the whites sat on the right side of the aisle, the blacks on the left. Curious, but at least no one had to sit in the back.
Walker talked about and read selections from his new book of poetry Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York—York being the slave who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their three-year exploration of the Louisiana Purchase. The book of poetry was written from York’s perspective and is not only the fictional equivalent of the journals Lewis & Clark kept but, it seems, the creation of an American folk hero (read Southern Myth?) I am interested to see if my hypothesis holds true when it actually comes out in print in February.
The poem that had the most immediate impact on me was toward the end of Walker’s reading. It told of York’s feelings upon their return to St. Louis, from where their expedition originally set out. After three testing, but rewarding years of exploring an untamed land, interacting with the native peoples, and seeing wondrous unheard of sights, upon his return he finds that he is excluded from the tales that grow from other explorers’ cups. Not even rewarded with his freedom, he is relegated again to the status of someone’s “boy.”
After the presentation, I introduced myself to Walker. I wanted to mention something along the lines of how much that poem had meant to me, given my own feelings of displacement here—that I deserve better because I am from here, because I have loved the school ever since I can remember, because one of my first field trips in grade school made a pit-stop at UK’s own Kennedy Book Store. Instead, I shook his hand and mentioned that I was a grad student in English from Stanford—ten minutes from his hometown of Danville (which York had traveled through with Clark.) Upon mention of Stanford, he smiled and said, “Homeboy.”
On the walk home, I wanted to take the chalk and write on something: the sidewalk, a telephone poll. I wanted to draw a flower, write “York was here” or “Chalk Sucks.” I didn’t though; I left it in my pocket. I think I will leave it there, hang onto it for a while.
One year ago today...
9-17-03 Kitten
I was thankful to hear that the reading list for my Lit of the South class was comprised of texts I hadn’t read. I had a little experience with Faulkner and Welty, but hadn’t read the chosen texts (Absalom, Absalom and The Golden Apples.) I had read an excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God in one of the surveys I had with Dr. Neeper last year, but not the whole thing. No experience at all with Peter Taylor, William Styron, and Harry Crews.
After munching down Welty and Taylor in the first couple weeks, today was our first day of discussion on Crews’ memoir A Childhood: the Biography of a Place. I haven’t been so enamored of a book in quite a while—easily since last fall when we (um, that’s the royal We, that is) read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. It has a peculiar effect on me; a personal one similar to the one after I finished Bobby Ann Mason's Clear Springs, like I'd just talked with a relative.
[Note: Word is that toward the end of the semester she, one of our writers in residence, is going to visit the class. We may pre-empt Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner in lieu of her new book on Elvis (which she was working on when she visited my creative non-fiction class at Morehead to talk about Clear Springs.]
Born in 1935, Crews was
born
equidistant between Granddaddy
and Dad (1922 and 1948.) Granted he was
talking
about Georgia but Crews grew up on tobacco farms, farms like the ones
in
the Kentucky counties my grandparents and father grew up in (Casey and
Lincoln.)
Had it not been for breaking his back in the early 1950s, Granddaddy
would
have had the same occupation as Crews’ father: tenant farmer (just like
most
of his and Granny’s brothers
remained until
they got land of their own.)
Not only do I get an interesting insight into a people much like the stock from which I come, but Crews starts the memoir with a scene ten years before his birth, calling it his first memory. It is a scene from his father’s life, his father dying when he was 21 months old. He has no real memories of him, but he does have the stories he's heard about his father. I am kind of like that with Granddaddy who died when I was six. I am a little better off than Crews in that I have some actual memories of the man—if only fragmented images and parts of scenes (not to mention in that I was dealing with a grandfather, he a father.)
The Succubus and I were talking about this as we drove back from dinner in Stanford a month ago. I was telling her how Granddaddy’s usual response to Granny’s mouth was to grab his fishing rod and head over the hill to the pond. I was there one time, just a toddler, when Granny tore into him for something. When Mom and Dad returned from wherever they had been, they found Granny still in the kitchen bitching for all she was worth. Granddaddy and I were nowhere to be found; he had snatched me and the fishing pole. But like I told The Succubus, I am not sure if I remember that or just heard the story too often. It seems like I remember it, but…
What do I remember of him? I remember how he ran on the balls of his feet. I remember sitting on his lap as he played pinochle with my dad and aunts, me tossing the cards he selected. I remember his ice blue eyes and snowy white hair. I remember how the artificial turf on the steps to the funeral home office where he worked felt. I remember there was not one, but two of those heavy old black rotary phones in their house: one I couldn’t touch (for calls from the funeral home) and the personal one (which I could play with at least until caught.) I remember gray slacks and black socks, an unbuttoned or no white button-up shirt, and a T-shirt: his post-work look. I remember he kept his carton of cigarettes (Winstons) under the bed. I remember how the cars lined every street when they laid him out at the funeral home where he worked. I remember Dad kissed his hand. I remember the embroidered red roses Dad and the rest of the pallbearers wore on the lapels of their suits (much like the tattoo on my left wrist.)
I know a lot more about him, some of which I could feasibly claim to remember. Like his funeral was the largest Stanford has seen to date; it took him close to three months to smoke each carton of cigarettes; that he drove the hearse to pick up bodies and was preparing to become a partner in the Beasley-Rainey-Speaks (& Atwood) Funeral Home when he had that final stroke. I know that for the years between breaking his back and coming to drive the hearse, he drove our town’s only cab. I know his hair was completely white by his early thirties. I know his brothers and sisters (all older) called him Kitten, a childhood nickname. I know he was the one that they all turned to in crisis.
I know he was a crack shot with either pistol or rifle and broke into tears at war movies. I know he served in the Army Corps of Engineers in WWII, and went over on or soon after the D-Day invasion. I know he came home with two Purple Hearts and a bullet scar across the bridge of his nose. I know one cold winter night in France he got to see his older brother Clyde for a few minutes, but his troop had already moved on when Clyde, a cook, returned with a pie for him. I know he tragically killed two fellow soldiers as they returned from liberty drunk and didn’t give the password.
The entire family loves to tell stories about him to The Succubus. Mom likes to tell about how, soon after she and Dad were discharged from the Navy, when she was pregnant with me, he would come and waddle her downtown to eat lunch, introducing her to everyone along the way. Judy likes to tell of his reaction after she cut down on Dad and one of his friends with a baseball for tormenting her and she hit the front window frame in the dead middle, breaking no glass. He tossed the ball back to her and told her she couldn’t do it again. She didn’t and busted the front window; he laughed.
In the dark car on the way home that night, The Succubus said, “I wish I had got to meet him.”
So do I, sweetheart. So do I…
One year ago today...
9-14-03 Galactic Potpourri
Here is a mixed jar of things that may or may not smell so good:
9-06-03 Our Mother’s Eyes
To look at me and Bill one would never suspect we are brothers. He is tall, standing close to six and a half feet; and, while 6’0 is not exactly short, I am not the textbook definition of tall. I am pale and red headed; he is dark and swarthy. He is painfully thin, I am stocky. [Note: As a matter of fact, the only physical trait I can think of that we share is the structure of part of our faces. From the bridges of our noses through our eyebrows, we are virtually identical—from the way our eyebrows are shaped to the slant of our eyes. Even the eye color is similar; both are different shades of hazel—his leaning more toward brown, mine to green. We have our mother’s eyes.]
When he first reported to the ship in the summer of ’98, people laughed when we told them we were brothers; once they got to know us though, they were forced to admit that we had to be brothers. We both smoked Camels, drank Mt. Dew, could eat mayonnaise with a spoon, and had similar tastes in food, movies, and music. The more observant realized that many of our mannerisms (for example, the way we smoke cigarettes), facial expressions, body language, and are virtually identical. And, most importantly, we both have personalities—above average intelligence, outspokenness, sharp tongues, and biting wits—that virtually ensure that people either love or hate us—no middle ground.
I always thought it was kind of cool to look so different on the outside and be so similar on the inside, to watch people as they realized this. Only this weekend though, did I discover a fundamental difference between us.
On Saturday, we—Travis, Bill and I, and the geologist—went to Stanford to visit the folks. Mom had been after us to bring Trav home so she could fix dinner for him, but mostly Bill and I wanted to split and rick all the firewood piled out back on the patio. [Note: If he and/or I don’t do it, they will; and, they really have no business doing that kind of work—not with his heart and her fibromyalgia.]
Working parallel to the narrow edge of the patio, I used the weighted splitter; Bill—at a 90º angle from me, parallel to the long edge—used the axe. [Note: I used to enjoy watching Bill split wood. Because of his height he was always really good at it, but because he was so thin it was always awkward looking. When he would swing the splitter back for his swing, he would wobble so much that you thought he was just going to keep going with it. Of course, he always enjoyed watching me split wood, too. With my fucked up eyeballs, I couldn’t—and still can’t—hit the same spot twice except by sheer luck.]
As we worked, I noticed that our swings were drastically different. His method is to stand feet together well back from his target, swing the axe back behind him, and take a giant stride toward the wood as he came down with the axe. In many ways it is reminiscent of a pitcher’s wind-up and delivery from the mound. As for myself, I stand, feet shoulder-width apart, about three feet from the target. The arc of my swing going out to the side of my body, I take no step toward the wood and let my upper body and legs do all the work, such that I usually ended up on my toes after each blow.
The effectiveness of Bill’s swing comes from utilizing his height to get as much speed into his swing as possible My technique is just brute force, playing into my own physiology: my arms, chest, and shoulders. His swing is better suited to using an axe than a splitter because of its lighter weight, just as mine is better suited to using the heavier splitter (without fucking up your back, that is.) [Note: Not that either one of us would use the other’s tool any differently than our own.]
Noticing the differences in our swings got me to thinking and a lot of things fell into place for me. It became evident that for as many similarities Bill and I have, we approach things 100% differently because we are built differently from top to bottom. Most of our similarities, ironically enough, are only superficial. It’s like our choice of career paths. He is a science/math type; I am a humanities type. He is fascinated by the trajectories of comets and planetary orbits; I like how the stars twinkle. I enjoy films that speak to some aspect of the human condition; he likes mutants and explosions. This weekend he told me to get a good look at Mars because it was as close to Earth as it would be in our lifetime; I told him about the film Lenny, how it blends comedy and tragedy into a very telling depiction of the 1960s.
Not that one is better than the other, though; his suits him, mine suits me. I have no doubt that he could do what I do and I could do what he does. It’s just that we wouldn’t enjoy it.
9-04-03 Rodeo Clown
The situation with the bleach blonde, middle-aged, woman who lives downstairs from us is escalating. For the past month or so, she has raised all sorts of hell about the noise we make after her bedtime (which seems to be sometime around 7:30 pm.) She claims she can hear the base from our speakers through the floor, us moving furniture, and stomping. I claim that she needs to lay off the caffeine so she can sleep because we have done everything in our power (beyond reason) to be quiet up here.
She bangs on the ceiling (our floor) all the time. Sometimes The Succubus and I will just look at each other and shrug, because we haven’t a clue as to what we’ve done. She has reported us to the apartment managers, who seem to have an open mind about who is at fault. She has called the police (who when they came upstairs and heard the noise level rolled their eyes at her complaint and went away.)
Tonight at midnight…
She stormed upstairs
drunk off her
ass dressed in her tight jeans,
cowboy
boots, and white cowboy hat. With her preternaturally blonde hair
peeking
out from under the hat and her smeared mascara, she looked like a rodeo
clown.
She didn’t knock on the door like a normal person. Instead she kicked
the
door and ducked out of sight where I couldn’t see who it was through
the peephole,
which sent Boss into a barking
conniption.
Finally I caught sight of her in the edge of the peephole. I opened the
door
and asked what her problem was, to which she replied that us living
above
her was her problem. No sooner than I asked her if she was going to a
rodeo,
she started slinging motherfuckers.
I listened to her scream about some people having jobs (“I don’t know what you do that you can stay up all night?!) where they had to get up in the morning to go to work (“On a weekday! On a weekday! On a weekday! On a weekday!”) and stomp the floor. At first I tried to explain that we had turned down the radio as far as possible so that we could still hear it, turned the bass levels down as far as they went, placed towels under the speakers… but I am sure she heard none of it as she banged the wall with her fists and chanted “Inconsiderate motherfuckers!” As I stood there in my comfy red robe, socks and sweat pants, watching her palsic fit, I imagined stepping outside the apartment, flipping her hat off her head and kicking her saddlebag of a purse down the steps. Rather, I waited until her tantrum was over and asked her to leave because she was drunk and scaring my dog.
When she stomped back downstairs in another flurry of motherfucker assholes, I called the office and left a complaint. I was proud of the way I conducted myself, but shaking because I was so mad.
Later…
She just showed back up. Bearing two wine glasses and a bottle of wine and leaning seductively against the door frame, no less. I told her no thanks, that I was both married and didn’t drink. Seeing as how she was calm I took the opportunity to recount the measures we had taken to be quiet for her (the ones she’d missed earlier while throwing her tantrum.) I also told her that part of my job is working at night studying for my classes and that I listen to the radio while doing so, not loud enough to keep my wife awake sleeping only feet from the speakers, however. I apologized for keeping her awake, explaining that it wasn’t intentional.
[Note: I had enough tact, not to mention that I was getting an education so that I didn’t have to work slavish early-morning hours, yet could earn enough money that I didn’t have to spend my middle-age in a crappy one-bedroom apartment with intolerant drunken rubes for neighbors.]
Even later…
A new tactic: now she is playing her shit-kick at deafening levels beneath us, giving the occasional rebel yell. What do you bet that wine bottle is empty? Little does she know that I can sleep through hurricanes.
Bitch.
9-02-03 Underworld, Part V: Invisible Man
With school lighting off, it seems that I am going to have to push my reading of Don DeLillo’s Underworld even farther to a back burner. As it stands now (and has for the last month and a half or so,) it has already taken up almost permanent residence in the bathroom underneath The Succubus’ book of Jewel’s poetry (which some—not necessarily myself—would argue is a fitting place for the latter.)
It’s not that Underworld is lacking in any way I can put my finger on, but it like I stated in my last writing about the book, the meandering storyline and infinite interconnections between characters with no seeming purpose is really frustrating. It is hard to explain what I mean by purpose. Let’s put it this way: I am not looking for something traditional either in form or content, so I am not upset that it doesn’t follow any pattern that comes before it. I hate to sound like a Leavisite, but I do want to get something out of the experience of reading the book. Tell me something, show me something, teach me something—anything—about some aspect of the human condition.
[Note: A rebuttal claiming that there is no point if it is truly a postmodern work is a cop-out. True, the aim of any good postmodern text is to tear down the structures of learning that came before it and to play in the rubble (as opposed to the modernist tendency to build new structures from the rubble.) From this, many may take the flippant stance that there is no point to a postmodern work. That is naïve. If that were the case, why would we read more than one work by an author? Why would people like Barthelme and Winterson have developed such well respected names in the field? My stance is that there is always a point; if, in nothing else, in the rubble chosen to play in. For example, Winterson plays in the rubble from toppled gender structures. If there is no point it is crap, a waste of my time.]
Whether or not Underworld is a postmodern work, I am not at liberty to say, not having finished it. To this point—two-thirds of the way into the novel—it doesn’t seem to be shaping up that way, though. It seems to be operating more on a modernist frame. What I mean by that is that stylistically I can see existing structural techniques being pulled down, altered, and reused (such as a paragraph-by-paragraph stream of consciousness in individual characters—as opposed to Faulkner’s fragmentary stream—as well as the same technique utilized to give what I have called a stream of public consciousness.)
I can also see some preexisting structures of understanding being questioned/pulled down (for instance, the Cold War US/USSR nuclear binary and the nature of reality in “Videotape.”) The troubling thing here is that—to this point in the novel—I see no new structures of understanding being erected in their place (which is more consistent with postmodern pieces.) Perhaps, I shouldn’t, but because of the stylistic rebuilding of structures, I am also expecting new structures of understanding for the world view the author wants to present.
Another thing that justifies my want of a structure of understanding is DeLillo’s thematic concerns. He keeps pounding the themes of everything is connected and waste (and waste management) in proactive ways. Rather than establishing them as themes by tearing down the preexisting structures by which they are currently understood in fiction and playing with the rubble created (which would be in line with postmodernism,) he is building these themes by reemphasizing them episode by episode in the novel (more in line with traditional fiction.) Are these themes what he intends as the new structures for understanding that will replace the ones he is pulling down? Everything is connected and everything is shit? It seems too weak an explanation, therefore I am expecting more.
Another reason for me to expect more is a passage in the middle of the novel where DeLillo makes distinct allusions to a highly political work from the middle of the last century: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. His character Ismael Muňoz—a.k.a. Moonman 157—equates Wright’s main character. Misunderstood and mistreated Muňoz finds a safe haven in the subway tunnels beneath the streets of New York where a community of people lived, kept pets, hung clothes to dry, and “stole electricity from the government”; the same as Ellison’s misunderstood and mistreated Invisible Man lived in complete isolation in the middle of the same bustling city (albeit aboveground), also stealing electricity. While this could be considered coincidence, the fact that both novels reference the music of Charlie “Bird” Parker in the same paragraph as we learn of the electricity stealing leads me to think otherwise.
Why would such an influential, politically-charged, revolutionary work as Invisible Man be referenced for seemingly no other reason than “everything is connected” and “everything is shit”? Like I say, that is too weak to serve as the answer. It has to be part of the build-up to a larger structure of understanding. So far we are questioning reality, know that everything is connected, and are questioning the Cold War black/white good/bad US/USSR dichotomy (which we, as post-Wall collapse readers, already know is fallacious and are expecting DeLillo, as a post-Wall collapse writer, to give us insight into,) and know that somehow everything revolves around our own waste (or the management of it.)
Something else has to be coming. And, 550 pages into the novel it hasn’t even been hinted at (not that I can see, anyway.) If old boy is just playing in the rubble and leaves things as is, I am going to be sorely pissed. (Of course, if so, I will be in the right spot to be pissed.)
[Note: And while we are on the theme of "everything is connected" I thought I might mention that in The Godfather, just before Sonny Corleone is brutally gunned down the game he is listening to on the radio is the October 3rd, 1951 Russ Hodges radio broadcast of the game where, a half-inning later Bobby Tompson would hit The Shot Heard around the World.]
9-01-03 Can I get a Huzzah?!
School has begun. The painfully sweaty days of August have arrived. Hunter Thompson, in the guise of Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, summed it up best when he wrote, “I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.” He was writing about the desert, but being born and raised in Louisville, I know he feels my pain. It’s a brain numbing experience thinking of that day in the Not Too Distant Future when The Succubus and I pack our backs and head south, where I can smell magnolia (in lieu of horse shit) as I read. (Sadly, to study the Literature of the South one usually has to live there.) Thompson himself lives in “a fortified compound near Aspen, Colorado” where he pimps his name for ESPN.com’s Page 2 supposedly writing about the NFL.
…which reminds me: today is Labor Day, the day after tomorrow is Mom and Dad’s 92nd wedding anniversary, and next weekend the NFL season starts. Huzzah! Huzzah! The death knell of summer! Football season is finally here! I can finally stop following baseball and break the word huzzah out of the mothballs we packed it in at the end of last season (along with my nifty long-sleeved, orange shirt I wear while watching—now listening—to Browns games.) Huh-fucking-zah!
Alright, I know I tend to get long-winded when talking about the NFL, but this season I am going to try and keep it to a minimum. I spent the last couple days sweating over a close to seven page tome detailing How the Season Will Go, but I scrapped it rather than spend another seven pages dealing with the NFC. Other than maybe Tami, I don’t think anyone reads my sports diatribes anyway.
Anyway, here goes with my Ultra-condensed Fat-Free Preseason Predictions:
Buffalo
Bills – With their
newly
purchased
defense they will cut their losses almost in half from a year ago going
11-5;
more importantly, quarterback Drew Bledsoe will make the Patriots
regret trading
him, not only by winning the division and making a playoff run, but by
sweeping
them in the regular season.
New
England – The truth comes out:
quarterback Tom Brady
is
a hack. I see another 9-7 campaign, another missed playoffs,
and more
teeth gnashing in Boston as the realization that their Super Bowl
victory
two years ago was a fluke. [Note:
Whoops! Guess I was wrong. The Pats won their second Super Bowl in
three years on a last second field goal to beat the Panthers 32-29.]
Miami
– All Hail, Ricky
Williams! He has
finally
established
himself as the premier running back that everyone thought he would be
coming
out of college. Sadly, quarterback Jay Fiedler is as durable as a bag
of
potato chips and Brian Greise is itching to create a quarterback
controversy
for his daddy’s old team. Ricky better have a Bo Jackson Techmo-Bowl
season
and rush for 4800 yards, or Miami stands a chance of finishing under
.500
(I’m thinking 7-9) and missing the playoffs for the first time
since
the Civil War.
NY
Jets – Last year’s surprise
Wonder
Boy Chad Pennington
shattered
his wrist in a preseason game, which means the Jets season is already
over.
Septuagenarian Vinny Testeverde will become only the ninth quarterback
to
pass for over 40,000 yards early in their 5-11 season.
Pittsburgh
– They finally
got
rid
of Kordell’s sorry ass in the off-season
(Huzzah!
Huzzah!) but career retread Tommy Maddox is still penciled in as
starter.
With a versatile offense and the usual kick-ass defense, Pittsburgh
will
have a solid year (10-6) and win the division, but there will be
no
real joy in the Steel Town until they have a decent QB, exiting early
from
the playoffs.
[Note: I am not happy at all that my favorite NFL running back Chris Fuamatu-Ma'afala didn’t make the final cut yesterday. I suspect it was because his last name was too hard for them to pronounce. Just further reason to hate the Steelers. Of course, it did make me snicker that their star linebacker Joey Porter got shot in the butt in a Colorado night club over the weekend.]
Baltimore
– The Ravens
upgraded an
already
kick-ass defense in the off-season, but still have a questionable
offense.
If Head Coach Brian Billick is half as smart as he is an asshole, he
will
handle the quarterback situation (between career back-up Chris Redmond
and
rookie stud Kyle Boller) well enough to perhaps land the final wildcard
with
a 9-7season. Watch out for this team in 2004.
[Note: I just read that Boller will indeed start the season at quarterback. My gut tells me this is a mistake, that he needs to be eased in around mid-season, that 9-7 will be a hard mark for the Ravens to reach if he gets jerked in favor of Redmond early in the season. Time will tell.]
Cleveland
– Head Coach Butch Davis takes a step back from our
playoff season last year (7-9, maybe
8-8) seeing as we have what looks to be mostly junior high school
kids
playing defense for us. How heretofore back-up quarterback Kelly
Holcomb
does as the starter in Tim Couch’s stead this year will determine which
quarterback
will get traded for defensive goodies after the season.
Cincinnati – The Bengals under
new coach
Marvin Lewis (the
architect
of the Ravens Super Bowl defense three years ago) look to finally be
heading
in the right direction. (Did I just say that?) If owner Mike
Brown
continues to let Lewis run the team as he sees fit, the Bengals could
be actual
contenders year after next. (Did I just say that, too?) As for
this
year, there is just too much chaff that still needs to be discarded for
much
to happen, although going 5-11 or 6-10 isn’t out of the
question. (Cincinnati
fans would shit themselves for six wins in one season.)
Indianapolis
– Next to
Kansas
City,
Indy might have the most explosive offense in the AFC with Peyton
Manning,
Edgerrin James, and Marvin Harrison. If Head Coach Tony Dungy can make
the
defense merely adequate, the Colts will easily go 11-5, win the
division,
and could go all the way to the Super Bowl (unless Peyton Manning truly
does
carry a playoff jinx.)
Tennessee
– Hamstrung by
salary
cap issues in the off-season, the 2002 AFC South champs were limited to
releasing
most of their players and resigning them to lesser paying contracts
during
free agency. While this didn’t upgrade shit, for the most part it kept
a
damn decent team in tact. With a healthy Steve McNair on offense and
Jevon
“The Freak” Kearse on defense, the Titans will be players again this
year
going 9-7 and competing with the Ravens and Raiders for the
final wildcard.
Houston
– Year two for the new Houston team. Alas, the offensive line that
allowed
David Carr to get sacked 1400 times last season is still shaky. Of
course,
with a couple more offensive weapons at running back and receiver, they
should
improve on last year’s 4-12 season. Will go (6-10), allow
Jacksonville
to claim the worst record in the division, and hope fervently that
David
Carr can survive another year of pounding.
Jacksonville
– Rebuilding mode under
new
Head Coach Jack Del Rio
makes
for a very dull season in Jacksonville. All things considered though,
they
shouldn’t do much worse than last year's ten loss season going 4-12.
On a related note, my prediction for how long Mark Brunell keeps the
starting
quarterback position before the reins are given to Byron Leftwich is game five.
Kansas
City – Much to my brother’s
frustration, even though
Kansas
City had the best offense in the League last year, he and I could have
made
the team on defense. Another cause for him to worry was the hip injury
that
running back Priest Holmes suffered with a couple games left in the
season.
Of course, the off-season saw many defensive signings and a healthy
Priest
Holmes emerge. Kansas City is my odds on favorite to go to win the
division
(12-4), get a bye in the playoffs, and go to the Super Bowl.
San
Diego – I believe in
Head
Coach
Marty Schottenheimer; he plays my kind of football: Smash-mouth. I
liked
him as far back as his days in Cleveland when his
only worry was John Elway, loved him when
he coached Kansas City in the middle to late 90s, and I have thoroughly
enjoyed
what he has been doing with the Chargers for the last couple years. And
this
is going to be the year they finally arrive. A typically strong
Schottenheimer
defense and the offensive combination of Drew Brees, David Boston, and
LaDanian
Tomlinson equal a 10-6 season and the first wildcard.
Oakland
– More or less the
same
team that suited up last year. On one hand, that is good because they
did
make it to the Super Bowl last year. On the other hand, I can hear them
aging
as I type—this is a talented, but very old team. MVP
Quarterback Rich
Gannon is 37, receivers Jerry Rice and Tim Brown are 40 and 37,
respectively.
Asshole linebacker Bill Romonowski is 37. Safety Rod Woodson is 38. As
much
as I would love to see Jerry Rice get another ring, I think his window
of
opportunity was slammed shut by Tampa Bay last year. Prediction: Age
finally
catches up with the Raiders as they limp to a 9-7 finish, in a
dead
heat with the Titans and Ravens for the final wildcard spot.
Denver – Brian Griese is out (to
the
Dolphins) and Jake
“The
Snake” is in (from the Cardinals) as quarterback. From everything I
have
read, everyone seems to think that as Plummer goes, so goes the
Broncos.
I am not so sure, though. Whereas, I think Plummer is an upgrade over
Griese,
I am not sure that the quarterback position was the one that needed
tweaking.
The part of the team I question is Head Coach Mike Shanahan’s handling
of
a defense whose secondary frankly sucks. Last year he hamstrung
defensive
coordinator Ray Rhodes before bringing in a yes-man to fill his shoes.
Prediction:
Plummer, after a rocky start finally settles in nicely although Denver
only
goes 8-8 and misses the playoffs. After the season, Shanahan
gets the
axe.
Philadelphia
– Still the
undeniable
cream of the NFC East crop. Some argue that they might have taken a
couple
steps back in handling defensive personnel in the off-season, but I
don’t
see it as much of a problem. While they probably won’t win 12 regular
season
games this season, I see the Eagles going 11-5 and winning the
division
easily. I also see a dose of payback in store for Tampa Bay when they
roll
into town for the season’s first Monday
Night Football game.
NY
Giants – One of the
ugliest
playing teams in football these days, it’s hard to predict what kind of
season
this is going to be for them. They still have a solid defense and
in
the off-season drastically improved their special teams. That, combined
with
a dysfunctional but oft-times effective offense, earns the Giants my
preseason
Team Ugly Award. My best bet is that Head Coach Jim Fassell can pull
enough
rabbits out of his ass to keep them in the playoff hunt until the final
week
of the season (9-7), but until they get a real quarterback
(Kerry
Collins, just ain’t it) they won’t be serious Super Bowl contenders.
Washington – Ah, one season down,
two left
(at most) until
Head
Coach Steve Spurrier flunks out of the league. Last year, he and his
“Fun
‘n’ Gun” system finished 7-9 largely due to the defense designed by
Marvin
Lewis who in the off-season took his skills to Cincinnati. While
the
Redskins will definitely put more points on the board this season, they
still
don’t have the pieces in place for Spurrier to accomplish what he
wants.
Combined with the total collapse of their defense, they won’t win as
many
games this season as last (6-10).
Dallas – As much as I hate to admit
it,
Dallas is going to
be
an interesting team to watch for the next couple years. How long will
the
potentially volatile marriage of owner Jerry “This Is My Team”
Jones
and Bill “No It Ain’t” Parcells last, long enough for Parcells to right
the
sinking ship that was once America’s Team? So far it has been smooth
sailing,
but then again they haven’t played a game yet. Time will tell. As for
this
season, I see only a small improvement over last year, but not
necessarily
in the win department (5-11, for the fourth season in a row). I
also
see both a breakout season in 2004 and storm clouds on the horizon. [Note:
In today’s final cuts, I noticed that former University of Kentucky
All-American
tight end James Whalen made the team. Can I get a huzzah?]
Green
Bay – Still the cream
of
the crop in the NFL’s weakest division, regardless of a defense that
should
be slightly weaker than last year’s and not many passing options for
Brett
Favre. But, hey, he didn’t retire and the simple fact is that he could
make
me and Bill look like All-Pro receivers. If he stays healthy, the
Packers
will win double digit games (10-6) and earn the beating they
will
take in the first round of the playoffs.
Detroit – Outside of Seattle, the
most
surprising team in
the
NFC might be the Lions. Under new coach Steve Mariucci, Joey Harrington
will
flourish (especially considering that, thanks to the draft, he has more
targets
to throw to than Az Hakim.) With Olandis Gary and, after returning from
a
shoulder injury a few weeks into the season, James Stewart rushing the
ball
and a young, talented defense, Detroit ought to easily double last
year’s
win total (three.) It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if they didn’t go 8-8
this year before making the playoffs next season.
Minnesota – You know, who fucking
cares
how Minnesota
does?
It is moronic to center an NFL offense around a receiver even one as
talented
as Randy Moss. As asshole and selfish to the point of being a detriment
to
the team, he is nowhere nearly in the same league as Jerry Rice who, if
any
receiver ever deserved to be the focal point of an offense, never was.
Throw
in a shitty defense, a questionable running game, and the overrated
Duante
Culpepper at quarterback and this looks like a 7-9 season to
me.
Chicago – Two years ago, they were
a
surprising 13-3
playoff
team; last year, an equally surprising 4-12 wash-out. While I
expect
their defense to regain a modicum of the efficiency it lost in last
year’s
injury-plagued season, I lay even odds that they have the most
ineffective
offense in the league (outside of the Cardinals) because they (A) have
no
running game, (B) have receivers not talented enough to cover the
miscues
of a sub-par quarterback, and (C) signed Kordell
Stewart
to play (of all things) quarterback.
I also lay even odds he throws a fucking fit when they jerk him in
favor
of the brittle Chris Chandler before midseason. Let’s just hope that
Chandler
can stay healthy long enough to give Rex Grossman enough time to keep
maturing
to where he can handle the quarterback reins when they are inevitably
thrust
upon him before another 4-12 season ends.
Tampa
Bay – The reigning
Super
Bowl champs are everyone’s odds on favorite to represent the NFC in the
Super
Bowl. Defense is the name of the game in this town and they look to
have
gotten even better this year. While they still lack the offensive flair
that
John Gruden is famous for, I expect him to adequately find ways to
cover
the holes there while grooming Chris Sims for the starting quarterback
role
in a couple years. No reason to think they won’t have another 12-4
season
enroute to the South title. Of course, I think they will lose in the
NFC
Championship game to (drum roll please)… the Saint Louis Rams.
Atlanta
– With the signing
of
free
agent Peerless Price for someone for Michael Vick to throw the ball to,
the
talk all through the preseason was a possible Super Bowl run for the
Falcons.
Sadly, Vick broke his leg in a preseason game and will be out for the
first
four to seven games. For a team that is young and painfully nondescript
without
Vick, they need to pull together quickly if they want to make the
playoffs.
As it stands, if Vick can return earlier rather than later, Atlanta (9-7)
still stands a good chance of competing with the Giants and Saints for
final
wildcard.
New
Orleans – On paper, the
Saints
look to be one of the strongest teams in the league. The triple threat
of
quarterback Aaron Brooks, running back Deuce McAllister, and receiver
Joe
Horn are comparable to anything the Colts, Rams, Chargers, or Chiefs
can
put on the table; their defense is one specifically designed with
Michael
Vick in mind; and they had the Buccaneers number last season. On talent
alone
they could easily finish 14-2 and march to the Super Bowl, but they
won’t.
This is the Ain’ts we’re talking about. Something will go wrong. Aaron
Brooks
will reinjure his shoulder. Deuce McAllister will shatter his knee in a
freak
Gatorade-dumping incident. The team plane will crash into a mountain
after
sucking a badminton birdie into an engine. Until proven wrong (and I
really
hope I am) my call is: a 9-7 season with an outside chance of
grabbing
the final wildcard.
Carolina – Next to the
Buccaneers,
Carolina had the best
defense
in, not only the division, but the league last year. Sadly, their
offense
was even worse than that of the Bucs. While this may not be the year
for
Carolina to make the playoffs (I see them going 8-8 owing
mostly to
an injured receiver corps and a handful of retread quarterbacks), they
can
easily play spoiler and knock a team or two out of the playoffs
(perhaps
Dec. 7th at Atlanta or, more likely, the last game of the season Dec.
28th
at the NY Giants?)
[Note: They were better than even I gave them credit for. Leaning heavily on their kick-ass defense and the battering ram RB Steven Davis, the Panthers made it to the Super Bowl where they finally succame to the Patriots 32-29.]
St.
Louis – Last season’s 7-9
meltdown
was an aberration and a direct result of a shitty offensive line which
led
to injuries to every quarterback on the roster and the league’s best
running
back (Marshall Faulk.) After addressing that this off-season, the only
weakness
I see in their game is their linebackers. Of course, when a team is
capable
of scoring 500 points a season does it even need linebackers? The Rams
will
go (at worst) 13-3 in the regular season with the return to
MVP
form
of both Faulk and Kurt Warner; win the division, the NFC title, and the
Super
Bowl. Of their three losses, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if (at
least) one
doesn’t come at the hands of…
Seattle
– A little behind
schedule
in reviving this team, Mike Holmgren does so with a vengeance this
year.
The Seahawks’ offense finally gelled late last season (after it was too
late
to make the playoffs) and (from what I have read) have a swagger going
into
this season. This, in and of itself, wouldn’t be enough to get them
over
the hump, but they also brought in defensive guru Ray Rhodes and half a
dozen
defensive gunslingers to revamp the other half of the team. All told,
this
will combine for a 10-6 season and the first wildcard spot.
San Francisco – Let me see if I
have the
logic of this
down…
Let’s take a proven, successful Head Coach like Steve Mariucci and
replace
him with Dennis Erickson (whose claim to fame was the most abysmal four
years
in Seattle Seahawk history), combine with known trouble-maker Terrell
Owens,
a shitty defense, and Jeff Garcia’s bad back… wait a minute, what is
the desired
result here? It must be an 8-8 season and no playoffs for the
first
time since I was like seven.
Arizona – In the off-season the
Cards cut
ties with the
only
two offensive weapons they had in Jake Plummer (Broncos) and Davis
Boston
(Chargers) and replaced them with Emmitt Smith (the aging All-Time NFL
Career
Rushing Leader) and quarterback Jeff Blake who throws the prettiest
long
ball in the league. Sadly, Blake has no one who can catch his pretty
passes
which is going to lead to defenses around the league stacking the line
of
scrimmage which is going to lead to the dismantling of an already
injury-prone
and inconsistent offensive line which is going to lead to Emmitt
getting
injured before he gets to the 1300-yard season he believes he still has
in
him. This is going to be ugly. Not. Pretty. At. All. On their schedule
I
see a total of four winnable games (at Detroit, at Dallas, Cincinnati,
and
at Chicago.) Let’s be generous and say they’ll go 4-12 for the
season.
A slight alteration
on last year's theme of
Head
Coach vs. his former team with Dick Vermeil and the Kansas
City
Chiefs
vs. the Saint Louis Rams (his old team.) An epic battle for
Missourian
bragging rights. (Sadly,
though, Red is not a football
fan...) This
time the former team wins, though. And
just to round things out:
Dick Vermeil (Chiefs) will win Coach of the Year; Ricky Williams
(Dolphins),
Offensive Player of the Year; Julius Peppers (Panthers), Defensive
Player
of the Year; and Dewayne Robertson (Jets, formerly of the University of
Kentucky),
Rookie of the Year. [Note:
Wrong on all counts, yo.]
One year ago today...
God, I love television. It is beginning to sink in just how much crucial stuff I have missed out on by not having cable over the summer—specifically how much exposure to world culture I’ve been deprived. In just the last couple days I have caught women’s World Cup action (fuck a war in the Middle East, these girls play nasty) and several hours of the World Series of Poker (featuring many Asian and Middle Eastern gamblers matching wits against car salesmen from Detroit and accountants from Ankeny, Iowa, dressed as southern rockers, cowboys, and NASCAR drivers.) Most importantly, today I got to watch Scotland play South Africa in rugby.
Rugby is an amazing sport. Talk about sheer violence—Jesus Christ! Regardless of not quite knowing the exact rules of the game, I was glued to the television for a commercial-less half an hour while these thick-necked, 275-lb. brutes—all, strangely enough, dressed like two year old tots in short pants, collared shirts, and beribboned sailor hats—abused one another.
At first, I suspected that there were no rules, but then I saw that there were referees—referees who mostly stood well out of the way and shouted at the players. I guess that means there are rules, but it’s optional whether the players actually have to follow them. I did see one penalty called, however... but I am not sure what it was for. Since the offending player was spitting blood, my guess is that it might have been for biting someone—a no-no in most international sporting events (with the possible exception of lacrosse.) Unlike in American football, action on the field was not stopped for the penalty; the game carried on until enough players were laying semi-conscious on the grass for the penalty to be issued. As in soccer, the ref issued him Yellow Card which is much like a parking ticket in that it can be crumpled up, thrown in the glove box, and easily ignored for six months. A yellow card really has no bearing on the game itself, it is just the ref’s way of saying, “You broke a rule… and, um… by George, I saw it.”
After the penalty, each team lined up shoulder to shoulder and locked arms. Then they rammed into the other team with their heads and tried to push them into the parking lot—this is called the ‘scrum.’ At some point the ball (not exactly a soccer ball and not exactly a football, it looked much like those ragged old basketballs from grade school gym class, the lumpy ones that couldn’t quite be dribbled because of the bubbles of inner tube poking through like aneurisms) got loose underneath the teams ramming into one another. Eventually, when one team had pushed the other far enough, someone picked up the ball and ran for the goal.
And he ran like a motherfucker too, because rugby is an ancient Welsh word roughly meaning, ‘kill the poor fuck with the ball.’ In American football once a player with the ball is tackled, the play is over. You help him up, pat him on the ass, and get ready for the next play. Not so in rugby. In rugby once the player with the ball is tackled, it’s open season on him. You and the rest of your team punch him in the mouth, hit him with WWE elbow-drops, and soccer-kick him in the chomes. Then you take the ball from him and run toward your own goal... until you get mugged yourself, that is. (The fucking game ought to be called mugby, call the ball the wallet.)
When a player has the ball, they are not even safe from their own teammates who will tackle and/or strip the ball from him as readily as an opponent. The best thing is when a player is in the process of being tackled by the other team, his teammates will often ram into the pile trying to push them toward the goal—the tackled player, in effect, becoming the ball. This, methinks, is an innovation American Football needs. I would love to see All-Pro defensive end Jevon “The Freak” Kearse come tearing through the offensive line, sack little Doug Flutie, pick the crumpled body up, and sprint for his own goal line. Touchdown! Ball in one arm, Flutie in the other, an idiomatic touchdown dance follows complete with the spiking of each.
As counter to the concept of team sports as this seemingly runs, it actually works quite well. Not only does it add to the feverish atmosphere of general chaos on the field, it inspires in players a greater willingness to play as a team. Players are more willing to share the ball—and the glory of scoring—out of something of a Here-You-Take-It-Please-Don’t-Hurt-Me-inspired esprit de corps.
It’s a fucking great game. If you ask me, all international problems ought to be settled on the rugby field instead of the battlefield. Just like war, it’s very violent, the rules of engagement are mostly optional, and teammates are likely to fuck their own up. The major advantage of rugby over war is a lot less actual death (regardless of considerably more loss of teeth and eyeballs popped out of sockets.) And the Swiss could be the referees, it would be great.
One year ago today...
9-25-03 Dear Abby
Ah, the soothing background chatter of cable TV, how I have missed you. Welcome back, old friend. Yesterday, we had digital cable installed after going without for the last few months. I don't know who was more happy when the cable guys knocked on the door: Boss (who sprinted out the door when I opened it, tail awag) or me (who had to resist the urge to hug them like the couple in the DirectTV commercials from a few months ago.)
Actually, not having television hasn't been all that rough on us this summer. We have listened to the radio a lot, watched an ass-load of movies on video and DVD (that's a technical term: ass-load,) and done more reading than in previous months. Of course, when we would visit Mom and Dad I would find myself slobbering, playing with the remote, and surfing the channels with an erection whenever I could steal away for a few minutes. To quote, ZuZu Petals in Andrew Dice Clay's debut movie The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, "TV!! Yum-yum!!"
Ironically, yesterday after it was installed and most of today, I spent listening to the radio and reading for class. I made up for it this evening, with wall-to-wall women's World Cup coverage. When The Succubus came home from work tonight, I informed her that—I knew it was going to be hard for her to accept—but, I am now in love with Abby Wambach, a nearly six-foot, elbow-throwing blonde beast of a woman who plays forward for the U.S. squad.
One year ago today...
9-22-03 Buick Le Sabre
It’s always fun to walk Boss because he has so much fun on our trip around the block. After he does his business, he will find a nice clean section of grass to roll around in and snort. He tries to chase any cats or squirrels he sees. [Note: There is one underground apartment on Rose Street with windows at street level. They have a big, mostly white cat who likes to nap and sun himself on the sill among the owners potted plants. Each time Boss sees him lying there he throws himself against the glass barking maniacally. Off goes the cat, ass over furry teakettle, in a mad scramble for safety. I snicker every time.]
It seems that everyone who lives around here knows his name (if not mine and The Succubus’) and those who don’t he makes it a point to walk right up to and introduce himself. Usually they stop to pet him and tell him how cute he is. He loves that; he will arch his head back as they scratch his ears. Whenever they hustle on their way and don’t stop to visit with him, he usually looks up at me as if to ask if he did something wrong (to which I have to explain that everything is alright, they are just dicks.)
Sometimes, though, the unexpected
happens on
our walks. Today when I
walked
him, we were on the far side of the block and I was hoping he would
take a
poo before we got halfway down Lyndhurst so we could shortcut between
the
other two buildings of our apartment complex and come in the backdoor
of our
own. Luckily for me, just before the shortcut, he started sniffing and
waddling
(a sure indicator of imminent poo.) Finally he found just the
right
spot and just the right position and did his thing. His back was to the
street
and this suited me fine because that meant I didn’t have to move in
order
to avoid flying shit if he decided to scratch in the grass afterwards
(as
is sometimes his wont.) When he finished today it was indeed his wont,
and
he did indeed kick turds everywhere; one of which, incidentally, stuck
to
the left front side-panel of the Buick Le Sabre parked there. God, I
love
this dog.Tonight, when The Succubus got home, he asked her to walk him. As they were using the very same shortcut he led her past a man lying on the ground in the parking lot behind our building. He was lying on his back between a row of cars and a waist-high wall. When she got back to the apartment with Boss, she told me what she’d seen. My reaction: “What? Do you want me to go see what’s up?” She did, and so, I did. He was unresponsive when I called out to him from a distance, so I angled in for a closer look. When I finally pulled focus, I saw that his face was bloodied. The Succubus was watching me from the second floor landing, so I mouthed the words “Call the Police” and gave her International Sign for “Hang Loose” (thumb and little finger extended from my clenched fist.) She disappeared and I went out front to watch for the cops.
Between the time that she called and they arrived, he woke up and split. The Succubus and I stood there watching as he staggered down High Street. When the half a dozen police cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck showed up sirens ablaze a few minutes later, I looked at The Succubus and asked her what she had told them on the phone, that he was on fire? We just waved them in his direction and they caught him two blocks later. Nosy people that we are, we ambled down in that direction and rubbernecked. When the party broke up, we found out from a 15-year old cop that old boy just had a snoot full and had fallen down and busted his melon.
One year ago today...
9-21-03 Casey County Roots
Today, for the third time in the past five or six weekends, I drove down to Stanford to help Mom and Dad put in some wood for the winter. Thankfully, last time Bill and I managed to split and stack the rest of the wood behind the house, so today wasn’t nearly as physically taxing. All we did was drive to Danville and pick up two loads of wood from some of their friends who’d had a tree come down earlier in the year.
[Note: Let me tell you about these people who Mom and Dad have known ever since I can remember. For discretion’s sake I won’t mention their names. She is one of the sweetest, most hard-working people I have ever met; he is a penny-pinching know-it-all who has the worst facial tic I have ever seen. It’s a combination squint/sneer/Siamese-fighting-fish-fin-flair. For the last twenty-five years, while she has worked low-paying shit-jobs (factories, department stores, etc.) to support the family, he has been trying (unsuccessfully, until recently) to get disability from various places. They are die-hard church goers who pride themselves on what good Christians they are and the witnessing they do through song in a traveling gospel group. And every seven years to the day, since everything they own is in her brother’s name, they file for bankruptcy. (I guess that’s okay since Fraud is not specifically mentioned as a no-no in the Ten Commandments they would like to see posted in all schools, government buildings, and restaurant menus.) When we pulled up, he and whatever disability he supposedly has took a break from installing new hardwood floors in their house to come chew the fat with us as we loaded the firewood. (In Bill’s words, the only thing he ought to get disability for is whatever the fuck is wrong with his face.)]
Dad parked the truck in the backyard and turned the radio up so we could listen to the UK-IU football game as we worked. [Note: This game is always a hoot as neither team seems to be able to figure out how to dribble the ball… but they keep trying.] As we pulled the wood out of the overgrown fencerow he—ever wary of Things That Slither—kept a sharp eye out for snakes. I, however, was the only one who ran across any sort of creature. Crawling across a piece of wood I was toting toward the truck, I found a fuzzy black and orange caterpillar. It was black at either end. I held the wood out to Dad. “I guess, we’re supposed to have a winter that’s rough at the ends and mild in the middle,” I said.
“I have been watching the squirrels. The trees are heavy with acorns and seeds. It wouldn’t surprise me if it isn’t a bad one all the way through.” He plucked the bug from the log in puffy yellow work-glove fingers. “Or, well, that’s what my granny used to say.” He held his hand close to the vines in the fencerow and let the caterpillar crawl off.
His granny and her husband could very well have walked off the pages of Harry Crews’ childhood memoir into reality of a tobacco farm Casey County, Kentucky. Grandpa—James Monroe Atwood, called “Pete” for short (don’t ask me, I don’t know)—would be up before sunrise to do the milking; home for breakfast; then, depending on the season, off to work in tobacco, hay, or cattle; home for lunch; back to work until dark and dinner.
She—Ethel Florence Sweeney Atwood, only ever called “woman” by him—had an even longer day than he did, considering hers came without breaks for meals which she had to cook, serve, and clean up after. She had the garden to tend, chickens to feed, eggs to collect, clothes to mend, house to keep tidy, and canning to do. This goes without mentioning helping out with the slaughter and preparation of pigs for meat and lending a hand out on the farm whenever needed, all while taking care of seven kids—the second of which was my grandmother.
The more observant among you will probably be wondering why my last name is Atwood, since that was my grandmother’s maiden name and she was of a generation when it was taboo for a woman to retain that name after marriage. Very simple: she married another Atwood, my grandfather Wince.
Okay, this is where it gets tricky. In Casey County, back in the day, there were several supposedly unrelated sets of Atwoods. I am a little hazy as to the specific number of unrelated Atwood clans in Casey County, but my grandfather and grandmother came from two of them, a little girl I went to grade school with came from yet a third. As far back as anyone could remember the lines hadn’t crossed. We know that Granny’s line of Atwood’s came to the area from North Carolina via the Cumberland Gap, and she, the oldest living member of her line (now age 75,) assumes that all the Atwood clans of Casey County, Kentucky came from North Carolina.
Naturally, based on the sketchy information we have, her assumptions, and the staggeringly slim odds of several sets of unrelated people with identical last names would settle in the same county of Kentucky, it seems to me likely that when traced far enough back (I am guessing sometime in the early 19th Century) I will find that they are related, a Lowest Common Atwood, so to speak. Why should I care, you might ask, considering that neither my father nor I, are mentally retarded, have cleft palates or webbed toes? Well…
Later when we were back home unloading the first load of wood, Dad stood in the back of the truck and tossed the fireplace-sized pieces in the window of what used to be the side porch which, with Bill’s addition of walls, has become the wood room. I stood on the ground next to the truck and split the few larger pieces. As I handed up the last pieces of wood I’d just split for him to toss in the window, I said, “I don’t envy Grandpa and them who had to do this all day long every day. This is some backbreaking shit.”
“Hmm, back when I was growing up and spending summers down on the farm, I didn’t mind it a bit,” he said. “It’s a lot easier when you do it all the time.”
“I think I’d still rather be inside reading a book,” I laughed. That, for a large part, I guess, explains my interest in where we came from, considering what I have chosen to read: the Literature of the South. The more I read in my classes and on my free time, the more I am haunted by the question: Did my ancestors fight for the Blue or the Gray? From which tradition do my people come from?
We all have sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers; surely one of mine took a side. I can immediately strike from my list the eight on Mom’s side of the family, as her father was an orphan and her mother a crackpot who told various conflicting stories about her background—even her original last name; they are dead ends. That leaves me with eight from which to work and—ironically—two of them bore the name Atwood. Bearing that name myself and having a double dose of that blood (if my assumption about all Casey County Atwoods flowing from the same North Carolina spring is correct,) those are the two I am most interested in.
A story I remember hearing as a boy had one of my Atwood great-great-great-great-grandfather (on Granny’s side,) George Washington Atwood, being recruited to fight for both sides, albeit at different times. The first side (I don’t know which) came riding up looking for George Washington; he told them they had the wrong man as he was George Atwood and wasn’t interested in going. A while later the other side rode up looking for George Atwood, to which he again replied that they had the wrong man, he was George Washington and he wasn’t interested in going. Given Kentucky’s general ambivalence as to which side to take in the War and the inborn streak of orneriness in the Atwoods, this family legend strikes me as probably not far off the mark, even if it isn’t actually verifiable.
Still, family legend or not, it doesn’t satisfy my curiosity. Legend only becomes history in the absence (or ignorance) of a paper trail. Sadly, if I cannot find one—and close to 150 years later what are the odds of that?—that might be what I am stuck with. Perhaps, though, I can put this legend in a context that will satisfy some of my curiosity.
What do I know or suspect? Here is what I have recreated through conversations with Granny and internet research:
-
I know that Grandpa Pete, the youngest of nine kids, was born in 1903.
-
I know that his father, Nathan Meredith Atwood, had his leg removed when he was 82 and my grandmother “thirteen or fourteen.” Granny being born in 1927, this would have placed his birth in 1858 or 1859. Therefore…
-
I know that my Civil War era ancestor of would have indeed been George Washington Atwood, Nathan Meredith’s father.
-
I know that Nathan Meredith had vague memories of the trip from North Carolina through the Cumberland Gap. Granny says he was like three or four, which would place that trip sometime around the Civil War.
-
I know that Granny thinks they made the move because there was land to be had. Since Kentucky became a state in 1792 and the frontier during the Civil War was well past the Mississippi River, I doubt it was some sort of open-range, land-grab deal.
-
I know that Nathan Meredith owned his own land and that Grandpa Pete inherited it from him. I do not know how Nathan Meredith came by it.
-
I know that some of Grandpa Pete’s oldest brothers and sisters (born in the late 1870s-early 1880s) could remember having an African-American mammy.
-
I know that after the Civil War, many slaves—especially domestic servants—stayed where they were, doing the same things they always had. Therefore, considering numbers 5-8…
-
I suspect that, the lure of land precipitating George Washington Atwood and family’s move to Kentucky might have come from a landowning Atwood relative already here. However…
-
I know that our family never owned a plantation. But…
-
I know that Kentucky, aside from Virginia, had the largest number of people who owned one to seven slaves.
I have no idea what the personal politics of my great-great-great-grandfather George Washington Atwood actually were, but I can see some of the reasons he chose to stay neutral given what his circumstances might have been.
In a couple weeks I plan to go back to Stanford to visit Granny to dig through her records and, later this winter, I am hoping to convince Dad to drive over to Liberty (the Casey County seat) to search through court records with me. What I would like to find, is that Nathan Meredith was born a couple years earlier than I have surmised, as that would give even more credence to my theory. However, if I find that he was born even a couple years later, my explanation goes right into the shitter because that would place George Washington Atwood in North Carolina during the Civil War and I’d have to start from scratch.
I also plan to pay a visit to my Uncle Lorne, Granddaddy’s big brother, now in his 90s, and the oldest surviving member of that Atwood line. Looking at rosters of some of the Union regiments that came out of Casey County during the Civil War, I have noticed a smattering of Atwoods. I wonder if one of them was the father of Granddaddy’s grandfather Calvin Atwood (or “Uncle Cal Atwood” as Granny calls him?)
9-18-03 Chalk
“My father died when I was a baby and my mother, with a simple courage born and sustained by desperation and a lack of alternatives, raised my brother and me.”I left The Succubus and Boss asleep in bed when I went to class today. This is unusual, because it’s usually The Succubus who leaves first. I kissed them both before I left and biked to the theory class that makes my head hurt. Thankfully it has now been relocated to an antebellum house only a couple blocks away.
– Harry Crews
The very nature of this class tells me that I am not going to have to learn the material by rote; the bitch of it is that it’s a chore to try to assimilate and position the various strands of theory so that I have an idea of what has gone on and is going on, while I determine the best course(s) to take when approaching my own field; a field that I am finding has no distinct theory of its own and whose scholars traditionally have tended to be reticent of applying other theory to for fear that under the microscope it might lose its distinctive “Southerness.”
Of course, Michael Freyling argues that what the Fugitives did in the early part of this century was take “a south” and make it “The South” by anointing William Faulkner’s work the End-All-Be-All of the American South and suppressing the entire female and the African American male voices. As far as I can see, what this portends for the field is the question: If, by being more inclusive, will Lit of the South lose its “distinctiveness” while by becoming, ironically, more universal in nature?
Right now Lit of the South seems to enjoy something better of a reputation than does most regional Lits (Appalachain Lit, etc.) Presumably, Lit of the South has a quality that makes it a more important part of American Lit than a mere regional lit. And, I would like to think that it does, as that is where I find myself drawn. Rather than the overt racism/sexism which could very well be Lit of the South’s “distinctiveness,” I would like to find something else—anything else. Right now I am drawn toward investigating the common myths that underlie all voices of Lit of the South. Is there a primary one, or are there even dominant ones?
Obviously, there is work to be done here.
This is the only class I have exclusively with grad students from the English department. The Lit of the South class is mostly undergrad, while the Appalachian Studies class is (a) sociology and (b) filled with a largely cross-disciplinary field (people from every discipline from English and Sociology, to Economics and Wildlife Biology.) As usual, I leave the class muttering to myself from a combination of equal parts fighting with Saussure, Todorov, and Lacan and hearing (what seems) a majority of my classmates talk about “their students.”
I will not hide the fact that these innocent mentions dig at me like spurs. It frustrates me that I don't have students; it angers me that I feel out of the loop. I don’t feel lesser in any tangible way; I feel I have as good or a better grasp on the material than the majority of my classmates. I wonder about the politics involved. I am acutely aware that I am from an in-state school instead of Syracuse or Vanderbilt, for being a local but not a product of their system. I feel subtle eyes on my T-shirts, cigarettes, and tattoos. It’s the diametric opposite of the overt shit I had to swallow on the ship for reading whenever I got the chance, for toting a book around in the back pocket of my coveralls, but it feels the same. Hunter Thomson via Terry Gilliam writes, “No. Calm down. Learn to ENJOY losing.” Fuck that; I’ll mutter, and stew, and wait.
Leaving my second class of the day this afternoon, I took the chalk from the desk after the prof split. Originally, I thought she’d left it by mistake and wanted to return it, but found that it belonged to the room instead. I held it in a pocketed hand while several of us smoked and talked. One of the undergrads came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be worth it to be an artist because of the sanity one necessarily sacrifices in the process. I built on that by asking if the demons were any different for us who are compelled to do what we do, study their work. In essence, we are, in many cases, searching for the same thing as the artist was in writing it: meaning, order, truth.
After a few butts I didn’t return the chalk, but instead headed on to the Student Center where in less than an hour there was going to be a presentation by Frank X. Walker (a part of the African American Studies and Research Program’s Carter G. Woodson Lecture Series here at UK.) Walker was one of the founding members of the Affrilachian Poets—originally a group of students, faculty, and community-minded people committed to writing here at UK in the early 1980s, it has evolved to encompass the voices of all people of color from the region.
I was early and the first to arrive, so I chose a good vantage point on the right side of the aisle close to the front, but not where I’d be under his nose. While I waited for the room to fill, I read a little extra from the unassigned stories in the Crews book. As I read, the room slowly filled up with, as I’d hoped, a mixed audience—I like harmonious diverse blends. But, I noticed that it wasn’t blended very well. Most of the whites sat on the right side of the aisle, the blacks on the left. Curious, but at least no one had to sit in the back.
Walker talked about and read selections from his new book of poetry Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York—York being the slave who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their three-year exploration of the Louisiana Purchase. The book of poetry was written from York’s perspective and is not only the fictional equivalent of the journals Lewis & Clark kept but, it seems, the creation of an American folk hero (read Southern Myth?) I am interested to see if my hypothesis holds true when it actually comes out in print in February.
The poem that had the most immediate impact on me was toward the end of Walker’s reading. It told of York’s feelings upon their return to St. Louis, from where their expedition originally set out. After three testing, but rewarding years of exploring an untamed land, interacting with the native peoples, and seeing wondrous unheard of sights, upon his return he finds that he is excluded from the tales that grow from other explorers’ cups. Not even rewarded with his freedom, he is relegated again to the status of someone’s “boy.”
After the presentation, I introduced myself to Walker. I wanted to mention something along the lines of how much that poem had meant to me, given my own feelings of displacement here—that I deserve better because I am from here, because I have loved the school ever since I can remember, because one of my first field trips in grade school made a pit-stop at UK’s own Kennedy Book Store. Instead, I shook his hand and mentioned that I was a grad student in English from Stanford—ten minutes from his hometown of Danville (which York had traveled through with Clark.) Upon mention of Stanford, he smiled and said, “Homeboy.”
On the walk home, I wanted to take the chalk and write on something: the sidewalk, a telephone poll. I wanted to draw a flower, write “York was here” or “Chalk Sucks.” I didn’t though; I left it in my pocket. I think I will leave it there, hang onto it for a while.
One year ago today...
9-17-03 Kitten
I was thankful to hear that the reading list for my Lit of the South class was comprised of texts I hadn’t read. I had a little experience with Faulkner and Welty, but hadn’t read the chosen texts (Absalom, Absalom and The Golden Apples.) I had read an excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God in one of the surveys I had with Dr. Neeper last year, but not the whole thing. No experience at all with Peter Taylor, William Styron, and Harry Crews.
After munching down Welty and Taylor in the first couple weeks, today was our first day of discussion on Crews’ memoir A Childhood: the Biography of a Place. I haven’t been so enamored of a book in quite a while—easily since last fall when we (um, that’s the royal We, that is) read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. It has a peculiar effect on me; a personal one similar to the one after I finished Bobby Ann Mason's Clear Springs, like I'd just talked with a relative.
[Note: Word is that toward the end of the semester she, one of our writers in residence, is going to visit the class. We may pre-empt Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner in lieu of her new book on Elvis (which she was working on when she visited my creative non-fiction class at Morehead to talk about Clear Springs.]
Born in 1935, Crews was
born
equidistant between Granddaddy
and Dad (1922 and 1948.) Granted he was
talking
about Georgia but Crews grew up on tobacco farms, farms like the ones
in
the Kentucky counties my grandparents and father grew up in (Casey and
Lincoln.)
Had it not been for breaking his back in the early 1950s, Granddaddy
would
have had the same occupation as Crews’ father: tenant farmer (just like
most
of his and Granny’s brothers
remained until
they got land of their own.)Not only do I get an interesting insight into a people much like the stock from which I come, but Crews starts the memoir with a scene ten years before his birth, calling it his first memory. It is a scene from his father’s life, his father dying when he was 21 months old. He has no real memories of him, but he does have the stories he's heard about his father. I am kind of like that with Granddaddy who died when I was six. I am a little better off than Crews in that I have some actual memories of the man—if only fragmented images and parts of scenes (not to mention in that I was dealing with a grandfather, he a father.)
The Succubus and I were talking about this as we drove back from dinner in Stanford a month ago. I was telling her how Granddaddy’s usual response to Granny’s mouth was to grab his fishing rod and head over the hill to the pond. I was there one time, just a toddler, when Granny tore into him for something. When Mom and Dad returned from wherever they had been, they found Granny still in the kitchen bitching for all she was worth. Granddaddy and I were nowhere to be found; he had snatched me and the fishing pole. But like I told The Succubus, I am not sure if I remember that or just heard the story too often. It seems like I remember it, but…
What do I remember of him? I remember how he ran on the balls of his feet. I remember sitting on his lap as he played pinochle with my dad and aunts, me tossing the cards he selected. I remember his ice blue eyes and snowy white hair. I remember how the artificial turf on the steps to the funeral home office where he worked felt. I remember there was not one, but two of those heavy old black rotary phones in their house: one I couldn’t touch (for calls from the funeral home) and the personal one (which I could play with at least until caught.) I remember gray slacks and black socks, an unbuttoned or no white button-up shirt, and a T-shirt: his post-work look. I remember he kept his carton of cigarettes (Winstons) under the bed. I remember how the cars lined every street when they laid him out at the funeral home where he worked. I remember Dad kissed his hand. I remember the embroidered red roses Dad and the rest of the pallbearers wore on the lapels of their suits (much like the tattoo on my left wrist.)
I know a lot more about him, some of which I could feasibly claim to remember. Like his funeral was the largest Stanford has seen to date; it took him close to three months to smoke each carton of cigarettes; that he drove the hearse to pick up bodies and was preparing to become a partner in the Beasley-Rainey-Speaks (& Atwood) Funeral Home when he had that final stroke. I know that for the years between breaking his back and coming to drive the hearse, he drove our town’s only cab. I know his hair was completely white by his early thirties. I know his brothers and sisters (all older) called him Kitten, a childhood nickname. I know he was the one that they all turned to in crisis.
I know he was a crack shot with either pistol or rifle and broke into tears at war movies. I know he served in the Army Corps of Engineers in WWII, and went over on or soon after the D-Day invasion. I know he came home with two Purple Hearts and a bullet scar across the bridge of his nose. I know one cold winter night in France he got to see his older brother Clyde for a few minutes, but his troop had already moved on when Clyde, a cook, returned with a pie for him. I know he tragically killed two fellow soldiers as they returned from liberty drunk and didn’t give the password.
The entire family loves to tell stories about him to The Succubus. Mom likes to tell about how, soon after she and Dad were discharged from the Navy, when she was pregnant with me, he would come and waddle her downtown to eat lunch, introducing her to everyone along the way. Judy likes to tell of his reaction after she cut down on Dad and one of his friends with a baseball for tormenting her and she hit the front window frame in the dead middle, breaking no glass. He tossed the ball back to her and told her she couldn’t do it again. She didn’t and busted the front window; he laughed.
In the dark car on the way home that night, The Succubus said, “I wish I had got to meet him.”
So do I, sweetheart. So do I…
One year ago today...
9-14-03 Galactic Potpourri
Here is a mixed jar of things that may or may not smell so good:
-
As
children, Bill and I knew that there
were
certain times that were dangerous to go in the bathroom: just after Dad. As awful as it was, we took some
twisted
sense of pride in the way our father could stink up a bathroom. The
odor
took on a life of its own; it became the Smog
Monster. It would stand in front of the mirror and flex its slimy
wings
as it waited for the next visitor. I was thankful when I finally left
home,
as I wouldn’t have to brave the bathroom waving the Bic lighter in
front
of me like Godzilla’s flaming breath.
And, then I got married …and she snickers each time she hears my “Jesus God, girl!”
-
While we are on the topic of monster movies. Two years ago on September 11, I was living with Darryl in Mays Hall. He was already gone to one of his preternaturally early science classes when I got up for my first class of the day. I flipped on the TV for a quick ESPN-fix before trudging across campus, but instead I found early coverage of one of the towers smoking. As I stood there in my comfy red robe watching—here came another plane! I had flipped on the TV just in time to catch the second crash—or to hear the reporters telling what they could see, as the initial footage, frankly, sucked. I ate my breakfast and did my reading for class while monitoring the goings on.
When I left the room, I left the TV on so that Darryl would be sure to catch it when he came in for lunch. Come to find out, he just flipped the TV off, thinking that I was taping yet another of my old monster movies. Only when he tuned in to NPR did he find out what happened.
-
Has Placido Polanco been playing professional baseball for the past thirty-five years? Does he keeping making comebacks like boomerangs, viruses, and Jesus? Or, have many Placido Polancos® been imported over the years from some hidden jungle baseball-player cloning facility in Central America?
-
In between my classes Thursday, I walked over to the little strip of UK dependent shops and restaurants on Limestone. A little hungry and needing a pack of cigarettes and to read the last fifty pages of Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis for class, I chose the ‘Ho (short for Tallyho.) I had been here once before; the nuttiest bitch on the planet had brought me here once upon a time when I was on leave back from the Navy.
The ‘Ho is a curious mix of a western saloon, college eatery, and the alien cantina from Star Wars. It is dark and dusty with hardwood floors; a railing separates the smokers from the non-smokers. By the front door (not a swinging one) is a shelf of fliers for local bands, happy hours, and concerts. Orders are taken by student-job flunkies at one end of the counter in the middle of the right-hand wall; others scream your name from the other end when your food is ready. In the back of the room, neon bars announce the airport-esque Ho-Mart. Pinball machines and arcade games haunt dustier corners. The clientele is half students and half admin staffers, with a smattering of scrubs from the hospital.
I think next time I will give the name Aloysius just to hear them scream it. Maybe Jesus.
-
A couple weeks ago the Damrons went to Memphis. When they returned, we found that Janet had bought us gifts for checking up on the guinea pig (now known as Rusty.) For The Succubus, a stuffed Stitch (from Lilo & Stitch); for me, was a Jesus Christ Action Figure—complete with Gliding Action.
At first I didn’t want to open it because I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but (and this is why I married) tonight The Succubus came up with the perfect use for it. We are going to take turns hiding the Messiah around the apartment so the other can Find Jesus. (Her sister will be so pleased.)
Right now he’s riding around in my pocket (I get to hide it first) which has afforded me the opportunity to perform miracles around the apartment all evening. The little wheels under his robe (that provide his gliding action) don’t glide well in slicks of spilled coffee. It won’t part them either, but then I realized I don’t have the Moses Action Figure …yet.
-
Thursday night’s double feature: The Hours and The Road Warrior. I wish our diet was so balanced.
-
The NBA
story I haven’t really been keeping up with—or trying not to—this
summer,
is the Lakers. I think the
Shaq-Kobe-Karl-GaryPayton tandem is a shit
sandwich
(an interesting idea just fated to go bad.) For added strife there is
the
Kobe Bryant sexual assault trial. Laker Head Coach Phil Jackson, when
asked
if Bryant should be playing considering the circumstances, said: "I
think
it's his choice. His genius is basketball. To do that, he's got to play
it
at its highest level. I think it will provide him a space where he can
do
what he does.”
What the fuck does that exactly mean? I am a trained professional (a wordsmith, as Dr. Neeper would say) and I can’t make head or tail out of it.
-
The walls of the bathroom stalls at the local Stupendi-Plex movie theatre in town are a flattish black with little white spots which, when seated, provides a decided galactic sensation. I mean, it’s downright disconcerting, the agoraphobic vertigo! (What if I fall off the toilet, Jesus?) With my beard amongst the stars I felt like George Lucas (All Hail, Big George!) For a minute I almost expected yellow letters to start crawling up the door and John Williams to kick it when I reached for the TP.
-
TV’s John Ritter died today (as did, in my best TV newscaster voice, "The Man in Black Johnny Cash.) Ritter, a couple weeks younger than my father, basically bled to death because of a tear in his aorta. As weepy as I am, I couldn’t help but to snicker when I read Henry Winkler’s statement to Entertainment Tonight: “It’s like there is a big tear in the world’s heart.” I don't get it: Jack Tripper dies sooothey get an official statement from The Fonz? Is he the official spokesman for '70s television (now that Carroll O’Connor is dead) or the entire damn decade.
9-06-03 Our Mother’s Eyes
To look at me and Bill one would never suspect we are brothers. He is tall, standing close to six and a half feet; and, while 6’0 is not exactly short, I am not the textbook definition of tall. I am pale and red headed; he is dark and swarthy. He is painfully thin, I am stocky. [Note: As a matter of fact, the only physical trait I can think of that we share is the structure of part of our faces. From the bridges of our noses through our eyebrows, we are virtually identical—from the way our eyebrows are shaped to the slant of our eyes. Even the eye color is similar; both are different shades of hazel—his leaning more toward brown, mine to green. We have our mother’s eyes.]
When he first reported to the ship in the summer of ’98, people laughed when we told them we were brothers; once they got to know us though, they were forced to admit that we had to be brothers. We both smoked Camels, drank Mt. Dew, could eat mayonnaise with a spoon, and had similar tastes in food, movies, and music. The more observant realized that many of our mannerisms (for example, the way we smoke cigarettes), facial expressions, body language, and are virtually identical. And, most importantly, we both have personalities—above average intelligence, outspokenness, sharp tongues, and biting wits—that virtually ensure that people either love or hate us—no middle ground.
I always thought it was kind of cool to look so different on the outside and be so similar on the inside, to watch people as they realized this. Only this weekend though, did I discover a fundamental difference between us.
On Saturday, we—Travis, Bill and I, and the geologist—went to Stanford to visit the folks. Mom had been after us to bring Trav home so she could fix dinner for him, but mostly Bill and I wanted to split and rick all the firewood piled out back on the patio. [Note: If he and/or I don’t do it, they will; and, they really have no business doing that kind of work—not with his heart and her fibromyalgia.]
Working parallel to the narrow edge of the patio, I used the weighted splitter; Bill—at a 90º angle from me, parallel to the long edge—used the axe. [Note: I used to enjoy watching Bill split wood. Because of his height he was always really good at it, but because he was so thin it was always awkward looking. When he would swing the splitter back for his swing, he would wobble so much that you thought he was just going to keep going with it. Of course, he always enjoyed watching me split wood, too. With my fucked up eyeballs, I couldn’t—and still can’t—hit the same spot twice except by sheer luck.]
As we worked, I noticed that our swings were drastically different. His method is to stand feet together well back from his target, swing the axe back behind him, and take a giant stride toward the wood as he came down with the axe. In many ways it is reminiscent of a pitcher’s wind-up and delivery from the mound. As for myself, I stand, feet shoulder-width apart, about three feet from the target. The arc of my swing going out to the side of my body, I take no step toward the wood and let my upper body and legs do all the work, such that I usually ended up on my toes after each blow.
The effectiveness of Bill’s swing comes from utilizing his height to get as much speed into his swing as possible My technique is just brute force, playing into my own physiology: my arms, chest, and shoulders. His swing is better suited to using an axe than a splitter because of its lighter weight, just as mine is better suited to using the heavier splitter (without fucking up your back, that is.) [Note: Not that either one of us would use the other’s tool any differently than our own.]
Noticing the differences in our swings got me to thinking and a lot of things fell into place for me. It became evident that for as many similarities Bill and I have, we approach things 100% differently because we are built differently from top to bottom. Most of our similarities, ironically enough, are only superficial. It’s like our choice of career paths. He is a science/math type; I am a humanities type. He is fascinated by the trajectories of comets and planetary orbits; I like how the stars twinkle. I enjoy films that speak to some aspect of the human condition; he likes mutants and explosions. This weekend he told me to get a good look at Mars because it was as close to Earth as it would be in our lifetime; I told him about the film Lenny, how it blends comedy and tragedy into a very telling depiction of the 1960s.
Not that one is better than the other, though; his suits him, mine suits me. I have no doubt that he could do what I do and I could do what he does. It’s just that we wouldn’t enjoy it.
9-04-03 Rodeo Clown
The situation with the bleach blonde, middle-aged, woman who lives downstairs from us is escalating. For the past month or so, she has raised all sorts of hell about the noise we make after her bedtime (which seems to be sometime around 7:30 pm.) She claims she can hear the base from our speakers through the floor, us moving furniture, and stomping. I claim that she needs to lay off the caffeine so she can sleep because we have done everything in our power (beyond reason) to be quiet up here.
She bangs on the ceiling (our floor) all the time. Sometimes The Succubus and I will just look at each other and shrug, because we haven’t a clue as to what we’ve done. She has reported us to the apartment managers, who seem to have an open mind about who is at fault. She has called the police (who when they came upstairs and heard the noise level rolled their eyes at her complaint and went away.)
Tonight at midnight…
She stormed upstairs
drunk off her
ass dressed in her tight jeans,
cowboy
boots, and white cowboy hat. With her preternaturally blonde hair
peeking
out from under the hat and her smeared mascara, she looked like a rodeo
clown.
She didn’t knock on the door like a normal person. Instead she kicked
the
door and ducked out of sight where I couldn’t see who it was through
the peephole,
which sent Boss into a barking
conniption.
Finally I caught sight of her in the edge of the peephole. I opened the
door
and asked what her problem was, to which she replied that us living
above
her was her problem. No sooner than I asked her if she was going to a
rodeo,
she started slinging motherfuckers. I listened to her scream about some people having jobs (“I don’t know what you do that you can stay up all night?!) where they had to get up in the morning to go to work (“On a weekday! On a weekday! On a weekday! On a weekday!”) and stomp the floor. At first I tried to explain that we had turned down the radio as far as possible so that we could still hear it, turned the bass levels down as far as they went, placed towels under the speakers… but I am sure she heard none of it as she banged the wall with her fists and chanted “Inconsiderate motherfuckers!” As I stood there in my comfy red robe, socks and sweat pants, watching her palsic fit, I imagined stepping outside the apartment, flipping her hat off her head and kicking her saddlebag of a purse down the steps. Rather, I waited until her tantrum was over and asked her to leave because she was drunk and scaring my dog.
When she stomped back downstairs in another flurry of motherfucker assholes, I called the office and left a complaint. I was proud of the way I conducted myself, but shaking because I was so mad.
Later…
She just showed back up. Bearing two wine glasses and a bottle of wine and leaning seductively against the door frame, no less. I told her no thanks, that I was both married and didn’t drink. Seeing as how she was calm I took the opportunity to recount the measures we had taken to be quiet for her (the ones she’d missed earlier while throwing her tantrum.) I also told her that part of my job is working at night studying for my classes and that I listen to the radio while doing so, not loud enough to keep my wife awake sleeping only feet from the speakers, however. I apologized for keeping her awake, explaining that it wasn’t intentional.
[Note: I had enough tact, not to mention that I was getting an education so that I didn’t have to work slavish early-morning hours, yet could earn enough money that I didn’t have to spend my middle-age in a crappy one-bedroom apartment with intolerant drunken rubes for neighbors.]
Even later…
A new tactic: now she is playing her shit-kick at deafening levels beneath us, giving the occasional rebel yell. What do you bet that wine bottle is empty? Little does she know that I can sleep through hurricanes.
Bitch.
9-02-03 Underworld, Part V: Invisible Man
With school lighting off, it seems that I am going to have to push my reading of Don DeLillo’s Underworld even farther to a back burner. As it stands now (and has for the last month and a half or so,) it has already taken up almost permanent residence in the bathroom underneath The Succubus’ book of Jewel’s poetry (which some—not necessarily myself—would argue is a fitting place for the latter.)
It’s not that Underworld is lacking in any way I can put my finger on, but it like I stated in my last writing about the book, the meandering storyline and infinite interconnections between characters with no seeming purpose is really frustrating. It is hard to explain what I mean by purpose. Let’s put it this way: I am not looking for something traditional either in form or content, so I am not upset that it doesn’t follow any pattern that comes before it. I hate to sound like a Leavisite, but I do want to get something out of the experience of reading the book. Tell me something, show me something, teach me something—anything—about some aspect of the human condition.
[Note: A rebuttal claiming that there is no point if it is truly a postmodern work is a cop-out. True, the aim of any good postmodern text is to tear down the structures of learning that came before it and to play in the rubble (as opposed to the modernist tendency to build new structures from the rubble.) From this, many may take the flippant stance that there is no point to a postmodern work. That is naïve. If that were the case, why would we read more than one work by an author? Why would people like Barthelme and Winterson have developed such well respected names in the field? My stance is that there is always a point; if, in nothing else, in the rubble chosen to play in. For example, Winterson plays in the rubble from toppled gender structures. If there is no point it is crap, a waste of my time.]
Whether or not Underworld is a postmodern work, I am not at liberty to say, not having finished it. To this point—two-thirds of the way into the novel—it doesn’t seem to be shaping up that way, though. It seems to be operating more on a modernist frame. What I mean by that is that stylistically I can see existing structural techniques being pulled down, altered, and reused (such as a paragraph-by-paragraph stream of consciousness in individual characters—as opposed to Faulkner’s fragmentary stream—as well as the same technique utilized to give what I have called a stream of public consciousness.)
I can also see some preexisting structures of understanding being questioned/pulled down (for instance, the Cold War US/USSR nuclear binary and the nature of reality in “Videotape.”) The troubling thing here is that—to this point in the novel—I see no new structures of understanding being erected in their place (which is more consistent with postmodern pieces.) Perhaps, I shouldn’t, but because of the stylistic rebuilding of structures, I am also expecting new structures of understanding for the world view the author wants to present.
Another thing that justifies my want of a structure of understanding is DeLillo’s thematic concerns. He keeps pounding the themes of everything is connected and waste (and waste management) in proactive ways. Rather than establishing them as themes by tearing down the preexisting structures by which they are currently understood in fiction and playing with the rubble created (which would be in line with postmodernism,) he is building these themes by reemphasizing them episode by episode in the novel (more in line with traditional fiction.) Are these themes what he intends as the new structures for understanding that will replace the ones he is pulling down? Everything is connected and everything is shit? It seems too weak an explanation, therefore I am expecting more.
Another reason for me to expect more is a passage in the middle of the novel where DeLillo makes distinct allusions to a highly political work from the middle of the last century: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. His character Ismael Muňoz—a.k.a. Moonman 157—equates Wright’s main character. Misunderstood and mistreated Muňoz finds a safe haven in the subway tunnels beneath the streets of New York where a community of people lived, kept pets, hung clothes to dry, and “stole electricity from the government”; the same as Ellison’s misunderstood and mistreated Invisible Man lived in complete isolation in the middle of the same bustling city (albeit aboveground), also stealing electricity. While this could be considered coincidence, the fact that both novels reference the music of Charlie “Bird” Parker in the same paragraph as we learn of the electricity stealing leads me to think otherwise.
Why would such an influential, politically-charged, revolutionary work as Invisible Man be referenced for seemingly no other reason than “everything is connected” and “everything is shit”? Like I say, that is too weak to serve as the answer. It has to be part of the build-up to a larger structure of understanding. So far we are questioning reality, know that everything is connected, and are questioning the Cold War black/white good/bad US/USSR dichotomy (which we, as post-Wall collapse readers, already know is fallacious and are expecting DeLillo, as a post-Wall collapse writer, to give us insight into,) and know that somehow everything revolves around our own waste (or the management of it.)
Something else has to be coming. And, 550 pages into the novel it hasn’t even been hinted at (not that I can see, anyway.) If old boy is just playing in the rubble and leaves things as is, I am going to be sorely pissed. (Of course, if so, I will be in the right spot to be pissed.)
[Note: And while we are on the theme of "everything is connected" I thought I might mention that in The Godfather, just before Sonny Corleone is brutally gunned down the game he is listening to on the radio is the October 3rd, 1951 Russ Hodges radio broadcast of the game where, a half-inning later Bobby Tompson would hit The Shot Heard around the World.]
9-01-03 Can I get a Huzzah?!
School has begun. The painfully sweaty days of August have arrived. Hunter Thompson, in the guise of Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, summed it up best when he wrote, “I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.” He was writing about the desert, but being born and raised in Louisville, I know he feels my pain. It’s a brain numbing experience thinking of that day in the Not Too Distant Future when The Succubus and I pack our backs and head south, where I can smell magnolia (in lieu of horse shit) as I read. (Sadly, to study the Literature of the South one usually has to live there.) Thompson himself lives in “a fortified compound near Aspen, Colorado” where he pimps his name for ESPN.com’s Page 2 supposedly writing about the NFL.
…which reminds me: today is Labor Day, the day after tomorrow is Mom and Dad’s 92nd wedding anniversary, and next weekend the NFL season starts. Huzzah! Huzzah! The death knell of summer! Football season is finally here! I can finally stop following baseball and break the word huzzah out of the mothballs we packed it in at the end of last season (along with my nifty long-sleeved, orange shirt I wear while watching—now listening—to Browns games.) Huh-fucking-zah!
Alright, I know I tend to get long-winded when talking about the NFL, but this season I am going to try and keep it to a minimum. I spent the last couple days sweating over a close to seven page tome detailing How the Season Will Go, but I scrapped it rather than spend another seven pages dealing with the NFC. Other than maybe Tami, I don’t think anyone reads my sports diatribes anyway.
Anyway, here goes with my Ultra-condensed Fat-Free Preseason Predictions:
AFC
East
Buffalo
Bills – With their
newly
purchased
defense they will cut their losses almost in half from a year ago going
11-5;
more importantly, quarterback Drew Bledsoe will make the Patriots
regret trading
him, not only by winning the division and making a playoff run, but by
sweeping
them in the regular season.New
England – The truth comes out:
quarterback Tom Brady
is
a hack. I see another 9-7 campaign, another missed playoffs,
and more
teeth gnashing in Boston as the realization that their Super Bowl
victory
two years ago was a fluke. [Note:
Whoops! Guess I was wrong. The Pats won their second Super Bowl in
three years on a last second field goal to beat the Panthers 32-29.]Miami
– All Hail, Ricky
Williams! He has
finally
established
himself as the premier running back that everyone thought he would be
coming
out of college. Sadly, quarterback Jay Fiedler is as durable as a bag
of
potato chips and Brian Greise is itching to create a quarterback
controversy
for his daddy’s old team. Ricky better have a Bo Jackson Techmo-Bowl
season
and rush for 4800 yards, or Miami stands a chance of finishing under
.500
(I’m thinking 7-9) and missing the playoffs for the first time
since
the Civil War.NY
Jets – Last year’s surprise
Wonder
Boy Chad Pennington
shattered
his wrist in a preseason game, which means the Jets season is already
over.
Septuagenarian Vinny Testeverde will become only the ninth quarterback
to
pass for over 40,000 yards early in their 5-11 season. North
Pittsburgh
– They finally
got
rid
of Kordell’s sorry ass in the off-season
(Huzzah!
Huzzah!) but career retread Tommy Maddox is still penciled in as
starter.
With a versatile offense and the usual kick-ass defense, Pittsburgh
will
have a solid year (10-6) and win the division, but there will be
no
real joy in the Steel Town until they have a decent QB, exiting early
from
the playoffs. [Note: I am not happy at all that my favorite NFL running back Chris Fuamatu-Ma'afala didn’t make the final cut yesterday. I suspect it was because his last name was too hard for them to pronounce. Just further reason to hate the Steelers. Of course, it did make me snicker that their star linebacker Joey Porter got shot in the butt in a Colorado night club over the weekend.]
Baltimore
– The Ravens
upgraded an
already
kick-ass defense in the off-season, but still have a questionable
offense.
If Head Coach Brian Billick is half as smart as he is an asshole, he
will
handle the quarterback situation (between career back-up Chris Redmond
and
rookie stud Kyle Boller) well enough to perhaps land the final wildcard
with
a 9-7season. Watch out for this team in 2004. [Note: I just read that Boller will indeed start the season at quarterback. My gut tells me this is a mistake, that he needs to be eased in around mid-season, that 9-7 will be a hard mark for the Ravens to reach if he gets jerked in favor of Redmond early in the season. Time will tell.]
Cleveland
– Head Coach Butch Davis takes a step back from our
playoff season last year (7-9, maybe
8-8) seeing as we have what looks to be mostly junior high school
kids
playing defense for us. How heretofore back-up quarterback Kelly
Holcomb
does as the starter in Tim Couch’s stead this year will determine which
quarterback
will get traded for defensive goodies after the season.Cincinnati – The Bengals under
new coach
Marvin Lewis (the
architect
of the Ravens Super Bowl defense three years ago) look to finally be
heading
in the right direction. (Did I just say that?) If owner Mike
Brown
continues to let Lewis run the team as he sees fit, the Bengals could
be actual
contenders year after next. (Did I just say that, too?) As for
this
year, there is just too much chaff that still needs to be discarded for
much
to happen, although going 5-11 or 6-10 isn’t out of the
question. (Cincinnati
fans would shit themselves for six wins in one season.) South
Indianapolis
– Next to
Kansas
City,
Indy might have the most explosive offense in the AFC with Peyton
Manning,
Edgerrin James, and Marvin Harrison. If Head Coach Tony Dungy can make
the
defense merely adequate, the Colts will easily go 11-5, win the
division,
and could go all the way to the Super Bowl (unless Peyton Manning truly
does
carry a playoff jinx.)Tennessee
– Hamstrung by
salary
cap issues in the off-season, the 2002 AFC South champs were limited to
releasing
most of their players and resigning them to lesser paying contracts
during
free agency. While this didn’t upgrade shit, for the most part it kept
a
damn decent team in tact. With a healthy Steve McNair on offense and
Jevon
“The Freak” Kearse on defense, the Titans will be players again this
year
going 9-7 and competing with the Ravens and Raiders for the
final wildcard.Houston
– Year two for the new Houston team. Alas, the offensive line that
allowed
David Carr to get sacked 1400 times last season is still shaky. Of
course,
with a couple more offensive weapons at running back and receiver, they
should
improve on last year’s 4-12 season. Will go (6-10), allow
Jacksonville
to claim the worst record in the division, and hope fervently that
David
Carr can survive another year of pounding.Jacksonville
– Rebuilding mode under
new
Head Coach Jack Del Rio
makes
for a very dull season in Jacksonville. All things considered though,
they
shouldn’t do much worse than last year's ten loss season going 4-12.
On a related note, my prediction for how long Mark Brunell keeps the
starting
quarterback position before the reins are given to Byron Leftwich is game five.West
Kansas
City – Much to my brother’s
frustration, even though
Kansas
City had the best offense in the League last year, he and I could have
made
the team on defense. Another cause for him to worry was the hip injury
that
running back Priest Holmes suffered with a couple games left in the
season.
Of course, the off-season saw many defensive signings and a healthy
Priest
Holmes emerge. Kansas City is my odds on favorite to go to win the
division
(12-4), get a bye in the playoffs, and go to the Super Bowl.San
Diego – I believe in
Head
Coach
Marty Schottenheimer; he plays my kind of football: Smash-mouth. I
liked
him as far back as his days in Cleveland when his
only worry was John Elway, loved him when
he coached Kansas City in the middle to late 90s, and I have thoroughly
enjoyed
what he has been doing with the Chargers for the last couple years. And
this
is going to be the year they finally arrive. A typically strong
Schottenheimer
defense and the offensive combination of Drew Brees, David Boston, and
LaDanian
Tomlinson equal a 10-6 season and the first wildcard.Oakland
– More or less the
same
team that suited up last year. On one hand, that is good because they
did
make it to the Super Bowl last year. On the other hand, I can hear them
aging
as I type—this is a talented, but very old team. MVP
Quarterback Rich
Gannon is 37, receivers Jerry Rice and Tim Brown are 40 and 37,
respectively.
Asshole linebacker Bill Romonowski is 37. Safety Rod Woodson is 38. As
much
as I would love to see Jerry Rice get another ring, I think his window
of
opportunity was slammed shut by Tampa Bay last year. Prediction: Age
finally
catches up with the Raiders as they limp to a 9-7 finish, in a
dead
heat with the Titans and Ravens for the final wildcard spot.Denver – Brian Griese is out (to
the
Dolphins) and Jake
“The
Snake” is in (from the Cardinals) as quarterback. From everything I
have
read, everyone seems to think that as Plummer goes, so goes the
Broncos.
I am not so sure, though. Whereas, I think Plummer is an upgrade over
Griese,
I am not sure that the quarterback position was the one that needed
tweaking.
The part of the team I question is Head Coach Mike Shanahan’s handling
of
a defense whose secondary frankly sucks. Last year he hamstrung
defensive
coordinator Ray Rhodes before bringing in a yes-man to fill his shoes.
Prediction:
Plummer, after a rocky start finally settles in nicely although Denver
only
goes 8-8 and misses the playoffs. After the season, Shanahan
gets the
axe.NFC
East
East
Philadelphia
– Still the
undeniable
cream of the NFC East crop. Some argue that they might have taken a
couple
steps back in handling defensive personnel in the off-season, but I
don’t
see it as much of a problem. While they probably won’t win 12 regular
season
games this season, I see the Eagles going 11-5 and winning the
division
easily. I also see a dose of payback in store for Tampa Bay when they
roll
into town for the season’s first Monday
Night Football game.NY
Giants – One of the
ugliest
playing teams in football these days, it’s hard to predict what kind of
season
this is going to be for them. They still have a solid defense and
in
the off-season drastically improved their special teams. That, combined
with
a dysfunctional but oft-times effective offense, earns the Giants my
preseason
Team Ugly Award. My best bet is that Head Coach Jim Fassell can pull
enough
rabbits out of his ass to keep them in the playoff hunt until the final
week
of the season (9-7), but until they get a real quarterback
(Kerry
Collins, just ain’t it) they won’t be serious Super Bowl contenders.Washington – Ah, one season down,
two left
(at most) until
Head
Coach Steve Spurrier flunks out of the league. Last year, he and his
“Fun
‘n’ Gun” system finished 7-9 largely due to the defense designed by
Marvin
Lewis who in the off-season took his skills to Cincinnati. While
the
Redskins will definitely put more points on the board this season, they
still
don’t have the pieces in place for Spurrier to accomplish what he
wants.
Combined with the total collapse of their defense, they won’t win as
many
games this season as last (6-10).Dallas – As much as I hate to admit
it,
Dallas is going to
be
an interesting team to watch for the next couple years. How long will
the
potentially volatile marriage of owner Jerry “This Is My Team”
Jones
and Bill “No It Ain’t” Parcells last, long enough for Parcells to right
the
sinking ship that was once America’s Team? So far it has been smooth
sailing,
but then again they haven’t played a game yet. Time will tell. As for
this
season, I see only a small improvement over last year, but not
necessarily
in the win department (5-11, for the fourth season in a row). I
also
see both a breakout season in 2004 and storm clouds on the horizon. [Note:
In today’s final cuts, I noticed that former University of Kentucky
All-American
tight end James Whalen made the team. Can I get a huzzah?]North
Green
Bay – Still the cream
of
the crop in the NFL’s weakest division, regardless of a defense that
should
be slightly weaker than last year’s and not many passing options for
Brett
Favre. But, hey, he didn’t retire and the simple fact is that he could
make
me and Bill look like All-Pro receivers. If he stays healthy, the
Packers
will win double digit games (10-6) and earn the beating they
will
take in the first round of the playoffs.Detroit – Outside of Seattle, the
most
surprising team in
the
NFC might be the Lions. Under new coach Steve Mariucci, Joey Harrington
will
flourish (especially considering that, thanks to the draft, he has more
targets
to throw to than Az Hakim.) With Olandis Gary and, after returning from
a
shoulder injury a few weeks into the season, James Stewart rushing the
ball
and a young, talented defense, Detroit ought to easily double last
year’s
win total (three.) It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if they didn’t go 8-8
this year before making the playoffs next season.Minnesota – You know, who fucking
cares
how Minnesota
does?
It is moronic to center an NFL offense around a receiver even one as
talented
as Randy Moss. As asshole and selfish to the point of being a detriment
to
the team, he is nowhere nearly in the same league as Jerry Rice who, if
any
receiver ever deserved to be the focal point of an offense, never was.
Throw
in a shitty defense, a questionable running game, and the overrated
Duante
Culpepper at quarterback and this looks like a 7-9 season to
me. Chicago – Two years ago, they were
a
surprising 13-3
playoff
team; last year, an equally surprising 4-12 wash-out. While I
expect
their defense to regain a modicum of the efficiency it lost in last
year’s
injury-plagued season, I lay even odds that they have the most
ineffective
offense in the league (outside of the Cardinals) because they (A) have
no
running game, (B) have receivers not talented enough to cover the
miscues
of a sub-par quarterback, and (C) signed Kordell
Stewart
to play (of all things) quarterback.
I also lay even odds he throws a fucking fit when they jerk him in
favor
of the brittle Chris Chandler before midseason. Let’s just hope that
Chandler
can stay healthy long enough to give Rex Grossman enough time to keep
maturing
to where he can handle the quarterback reins when they are inevitably
thrust
upon him before another 4-12 season ends. South
Tampa
Bay – The reigning
Super
Bowl champs are everyone’s odds on favorite to represent the NFC in the
Super
Bowl. Defense is the name of the game in this town and they look to
have
gotten even better this year. While they still lack the offensive flair
that
John Gruden is famous for, I expect him to adequately find ways to
cover
the holes there while grooming Chris Sims for the starting quarterback
role
in a couple years. No reason to think they won’t have another 12-4
season
enroute to the South title. Of course, I think they will lose in the
NFC
Championship game to (drum roll please)… the Saint Louis Rams.Atlanta
– With the signing
of
free
agent Peerless Price for someone for Michael Vick to throw the ball to,
the
talk all through the preseason was a possible Super Bowl run for the
Falcons.
Sadly, Vick broke his leg in a preseason game and will be out for the
first
four to seven games. For a team that is young and painfully nondescript
without
Vick, they need to pull together quickly if they want to make the
playoffs.
As it stands, if Vick can return earlier rather than later, Atlanta (9-7)
still stands a good chance of competing with the Giants and Saints for
final
wildcard.New
Orleans – On paper, the
Saints
look to be one of the strongest teams in the league. The triple threat
of
quarterback Aaron Brooks, running back Deuce McAllister, and receiver
Joe
Horn are comparable to anything the Colts, Rams, Chargers, or Chiefs
can
put on the table; their defense is one specifically designed with
Michael
Vick in mind; and they had the Buccaneers number last season. On talent
alone
they could easily finish 14-2 and march to the Super Bowl, but they
won’t.
This is the Ain’ts we’re talking about. Something will go wrong. Aaron
Brooks
will reinjure his shoulder. Deuce McAllister will shatter his knee in a
freak
Gatorade-dumping incident. The team plane will crash into a mountain
after
sucking a badminton birdie into an engine. Until proven wrong (and I
really
hope I am) my call is: a 9-7 season with an outside chance of
grabbing
the final wildcard.Carolina – Next to the
Buccaneers,
Carolina had the best
defense
in, not only the division, but the league last year. Sadly, their
offense
was even worse than that of the Bucs. While this may not be the year
for
Carolina to make the playoffs (I see them going 8-8 owing
mostly to
an injured receiver corps and a handful of retread quarterbacks), they
can
easily play spoiler and knock a team or two out of the playoffs
(perhaps
Dec. 7th at Atlanta or, more likely, the last game of the season Dec.
28th
at the NY Giants?) [Note: They were better than even I gave them credit for. Leaning heavily on their kick-ass defense and the battering ram RB Steven Davis, the Panthers made it to the Super Bowl where they finally succame to the Patriots 32-29.]
West
St.
Louis – Last season’s 7-9
meltdown
was an aberration and a direct result of a shitty offensive line which
led
to injuries to every quarterback on the roster and the league’s best
running
back (Marshall Faulk.) After addressing that this off-season, the only
weakness
I see in their game is their linebackers. Of course, when a team is
capable
of scoring 500 points a season does it even need linebackers? The Rams
will
go (at worst) 13-3 in the regular season with the return to
MVP
form
of both Faulk and Kurt Warner; win the division, the NFC title, and the
Super
Bowl. Of their three losses, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if (at
least) one
doesn’t come at the hands of…Seattle
– A little behind
schedule
in reviving this team, Mike Holmgren does so with a vengeance this
year.
The Seahawks’ offense finally gelled late last season (after it was too
late
to make the playoffs) and (from what I have read) have a swagger going
into
this season. This, in and of itself, wouldn’t be enough to get them
over
the hump, but they also brought in defensive guru Ray Rhodes and half a
dozen
defensive gunslingers to revamp the other half of the team. All told,
this
will combine for a 10-6 season and the first wildcard spot. San Francisco – Let me see if I
have the
logic of this
down…
Let’s take a proven, successful Head Coach like Steve Mariucci and
replace
him with Dennis Erickson (whose claim to fame was the most abysmal four
years
in Seattle Seahawk history), combine with known trouble-maker Terrell
Owens,
a shitty defense, and Jeff Garcia’s bad back… wait a minute, what is
the desired
result here? It must be an 8-8 season and no playoffs for the
first
time since I was like seven.Arizona – In the off-season the
Cards cut
ties with the
only
two offensive weapons they had in Jake Plummer (Broncos) and Davis
Boston
(Chargers) and replaced them with Emmitt Smith (the aging All-Time NFL
Career
Rushing Leader) and quarterback Jeff Blake who throws the prettiest
long
ball in the league. Sadly, Blake has no one who can catch his pretty
passes
which is going to lead to defenses around the league stacking the line
of
scrimmage which is going to lead to the dismantling of an already
injury-prone
and inconsistent offensive line which is going to lead to Emmitt
getting
injured before he gets to the 1300-yard season he believes he still has
in
him. This is going to be ugly. Not. Pretty. At. All. On their schedule
I
see a total of four winnable games (at Detroit, at Dallas, Cincinnati,
and
at Chicago.) Let’s be generous and say they’ll go 4-12 for the
season. Super
Bowl XXXVIII
A slight alteration
on last year's theme of
Head
Coach vs. his former team with Dick Vermeil and the Kansas
City
Chiefs
vs. the Saint Louis Rams (his old team.) An epic battle for
Missourian
bragging rights. (Sadly,
though, Red is not a football
fan...) This
time the former team wins, though. And
just to round things out:
Dick Vermeil (Chiefs) will win Coach of the Year; Ricky Williams
(Dolphins),
Offensive Player of the Year; Julius Peppers (Panthers), Defensive
Player
of the Year; and Dewayne Robertson (Jets, formerly of the University of
Kentucky),
Rookie of the Year. [Note:
Wrong on all counts, yo.]One year ago today...