tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81204471963529230202024-02-18T22:28:10.493-08:00Obscure DestiniesMilton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-218665440712507802011-12-05T18:47:00.000-08:002011-12-05T18:54:16.767-08:00Milton T. Burton July 23, 1947 - December 1, 2011This is Milton's eldest son Seth. I regret to have to post on dad's blog that he passed away Thursday morning. I know that each and every person whose life he touched will miss him terribly. He so enjoyed writing his books and posting on his blog as well. Underneath his curmudgeonly exterior he was in actuality a very social person. He loved to call people to chat even if only for a minute and then he would be launching off to the next call. Keeping in touch with his friends was one of his greatest joys and I would like to express my gratitude to everyone that touched his life. The service will be Sat. Dec. 10th, 3:30 at the Tyler Primitive Baptist Church.Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-84077229983791953382011-07-16T12:54:00.000-07:002011-07-17T15:01:13.373-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnrg6zZ_ROTfp_Ruw8nPraj2mRB1pGXCNKPd2Tvr_g6thUtz-844MamosaYGOd9Cpk6bBii6LFUq6W8ZHnlv4p8kED_I-nJNkXWX0tQbdTC1OINPif2YtAr0jlBGOYJ-lWT2hbrTdod0c/s1600/070301_obit_schlesingerTN.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 155px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnrg6zZ_ROTfp_Ruw8nPraj2mRB1pGXCNKPd2Tvr_g6thUtz-844MamosaYGOd9Cpk6bBii6LFUq6W8ZHnlv4p8kED_I-nJNkXWX0tQbdTC1OINPif2YtAr0jlBGOYJ-lWT2hbrTdod0c/s200/070301_obit_schlesingerTN.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5630042338181799714" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Back in 1988 televangelist Pat Robertson ran for president. One of the networks hired Harvard professor/former Kennedy advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. as a commentator on the primaries. Robertson came to my home town, and Schlesinger tagged along in his wake. It is my belief that if anyone in the country could transcend Robertson in sheer jackassery, it is Schlesinger. Here is my take on the matter: </span><br /><br />There were others making travel plans that day with Tyler as their ultimate destination. Two major networks were sending crews to town to augment the efforts of local affiliates, and American Broadcasting Company was sending its elite commentator, Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger to comment on the socio-historic significance of Pat Robertson’s visit. Professor Schlesinger was on the retainer of ABC News as a roving and occasional commentator on national, international and perhaps even interplanetary affairs for the New York based network.<br /><br />Schlesinger, dean of the East Coast establishment liberals and Historian Extraodinair, had established his academic reputation with a series of books which proved beyond the doubt of any reasonable person that Liberalism was a divinely ordained blessing on the human race and that all Democratic Presidents (with the exception of course, being the earthy Lyndon Johnson) were noble apostles of progress, while all Republican presidents (with the exception of course, being the great Abraham Lincoln) had been little more than moronic tools for the forces-of reaction.<br /><br />Professor Schlesinger taught for many years at a famous Ivy League university and had achieved the status of Exalted Adept in that ad hoc but nonetheless real fraternity of those who function in that grey wonderland, the government/higher education complex. This coagulation had been christened by one irreverent pundit "The Legion of Stratospherically, Situated Academic Honchos," and Schlesinger had well earned his membership. He had been an advisor to presidents and chairman of numerous prestigious commissions; he had headed task forces beyond the numbering of mere mortals; and he had advised congress on vast reams of crucial legislation. At one time of another he had been an unofficial governmental representative to everyone everywhere on the face of the globe, and at any given moment of time he knew absolutely everything worth knowing. He had served as Ambassador Plenipotentiary (with and without portfolio) to a plenitude of potentates both potent and impotent; he had organized international conferences and defused student rebellions; he had jetted off aboard Presidential aircraft pursuing missions of monumental import that were designed to save whole continents through the benevolence of the American tax dollar; and he had completely redefined the nature and purpose of representative government by advising congressmen that they must ignore their constituents "provincial concerns" and learn to "think globally." <br /><br />In his long and productive life, Professor Schlesinger had enjoyed the unique privilege of never having committed a single intellectual error. Anyone wishing to prove this assertion needed to consult no lesser luminary than Schlesinger himself, though he would admit to having been misunderstand on number of occasions when same critic had become annoyingly convinced that something he had either written or said that seemed to mean something other than what he currently claimed that it meant.<br /><br />The good Professor had been employed by the network because he was able to discourse fluently upon the political and historical significance of any event which had occurred during the entire history of human society from the very first moment of the Neolithic Revolution in 50,000 BC right on down to 3:23 P. M. Wednesday the last. He was particularly important to his employers because could discourse fluently regardless of whether or not he knew anything at all about the subject at hand. Indeed, he was at his most erudite and authoritative concerning those things about which he knew the least, and he rose to Olympian heights of certitude when pontificating upon matters of which he was totally ignorant. At age seventy and perpetually bow-tied, Professor Schlesinger was short, chubby, voluble, and prone to flatulence, but a fierce dedication to his high ideals had kept him faster than a speeding entitlement and he was still able to leap tall footnotes with a single bound. And he was coming, in all his Celestial Excellence, to Tyler, Texas, in order to philosophize upon the Pat Robertson rally for the edification and enlightenment of the American citizenry. As might be expected, he considered the famous televangelist to be a muddleheaded fascist, a fraud, and a pompous ass. Robertson in turn considered Professor Schlesinger to be a muddleheaded socialist, a fraud and a pompous ass. There is a high degree of probability that each was absolutely correct in his estimation of the other.Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-31018437469642718882011-01-29T10:36:00.000-08:002011-02-26T06:59:01.941-08:00A Plague On Both Their HousesAs far as politics goes, I am an equal opportunity hater. I have become sick of left and right and loathe them both. Here in Texas, right wing males are invariably football-obsessed, crotch-massaging cretins who say "bidness" for "business." While watching football they like to drink Cuervo Gold for the Southwestern, tough guy image they think it projects. Once the game is over, they go out and “chase some nookie,” a commodity none of them have had more than a passing acquaintance with since about 1981. <br /> <br />On the left, we have an abundance of Austin liberal types who venerate the now-dead Molly Ivins, slobber over Coen brothers movies (even the bad ones), and go into a state of nirvana when describing any barbecue joint that serves food on butcher paper instead of plates (butcher paper is so-down-to-earth and egalitarian, you know). Their only real connection to Texas comes once a year when they pull on a pair of cowboy boots and go slopping out to the Willie Nelson picnic with a six-pack of Shiner slung over one shoulder and a sanctimonious aura of "progressivism" wafting about their pointed little heads. Both groups have done for this state what pantyhose did for romance.<br /> <br />Austin liberals also love barbecue joints run by blacks, and if the black running the place happens to be rude and grumpy, so much the better. This marks him as a true culinary artist. Occasionally, one of these individuals will discover an out-of-the-way barbecue joint run by a rude, grumpy black who also serves his wares on butcher paper. When this happens, the Austin person goes into such raptures that he dies of a syndrome know as ESO or "Endless Spontaneous Orgasm." He is then cremated and his friends hold a “non-religious-yet-very-spiritual” memorial service to "celebrate his life" at which his ashes are prominently displayed in an organic gourd. As three right wing cretins drive past, one of them says, "What's going on over there, Otis?" <br /> <br />Otis answers, "Aw, it ain't nothin' but a bunch of left wing faggits holdin' a funeral. Let's go do some bidness."<br /><br />Tedious...Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-23796287542593219802010-11-05T13:24:00.000-07:002010-11-06T06:31:31.009-07:00An Old Egg Cooked<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW9l7gUqDd576HO5t7nruofylNPD1WuS0TdIXJkFsLw8bZ4AVwKijE0z2t2lOEFdjzjH6Sz3ldsZVFjMUQxzsS1tmuhk8Kxv9LAkJfmHCzF3_pvSVN8kRP6mm23ZM3JETN8xInCcblIa8/s1600/ts+eliot.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 143px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW9l7gUqDd576HO5t7nruofylNPD1WuS0TdIXJkFsLw8bZ4AVwKijE0z2t2lOEFdjzjH6Sz3ldsZVFjMUQxzsS1tmuhk8Kxv9LAkJfmHCzF3_pvSVN8kRP6mm23ZM3JETN8xInCcblIa8/s200/ts+eliot.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5536164939132077266" /></a><br />There has been a lot of attention given to T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot (1888-1965) here lately. Both <span style="font-style:italic;">The American Conservative</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Commentary</span> have recently published lengthy articles about the man, and the long-awaited "official" biography seems to loom once again upon the literary horizon. <br /><br />The facts of his life are too easily available online to hash them over here. Suffice to say that he was born in Missouri and then attended Harvard after a three-year sojourn in a private prep school. He soon thereafter skedaddled off to England and never again left except for speaking engagements. Hemingway once said that novelist Henry James could have profited from a "whiff of the Chicago stockyards." Apparently Eliot did did get that whiff and quit these shores as quickly as he could soon thereafter. <br /><br />In the teens and twenties he wrote a number of unrhymed and unmetered poems such as "The Waste Land" and "The Hollow Men" whose titles are self-explanatory and reveal a great deal about Mr. Eliot's sensibilities. The following from "The Hollow Men" are among his most famous and most often quoted lines. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">This is the way the world ends<br />This is the way the world ends<br />This is the way the world ends<br />Not with a bang but a whimper.</span><br /><br />Whether or not he was correct remains to be seen. At any rate, his poetry attracted a great deal of critical attention and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. <br /><br />Eliot had long since taken British citizenship and come to describe himself as, "An Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics." <br /><br />One of the great ironies of literature in this age is that Eliot, who is often considered the quintessential conservative, is also cited as the apex of literary modernism. <br /><br />Eliot also wrote some light verse, the most famous of which was <span style="font-style:italic;">Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats,</span> "Old Possum" being Ezra Pound's nickname for him. After Eliot's death, it became the basis of the musical, <span style="font-style:italic;">Cats,</span> by Andrew Lloyd Webber. <br /><br />In recent years much has been made of his Anti-Semitism, which is undeniable and apparent in such poems as "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" in which he says, "The rats are underneath the piles / The Jew is underneath the lot." Or in "A Cooking Egg," which contains the following: "The red-eyed scavengers are creeping in / From Kentish Town and Golder's Green," Golders Green being a largely Jewish suburb of London. Little can be said in his defense on this score other than to point out that during the decades in which he wrote such sentiments were far more socially acceptable, especially in the rarefied circles in which moved, than they are today in our post-Holocaust world. Personally, my take on the subject is this: Jews are, by and large, a passionate, energetic people, and Eliot, who operated exclusively in the testosterone-free zone, seems to have been repelled by anyone with a pulse that ran over thirty beats per minute. As a consequence, Jews seem to have come to personify for him anyone with any zest for life. <br /><br />If one considers such poems as "A Cooking Egg" and "Sweeney Among The Nightingales" (both readily available online) one soon realizes that any meaning to be found in much of Eliot's verse is so intensely personal as to be useless to the general reader. On the other hand, if one takes seriously H.L. Mencken's observation (and Mencken was a first class literary critic) that poetry should strive to be nothing more than gorgeous word music, then Eliot is indeed---in his rhymed and metered poetry at least---a first class poet. If one thinks that poetry should be more than that, then it is obvious that such poems as "A cooking Egg" are meaningful only to the seventeen people in the entire world who are both fluent in French and intimately familiar with Greek mythology, British financial history, and London urban geography in the 1930s. That makes for a rather small audience. <br /><br />Yet I find myself going back to these poems several times a year simply for what Mencken called "the beauty of the word music." <br /><br />I have read a lot about and by Eliot, so in conclusion I will herein give my opinion: though born and raised in St. Louis, he was descended from a long line of long-faced Puritans and kin to all the Right People, meaning all those stalwart New Englanders who pinned the Scarlet Letter on Hester for fornication and then proceeded to get rich in the slave trade. As a consequence of this Puritan background, he had a great respect for personal guilt---and especially in its value to a literary career---yet he was never able able to accumulate quite enough to satisfy himself. As the fellow who put the "P" in "persnickety," sinning did not come easily to Thomas Stearns Eliot. In fact, I am convinced that the great secret tragedy of his life was that his turds didn't come out wrapped in cellophane<br />***Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-22193937302577920752010-09-15T05:49:00.000-07:002010-09-15T08:12:14.906-07:00R.I.P. David Thompson<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN5NUg4VqdqH34k2zct5SKJTHTtgItMcHaX4ejrrxezUcZZFZ-59MfK_mhBYra7_5uLTmeLF0_VaOnP0yVzZd2KmMzOGb2i8OYsgzMo5wcbuk92WAa1NVrdXS8Ks3IbeQnKr9u3wN0Kmw/s1600/Justin_Cronin_party_Justin_Cronin_McKenna_Jordan_David_Thompson_Valerie_Koehler_041.800w_600h.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 136px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN5NUg4VqdqH34k2zct5SKJTHTtgItMcHaX4ejrrxezUcZZFZ-59MfK_mhBYra7_5uLTmeLF0_VaOnP0yVzZd2KmMzOGb2i8OYsgzMo5wcbuk92WAa1NVrdXS8Ks3IbeQnKr9u3wN0Kmw/s200/Justin_Cronin_party_Justin_Cronin_McKenna_Jordan_David_Thompson_Valerie_Koehler_041.800w_600h.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5517123984373980946" /></a><br />I suppose that by now everyone who reads this blog is aware of the untimely death this past Monday of David Thompson of Murder By The Book in Houston. David's wife, McKenna Jordan, found him that evening near his computer. He was thirty-eight and had no known health problems. David had been at the store for twenty-one years, and insofar as I know it was the only job he ever held aside from being publisher and chief editor of Busted Flush Press, which he founded in 2005. Among his many other duties at MBTB, he functioned as the store's events coordinator. Over the years he had been responsible for bringing many true heavyweights of the crime fiction genre to Houston. <br /><br />There was no one quite like David in the mystery field. But with David there was no mystery: what you saw was what you got, and what you saw was boundless enthusiasm and a love of fine stories. To say nothing of an endless well of help and encouragement for new writers. He was the first person to contact me about a book signing when my debut novel came out, and we were friends ever afterward. Most recently he was instrumental in my getting two fine jacket blurbs from better known writers for my current book. And I was certainly not the only person he ever helped. <br /><br />We will all miss him.<br /><br />***Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-79566620222628511732010-07-16T15:03:00.001-07:002010-07-16T17:08:36.307-07:00Bitter Bierce<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCWlSk6CbiBnLkTRvwY4ldMfE_DL8aLs7sWksWj320M45_kytCltew-x-CJ9E9_xHcwpiSKi3URRwlQVFIrUIwjd23siRdn1TRFwmbUf6wFy3OhjjLA-0ADcN7OiGxL1NN4J28NWI2_Nc/s1600/200px-Abierce_1866.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCWlSk6CbiBnLkTRvwY4ldMfE_DL8aLs7sWksWj320M45_kytCltew-x-CJ9E9_xHcwpiSKi3URRwlQVFIrUIwjd23siRdn1TRFwmbUf6wFy3OhjjLA-0ADcN7OiGxL1NN4J28NWI2_Nc/s320/200px-Abierce_1866.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5494628386946787010" /></a><br />Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842, as Southern writer Florence King pointed out, "On the Ohio frontier, which he hated. Soon the family moved to the Indiana frontier, which he also hated." Born into a poor but well read family, he was apprenticed to a printer when he was fifteen. At the outset of the Civil War he enlisted in the Ninth Indiana Infantry Regiment as a private and rose to the rank of brevet major by the end of the War, during which he was seriously wounded twice and cited eleven times for valor. The war and his short participation in the Reconstruction occupation made Bierce a thoroughgoing misanthrope: "I favor war, famine, pestilence... In short, anything that will keep people frightened enough to behave halfway decently." <br /><br />After resigning his commission, he made his way to San Francisco where he wrote for a number of newspapers. In 1888 he became affiliated with the Hurst papers where he rose to the position of one of the most widely-respected columnists of the day. An early pioneer of investigative journalism, he wrote a series of articles that exposed the manipulations of Colis P. Hunnington's <br />Southern Pacific Railroad in bilking of the federal government of vast amounts of money. He was called to testify before Congress in the matter. A highly placed attorney for the railroad accosted him on the steps of the capitol and tried to bribe him. "Name your price, Bierce," the man said. "Everyone has a price." Bierce knocked the man tumbling down the steps and bellowed out, "My price is sixty million dollars to be returned to the treasury of the United States." <br /><br />He was also well known as a short story writer. His "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" is one of the most famous stories in the American cannon. Filmed three times, it was regarded by novelist Kurt Vonnegut as the most perfect short story in the English language. He called it "A work of flawless American genius."<br /><br />Bierce, who delighted in being politically incorrect a full century before the term was invented, was fond of claiming that women were incapable of rational thought. Whether or not this reflected his true opinion or whether it was meant to annoy and inflame passions is subject to debate. Whatever his feelings toward the fair sex, they did not stop him from having one wife, numerous affairs and a bevy of female admirers. Nor did they prevent him from blatantly and publicly trying to seduce one of the most famous feminists of the era. <br /><br />One of Bierce's more delightful books is his <span style="font-style:italic;">Devil's Dictionary</span>. In his own prose the soul of brevity, he defined "once" as "enough" and "twice" as "once too often." <br /><br />A few of Bierce's definitions: <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">POCKET, n. The cradle of motive and the grave of conscience. In woman this organ is lacking; so she acts without motive, and her conscience, denied burial, remains ever alive, confessing the sins of others.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">NOSE, n. The extreme outpost of the face. From the circumstance that great conquerors have great noses, Getius, whose writings antedate the age of humor, calls the nose the organ of quell. It has been observed that one's nose is never so happy as when thrust into the affairs of others, from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">PALACE, n. A fine and costly residence, particularly that of a great official. The residence of a high dignitary of the Christian Church is called a palace; that of the Founder of his religion was known as a field, or wayside. There is progress.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">PAINTING, n. The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic. Formerly, painting and sculpture were combined in the same work: the ancients painted their statues. The only present alliance between the two arts is that the modern painter chisels his patrons.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">FOLLY, n. That "gift and faculty divine" whose creative and controlling energy inspires Man's mind, guides his actions and adorns his life.</span><br /><br />Bierce was himself fond of saying that a cynic was merely a realist as viewed by an idealist. Regardless of whatever else might be said of the man, he was a journalist the likes of which we could use on the national scene these days. H.L. Mencken, a man not given to idle praise, said of him, "He would not lie and he could not be bought." <br /><br />No one knows for sure what happened to Bierce. In 1913 he got his affairs in order and vanished into the maelstrom of the Mexican Revolution. All subsequent attempts (and there have been many) to determine his fate have proven fruitless. A few years ago a film was made of Bierce's supposed Mexican adventure called "The Old Gringo" after the novel of the same title by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. The movie starred Gregory Peck as Bierce and Jane Fonda as an idealistic young American teacher who fell under his sway. Because Fuentes is an optimistic socialist and because Jane Fonda is Jane Fonda, the film considerably softened Bierce's personality. <br /><br />I will let Bierce himself have the last word on things via advice he wrote to his son: "Endeavor to see the world as it is and not as you would have it be. Do not trust the human race without collateral security for it will play you a scurvy trick every time. And remember: it harms no man to be considered an enemy worthy of respect until he has proven himself a friend worthy of affection."Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-13602026230268491792010-07-03T23:28:00.000-07:002010-07-04T23:26:14.532-07:00The Sage of Baltimore<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii5nleCRz-wdfS_xmTMSSXBjVoDjqJkx3NvrEj3uDArtQe_10_S5Qm5FoQ7Q7rXsKmR-uCeXecMM48LaV9X5yzMZkHZx1bwAIpvRZj3P-DaxsjRBFdJYeNkd6NT1dYkqK8R5bMRTBTwuU/s1600/h_l__mencken1.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii5nleCRz-wdfS_xmTMSSXBjVoDjqJkx3NvrEj3uDArtQe_10_S5Qm5FoQ7Q7rXsKmR-uCeXecMM48LaV9X5yzMZkHZx1bwAIpvRZj3P-DaxsjRBFdJYeNkd6NT1dYkqK8R5bMRTBTwuU/s200/h_l__mencken1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5489934663174238386" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Fourth of July is a perfect time to read a modest proposal for the betterment of the government in this fair republic. I give you H.L. Mencken and his prescription for dealing with corrupt and unjust officials.</span><br /><br />"The Malevolent Jobholder"<br /><br />H.L. Mencken<br /><br />[From the American Mercury, June, 1924. <br /><br />In the immoral monarchies of the continent of Europe, now happily abolished by God’s will, there was, in the old days of sin, an intelligent and effective way of dealing with delinquent officials. Not only were they subject, when taken in downright corruption, to the ordinary processes of the criminal laws; in addition they were liable to prosecution in special courts for such offenses as were peculiar to their offices. In this business the abominable Prussian state, though founded by Satan, took the lead. It maintained a tribunal in Berlin that devoted itself wholly to the trial of officials accused of malfeasance, corruption, tyranny and incompetence, and any citizen was free to lodge a complaint with the learned judges. The trial was public and in accord with rules fixed by law. An official found guilty could be punished summarily and in a dozen different ways. He could be reprimanded, reduced in rank, suspended from office for a definite period, transferred to a less desirable job, removed from the rolls altogether, fined, or sent to jail. If he was removed from office he could be deprived of his right to a pension in addition, or fined or jailed in addition. He could be made to pay damages to any citizen he had injured, or to apologize publicly.<br /><br />All this, remember, was in addition to his liability under the ordinary law, and the statutes specifically provided that he could be punished twice for the same offence, once in the ordinary courts and once in the administrative court. Thus, a Prussian official who assaulted a citizen, invaded his house without a warrant, or seized his property without process of law, could be deprived of his office and fined heavily by the administrative court, sent to jail by an ordinary court, and forced to pay damages to his victim by either or both. Had a Prussian judge in those far-off days of despotism, overcome by a brain-storm of kaiserliche passion, done any of the high-handed and irrational things that our own judges, Federal and State, do almost every day, an aggrieved citizen might have haled him before the administrative court and recovered heavy damages from him, besides enjoying the felicity of seeing him transferred to some distant swap in East Prussia, to listen all day to the unintelligible perjury of anthropoid Poles. The law specifically provided that responsible officials should be punished, not more leniently than subordinate or ordinary offenders, but more severely. If a corrupt policeman got six months a corrupt chief of police got two years. More, these statutes were enforced with Prussian barbarity, and the jails were constantly full of errant officials.<br /><br />I do not propose, of course, that such medieval laws be set up in the United States. We have, indeed, gone far enough in imitating the Prussians already; if we go much further the moral and enlightened nations of the world will have to unite in a crusade to put us down. As a matter of fact, the Prussian scheme would probably prove ineffective in the Republic, if only because it involved setting up one gang of jobholders to judge and punish another gang. It worked well in Prussia before the country was civilized by force of arms because, as everyone knows, a Prussian official was trained in ferocity from infancy, and regarded every man arraigned before him, whether a fellow official or not, guilty ipso facto; in fact, any thought of a prisoners’ possible innocence was abhorrent to him as a reflection upon the Polizei, and by inference, upon the Throne, the whole monarchical idea, and God. But in America, even if they had no other sentiment in common, which would be rarely, judge and prisoner would often be fellow Democrats or fellow Republicans, and hence jointly interested in protecting their party against scandal and its members against the loss of their jobs. Moreover, the Prussian system had another plain defect: the punishments it provided were, in the main, platitudinous and banal. They lacked dramatic quality, and they lacked ingenuity and appropriateness. To punish a judge taken in judicial crim. con. by fining him or sending him to jail is a bit too facile and obvious. What is needed is a system (a) that does not depend for its execution upon the good-will of fellow jobholders, and (b) that provides swift, certain and unpedantic punishments, each fitted neatly to its crime.<br /><br />I announce without further ado that such a system, after due prayer, I have devised. It is simple, it is unhackneyed, and I believe that it would work. It is divided into two halves. The first half takes the detection and punishment of the crimes of jobholders away from courts of impeachment, congressional smelling committees, and all the other existing agencies—i.e., away from other jobholders—and vests it in the whole body of free citizens, male and female. The second half provides that any member of that body, having looked into the acts of a jobholder and found him delinquent, may punish him instantly and on the spot, and in any manner that seems appropriate and convenient—and that, in case this punishment involves physical damage to the jobholder, the ensuing inquiry by a grand jury or coroner shall confine itself strictly to the question of whether the jobholder deserved what he got. In other words, I propose that it shall be no longer malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay, or even lynch a jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder’s deserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined. The flogged judge, or Congressman, or other jobholder, on being discharged from hospital—or his chief heir, in case he has perished—goes before a grand jury and makes a complaint, and, if a true bill is found, a petit jury is empaneled and all the evidence is put before it. If it decides that the jobholder deserves the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that this punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to the difference between what the jobholder deserved and what he got, and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course.<br /><br />The advantages of this plan, I believe, are too patent to need argument. At one stroke it removes all the legal impediments which now make the punishment of a recreant jobholder so hopeless a process, and enormously widens the range of possible penalties. They are now stiff and, in large measure, illogical; under the system I propose they could be made to fit the crime precisely. Say a citizen today becomes convinced that a certain judge is a jackass—that his legal learning is defective, his sense of justice atrophied, and his conduct of cases before him tyrannical and against decency. As things stand, it is impossible to do anything about it. A judge cannot be impeached on the mere ground that he is a jackass; the process is far too costly and cumbersome, and there are too many judges liable to the charge. Nor is anything to be gained from denouncing him publicly and urging all good citizens to vote against him when he comes up for re-election, for his term may run for ten or fifteen years, and even if it expires tomorrow and he is defeated the chances are good that his successor will be quite as bad, and maybe even worse. Moreover, if he is a Federal judge he never comes up for re-election at all, for once he has been appointed by the President of the United States, on the advice of his more influential clients and with the consent of their agents in the Senate, he is safe until he is so far gone in senility that he has to be propped up on the bench with pillows.<br /><br />But now imagine any citizen free to approach him in open court and pull his nose. Or even, in aggravated cases, to cut off his ears, throw him out of the window, or knock him in the head with an axe. How vastly more attentive he would be to his duties! How diligently he would apply himself to the study of the law! How careful he would be about the rights of litigants before him! How polite and suave he would become! For judges, like all the rest of us, are vain fellows: they do not enjoy having their noses pulled. The ignominy resident in the operation would not be abated by the subsequent trial of the puller, even if he should be convicted and jailed. The fact would still be brilliantly remembered that at least one citizen had deemed the judge sufficiently a malefactor to punish him publicly, and to risk going to jail for it. A dozen such episodes, and the career of any judge would be ruined and his heart broken, even though the jails bulged with his critics. He could not maintain his air of aloof dignity on the bench; even his catchpolls would snicker at him behind their hands, especially if he showed a cauliflower ear, a black eye or a scar over his bald head. Moreover, soon or late some citizen who had at him would be acquitted by a petit jury, and then, obviously, he would have to retire. It might be provided by law, indeed, that he should be compelled to retire in that case—that an acquittal would automatically vacate the office of the offending jobholder.Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-10954873306743659422010-06-11T10:57:00.001-07:002010-06-16T13:10:17.408-07:00Buffalo 66 --- Don't Bother<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRkpsOefvpnb_j1sy5NRD1B6l7SQTxrsrdxiKyhJajvrOukk_Fr-d69qNqdQUuaRdT3KnD2dFVgSj04krdVszP1yEpBmPGK8AWp6r3XFHQ5Zxllj1G8CMjOn2crYZha_I_fK4YgAWmVls/s1600/vincent_gallo_5085167.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 134px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRkpsOefvpnb_j1sy5NRD1B6l7SQTxrsrdxiKyhJajvrOukk_Fr-d69qNqdQUuaRdT3KnD2dFVgSj04krdVszP1yEpBmPGK8AWp6r3XFHQ5Zxllj1G8CMjOn2crYZha_I_fK4YgAWmVls/s200/vincent_gallo_5085167.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5481577027275220338" /></a><br />This is the first time I have reviewed a movie on here, largely because it is the first time I have encountered one so uniformly bad and pretentious that it called forth my venom. The film in question is <span style="font-style:italic;">Buffalo 66<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span> by indie/art house director/producer Vincent Gallo. Truthfully, a great many art house movies are very good. This is because they are made by people of considerable ability working in a medium they actually understand. However, Mr. Gallo submits himself to no such limitations. "Buffalo 66" is the second of his films that I have seen, and I can assure you this man operates entirely in the talent-free zone. Dedicated professional that he is, he throws his ham-handed ineptitude into each film he makes with the titanic energy of a nuclear bomb. <br /><br />Not only that, but his character appears to be pure, unadulterated white trash. And not just garden variety white trash, either. We're talking about true social road kill here---the distilled and concentrated essence of all the white trash ever whelped in all the vast eons of the world's history since the very Morning of Time. One might conclude that this is the result of costuming and makeup. If one did, one would be very wrong. Mr. Gallo does not bother with costuming and the like. Long famous for his sleazy and disgusting off-camera behavior, it is obvious that he simply elects to play individuals who who look, talk, and act exactly as he does in real life. <br /><br />The action begins when Gallo's character, a young miscrant named Billy Brown, is released at the gates of a prison after a stay of unstated length. Upon exit, he immediately needs to pee. Why Billy didn't pee while he was still in the joint, we are not told, although he does try to get back in for exactly that purpose, only to be rebuffed. This scene is no doubt designed to take the viewer back to childhood vacations when Dad would boom out in his most anoyed voice, "Damn it! I told you to go when you had the chance back there at the gas station." This is so we will identify and be sympathetic toward poor Billy. Doesn't work for me because no doubt Rasputin, John Wayne Gacey, and Hitler all needed to pee from time to time as well. <br /><br />The next few minutes of action are dominated by Billy rushing around the neighborhood, all the while desperately grasping his crotch. In fact, this is the only part of the film that does work for me: one look at Billy/Gallo and I knew immediately that he was the kind of fellow who would be given to enthusiastically grasping his crotch in public. Indeed, he does it so well and with such native abandon that I would suggest he make it his signature quirk and find some reason to do it in all his future films. <br /><br />Finally Billy winds up in a dance studio where he blunders into the bathroom. Will he relieve himself so that at long last we can be free of this peeing business? Of course not. He rapidly discerns, through a mental process to which we are not made privy, that the man at the next urinal is a homosexual. And as might be expected, he attacks this poor fellow no apparent reason. The purpose of this business is not to show our protagonist as a bigot. Far from it. It is meant to depict him as a man of such rare refinement and sensitivity that he can't let go while standing beside someone he thinks is gay. It is at this point that we begin to realize that Gallo is depicting a SENSITIVE BUT MISUNDERSTOOD YOUNG MAN. Whee!! Now we're getting somewhere. <br /><br />This Homeric search for a bathroom serves the additional function of getting him into the dance studio so he could kidnap a young student named "Layla" portrayed by Christina Ricci. I used the term "portrayed" in its broadest sense, here. Ricci never actually acts in this pathetic excuse for a film. Instead, she merely stands around looking like an overripe peach waiting for some psychotic white trash peckerwood to come along and pluck her. <br /><br />The long and the short of the matter is that Billy wants Layla, who was grabbed either at random or because of her prominently displayed cleavage, to impersonate his non-existent wife while he visits his parents. But before we can deal with that, we must first dispense with the peeing business. He forces her to drive her car outside of town where he leaves her at the wheel of the idling vehicle while he runs about fifty yards out into a nearby field to (at long last) tend to business. Does Layla do the sensible thing and simply put the car in gear and drive off, leaving this lunatic to his own devices? Of course not. This is because she has obviously intuited that he is a SENSITIVE BUT MISUNDERSTOOD YOUNG MAN. It is at this point that we begin to realize that somewhere down the road she is going to give him THE LOVE HE NEVER HAD. <br /><br />Arriving at his home, we meet his parents, Jimmy and Jan Brown, played by Ben Gazzara and Anjelica Huston. Billy has told them that he has been working in Europe for the U.S. Government in some refined capacity. One wonders why they are so clueless that they don't know he has been in prison. There is also the question of why they are so gullible as to believe that someone who looks like their disastrous oaf of a son could actually be a high-level government employee. This is an issue that is not addressed at this point. However, the reasons later become apparent as Layla asks to see Billy's baby pictures. After a monumental search that rivals their son's desperate quest for a urinal, they finally unearth them. Or I suppose I should say they unearth IT. That's right---Jimmy and Jan have only one photo of baby Billy, though they have whole albums full of pictures of the Buffalo Bills pro football team. Indeed, their entire house is a sort of mystic shrine to the Bills, with statues and posters and memorabilia scattered hither-thither all over the place. Now we get it. Poor Billy was neglected in favor of a football team. <br /><br />As one last insult to the viewer's intelligence, Layla, who has revealed herself to Billy as a vegan, sits down to supper with the family. Momma Jan hauls out the evening's fare, which happens to be a steaming platter full of stewed cow guts. <br /><br />Had enough? I had, and this is where I quit watching. <br /><br />Did I mention that this mess of a film squanders some first rate acting talent in the persons of Gazzara, Huston and Mickey Rourke? Did I mention that it is a pointless, pretentious and nonsensical waste of time? Did I mention that it is utter drivel? Did I?.... Well, you get the point even if Gallo didn't.<br /><br />One final note: Gallo is said to get annoyed when he is told---as he often is---that he would be perfect to play Charles Manson. Can't the man take a hint?Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-78310979203672032302010-04-24T21:06:00.001-07:002010-04-24T21:16:30.715-07:00Lone Star Noir<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiV0iEPXWH5hJs2fuSnebS8l_V6NZTI5M384j3dLBICnVMJ0NLP9vywAU_TbPRRaWRrrwV3mkwqk00ojKRAh-QtTB1XL2GGveP_l4pfHsGGdkjsZwW7GZU01OGoEZp7vVzw0tvKv2EsdA/s1600/Lone+Star+Noir.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 254px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiV0iEPXWH5hJs2fuSnebS8l_V6NZTI5M384j3dLBICnVMJ0NLP9vywAU_TbPRRaWRrrwV3mkwqk00ojKRAh-QtTB1XL2GGveP_l4pfHsGGdkjsZwW7GZU01OGoEZp7vVzw0tvKv2EsdA/s400/Lone+Star+Noir.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5463923456137567090" /></a><br />Slated for fall release. I have a story called "Cherry Coke" in this anthology to be brought out by Akashic press (New York, NY) but that is the least of it. It also contains stories by David Corbett, James Crumley, Jesse Sublett, Joe Lansdale, and my good friend George Wier. This book is one of a series of successful and highly acclaimed anthologies including <span style="font-style:italic;">New York Noir, Chicago, Noir, Phoenix Noir</span> and several others.<br /><br />Edited by Bobby and John Byrd of El Paso, it promises to be a real winner.Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-24776999253480465332010-02-23T12:36:00.000-08:002010-02-25T08:03:52.412-08:00NIGHTS OF THE RED MOON<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOxKMt4au6o54o1takAi9JrpsDj9-IT_ePVvH6GYnDAkXFg2H4eIrz0KwnYtd2lafgd7zpujIhuYERDmZ8w5QOqNyJFLIxHpcht2_0AvQDU996TiYU489XHPEHm_7zUxm74LmZMm_ooQY/s1600-h/NightsoftheRedMoon.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 265px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOxKMt4au6o54o1takAi9JrpsDj9-IT_ePVvH6GYnDAkXFg2H4eIrz0KwnYtd2lafgd7zpujIhuYERDmZ8w5QOqNyJFLIxHpcht2_0AvQDU996TiYU489XHPEHm_7zUxm74LmZMm_ooQY/s400/NightsoftheRedMoon.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442212418624458066" /></a><br /><br />Slated for fall release by St. Martin's Press, New York, NY.<br /><br />CHAPTER ONE <br /> <br />My name is Bo Handel, and I'd been sheriff of Caddo County, Texas, for almost thirty years when Amanda Twiller was slaughtered and then dumped in front of the Methodist parsonage shortly before sunup on a hot, dry morning in early September. I was enjoying a third cup of coffee and trying to dig my way through the Houston Chronicle when I heard a loud knock at my front door. I padded up the hall barefoot and in my bathrobe to find my Chief Deputy, Toby Parsons, standing on the porch. Toby is a mid-thirties African American ex-Special Forces sergeant with a keen mind and a calm, even temperament. But he looked anything but calm and even that morning. <br /><br />I motioned him inside. "From your expression I conclude that either the courthouse has gone missing or we have a body on our hands. Which is it?"<br /><br />"A body."<br /><br />"Any idea whose?"<br /><br />He nodded. "Afraid so, Bo. It's Reverend Twiller's wife."<br /><br />I shook my head sadly, not overly surprised. I didn't know the woman, but I knew that she was the wife of Reverend Bobby Joe Twiller, pastor of Sequoya's First United Methodist Church, and that they'd been in town about three years. The morning he preached his first sermon, Twiller stressed that he hoped to become a refuge and safe harbor to anyone in spiritual need. How successful he was in this endeavor is for others besides myself to decide, but it is a matter of public record that after ten years of marriage, his wife had found his gentle presence in her life so burdensome that she'd begun an affair with the owner of a local liquor store, and then run off to Houston with the man a few weeks later. <br /><br />Initially the Twillers' arrival in town had generated quite a splash with the congregation. As time wore on, they had come to be well liked in the community, and with Reverend Twiller at the helm the membership of the old, almost moribund church quadrupled. Along the way a full-time educational director had been hired, and a large and popular Sunday school class for adult singles was added. Then at the beginning of the summer, Twiller announced the creation of a youth ministry that featured a week's encampment on Sam Rayburn Reservoir. <br /><br />Yet his accomplishments must have seemed meaningless to him that Sunday morning back in late July when his conscience compelled him to reveal his wife's adultery to his congregation, something he saw as rooted in his own failures as a husband. The clear-eyed businessmen on his board of stewards were aware of one fact that was lost on their pastor: Amanda Twiller was a nervous, erratic individual who had been a very poor choice as a minister's wife. They refused to accept his resignation and asked him to stay on. He did, though only as a shadow of his former self. But if the church hadn't given up on Reverend Twiller, then neither had he given up on his wife. At least not until this grim morning. <br /> <br />"This would be a murder, I assume?" I asked Toby. <br /><br />"Unless she found some way to shoot herself three times in the back. Her husband found her in their front yard just a little while ago, but it looks like she was killed somewhere else because there's hardly any blood at the scene." <br /><br />"It's inside the city limits. Doesn't the Police Department want primary jurisdiction?" <br /><br />"No. Chief Ogilvie and his wife are on vacation up in Virginia. With him out of town, the city PD doesn't have anybody with homicide experience except Clyde Kraft, and he's filling in as acting chief. He requested that you take over the investigation since he's busy with administrative duties."<br /><br />"Of course he would," I said, shaking my head with mild exasperation. "Clyde's too damn lazy to cast a shadow." I led the way back to the kitchen and motioned to the percolator. "Go ahead and have a cup of coffee while I get dressed." <br /><br />I went upstairs to the bedroom I had shared with my wife until she died of cancer five years earlier. I pulled out a fresh pair of dark Wrangler dress jeans and a starched white western shirt and climbed into them. Once I got my Tony Lama boots situated on my feet and my cream-colored western summer hat mounted on my head, I went down the stairs. I didn't bother to take a look in the hall mirror before leaving the house the way I always did in my younger years. By now I was reconciled to what I'd see looking back at me--a weathered, sun-darkened face that would never make women swoon. But neither would it make little kids run screeching for their mothers, so I knew I could live with it one more day, just as I'd done for the past sixty-two years...Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-27991805787300827692009-04-12T21:21:00.000-07:002009-04-21T10:39:57.623-07:00Destroyer of Myths<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9sQ6c59qckdqih3v6hX5waYqfBDeFAeBQ6KjGCA41HrS6VYh7QVcRklbdcAnQxNraRrAtHPbEl1GMk1oMgqhB2Bxfi9afwSxWb-Tzj-WWLHCMZpPEqC67BAKQBgOsk8Z1x1kNtZBkzyU/s1600-h/Homefromthehillpost.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9sQ6c59qckdqih3v6hX5waYqfBDeFAeBQ6KjGCA41HrS6VYh7QVcRklbdcAnQxNraRrAtHPbEl1GMk1oMgqhB2Bxfi9afwSxWb-Tzj-WWLHCMZpPEqC67BAKQBgOsk8Z1x1kNtZBkzyU/s320/Homefromthehillpost.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324026884239668178" /></a><br />They must have made an exotic couple, the small, sandy headed Anglo-Celtic boy from Northeast Texas and the tiny, dark-haired, Brooklyn-born Jewish girl---a contrast made doubly odd by the fact that they were on the lam, hiding from the girl's husband and the authorities so she would not lose custody of her three-year-old daughter. Exotic or not, it was a match that would last until his death some forty-odd years later.<br /><br />William Humphrey was born in Clarksville, the seat of Red River County Texas, on June 18, 1924 and died on August 20, 1997. He studied at both Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas in Austin, but never completed a degree at either institution. He left Texas for good in 1944 and made his home in Hudson, New York, for the bulk of his remaining years. He taught for a decade and a half at Bard College where he mentored several well known playwrights. The author of thirteen books, one of which was nominated for a National Book Award, he is considered both a minor novelist and a "mere" regionalist. He was neither, facts that he realized and which led, understandably, to some bitterness on his part. <br /><br />The major event in his life was the death of his larger-than-life father when he was thirteen. According to Humphrey, his mother awakened him in the middle of the night with the news, thus beginning what he called "an anguish that would never end." It was also the end of his peaceful, bucolic life in East Texas. A month later the small family moved to Dallas. Humphrey did not return to Clarksville even for a short visit for thirty-two years. Nevertheless, critics have noted that while he spent the bulk of his life in the North with occasional year-long sojourns in Europe, the creative core of his work was firmly rooted in the first thirteen years of his life and in the social patterns and rituals of Northeast Texas, which is culturally very much a part of the South. In a letter dated 9 August, 1958 he said, "I think of myself as a southerner, my characters as southerners, not westerners, and this is what one can expect to find in Clarksville." <br /><br />At college he became enamored of the German language, applied himself quite diligently to its study, and grew quite fluent. In the early 1940s, at the insistence of friends, he made his one and only visit to a nightclub, where he was thoroughly out of place. But the evening was redeemed when he recognized the great German novelist Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize, who was also less than enchanted with his surroundings. Humphrey approached Mann, was invited to sit at his table, and the pair engaged in an animated two-hour conversation from which they both emerged happy and more than a little drunk. <br /><br />While still an unpublished young writer, he was helped by Texas novelist Katherine Ann Porter, who became a close friend. One annoyance he mentioned often was that critics frequently compared him to Faulkner. Humphrey was fond of pointing out that both he and the great Mississippi novelist had been born into the small town Southern cotton culture only three hundred miles and a few years apart in time, and that it was no miracle that they would write about some of the same things. <br /><br />His first novel, <span style="font-style:italic;">Home From The Hill</span>, which was his best and most successful book, was made into a film and released in 1960. It was directed by Vincente Minnelli and starred Robert Mitchum, Eleanor Parker, George Peppard, George Hamilton, Everett Sloane, and Luana Patten. As one might expect from Hollywood, several changes are made to the plotline and the story is given a happy ending. However, the thing was filmed in the Clarksville area, and is well worth watching. <br /><br />Next came <span style="font-style:italic;">The Ordways</span>, which was less successful. In the decades to come he would write some of the finest short stories to ever flow from the pen of an American author, yet the recognition that he craved eluded him and his bitterness grew as the years sped by. <br /><br />Something of a malcontent, he was known to have a prickly temperament. Early in his career, his work was actually solicited by a famous editor at <span style="font-style:italic;">The New Yorker</span>---no mean complement for a young writer. However, the editor made the mistake of writing to Humphrey that, "We would like to add you to our stable." Humphrey sent back a one sentence reply: "I am not a horse." Luckily for both, this breach was repaired and several of his better stories would eventually appear in that prestigious journal. A decade or so later, his editor on <span style="font-style:italic;">Home From The Hill</span> marked a sentence and said, "This sticks out like a sore thumb." Humphrey replied, "I told you that when you put it in there, you idiot!!" <br /><br />Humphrey saw himself as a destroyer of myths---the myth of the hunter, the myth of the frontier, the myth of the Southern aristocrat. If there was any myth that ran like a thread through the whole corpus of his work, it is the myth of community. According to Ashby Bland Crowder, his literary biographer, the true themes are are isolation and suffering: "Humphrey writes about pain. That he does it in prose of great beauty does not mute the impact." He goes on to say: <br /><br /><blockquote>"The fate that Humphrey's characters face over and over again is that they must live with great loss. In one way or another they lose someone or something that they value greatly---a father, a son, a brother, a wife, a friend, God, confidence, integrity, authenticity, freedom, respect, home. Whatever the loss, 'the grieving heart grieves all alone, in unabridgeable isolation.'" </blockquote><br />Humphrey was a reclusive and intensely private person. Even his death is shrouded in some degree of mystery. The cause of his passing has been given variously as cancer, the ravages of alcoholism, and heart failure. A tiny man, when he breathed his last on August 20, 1997 he was reputed to have weighed only 77 pounds. <br /><br />Yet one wonders. Despite his rejection of the "myth of community," he was buried, at his own insistence, in a plot he had bought years earlier for his wife and himself in the Clarksville City Cemetery. It was, he said, his desire to "lie in peace near the old Hanging Tree and hear the courthouse clock strike the hour until the coming of Judgment Day." The prodigal son had come home at last. <br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-style:italic;">Note: much is available about Humphrey on the web, and I firmly expect his critical stock to rise. If you have not read him, you should. "Home From The Hill" is a good place to start. And do not forget some of his exquisitely-crafted short stories. <br /></span><br /></blockquote>Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-58859282107976205002009-03-08T17:16:00.001-07:002009-03-10T08:05:47.470-07:00Down These Mean Streets...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS7i2OINDq4v8k4PCkUoAbsd9CY7poejYmoQdRI8C96GU26_QF6zRVtDZ5gh5XgXVZCbI4GKzp3WSxVxjsC0OY9h0ho4KtMPZeJ7kRnM0LBf3I7Z5x_GeJrktaFkFUaNsLsH45bZOGHnM/s1600-h/Raymond-Chandler-Splash.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 237px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS7i2OINDq4v8k4PCkUoAbsd9CY7poejYmoQdRI8C96GU26_QF6zRVtDZ5gh5XgXVZCbI4GKzp3WSxVxjsC0OY9h0ho4KtMPZeJ7kRnM0LBf3I7Z5x_GeJrktaFkFUaNsLsH45bZOGHnM/s320/Raymond-Chandler-Splash.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5310975538868137106" /></a><br />"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness." <br /><br />Thus Raymond Thornton Chandler described the ideal crime novel protagonist in his most famous essay, "The Simple Art of Murder," which appeared in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Atlantic Monthly</span> back in 1945.<br /><br />Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888, but was raised largely in England and received a classical education at Dulwich College, London. He fought in World War One, came home to America, and settled in Los Angeles, which was to be the scene of practically all his fiction. He married a woman eighteen years his senior, and after having drunk himself out of a good job as the director of a oil company, he started writing detective fiction for pulp magazines like <span style="font-style:italic;">Mask</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Black Cat</span> Thus began the unlikely career of our greatest crime novelist. Or if not our greatest crime novelist, then certainly our most talented prose stylist to write in the crime fiction genre. <br /><br />In a career that spanned almost thirty years, his output was limited to six novels and about two dozen stories. His first novel, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Big Sleep</span> (1939), introduced the iconic Phillip Marlowe, who was to be his protagonist for the remainder of his literary career. <br /><br />Marlowe, a former investigator for the L.A County District Attorney's office who was fired for insubordination, is a sardonic and somewhat bitter man with high ethical standards. Here, in a continuation of the essay cited above, Chandler describes him better than I possibly could: <br /><blockquote>"The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without<br />saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him."<br /></blockquote><br />Marlowe inspired a whole spate of imitations, none of whom have survived the test of time largely because, while their creators caught the sarcasm, they missed the depth of character and profound sense of decency that motivated Chandler's protagonist. These cynical, cardboard-like figures, more shadow than substance, were ably satirized by William S. Burroughs in <span style="font-style:italic;">Naked Lunch</span> with his hilarious Clem Snide, who, acting in a fashion characteristic of this lesser breed, described himself as a "private asshole." <br /><br />Several of Chandler's novels have been made into films, some more than once. To my mind, the best of the lot is the 1946 version of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Big Sleep</span> staring Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Sternwood, with Howard Hawks directing and the great Southern novelist William Faulkner as lead scriptwriter. This was Hawks first shot at film noir, and he stuck to the obvious and didn't try to get overly arty, an approach more directors might consider. <br /><br />But Chandler was not the first crime novelist to write in the realistic vein. He highly valued Dashiell Hammett as the first major writer to break away from the English cozy sort of mystery as exemplified by Dorothy Sayers and A.A. Milne. Here what he said of that transition: <br /><br /><blockquote>"Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing. He wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.<br /><br />"Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes." <br /></blockquote><br />Chandler was much valued as a stylist by Truman Capote, who did much to rekindle interest in his work for a whole new generation of readers back in the 1960s. The simple vividness of Chandler's prose is apparent in this selection below from his short story, "Red Wind" which was published in 1938:<br /><br /><blockquote>"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge." <br /></blockquote><br />Or his description of twentieth century America from "The Simple Art of Murder": <br /><br /><blockquote>"The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule cities and almost rule nations, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge."</blockquote><br />And from <span style="font-style:italic;">The Long Goodbye</span>: <br /><br /><blockquote>"When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is."</blockquote> <br />If you haven't read Chandler, you should. His books have never been out of print, and his stock continues to rise with literary critics. The full text of his essay on murder can be found <a href="http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html">here</a>. <br />I will leave it to Chandler, speaking once again of the ideal crime novel protagonist, to close. <br /><br /><blockquote>"If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in."<br /></blockquote>Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-86619444507749314172009-02-11T11:01:00.000-08:002009-02-11T11:57:47.400-08:00Walker Percy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjag_e6RizK1w9VgTXJ8sNlcXDe9ij0-lf_xKawelDdsLEJHtlf6t1-yi5YRTYkYrnDoaUSu-fgrulpH12UTGgmBPNOpMGj-wXklVal4ar_IvJ6GV61hk0rc-ITJrE0ERNP1fJOSIBB7VA/s1600-h/Percy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 181px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjag_e6RizK1w9VgTXJ8sNlcXDe9ij0-lf_xKawelDdsLEJHtlf6t1-yi5YRTYkYrnDoaUSu-fgrulpH12UTGgmBPNOpMGj-wXklVal4ar_IvJ6GV61hk0rc-ITJrE0ERNP1fJOSIBB7VA/s200/Percy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5301617325026970466" border="0" /></a>At the urging of my friend Terry Cowan I am reading <span style="font-style: italic;">Love In The Ruins</span> by Southern novelist Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990), and it is turning out to be a delightful literary adventure. It is the sort of thing that might have resulted had Hunter S. Thompson been both civilized and educated.<br /><br />Percy was scientifically trained and received his medical degree, yet by the time he had finished his formal education he became convinced that science was utterly incapable of explaining the real mysteries of human existence.<br /><br />Rather than wear myself out writing a parallel description of what Terry has written, I have decided to follow T.S. Eliot's advice and steal liberally from what my friend posted on his blog found <a href="http://notesfromacommonplacebook.blogspot.com/">here</a>. <em></em><em><br /><br /></em><blockquote><em>"Love in the Ruins</em>, published in 1971, is a futuristic pre or mid-apocalyptical novel. The age is one of random, inexplicable violence, though in this death-denying culture, the mere mention of the word "funeral" causes embarrassment. The utter banality of American life has broken down every defense. Life revolves around the golf course, which can now be played even at night. Jesus Christ is described as "The Greatest Pro of Them All." The Pro-Am is kicked-off with a "Bible Brunch" and a performance by the Christian Kaydettes. The biggest event in the liturgical calendar is now "Property Rights Sunday." The Catholic Church split into 3 factions: 1. the American Catholic Church (the A.C.C.) based in Cicero, IL which preaches property rights and neighborhood integrity and plays the <em>Star-Spangled Banner</em> at the elevation of the Host, 2. the Dutch schismatics who "believed in relevance, but not God," and 3. the Roman Catholic remnant, where the "monks are beginning to collect books again."<br /><br />"Politically, the old divisions hold: the conservatives are now the Knotheads (the businessmen), and the liberals the Leftpapas (the federal bureaucrats and the therapists and scientists). On Sunday mornings, the Knotheads go to church and the Leftpapas go on bird-watching expeditions into the woods, hoping against hope of spotting an ivory-billed woodpecker. But other than that, the lives of each group are much the same.<br /><br />"Therapy is the rule of the day, and pervades every aspect of daily life. Older Americans are shipped off to Tucson or Tampa. If they give any trouble there, they are shuttled off to clinics for more therapy. If this is unsuccessful, the oldsters are sent to the Happy Isles of Georgia, a way-station to self-euthanization.<br /><br />"The nation as a whole has undergone periodic unrest and riots. The Automobile Age, as it is known, is now a fond memory. There are still cars on the roads, but when they break down, they are just left, as there is now no one to repair them (or anything else.) The nation has been bogged down for the last 16 years in a civil war in Ecuador. All the while, the vines and sumac steadily encroach from the swamps and bayous.<br /><br />"And everyone pretends that all this is normal--except, that is, for the protagonist, a lapsed Catholic by the name of Dr. Thomas More. He alone, seemingly, realizes the spiritual malaise, and recognizes the swings between pure abstract thought and violence. He seeks to "cure" mankind through his invention, the lapsometer, and believes he can "<em>save the terrible God-blessed Americans from themselves</em>." He hopes his device can perhaps bridge "<em>the dread chasm between body and mind that has sundered the soul of Western man for five hundred years</em>.'"<br /></blockquote><br />Early on Percy gets to the heart of the matter: that attitude historians call "the myth of American exceptionalism," which is nothing less than the commonly held belief that we are somehow special in that the forces of economics and history do not apply to us: <br /><br /><em></em><blockquote><em>"Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself....Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward.?</em>"<br /><br />And later:<br /><br /><em>"Even now, late as it is, nobody can really believe that it didn't work after all. The U.S.A. didn't work! Is it even possible that from the beginning it never did work? that the thing always had a flaw in it, a place where it would shear, and that all this time we were not really different from Ecuador and Bosnia-Herzegovina, just richer.</em>"<br /></blockquote><br />Sound familiar? It should. It seems that Percy was astute in his analysis of the American character---so astute, in fact, that his writing was remarkably prescient.Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-61136202772725163962009-01-14T22:17:00.000-08:002009-01-21T15:12:50.367-08:00The Faulkner of The Crime Novel<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5RZXA8wu4W1AndvBz_yGUkZ69PxCptJbxExiEWUhPvZ4wWVSCx5a2mIp5BGhAmsqtJzjAf4qN2xFjbuTS3peKTsAqYxD1RubOjmU2PgrjcDwESZWGsrjlcQeb9LqjiOAD3v9GnrP8z6w/s1600-h/james_lee_burke,0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 245px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5RZXA8wu4W1AndvBz_yGUkZ69PxCptJbxExiEWUhPvZ4wWVSCx5a2mIp5BGhAmsqtJzjAf4qN2xFjbuTS3peKTsAqYxD1RubOjmU2PgrjcDwESZWGsrjlcQeb9LqjiOAD3v9GnrP8z6w/s320/james_lee_burke,0.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292687037570443794" border="0" /></a>If you haven't read James Lee Burke but have an interest in mystery & crime fiction, you have one of the more pleasurable experiences in contemporary literature waiting for you.<br /><br />Burke was born in Houston in 1936 and was raised in Houston and southern Louisiana. Between then and now he earned a master's degree in English and journalism and worked variously as a petroleum <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">landman</span></span>, a social worker, a surveyor, and a college English teacher and survived alcoholism. Along the way he acquired a Chinese-American wife named Pearl and sired four high-achieving children including his <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">daughter</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Alafair</span></span> who is both a law professor and a published crime novelist. He and his wife, who have been married forty-eight years, divide their year, living in homes in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Missoula</span></span>, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.<br /><br />Two of his crime novels have been made into movies: <span style="font-style: italic;">Heaven's Prisoners</span> (with Alec Baldwin & Mary Start <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Masterson</span></span>), and <span style="font-style: italic;"> In The Electric Mist with Confederate Dead</span>, which starred Tommy Lee Jones & Mary <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Steenburgen</span></span>. Both Baldwin and Jones played Dave <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Robicheaux</span></span>, Burke's conflicted, alcoholic Cajun deputy sheriff/protagonist.<br /><br />And those are the bare bones of the man's life, other than the fact that he holds a record of sorts: his novel, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Lost Get-Back Boogie,</span> was rejected by one hundred and eleven separate and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">distinct </span>publishers only to be brought out at last by Louisiana State University Press. Six months after its inception, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, thus <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">proving</span> that the American publishing industry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">is</span> largely run by idiots.<br /><br />I will not belabor the issue other than to say that in his <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Robicheaux</span> books, Burke paints a picture of a place (southern Louisiana) and a people unlike anything else ever seen in print. He also has a second series, the Billy Bob Holland books, whose protagonist, Holland, is a retired Texas Ranger-turned lawyer. While they are well worth reading and very entertaining, it is the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Robucheaux</span> series that his magnum opus. Burke has attracted a wide readership outside the world of literature and has been the subject of laudatory newspaper pieces by such diverse figures as noted University of South Carolina history professor Clyde Wilson, the editor of the John C. Calhoun papers, and political columnist Charlie Reese. Reese's piece can be found <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese380.html">here</a>.<br /><br />Each of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Robicheaux</span> books can be read independently without reference to the earlier volumes for background. However, they are best read in order because great changes occur in the protagonist's life. This snippet from <span style="font-style: italic;">Jolie <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Blon's</span> Bounce</span> will give you some idea of the man's style:<br /><br /><blockquote>"I wanted to drive deep into the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Atchafalaya</span> Swamp, past the confines of reason, into the past... on the tree-flooded alluvial rim of the world, where the tides and the course of the sun were the only measures of time and all you had to do was release yourself from the prison of restraint, just snip loose the stitches that sewed your skin to the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">hairshirt</span> of normalcy."<br /></blockquote>A complete list of Burke's works can be found at his website <a href="http://www.jamesleeburke.com/index.html">here.</a><br /><br />A couple of years after 9/11, the ancient and venerable magazine <span style="font-style: italic;">The Nation</span> asked several American writers for articles on their home states. Burke's contribution can be found <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030512/burke">here</a>, and it will give you some idea of the magic this man can do with words.<br />If you like crime novels or just love good strong Southern fiction, I urge you to give him a try.Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-49825792257609522122009-01-10T11:09:00.000-08:002009-01-12T09:48:29.946-08:00William Shakespeare, Pulp Writer<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtbOE0tvszmefko81yZTGifqCVWLfcawA6H-zYMV4oGSbuOr9XfiPph922qyRZUcxagxClOM41ZKc7L2G_T70EBvNwQHhvs6CsfBFckXUUV5x32Ihhi6sCk1zI4RpewVXsL0Wnmubvt5g/s1600-h/shakespeare+4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 215px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtbOE0tvszmefko81yZTGifqCVWLfcawA6H-zYMV4oGSbuOr9XfiPph922qyRZUcxagxClOM41ZKc7L2G_T70EBvNwQHhvs6CsfBFckXUUV5x32Ihhi6sCk1zI4RpewVXsL0Wnmubvt5g/s320/shakespeare+4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5289744645332242866" border="0" /></a><br />If that title didn't get your attention, I don't know what would. But Shakespeare was, in many respects, a pulp writer, and he was, in most respects, a commercial writer.<br />He wrote to make money. Which goes hand-in-glove with a point I want to make.<br /><br />The facts of Shakespeare's life are too readily available to repeat them here. Suffice to say that he was a professional actor who owned part of a theater company that operated in a very competitive environment. Apparently he thought that he could do better than the plays commercially available, and about 1590 he began<br />to write. And make no mistake: all his plays were written for a popular audience. Not only that, he often padded his texts to increase their length. London theater audiences were very volatile, and could riot and damage a theater if they did not think they were getting their money's worth. To this end, Shakespeare included plenty of bawdy comedy, outlandish fight scenes, grotesque puns, obscene <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">buffooneries</span></span></span>, spilled blood and limitless gore--in short, all the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Ramboesque</span></span></span> departures from "good taste" the movies are accused of today.<br /><br />My point being that the greatest writer in the English language was very much a part of the entertainment industry and that he wrote for a popular audience. And he was subject to much of the same same sort of derisive criticism one hears of Hollywood in modern times. In Shakespeare's day, snobbish young <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Oxbridge</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">pecksniffs</span></span></span> used to come out to the London theaters to laugh at how the "ignorant" playwrights of the era violated the dramatic "unities." Why, everyone knew that the action of a tragedy had to take place in the space of a single day! The great Aristotle had said so! I'm sure Shakespeare was laughing all the way to the bank. He invested wisely and retired wealthy, and along the way gave us some of the greatest poetry ever to grace our language.<br /><br />These days, in this country at least, there exists a vast divide between those books that are considered literary fiction and those that are dismissed as "popular" entertainment. This was not always the case. At least up through the early 1960s, our best literary writers had a wide audience and it was not uncommon for books by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck to be found on the bestseller lists.<br /><br />This began to change in the 1960s. I believe part of the reason for this was the vast influx of the Boomer generation into colleges. Prior to this time, a writer had to cultivate a fairly wide readership in order to make any money or get any recognition. With the rapid growth in the size of college classes, and with state universities quadrupling their enrolments in this decade, it became possible for a writer to have a captive audience of students who were required to buy his books merely by pitching his work to the academic critics who determined what was read in college courses.<br /><br />Then there was the rising popularity of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">avant</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">garde</span></span></span> with popular, wide circulation magazines like <span style="font-style: italic;">Atlantic Monthly </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">The New Yorker </span>in which such pretentious frauds as Susan Sontag whooped it up for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">inaccessible</span> writers like William Burroughs, Antonin <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Artaud</span></span></span>, and Andre <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Robbe</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Grillet</span></span></span>. The obscure became the darling plaything of the so-called literary intelligentsia while storytelling fell by the wayside as archaic and vulgar hangovers from an earlier and less enlightened era. Along about the same time and for reasons I can't begin to understand, some of our best writers turned their talents away from fiction and moved toward what can only be called impressionistic journalism. An example of this is Truman Capote. One of the last books by a major literary writer that I can recall that achieved blockbuster status was his <span style="font-style: italic;">In Cold Blood</span>, a novel-like account of a brutal quadruple Kansas murder and its aftermath that was greeted as a "non-fiction novel." Capote himself hyped this work as a new type of reportage, which he, with characteristic pomposity, pronounced in the French fashion as "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">rey</span></span></span></span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">por</span></span></span></span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">tage</span></span></span></span>." Since the death of the author, who was a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">pathological</span> liar of the first water, it has come to light that several of the key scenes and conversations he recounted in his published narrative never occurred. In short, Capote left us with a sort of literary <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">morphodite</span></span></span></span> that is neither true crime nor truly fiction. It is, however, a thrilling and brilliant account that is well worth reading, whatever it is. But <span style="font-style: italic;">In Cold Blood </span>was the beginning of a trend followed by many of our other best writers, including Norman Mailer (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Executioner's Song, Oswald's Tale</span>) and Don <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">DeLillo</span></span></span></span> (<span style="font-style: italic;">Falling Man, Libra</span>), in which the authors wrote fiction-like accounts of true events in a way that blended the subjectivity of literature with the objectivity of newspaper reporting. This has, in my opinion, been a destructive trend in many ways for much fine talent has been wasted in areas where it should not have been spent.<br /><br />Then came literary critics like Derrida, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Foucalt</span></span></span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">le</span></span></span> Man and others, and with them came the critical schools of postmodernism, deconstructionism, textual analysis, and on and on. These preposterous oafs all sought, in one way or another, to prove that (A.) nothing means anything in literature & (B.) all past literary efforts had been the tools of oppression directed toward the downtrodden of the world. Yes. that's right, friends and neighbors: Shakespeare/Faulkner/Hemingway/Cather/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">et</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">al</span></span></span>. weren't writing to entrance and entertain; they were writing to oppress women, blacks, gays, Muslims, Moors, lesbians, Amerindians, Africans, Tasmanians, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Blogdovians</span></span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Wachovians</span></span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Malmutes</span></span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Tasmutes</span></span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Transmutes, Piutes</span></span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Flems</span></span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Waloons</span></span>, and bridge players--just take your pick from a bulging, K-Mart grab-bag of late 20<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">th</span></span></span> century trendy <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">victimology</span></span></span>. It seems strange to me that people drawn to the study of literature would spend their lives trashing the very writers one would think they should love. But taking human nature into account, I suppose it is no great wonder that we enjoy a surplus of the bright-eyed and ambitious who would eagerly <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">fellatiate</span></span></span> a baboon in Macy's window if it would earn them a little attention or help them build a career. Such is the state of utter <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">whoredom</span></span></span> one finds in the world of contemporary literary studies.<br /><br />So is literature dead? Far from it, according to several college English teachers of my <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">acquaintance</span>. However, they tell me that the truly vital work these days is to be found in genre literature---crime novels, science fiction, erotic romance, etc., and they expect a rebirth of true quality any day now. So in the interregnum, get yourself some James Lee Burke, Robert A. Heinlein, or Melinda M. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">Snodgrass</span></span></span>. Meanwhile, for those of you who can afford the airfare, <span style="font-style: italic;">Hamlet</span> is playing this spring at the restored Globe Theater in London---as it still is here and there all over the world.Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-21482314951936575152009-01-03T16:14:00.000-08:002009-01-05T19:58:45.162-08:00Beyond The Last Divide<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdLyp0hqIWKMoyJaLtbeTvG3wagzZjQwvRE7-bSHABuovpy-C3Vvqy9NV-GHgPq4tJX9RnrGAEbCGkbp5Y2ov5VJtZo6zoORnUB5Itmfe6vJTVBU0oNsyeBIxCWjvEQ-N7sVbG8P-YlyE/s1600-h/image002.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 273px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdLyp0hqIWKMoyJaLtbeTvG3wagzZjQwvRE7-bSHABuovpy-C3Vvqy9NV-GHgPq4tJX9RnrGAEbCGkbp5Y2ov5VJtZo6zoORnUB5Itmfe6vJTVBU0oNsyeBIxCWjvEQ-N7sVbG8P-YlyE/s320/image002.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287303009639076322" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Texas Ranger Captain John R. Hughes (1855-1947) at the far right---the model for Zane Grey's Lone Ranger.</span><br /><br />One might ask what a Texas Ranger Captain has to do with literature. Bear with me, for good writing is where you find it.<br /><br />John Hughes was born in Illinois and came to Texas on his own when he was about fifteen after having been a horse trader in the Indian Territory. In 1886 a gang of rustlers stole several horses from his own and neighboring ranches. Hughes tracked the men for two months and recovered the horses after killing two of the thieves. This exploit earned him the attention of Ranger Ira Aten. The next year, Aten asked Hughes to help him track down Judd Roberts, a brutal convicted murderer who had escaped from the authorities in Central Texas. When the pair accosted Roberts in Kansas, a gunfight ensued and Roberts was killed. That fall Aten succeeded in convincing Hughes to join the Rangers, an association that was to continue until his retirement in 1915.<br /><br />By 1893 Hughes had risen to sergeant in Company D of the famed Frontier Battalion, Late that same year he was promoted to head the company after the murder of its captain, Frank Jones. In 1901 the Frontier Battalion was abolished and the Ranger Force was reorganized into four co<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVca-h-4ze_v8hxXf0ffd_eygLXUaAsQRULBk-T8omzB61o1p9qmkKsL2P0oECuvEL4AhQkFJHm0KUvdilsYQG5sajFXio3Vopx85RgHwr67L-9ARuCdHEchUgxE6-tCXNyYiPspmbqQE/s1600-h/hughes2l400.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 252px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVca-h-4ze_v8hxXf0ffd_eygLXUaAsQRULBk-T8omzB61o1p9qmkKsL2P0oECuvEL4AhQkFJHm0KUvdilsYQG5sajFXio3Vopx85RgHwr67L-9ARuCdHEchUgxE6-tCXNyYiPspmbqQE/s320/hughes2l400.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287303946848366882" border="0" /></a>mpanies. Hughes was appointed once more to head Company D, which was to be headquartered in Brownsville in deep South Texas and had the task of patrolling the Texas/Mexican border. A quick study, he soon became fluent in Spanish and cultivated an extensive network of informants on both sides of the Rio Grande. He also had good relationships with the Mexican police, and it was during the early years of the 20th century that he became know on both sides of the river as the "Border Boss." Historian Bill O'Neal, in his authoritative <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Western-Gunfighters-Bill-ONeal/dp/0806123354"><span style="font-style: italic;">Encyclopedia Of Western Gunfighters, </span></a>credits Hughes with eight official killings in the line of duty. I suspect that there were more. On several occasions he vanished into Mexico with murder warrants on American criminals who had fled across the border, only to reappear some weeks later with no official report ever filed.<br /><br />He was known as an easygoing man with a robust sense of humor and was very popular with the men under him. He always cautioned his men to use prudence and common sense. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqB34K4yceJN8glD2AOt4oBWzV8Bf8jbTN6UG9dkI0FHG5F9ZkannE4ZsvrzB30fdn4Tj8nMux_L-J4PPF5PXzbNXjvXRWsJv4T6KQp401PRnvWhdd8yTruVQl42LXi_REaz6-zFouG1E/s1600-h/2297.GIF"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 141px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqB34K4yceJN8glD2AOt4oBWzV8Bf8jbTN6UG9dkI0FHG5F9ZkannE4ZsvrzB30fdn4Tj8nMux_L-J4PPF5PXzbNXjvXRWsJv4T6KQp401PRnvWhdd8yTruVQl42LXi_REaz6-zFouG1E/s200/2297.GIF" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287302855829976386" border="0" /></a>His favorite maxim was said to be, <span style="font-style: italic;">"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."</span> I suspect that the modern-day Ramboesque school of law enforcement exemplified by John Wayne/Sylvester Stallone movies would have disgusted him.<br /><br />After the 1901 reorganization, Rangers were required to make a formal report for each complaint they received. Around 1903 Hughes got a telegram telling him that some ruffian was hoorawing the town up at Eagle Pass and the local authorities couldn't handle him. Eagle Pass was quite a ways upriver, and the trip took several days. When Hughes returned, he made what is probably the most famous police report in Texas history. I can see him in my mind's eye sitting at an old-time roll-top desk, writing with the stub of a pencil by the dim light of a kerosene lamp. Down at the lower corner of the form the Rangers were provided was a blank marked "Disposition," which meant how was the complaint disposed of---arrest, etc. Perhaps it was Hughes' famous sense of humor that lead him to do what he did with this space. Or perhaps he really thought the word "Disposition" referred to the subject's temperament. At any rate, this is what he wrote:<br /><br /><blockquote>"Mean as hell. Had to kill him." </blockquote><br />Given the context, if that isn't literary, I don't know what would be.<br /><br />Captain Hughes never married, though he was engaged in his early years. His fiance died of typhoid fever in one of the periodic epidemics of that terrible disease that swept through the country in the 19th century. Each year, on what would have been their wedding day, he traveled back to Rockport to put flowers on her grave.<br /><br />Somewhere along in his later life, Hughes penned what I consider the only example of cowboy/frontier verse that rises to the level of literature. I say that because, unlike the authors of so much of what passed for poetry in the western anthologies of that era, Hughes didn't strain for high-toned imagery and Homeric metaphor. Instead, he wrote four simple lines that embody the authentic thoughts of an authentic man of this time and place.<br /><br /><blockquote>"When my old soul hunts range and rest<br />Beyond the last divide,<br />Just plant me in some strip of West<br />That's sunny, lone and wide.<br />Let cattle rub the headstone round;<br />Let coyotes wail their kin<br />Let horses come and paw the mound,<br />But don't you fence it in."<br /></blockquote><br />In 1947, suffering from a half dozen disorders and wracked with pain, yet still too tough to die, Hughes took his own life with the same old single action Colt he'd used to dispatch so many desperados. His funeral was held on a fine, sunny day in late spring. The old man was the last of the frontier Rangers, and his passing marked the end of an age. As might be expected, the services attracted a considerable crowd. And as might also be expected, the politicians flocked round his coffin and said all the Rotarian things that politicians say at such times. After the long-winded tributes were finished, he was laid to rest in the State Cemetery in Austin, which is surrounded by a tall fence of iron bars.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span>Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-79901469181821198932008-12-30T20:53:00.000-08:002009-01-01T07:45:27.535-08:00The Detritus of A Soul<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjycSfexUoqrpbVjygToi3Xkgw1ws5HNPz7fQ_e2GrE-zSYCq6fXBPQ0Lj6SZuk2WX_ErWqdlu06-zUMj0XWUHXqrrTrTNg3gef1XfVfsfCO0Lci5gcdM52iHEwaODfhfmGgdxnUQRGDCg/s1600-h/vfiles9008.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjycSfexUoqrpbVjygToi3Xkgw1ws5HNPz7fQ_e2GrE-zSYCq6fXBPQ0Lj6SZuk2WX_ErWqdlu06-zUMj0XWUHXqrrTrTNg3gef1XfVfsfCO0Lci5gcdM52iHEwaODfhfmGgdxnUQRGDCg/s200/vfiles9008.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286142255226949106" border="0" /></a><blockquote></blockquote>Yesterday, while I was reading my friend Joe <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Prentis's</span></span></span></span> blog, which is linked here, I came across an article that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">reminded</span> me of something I'd seen years ago and have never been able to get out of my mind, something that often comes back to me when I wake in those long hours after midnight and sleep won't return. Just a bit of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">grafitti</span></span></span>. . .<br /><br />Back in the mid-1990s a local attorney and history buff here in Tyler named Randy Gilbert bought the old 1880s county jail, which had been converted to a fleabag hotel in the early years of the 20<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">th</span></span></span></span> century, and set about restoring it as a law office. While the work was underway I went through the building several times, and on one trip Randy pointed out to me some graffiti that had been scribbled on the cement of the outer walls back in the cell-block area. All were interesting, but the one that has stuck in my mind read:<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">"R. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Druse</span></span></span></span>, Jan. 1, 1916. Pen Bound.</span>"<br /></blockquote>Nineteen-sixteen---a time when convicts feared the trip down to Huntsville about as much as they feared the penitentiary itself. The reason was<a href="http://texashideout.tripod.com/"> </a><a href="http://texashideout.tripod.com/russell.html/">Bud Russell,</a> longtime transfer agent for the Texas prison system. Known as "Uncle Bud" to the convicts, there was nothing warm, cuddly, or familial about the man. In a career that spanned better than four decades, he ranged the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">length</span> and breadth of the state, logging nearly four million miles as he hauled over a hundred thousand men down to begin their sojourns in the blistering sun of the state's cotton fields. Here is how <span style="font-style: italic;">Time Magazine </span>described him in 1940, shortly before his retirement:<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">"Big, red-faced, rawboned Uncle Bud Russell, 62, is Texas' prison transfer agent. Armed to the teeth (two six-shooters, two gas guns, blackjack, brass knuckles), he likes to ride his charges to jail with a Thompson S<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">ubmachine</span></span></span></span> gun between his knees. . .</span>"<br /></blockquote><span>I have no idea <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">what <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Druse's</span> crime </span></span>might have been, but I do believe it is a safe assumption that he arrived at his destination. </span><span> </span><span> Russell always said he would die before he gave up a prisoner. </span><span>"You were born about forty years too late to get tough with me," he would tell each man as he boarded the steel mesh cage welded to the bed of his flatbed truck. </span><span>Uncle Bud hauled Clyde and Buck Barrow and Raymond Hamilton---all with nary a hitch, so I doubt that this unknown young miscreant from Tyler even caused him to work up a sweat. Here is how famed blues artist Lead Belly, who made two trips with him, described the experience:<br /></span><style></style><blockquote><div style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><br />"Let the Midnight Special shine her light on me<br />Let the Midnight Special shine her ever-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">lovin</span></span></span>' light on me<br />"Here come <b>Bud Russell</b>," How in the world do you know?"<br />Well he know him by his wagon, and his forty-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">fo</span></span></span>'<br />Big gun on his shoulder, big knife in his hand<br />He's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">comin</span></span></span>' to carry you back to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Sugarland</span></span></span>.</span>"<br /></div></blockquote><span>But still I cannot help but wonder who R. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Druse</span></span></span> was and what obscure destiny was his. I would like to know too what combination of jauntiness and fatalism made him write that "Pen Bound" after his name. The Texas prison system was a terrible place in those days, and I wonder if he survived the experience. Many didn't. The guards could kill with impunity, and at least a few of them were sadists who knew no greater moment of joy than when they had tormented some hapless convict into desperate flight and then felled him with a load of buckshot. Did this stay in the pen reform <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Druse</span>, or did he become a career criminal? Did he go on to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">become</span> a father and grandfather? When did he die and where? These are questions that will never be answered. All I know of the man is that he was alive and here in Tyler, Texas, on New Year's Day back in 1916, waiting for the arrival of Uncle Bud and his Midnight Special. </span><br /><br /><span>You might well ask what this has to do with literature. A similar name </span><span>scratched onto the glass of a window of the old Oxford, Mississippi, jail back in the 1850s</span><span>, this one the name of a young girl who was the daughter of a sheriff and lived on the premises, inspired one of the great short stories of the English language, William Faulkner's "The Jail." If you haven't read it, I urge you to do so. It is found in<span style="font-style: italic;"> The Portable Faulkner,</span> which was edited by <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Malcolm</span> Cowley.</span><br /><br /><span>After following the imagined <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">vissitudes</span> of the girl's life, from adolescence to old age, at the end of the story Faulkner goes back to give her motive for marking at that pane back in the days of her youth:</span><br /><br /><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">"... since you know not that there is no time: no space: no distance: a fragile and worthless scratching almost <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">depthless</span> in a sheet of old barely <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">transperent</span> glass. . . there is the clear and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">undistanced</span> voice as though out of the antenna skeins of radio. . . across the vast instantaneous intervention, from the long long time ago:<span style="font-style: italic;"> 'Listen stranger; this was myself: this was I.'"</span><br /></div><span><br /></span></blockquote>Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8120447196352923020.post-15782648186835764152008-12-28T20:30:00.001-08:002009-01-04T09:11:19.610-08:00Why Obscure Destinies?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQuXnDzxuUrcDAI_ehT6tK1hu6EVxgYLe0uCVxuOua5-MlQ014tbm7sipvO8vDw8dMQOJgKTt1LtRSkiWDIPRyjPfRkGU1xJa_bCb08FxahoXVVdhP6GhrcUiuEWi0IM5jf9bNXfnpPiI/s1600-h/cather2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 254px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQuXnDzxuUrcDAI_ehT6tK1hu6EVxgYLe0uCVxuOua5-MlQ014tbm7sipvO8vDw8dMQOJgKTt1LtRSkiWDIPRyjPfRkGU1xJa_bCb08FxahoXVVdhP6GhrcUiuEWi0IM5jf9bNXfnpPiI/s320/cather2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5285064957868483714" border="0" /></a><br /><style></style><div style="text-align: left;"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span style="font-size:85%;">In 1932 Willa Cather's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., brought out a volume containing three of her longer short stories. The book was called <i>Obscure Destinies</i>, which I chose for the title of this blog because I have always loved the imagery the phrase evokes in my mind. The grim truth is that most of us are obscure people, and our destinies are ephemeral and worthy of little note. Or at least they are by the standards of the world, and therein lay Cather's genius--the depiction of common, obscure people in a way that is anything but common.<span> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><o:p><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" ></span></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" ></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Willa Sibert Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and raised in Red Cloud, Nebraska, during the closing days of the Great American Frontier. Many of her books deal with the Swedish, Bohemian, and German immigrants who settled the Central Plains. Much is readily available online about her, so I will not labor the issue with needless repetition.<span> </span>Of her novels, my favorites are <i>O Pioneers!, My Antonia</i>, and <i>A Lost Lady.<br /></i></span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Cather was aloof, forbidding, and distant---a very private person, one who brings to mind Florence King's description of another iron-willed woman: "She did not suffer fools gladly, but was always glad to see fools suffer." One critic called her a "Doom-struck Episcopalian." That description may have been apt seventy years ago, but I doubt that most of today's happy-clappy Episcopalians could even define the word "doom."<span> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><o:p><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" ></span></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" ></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Cather died in 1947 having never married, and it is widely assumed that she was a lesbian. On that assumption, both gay and straight feminists have criticized her severely for not coming out and thereby doing her part for the distaff sisterhood.<span> </span>Gloria Steinem was one of her posthumous critics on this matter, and it would have been fun to see that gibbering ninny confront Cather in the flesh.<span> </span>She would have had all the effect of a Nerf Ball crashing into a granite cliff. As for myself, I will honor Cather's privacy and make no speculations as to her sexuality. In the first place, it is none of my business, and in the second, its influence on her writing was minimal.<br /></span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Cather was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for <span style="font-style: italic;">One Of Ours, </span>which was the story of a young Nebraska farmer who joined the American Expeditionary Force and was killed in the First World War. Her writing was praised by such luminaries as H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, the latter of whom went so far as to say that his Nobel Prize should have gone to her. Beginning about 1900, she wrote numerous short stories and twelve novels, the last of which was published in 1940. With the coming of the New Deal and the general leftward drift of American politics in the thirties, Cather, a political conservative, wrote little that pleased the "socially conscious" critics of the decade, and she was taken to task for not doing more to improve the lot of the common people she wrote about. While it would not be entirely accurate to say that she died with her career in eclipse, her popularity was waning by the late 1940s. She was a person whose heart belonged to an earlier age, and she made no apologies about her obvious distaste for the modern world, particularly Hollywood. But in the decades since her death, her stock has risen steadily until she is now seen as one of our greatest novelists, one who is ranked by many critics as the equal of Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Hemingway.<br /></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><br /><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" ></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" >Though violence and tragedy often haunt Cather's best works, there is something fundamentally decent about all her writing---decent in a way I can't quite put my finger on.<span> </span>I do know that she could do more with simple language to conjure up vivid imagery in the mind of her reader than just about any modern American writer with the possible exception of Hemingway. If you haven't read her, please do yourself a favor and buy a couple of her books.</span></span></span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" >*************************************************************************************<br /></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" >Note: The purpose of this blog (insofar as it has a purpose) will be to discuss literature---particularly English language literature---and its relationship to we the obscure---what it means to us as a common denominator of our humanity.</span></span></span><br /></p></div>Milton T. Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01063079657696373189noreply@blogger.com7