In Percival Everett’s historical novel “James,” the whole world relies on the naming of names

I spent the past couple weeks with James. I knew him in my youth as Jim, Nigger Jim, from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” On the eve of the Civil War, Jim and Huck go on a spree down the Mississippi. In Percival Everett’s novel, “James,” Huck’s name remains the same while Nigger Jim becomes Jim and then, at long last, becomes James. No accident that these are the last lines of the book:

“And who are you?”

“I am James.”

“James what?”

“Just James.”

I guess that I should issue a spoiler alert, that the main character is speaking at the end of the novel. But you don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. You don’t even know if it’s not an imagined scene, something from the always creative mind of Everett. So I’ll leave it at that.

James is a slave on a journey, sometimes with his white pal Huck and sometimes not as he and Huck get separated. We revisit a few of Twain’s characters, the Duke and the Dauphin among them (I’m thinking of you Jason Burge, The One True Dauphin of Mississippi) and others are new creations.

But as the Kindle pages turned, I was less interested in Everett’s Twain trail as I was by what Everett was doing with his own creation. It’s crystal clear early on when James is still in Hannibal talking to other slaves about proper diction. And it’s hilarious. Slaves know how to speak white man’s English (I would say proper English but this is the South) but they also need to master slave’s English. A hilarious scene, one that caused me raucous laughs that awoke the family. Slaves must dumb down their language to make sure white people are not offended by the possibility of a smart Negro. Even language is a slaveholder’s weapon. That scene really nails down what’s at stake in “James.” If you are a slave, everything you do must conform to the white man’s image of you and the owner’s sense of mastery over you. To challenge that leads to death.

As a slave, James sneaks into Judge Thatcher’s study to read. He knows Voltaire's "Candide" and John Locke even appears to James on the trail for verbal sparring matches. This journey is so much fun that you almost forget the stakes. But not quite. As I read, I thought deeply about slavery and its continuing hold on America. We are in the midst of a fascist coup by the same white men who gave us slavery and the KKK and Auschwitz. Massa Ron DeSantis gloats over his concentration camp in the Glades and plans to open more. Trump’s White Nationalist Stephen Miller plots the creation of a white nation, one without those pesky people of color.

But back to the book. It’s clear why it won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. A work of genius. I cringed in spots but I fear that not cringing would make me unrecognizable to me and to James, Just James.

A couple things about Everett. He grew up in South Carolina, educated in Florida and Rhode Island, but went West as soon as he could, as the saying goes. He spends time and writes about the West of Wyoming and New Mexico. I look forward to reading “Walk Me to the Distance” and “God’s Country.” There’s a funny Twain quote that might have come from Everett. “I’ve only been as far West as California.” It sounds like Twain but I can’t find confirmation that he said it. He traveled in what we know as the real West: Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada, the gold-mining fields of California. But the quote has been used sarcastically by those in the inner West who say “California ain’t West.” Twain knew it. As you see in Everett’s books, he does too.

In the “James” acknowledgements, Everett writes this:

“Finally, a nod to Mark Twain. His humor and his humanity affected me long before I became a writer. Heaven for the climate; hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain.”

Always read the acknowledgements. You find gold nuggets there.

Post #4,000

In "Untamed," the most ferocious animal in our national parks is not the bear

I finished watching "Untamed" last night. It's a limited series on Netflix starring Eric Bana, Sam Neil, Lily Santiago, and Rosemarie DeWitt, and a great supporting cast. It's set in Yosemite National Park. Shots of El Capitan and other familiar landmarks are blended into the narrative filmed in British Columbia. We again see a series set in the wild landscapes of the U.S. and filmed elsewhere, usually Canada, Trump's imaginary 51st state. The landscapes are gorgeous to look at and made me miss Wyoming and Colorado. The peaks. the trails winding through forests, the sparkling waters of the creeks. Even the ranger unis made me ache for the West. Rangers were our friends, men and women who welcomed us to the parks,  delivered campfire chats, and kept things orderly. 

I give high marks to "Untamed," its grim storyline and fine acting. It involved me for some five hours. Child abduction. drug-dealing, missing Native American women, murder, and treachery play roles. That is sometimes offset by sheer grandeur. But one  thought I came away with was: is this what we've become? We live harsh lives and are harsh with each other. Was it always this way or is it all grim now?

One more thing. Humans can be more savage than predatory animals. That was brought out in the first episode by fearsome roar of a grizzly at a cabin door. Lions and tigers and bears! But humans remain the deadliest animal. First scene. Climbers scaling El Capitan. It is a long way down, a dangerous business this rock climbing. Just as the top climber bangs a spike into the rocks, he looks up and sees a body falling toward him. The body snags the rope and pulls down the climbers but they don't fall. We see a close-up of the body. It is a young woman, clothes ripped, dead eyes stare up. We know the mystery. Did she jump or was she pushed? 

It's worth watching. Some scenes stay with me. One takes place in the morgue where the dead woman's (Lucy Cook) body is being stored while park investigators try to discover her identity. National Park Service Investigative Branch Ranger Kyle Turner (Bana) and his new assistant, former L.A. cop Naya Vasquez,  try to solve it. There follows lots of creepiness but the scene that lingers is in the morgue. Turner finds a cellphone hidden in the dead woman's backpack. It needs a photo I.D. to open. He takes it to the morgue and requests a picture of the corpse's face. No dice. The eyes have to be open. The morgue tech puts drops in the eyes to make them open unnaturally. Phone still won't open. The morgue tech says hydrogen peroxide has been known to bring life back to dead skin, warm it so it registers for the camera. He brushes it on the cheeks. Bama takes another photo and it works, the phone is unlocked and we're on the way to a resolution or so we think. I was left with the image of Lucy Cook, dead, again staring up, asking "why did you forsake me?"

The New York Times' Mike Hale reviewed the show. The reviewer's main takeaway was the show's bad timing. So who has time to pursue killers when DOGE cuts leave nobody to clean the bathrooms or break up Yellowstone bear jams? Good point. 

An accompanying NYT story tells of the few remaining park employees being tasked by the Trump regime with removing comments that "disparage America" from monuments, trail signs, and printed material. Our sins against black slaves and native peoples are being purged from the public records. If this sounds Orwellian to you, you've read Orwell and you're dead-on. The Know Nothings have won. The South has risen again. And we're all up Shit's Creek, somewhere out in the American wilderness.

Post #3,999

"Return to Sender" is more than just an Elvis song

I have got to hand it to Neil at LiquidLawn.com. He is persistent. I do not require his services at this time but there will come a time when I may. This is the fourth flyer I have received from Liquid Lawn and, really, the rare piece of mail I have personally received from anyone, human, company, or provider of services important to the Florida homeowner. My daughter receives disability and got mail from Social Security. It was sent to our Melogold address although it was spelled Mellogold but I wish they had written Mellowgold just to stop me from editing in my head JR Horton street names. On the envelope was handwritten "FWD" which means forward but why it would request forwarding when it was already destined for the right address with a slight misspelling? 

Yesterday I received a call from my former employer of 25 years. The caller asked if I had a new address as mail sent to Ocean Shore Drive had come to her, "Return to Sender," you know, like the Elvis song that got to number two on the charts in October 1962 after "Big Girls Don't Cry." The caller asked if I had sent USPS a change of address and I said yes, I dutifully did so. I did neglect to send that information to my trusted former employer, but had to wonder why they got "Return to Sender" when I had filed an official forwarding request to USPS on June 2. She was a bit stumped too but was friendly and polite as are most people in Wyoming. 

I filed an address change last August on my Wyoming address and mail seemed to find its way fine from Townsend Place in Cheyenne, to Ormond Beach but for some reason, USPS can't seem to get mail from Ormond-by-the-Sea to Ormond Station about five miles west as the crow flies. Now that USPS has raised rates on first-class mail, and has cut back on their trucks running from the big mail-gathering places to the little P.O.s on the coast, they can afford some drones to fly out our way. I wouldn't mind a drone mail drop. Really. 

Remember all those great songs about getting a letter, or not getting one?

The Letter

Wait a Minute Mr. Postman 

Return to Sender 

P.S. I Love You

Take a Letter, Maria

A Dear John Letter

Just a few of the pop songs about the good and bad of mail. Youthful memories, from a time when getting a letter meant getting A LETTER. Might be good news such as a letter from an old friend, birthday card from grandpa, or fan mail from some flounder, or not-so-good, say a missive from Selective Service, the IRS, a fed-up girlfriend. 

And yes, this is grousing from a Baby Boomer. Mail has lost its cachet. But mail still gets delivered, or not, depending on who's doing the delivery. Our postal delivery in Ormond Station has been dismal. Mail sent to us in June that was supposed to be forwarded to our new address was never forwarded. I got a call from my former employer in Wyoming that asked for my new address. She said mail sent to our address on Ocean Shore Drive was not forwarded to Melogold Drive but just returned to sender, as in the song. Somehow it missed a step. We put in a forwarding request before we moved. I dialed in my new address to address change sites for credit cards, car payments, payees like Dell and Lowes, and often it responded that there is no address. It was odd, since I was living in this new address and as far as I knew, it existed as did my wife and I. Now, houses in our Groveside neighborhood were still getting their finishing touches and some had yet to sell, but it seems like the P.O., a very large and respected organization, would have the Internet, GPS, drones, even printed maps at its disposal, the combined knowledge of thousands of postpersons, and they could figure this out. But they did not.

I have great memories of the mailman, as that person was known in my youth. They walked routes in those days. They had tales of ferocious dogs and snarling customers. They told of days cold enough to freeze your keisters and hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. 

Our woman delivery person in Cheyenne was the friendliest person I know, always with a greeting and mail that might mean something or might mean nothing. She wore arctic gear in January and plowed through snow-packed roads in those funny little vehicles. My brother Tim delivered the mail in Daytona Beach until a brain tumor took hold. I shared cardiac rehab with a woman younger than me that sometimes arrived at rehab in her uniform. One day, both of us on treadmills, chatting, she had a follow-up heart attack and quick response by rehab nurses brought her back. 

The U.S. Mail meant something. Lots of great songs. The Beatles, of course, and Elvis. 

I was 16 when "The Letter" by the Box Tops climbed the charts to number one. I viewed it on YouTube and I would post a link here but I never know if it will work down the line. Go watch it. The band members look high. A flashback to 1967. Vocalist was the great Alex Chilton. Joe Cocker had a big hit with it too. 

"A Dear John Letter" was a hit in 1953 by Ferlin Husky and Jean Shepard. In it, a young woman writes to her boyfriend under fire in Korea that she is dumping him for his brother. I'd like to think the song spawned the term we use now, but I've heard World War 2 soldiers talk about Dear John letters. Maybe it goes back even farther than that. What say, history buffs?

I hear from The Lawn Guy but wondering about the fate of my U.S. Mail

Thanks for Neil over at Liquid Lawn for sending me some mail. This is the third flyer I've received from his company since I moved to Ormond Station. I have another service I'm using for my new lawn, They have seen to my yard but never send me mail, not even a bill. I never get any bills and I should be getting a ton as a new homeowner. I also should be getting rejections from various literary magazines. Come to think of it, I should be getting some magazines too, like the one from AARP that arrives without fail, AARP particularly fond of Florida. I expected some summer postcards -- Wish You Were Here With Us in the Tetons! -- and greetings from other companies welcoming us to the neighborhood. Forwarded mail is the biggest issue. Nice person from Ormond Beach P.O. called today, a response to my inquiry about lack of mail. She said it should be catching up to us any day. I asked if it was SOP for forwarded mail all the way from Ormond-by-the-Sea to take from June 3 to July 9 to catch up with the consumer. She said it takes time, noting that her office has done everything possible to make sure I get my stuff, that the mail delivery person is making his appointed rounds, stuffing our mail into our mail station out there on Airport Road. She said he could be a bit confused that my address is 65 but my box number is 88 and maybe 65 is chock full of my mail although the mailman has delivered a missive from the mortgage company to 88 so I think he knows what's going on numbers-wise. The P.O. spokesperson said incoming mail deliveries by truck from various locales have been cut from three per day to just one. Probably the doings of Elon and the DOGE, but she didn't say. I guess I will will just look forward to hearing from Neil over at Liquid Lawn. I mean, he's a Guaranteed Weed Killer and I can Bundle + save! Not a bad deal. Not bad at all.

"Old Girls and Palm Trees" by Meg Pokrass is a dream

I am reviewing a new book today but first wanted to outline the pleasures and dangers of late-night reading on the Fourth of July weekend.

I've read about the gender gap among White American Male Literary Fiction Writers, notably novelists. Upstarts such as Salinger, Hemingway, and Updike seem to be a vanishing breed. Guys whom you can't wait to read. Guys that hog the bestseller charts. 

I made the mistake of choosing Marc Tracy's July 3 New York Times article for late-night reading. My wife Chris was asleep, or trying to get to sleep as fireworks exploded around us in Ormond Beach suburbia. A few hours earlier we'd joined friends for dinner at a Flagler Beach bistro with a view of the rickety old pier under reconstruction. Made me wonder about hurricane season. The sky burned red as we drove west toward home. Should have taken that as an omen.

"The Death and Life of the Straight White Man's Novel" was compelling reading. I am an old straight white man fiction writer who has published one story collection and written two as-yet-unpublished novels. I've published a number of short stories and a smattering of flash fiction and prose poetry. I left the corporate world to get my M.F.A. in creative writing. I wrote and raised a family while working full-time as an arts administrator, a rapidly dissolving field thanks to MAGA. Agents and editors will admit over late-night beers at writers' conferences that white guys aren't getting published because it's a new world out there, a new multigenerational, multiethnic, gender-neutral world out there. And young white guys are spending their 10,000 hours gaming and not sitting alone in a cafe populating their journals with trenchant observations. So suck it up, buttercup (what is a buttercup anyway? Must Google it). 

I am including a photo of a buttercup.

This buttercup looks happy. Or surprised. Or maybe it's surrendering. They can be poisonous and in the South they are seen as an invasive species. On the plus side, kids like to hold the flower up to their chins and the reflective petals turn skin the color of butter. Like butter!

Since I'm a buttercup, I ordered a nifty little chapbook by Meg Pokrass, "Old Girls and Palm Trees." Published by Bamboo Dart Press, a nifty little outfit with offices in Claremont, Calif. It's illustrated by artist Cooper Renner, who has a playful style. I tackled this book late at night and it pleased me. Meg is a writer friend I met a dozen years ago on Facebook who wasn't afraid to put her flash fiction on display for all the e-world to see. She's from California but now lives in Scotland. Many writers, me included, were a bit concerned about placing our work on social media. Into what dark and dreary and corporate place will it end up? Any Tom or Dick, Harry or Sally, can scoop it up and claim it as their own. That occurred to Meg but didn't faze her, probably because she is represented by crackerjack agent Peg Mokrass who sports huge eyeglasses and looks a bit like Meg. So here it is, years later, and Meg had published some 900 pieces in various mags and online sites. And she's published eight flash collections and two novellas. I brought her to Casper, Wyoming, in September 2014, as a presenter at the Equality State Book Festival.  

The book is delightful. Can a SWMW say delightful? I await your response.

Meg's book features flash pieces about her imagined life with an old friend in California. In the opening piece, she imagines this old friend behind her, "a friend who had become a shadow that needed to be sewn back on." I had to stop there because this is a scene from the black-and-white "Peter Pan" I grew up on. Peter loses his/her/their shadow and has to sew it back on. I watched my own shadow for weeks after that, afraid if it came off I wouldn't know how to sew it back on. I close my eyes and remember that feeling. I'm scared, but also aware that my shadow is a living thing with its own life. It may have turned me to writing, as my Mom read Peter Pan to us after and I saw that words were kind of like a shadow of life, that the writer has thoughts and it travels down the arm for finger to make imprints on the page. Did I think that at five? No, I am imagining that now. Something magical was going on, I knew that much. Somehow I understood that knowing how to read those shadow words could open up new worlds to me. I was a nuisance. I read everything: cereal boxes, candy wrappers, billboards, and eventually magazines and books. I am still a nuisance; any printed matter within reach is not safe. I can read upside-down like a noir detective. So much joy and heartache comes from reading and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There is joy and heartache on the pages of "Old Girls and Palm Trees." It is a dream, basically, and dreamily written. 

About the book: It's a chapbook, 6.5 x 6.5 inches. Well constructed, with a sturdy coated cover, and easy to carry on the Metro or to the beach (as we retirees do) in your E-Cycle or E-Tricycle basket. Nice gifts at $10.99. E-book version available but that kind of defeats the idea of having a nice little chapbook to carry around. As I mentioned, art is by Cooper Renner. Cover art by Meg and Dennis Callaci. 

Support small presses: www.bamboodartpress.com

How to choose art for the bare walls of a new house

It began with a June 19 Facebook post by artist Linda Anne Lopez of Winchester, Virginia. Linda and I met several times over the years. She's married to diehard reader and biker Ben Lopez, a longtime friend of my late brother Dan and his wife Nancy. They met in Santa Barbara while going to UCSB. Turns out they all moved to Florida for work and kids and riding motorcycles year-round. 

Ben is the most voracious reader I know and we trade book titles on FB. His most recent: a biography of Rudyard Kipling. My most recent is a novel The Sleeping Car Porter by Canadian author Suzette Mayr. I am now hip-deep in Carl Hiaasen's newest, Fever Beach. Ben sticks mainly to non-fiction and I'm a creature of fiction as that is what I write. And, sometimes, like these crazy times right now, who can tell the difference?

Linda got serious about her art after retirement. Photography was her thing. Along the way she discovered encaustic mixed media and that's what you're seeing here. 

Linda is  a bird-and-flower person which carries a lot of weight with me, a hummingbird admirer and gardener. She describes her specialty as Encaustic Mixed Media. She combines her love of photography with the ancient arts of encaustic. See further explanation below. Find out more at Lindalopezartist.com

And I spent most of my professional career in the art world, mostly in the realm of state arts agencies (SAAs), local arts funding, a stint at the National Endowment for the Arts, and dabs in arts and literary criticism. All of these worlds are being decimated by Trump and his goons but I will leave my political critiques to other posts on Hummingbirdminds and other rabble-rousing sites.

Linda got my attention with this FB post on June 19:

Hummingbird and flowers, encaustic mixed media, 8-by-8 inches, Linda Lopez

It got my attention because it is beautiful and because it features a hummingbird and flowers. I must have it, I told my PC, and contacted Linda. It was for sale and she also had a companion piece, shown in this June 25 FB post by Linda: 

Encaustic mixed media, Linda Lopez, work at left is 9-by-17 inches.

The new home this refers to is mine in Ormond Beach, Florida. They will be the first works of art to go up in our new home in a woodsy place called Groveside at Ormond Station. I plan to turn these bare walls into a gallery of sorts, one that will feature groups of pieces celebrating my wife Chris and me. These two pieces will hang above our dining room table which, strangely enough, matches the color schemes of the art. It will feature work by Florida and Wyoming artists with a Virginia and Colorado artist in the ranks. 

You might ask: Hey Mike, what, exactly, is encaustic? I will let Linda answer that:

Explanation and History of Encaustic 

Encaustic is a wax-based paint (composed of beeswax, damar resin, and pigment), which is kept molten on a heated palette. It is applied to an absorbent surface and then reheated to fuse the paint.  The word ‘encaustic’ comes from the Greek word enkaiein, meaning to burn in, referring to the process of fusing the paint.  

 

Encaustic painting was practiced by Greek artists as far back as the 5th century B.C. The Fayum portraits are the best-known encaustic works. These funeral portraits were painted in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. by Greek painters in Egypt. 

 

Modern encaustic painting was made possible by the invention of portable electric heating implements and the availability of commercial encaustic paint and popularized by its usage among many prominent artists. Encaustic paintings do not need varnishing or protection with glass. Beeswax is impervious to moisture, which is one of the major causes of deterioration in a paint film. Wax resists moisture far more than resin varnish or oil. Buffing encaustic will give luster and saturation to color in just the same way resin varnish does. 

 

Encaustic can be used as a traditional painting medium, but it can also be used to create sculptures, with photography (transfers and prints), drawing, and printmaking (monotypes). Painting with encaustic is a multi-step process. First, the paint must be melted. Then the molten paint is applied to a porous surface. The wax is then fused into the working surface, allowing it to form a bond. As a final option, the cooled paint can be buffed to bring up the luster of the wax and resin. Every layer of encaustic wax must be fused. 

Thumbs up to new public art on National Mall

 

New sculpture on National Mall in D.C. This is the kind of public art
we want to see. 

A Writer Orders a Birthday Cake

She’s pretty but doesn’t know it yet or maybe she does, maybe her new spouse told her that this morning before she hustled off to a new job. But she’s still in college, I think, summer break from FSU, a job making and decorating cakes. Could be worse, with her skin, working out in the Florida sun in June. A head taller than the slight Indian woman in a sari she helps. The woman wants a birthday greeting on a whipped cream cake. She spells out her granddaughter’s name and the clerk writes it down, says that’s a pretty name and then admires the women’s shiny hoop bracelets. The clerk tries to write on whipped cream but it’s not going well and she summons the head baker, a white-clad bearded guy old enough to be her father. I think they would like to tell the customer that she might try another cake, you know, one of those solid bar cakes or maybe a sheet cake with buttercream frosting, the ones you can write on. They come up with a solution, placing a plastic oval over the cake and writing on that. A bald Indian man rolls by on his store scooter that matches the one I ride on. He speaks brusquely and then rolls past the doughnuts and disappears down an aisle. Minutes later he returns but the woman from India is patient and keeps at it. He rolls away again. The Indian man is about my age, maybe even younger. I want to be a watcher at the counter, quiet, as I wait to order my cake. The woman customer turns to me. She is beautiful and tells me that it’s her granddaughter’s birthday and she is 10. Happy birthday to her, I say, and she smiles. The baker and the clerk finish their work and I draw close to admire it. Pink greeting on clear plastic over a white cake. High art. She turns and leaves. I order a sheet cake for my siblings’ birthday. A quarter sheet? Enough for 25? The clerk isn’t sure, looks for the baker and he’s in the back and she fetches a cake from the cooler and shows it to me. I know it is not the size I want and I think she knows it too but then consults with the baker and he comes out and tells me it feeds 20 when you cut 2-inch-by-2-inch pieces. If it’s not enough, you can grab some of our cupcakes. He points to a table piled high with them. I like that solution. I order my cake, the clerk writes down the birthday greeting, and I leave them for the day, a day that will lead to other days and other stories. I pass the Indian woman on the cereal aisle. She smiles, raises the cake in a salute, and peers down the rows of Cheerios and Fruity Pebbles, looking for the bald man in the scooter.

"In My Room:" Brian Wilson spent most of his time looking out his bedroom window

Rob Tannenbaum wrote June 12 in the New York Times:

In songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations,” Wilson did as much as anyone to depict Los Angeles and California as a land of bikinis and warm, honey-colored sunsets. The songs he wrote about the West Coast, he said in “I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir,” were “more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.” Wilson didn’t like waves, but realized how they could serve as a metaphor for life.

Wilson tried surfing once and his board conked him on the head. He liked looking out windows at other people surfing and driving hot rods. Tannenbaum went on:

The songs, he added, tell stories about teenagers. 'We base them on activities of healthy California kids who like to surf, hot rod, and engage in other outdoor fun.' He saw these activities the same way he saw the ocean — through a window.

This caught my attention because it says a lot of what writers do: watching activities through their window of imagination and not actually taking part in that activity. As Wilson wrote ("In My Room") he spent a lot of time in his room imagining what was happening outside.

I grew up surfing in Daytona Beach, Florida. I surfed for five years, 13-18-years-old. I gave it up the summer of 1969. My surfboard, a Greg Noll Bug, was stolen out of my family's garage. It was the last board I owned and the only short board. I also sold my beat-up old car that summer as freshmen weren't allowed to have cars on campus. Our house burned down, destroying the kitchen, my school clothes, and my father's Barracuda, 'Cuda as the cool kids called it. My eight brothers and sisters and my parents survived and we moved to cramped motel rooms. The End Times were coming, or so it seemed. I began to have dark thoughts, imagined a black ball rotating in my chest. My girlfriend was pretty and nice but she was going off to the state school and I was going to another state's school 400 miles away. I was slated to be a NROTC midshipman and I had no idea why except the Navy agreed to pay my way if I agreed to get ship-shape and squared-away which I failed at miserably.

Depression came to call. I returned home to my beach town, lied in bed, listening to surf sounds drifting up from the beach and rolling through my jalousie windows.

Brian Wilson suffered with crippling depression. I know how that feels. Wilson laid in bed and looked through windows and saw different lives. His head was populated with beaches and endless streets to race cars and meet girls. His head and heart were also populated with monsters and he didn't really write about them. He looked out windows and saw himself. 

When he was 20, Canadian Steven Page wrote the song "Brian Wilson" which was later recorded by his band, Barenaked Ladies. When he heard it, Wilson wrote his own version. But lyrics in the original go like this:

So I’m lyin’ here 

Just starin’ at the ceiling tiles

And I’m thinkin’ about

What to think about

Just listenin’ and relistenin’

To smiley smile

And I’m wonderin’ if this is

Some kind of creative drought because

I’m lyin’ in bed

Just like Brian Wilson did

Well I’m

I’m lyin’ in bed, just like Brian Wilson did, oh

So,

If everybody had an ocean

Across the USA

Everybody'd be surfin'

In Cal-if-or-ni-a

Or lyin' in bed, just like Brian Wilson did.

 R.I.P. Brian.

America's Big Weekend: Tanks roll on D.C. streets, Marines protect L.A. from old hippies carrying signs

Top part of an image posted by an old friend from L.A. I told the friend I wouldn't use his/her/their name due to the fact that it's not a great idea to name names right now. If U.S. Senators can get arrested and  cuffed for asking questions of Fuhrerin K. Noem, than none of us are safe. My name is on this blog and has been floating in Cyberspace for 20 years. I cropped this to remove the bottom part of the poster because it was more inflammatory than necessary, or so says the editor. Something about betrayal, what some of us are feeling as Trump sends Marines to L.A. to shoot protesters. He is holding his grand birthday parade in D.C. tomorrow. Wonder how close it will pass to the Vietnam War Memorial just off Constitution Avenue, or the World War II Memorial at the far end of the Reflecting Pool? Will you be able to see those monuments from the tanks clanking down the pavement? I need to mention the name JOLEA on the image. Anyone know who that is, an artist or maybe an organization's acronym?

Word Back: Let’s Make America Again Again

Again.

Make America Great Again

I’ve been exploring this phrase as it has taken over conversations, rallies, bots, blather, mind games, etc.

It’s a work of genius, really. It gets everyone on the same page. It does, if you are a true believer in Trumpism. That’s what 70-some million people voted for, right? America is no longer great so we needed to fix it. And we will put in place a supervisor who really has never done anything I could call great. But let’s pretend he has and see what magic time in our recent history he wants to return to, revisit, make great again.

So many T voters were elderly as am I. They remember a time when a middle-class suburban lifestyle ruled lives and airwaves. Our Southwest Denver neighborhood was mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP. Not the kind of WASP who grew up in suburban New York City or Chicago. Our Dads made less money than yours. I say Dads because that’s who left the house to work.

Mom was a housewife or householder – she held the place together. Dad was a contract something-or-other for the Martin Company in Lakewood. I never really know what Dad did for a living. Martin eventually merged with American-Marietta and then Lockheed to become part of aerospace and defense work. Martin got his start building airplanes and so did Lockheed. Martin ranked 14^th among defense contractors and built the B-26 Marauder bomber and the B-29 Superfortress that dropped The Big Ones on Japan. Lockheed was most famous for building the P-38 Lightning, the twin-tailed warplane that all of us kids bought in model kits.

We knew our warplanes in the fifties. We were fed by movies, TV,  and comic books. We heard some stories from our fathers but nothing of great import because that’s the way it was. Dad was an infantryman, a Signal Corps radioman who marched through Europe with the rest of the grunts. His unit was lost in the Ardennes during the Bulge but eventually made it back to American lines. I wondered what it was like, being lost in a war zone, but he never elaborated on it. I saw the fellow vets huddled around the patio bar at or the grill during parties and knew they were telling war stories but we were never invited in. So we had to read about them in books or imagine them.

Most of the neighbor men were soldiers and sailors. No fighter pilots on our street and we would have known if there were any. The dad of the kid next door was a plumber. The kid’s name was John and last name Lennon. He went on to become famous as one of the Beatles. Just kidding. I don’t know what happened to him. On our other side lived an older childless couple. They were nice enough. What I wonder about is what they thought about living next to us, one of the largest families on the street. We were a rowdy bunch. Loud. They complained when Dad installed a set of monkey bars in the backyard. It was perilously close to the older neighbors’ fence and it apparently gave them nightmares about one of us swinging wildly on the bars and breaking our backs on their fence. Looking back, we think it hilarious but, older now, we have our own nightmares about injured children and grandchildren.

The man who lived behind us was an army mess sergeant. An FBI agent lived down the street. Across from, him was the only Hispanic family on the block and Catholics like us. One of the boys was the age of me and my brother and we rode bikes together. He took a spill and was impaled by his handlebars. They rushed him to the hospital. When he reappeared, he showed us his stitches and said his spleen was removed. A spleen? Who knew we had one?

We rode our bikes to Bear Creek and played war. Firecracker wars! No danger there. The creek tumbled from the high peaks but was tame by the time it reached the flatlands. Our father once pole-vaulted across the creek and we thought it amazing. Dad showed us how to skip rocks. We rode our bikes down steep hills and crashed in a cloud of dust and rocks. We explored the mall digs, daring each other to ride down into the holes.

We walked to school four blocks away. It was rare, even when it snowed, to see Moms bundle the kids into station wagons and shuttle them to school. I drive past my local elementary school at the end of the day and there is a traffic jam of SUVs idling on the street. Maybe that’s what MAGA people want? Make schools close enough to walk to! Well, that would mean more schools and more taxes to pay for them and the school library might have a book about two dads or a boy who wants to be a girl and all hell would break loose at PTA meetings.

Why can’t we go back to the days of PTA meetings where the only squabble was how many cakes to bake for the Halloween Walk? You remember that, right? Kind of like musical chairs but if you win you get to take a cake home and hope you are there early enough, dressed in your Popeye costume, to win a chocolate one and not one of those yucky coconut ones. A coconut cake! That mom must be a commie!

Ah, those good ol’ days.

Note to my son: Thank you for sending me the book “Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story: A Father’s Guided Journal to Share His Life and Love.” I will fill out some of the pages but most memories can be found on these pages which I’ve been keeping for 20 years. Most stories are true, although I have been known to take liberties. If I still covered high school sports for A Major Metropolitan Newspaper, I would be much more careful in my reporting. I would take time for better fact-checking and less snark. Enjoy!

All the propaganda I am falling for

 

Courtesy the Denver Public Library by way of a librarian/propagandist/writer
 from Wyoming. The downtown DPL was the first library my parents took me to
in the 1950s. Falling for propaganda even in kindergarten.

Word Back: Trump reached his goal: Make America Grate Again

Make America GREAT Again

Great as in...The Greatest Generation.

As he wrote his famous book on his Montana ranch, Tom Brokaw gave a lot of thought to the GREAT-est Generation. He gets credit for popularizing the term although its first documented use is by U.S. Army General James Van Fleet ("our greatest General" Pres. Truman called him) during the Korean War. Brokaw might cover it in the book but, well, you see, I never read it. As offspring of that generation, I already knew how great they were. 

It took some time to realize it. 

My parents, two Denver natives, born 1923 and 1925, who found themselves growing up in The Great Wall Street Collapse of 1929, the Great Depression, The Great War Part Deux, and America's post-war boom which, as far as I know, does not have "great" attached to it. Great Caesar's Ghost! That was a term The Daily Planet Editor Perry White in "The Adventures of Superman" made famous, first in 1946 on the radio show and then on TV in the 1950s. We Boomer kids loved Perry White's apoplectic outbursts. We loved cub reporter Jimmy Olsen getting blasted by White: "And don't call me chief!" And his outbursts at Clark Kent, "mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan daily." "Great Caesar's Ghost, Kent!" Kent just took the abuse as underneath all the mild manners and big eye glasses was a super man from another planet who "could leap tall buildings in a single bound" and round up passels of bad guys before breakfast. 

We loved Superman. Our parents were not so sure about this hero worship. But our first heroes were our World War II fathers. We sort of knew their good deeds. We played with his medals and shoulder patches and uniforms. He had a helmet and machine guns, booty from the war. We played war, having no idea what it was preparing us for. But our parents' generation accomplished great things and we knew it.

Vietnam and assassinations and Watergate almost banished the greatness. Today marks the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings. The end of the war was in sight. Our fathers were still in great danger and we wouldn't know the stories first-hand had they been killed on that day and the others that followed in 1944-45. Death on all fronts. Our Denver neighborhoods swarmed with our fathers' memories and the ghosts of those who made it home or made it home and died later or were not quite right. You'd think all of that would be enough to lift a nation, cause it to avoid pointless wars and entanglements. You would think it would be enough to stop a charlatan and his goons from taking over our great country. 

Researching this post, I came across all kinds of references to great. I watched the first season of "The Great," a satiric retelling of the Greats of Russia: Peter and Katherine Very funny. Educational too.  

I came across this reference: "Literae humaniores, nicknamed Greats, is an undergraduate course focused on the classics (Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Latin, ancient Greek, and philosophy) at the University of Oxford in England and some other universities."

Make America THE GREATS Again!

Finally, the Online Dictionary writes this: "great is sometimes confused with grate."

We can certainly see that Grate is a far better term for what America has become. Make America Grate Again. Yes, MAGA is grating, it grates the nerves. It's prime spokesperson, POTUS, may be the most grating person on the planet. His online rants are beyond grating, they get on my last serve.  Not so great.

Word Back: In America, We're All Bozos on This Red-White-And-Blue Bus

Part 2 of Word Back: America

I explore word choice in "Make America Great Again."

What was America like in my youth? Was it all fun and games?

Yes and no. 

The Wayback Machine takes us back to my collegiate years, 1969-1976. Yes, I was on the seven-year B.A. Plan. 

I remember the legendary Firesign "I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus" Theater perform at the UF Gator Growl in 1975? And wasn’t I there physically although my mind was wandering due to cannabis? I looked it up. Yes, Firesign Theater performed at the ’75 Growl. As I looked up the event's history at the HardyVision Institute of Pop Culture, I found this header: “Frequently Asked Questions: Gator Growl’s Stand-up Comedian History.”

Wow. That was my question. Thanks, WWW. Sometimes hummingbirdminds are glorious. I scrolled down to this:

When did Gator Growl start hiring big-name stand-up comedians?

In 1970, UF alumnus Buddy Ebsen (of “Beverly Hillbillies” fame) was invited to be the Gator Growl emcee. Of course, he’s not a stand-up comedian, but he did show up and lent a celebrity flair as he told showbiz stories and talked about how nice it was to be back.

In 1974, the musician Jim Stafford was the emcee. The Independent Florida Alligator reports that the Winter Haven native opened the show with his song “Wildwood Weed” blaring over the loudspeakers, and later in the show “he sang his big hit – ‘Spiders and Snakes,’ accompanied by six dancing girls.” 

In 1975, the show was emceed by the comedy duo of Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theater.

But it was Bob Hope in 1976 who was Gator Growl’s first nationally known stand-up comedian headliner. He would return to headline Gator Growl in 1979 and in 1983 at age 80.

I was right about Firesign! Jed Clampett was a UF grad – who knew? And Bob Hope hosted three times, once when I was allegedly in the crowd in ’76?

Instead of continuing my research into Firesign, which was the day’s assignment, I scrolled down to a video: “The Bob Hope Collection at the University of Florida.” Really? The Smathers Library has a huge Hope collection willed it by the Bob and Dolores Hope Foundation, most of it previously displayed at the World Golf Hall of Fame Museum at World Golf Village off I-95 west of Ponte Vedra Beach where they do a lot of golfing. The new World of Golf Museum is now in Pinehurst, N.C., near swanky Pinehurst C.C. Its largest display is a women’s locker room with more than 160 lockers of famous women golfers.

So comedian golfer Bob Hope’s collectibles are now at the UF Library? That is something. This is the same library where I spent hundreds of hours learning how to be a writer. I read through the reading list former radical Nelson Algren handed out in my creative writing class. I read Harry Crews' Esquire column because I couldn't afford my own subscription. I read it all. I wrote thousands of words in my journal. I wrote and wrote. 

And now I remember. In my youth, Bob Hope was my favorite comedian. And I wasn’t alone. As quoted in the 16-minute library video, Time Magazine’s Richard Schickel said he admired Hope’s “rapid-fire patter” and “as a kid growing up, I thought he was terribly funny as did most of the nation.” Me too. He and Bing Crosby were hilarious in their “Road” pictures. I loved how they broke the “fourth wall” to comment right at the camera, right at me sitting in suburbia. He had his own TV show. He traveled the world entertaining our troops fighting fascists and commies or just confused about why they were so far from home. He cracked me up. At one point, he was a starving artist in Vaudeville. The photo of that hopeful kid is in the UF collection.

I became a know-it-all college kid and Hope was out. He was part of the establishment. He was buds with Nixon and supported our foray into Southeast Asia. He was going to get us killed. He wasn’t funny anymore. I threw Bob Hope under the bus (the Bozo bus) because he was too establishment. 

Bob Hope tear-gassed me. Not him but him and his pals at Honor America Day on the National Mall on July 4, 1970. I return now to the American I was that day, a 19-year-old confused U.S. Navy midshipman on leave. I told the story in a 2019 blog post:

There were lots of fireworks at the July 4, 1970, event, not all of it in the sky. American Nazis attended to protest Vietnam War protesters and the Yippies staging a smoke-in at the Washington Monument. Police tried to maintain a DMZ between the protesters and Silent Majority picnickers. When that failed, park police fired tear gas at the rowdy hippies and gas clouds drifted over the multitudes. This led, as one reporter wrote, to a "mad stampede of weeping hippies and Middle Americans away from the fumes." At the same time, the U.S. Navy Band played the Star-Spangled Banner from the Lincoln Memorial stage.

I was in that mad stampede. I picnicked with my buddy Pat's family. When the fumes reached us, Pat and I scrambled to lead his grandmother and younger sisters to safety. Pat and I had been tear-gassed several times that spring at the University of South Carolina during protests of the Kent State killings. It was no fun for young people but could be dangerous for the elderly. We made it out of the gas cloud and, when the hubbub died down, we returned to our picnic. Later, we listened to Honor America Day jokes from Bob Hope and Jeannie C. Riley's version of Merle Haggard's "The Fightin' Side of Me." Then, despite the chaos or maybe because of it, we admired the bitchin' fireworks display. 

So this is America, all of it, all of us, me and Bob Hope and you. We're All Bozos on This Bus.