On (Semi-) Pause to Finish a Writing Project

Visitors here know that for a couple of years I was serializing a very rough draft of a memoir about chasing Mary Shelley's story. I've been revising, revising. But ... it's taking too long. So I'm going to neglect this blog for a bit until I finish Frankenstein Sundae.

Oh, if there's something I really want to write about here, I will, but I want to finish this book! Time's winged chariot is hurrying near (as some poet once said), very near.

I'll post an update now and then,

Sunday Sundries, 189

1. AOTW: I think we may be nearing a Lifetime Achievement Award for those drivers who insist that when their lane is closing, they still have the right-of-way.  Dealt with such AOTWs several times this week in several different places. Each time I said several different bad words.

2. I finished a couple of books this week ...

     - The first was the next in the series of novels about Jack Taylor, a former Irish cop who lost his job for alcohol-related reasons. (He appeared for a while, did Jack, in a TV series we streamed; we'd like to see him back.) I've been reading Ken Bruen's novels about him, reading them in the order that Bruen published them. This most recent--Cross (2007)--involves Jack in a couple of cases, the principal one about a death by crucifixion of a young man in Galway (where Bruen sets his novels). Jack is winning his battle with alcoholism in this installment (but he will be sure to fall), and life has battered him and bruised him. But ... into the case he dives, and eventually he ... ain't tellin'.

Next in the series ... Sanctuary, which I've ordered. (For some reason it's not on Kindle, which is how I've read the others.)

     - The second I finished was Barracoon, the recently published early work by Zora Neale Hurston, whose Their Eyes Were Watching God I taught at Western Reserve Academy back in the day. Hurston was studying anthropology (with Franz Boaz) at Columbia Univ., and she latched onto this story of a last surviving slave. With Boaz' encouragement, she went to Alabama late in 1927 to interview Oulale Kossala (now called Cudjo Lewis); she got to know him well; interviewed him multiple times, and this book--for which Hurston could not find a publisher--tells both his story and hers.

His story is a grim one. Captured by other Africans from another tribe and sold, Lewis endured the terror and humiliation of it all; spent some foul time in the Barracoon (barracks) waiting to be shipped out; the trans-Atlantic voyage; the humiliations and horrors of slave labor here. Liberation in the Civil War. The struggle to survive in the South, where he and other freed slaves were hardly welcomed into the fellowship of humanity.

Near the end, Hurston writes: "I am sure that he does not fear death. ... But he is full of trembling awe before the altar of his past" (94).

There's a brief Foreword by Alice Walker (who helped return Hurston to public prominence years ago)--and much other scholarly front- and back-matter.

Informative to read--and wonderful to see Hurston first beginning to spread her writing wings.

3. Joyce and I finished watching (in several installments, via Netflix DVD) the 1971 film The Last Picture Show, based on the eponymous novel by Larry McMurtry (who also co-wrote the screenplay). We had been  married only two years when we first saw it, and I don't think I've seen it since.

Link to film trailer.

But it is something. Astonishing cinematography showing the dying small Texas town, the vast Texas terrain. And the performances were amazing, too--Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson, Clu Gulager, Randy Quaid, Cybill Shepherd, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan ... so many others.

Director Peter Bogdanavich burst onto the scene with this--and never really (as I recall) matched the power of what he did here. (He filmed the 1990 sequel, also based on a McMurtry novel--Texasville (1987)--but it didn't match the power of the earlier story, though it featured many of the same performers.)

I hadn't remembered the emphasis on the sex lives of the characters--but it is a principal focus. (Hey, the picture show's closing ... what else is there to do?) And the desperation of so many lives ...

4. We finished the latest available streaming season of Death in Paradise, a series we've enjoyed. They did something unusual this year: They phased out their principal detective and phased in a New Guy. We not so sure we like the New Guy so much (shown in the foreground below), but will give him a chance when the current season is available to stream.

5. Last word--a word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers:

     - from wordsmith.org

Cervantic  (suhr-VAN-tik)

adjective: Of or relating to Miguel de Cervantes, especially his satirizing of the chivalric romances.

ETYMOLOGY: After the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), best known for Don Quixote. Earliest documented use: 1760. Many of Cervantes’s characters have also become eponyms.

USAGE: “The novel’s strong vein of comic dissent is summed up in the figure of Yorick, Shakespearean joker and memento mori, whose Cervantic tilting at windmills has a serious edge.”

Carol Watts; Rereadings; The Guardian (London, UK); Aug 23, 2003.

101 Ways to Be Revolting

It was almost exactly fifty years ago--on May 24, 1968--that I directed my second play at the old Aurora Middle School (102 E. Garfield Rd.; Aurora, Ohio). It was a comedy (?) that I'd written with a group of students throughout the year, a comedy about the American Revolution, and we called it Our War for Independence; or, 101 Ways to Be Revolting. I was 23 years old.

It was long before the days of easy photography, and I don't think I have any pictures from the production--though perhaps others out there do (if so, I'd love to see them).

We had no theater or auditorium in the old middle school, so we mounted our productions on the gym floor. We had, in those infant years, no spotlights or other special effects. Just a record player (!) attached to a speaker system--a very primitive speaker system.

At the bottom of the page are scans of our program. So many 7th and 8th graders ...

I have a script in a file--but I'm afraid to look at it. I would much prefer to remember it as a dazzling comedy that dazzled the audience during our two dazzling performances: one, an afternoon assembly for all students; two, for the parents (and others) in the evening.

Okay, a couple of memories.

• We staged the old Paul Revere joke. Three women spaced out on the stage. He "rides" to the first: Is your husband at home? Yes! Tell him the British are coming! Woman 2: same thing. Woman 3: Is your husband at home? No! Whoa! (Pretty racy stuff for a middle school?)
• But the big surprise--and crowd reaction--came at the end when King George III (who, unaccountably, is in America), realizing the war is lost, converts. We had him come running out in full hippie attire with the music of "Georgie Girl" blasting over our sound system (link to that 1967 hit). The audience went nuts for our converted King, played by John Mlinek, 8th grade, who went on to do a lot of acting and directing and has long been a Facebook friend--and real one, too.

It terrifies me that those "kids" are now in their sixties--for that makes me ... never mind.

But this play convinced me that this--directing kids--was something I loved to do. And so I did it for another thirty years, loving it every second, except when I hated it, which wasn't all that often!

The image at the top of the page is a rock that one of those "kids"--Doug "Skip" French--painted for me and gave me. It's been on my desk since 1968. Skip, by the way, went on to become quite an actor himself--and quite a human being. Cover design by Dave Prittie--a great actor, later a professional artist in NYC.

"Cheyenne, Cheyenne, where will you be campin' tonight?"

Cheyenne Bodie. RIP. (Link to New York Times obit.)

I watched Cheyenne (with Clint Walker as the eponymous Western hero) throughout my boyhood and youth. It ran from September 1955 (I was about to turn 11) through September 1963 (I was about to turn 19). It was on Tuesday nights (7:30-8:30), then Mondays, then (its final season) Fridays.

It was the era of the TV (and movie) Western. There were many on the tube, every week--and the "picture show" each week offered a steady diet of them, as well. And I devoured them. I grew up in Oklahoma, and although I was a "city" boy (Enid!), I still felt a swoop of emotion whenever I saw the terrain that reminded me of home--or of our car trips into the West to see my dad's family in Oregon.

Oh, my boyhood heroes! Hopalong Cassidy. The Range Rider. The Cisco Kid. Wild Bill Hickok. Billy the Kid (the "good" version). The Three Mesquiteers. Whip Wilson. Lash LaRue. Wyatt Earp. Matt Dillon. Paladin, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry (these latter two were "singing cowboys"--not my favorite but better than no cowboys at all). ...

... Cheyenne Bodie.

He was big (I wasn't), strong (I wasn't), knew right from wrong (I didn't), acted ethically (I didn't), defeated the Bad Guy(s) (I didn't). You get the picture.

I remember one show that ran around Christmas time. Cheyenne was alone in a remote cabin in a blizzard. His only companion? A mule. On Christmas Day, he invited the mule into the cabin, said, "Merry Christmas, Mule." To this day, when I call my younger brother on Christmas (he, too, was a Cheyenne fan), I say, "Merry Christmas, mule."

And we remember those evenings (homework done, of course!), lying on the living room floor, stacks of saltines, some Tang, Cheyenne on our black-and-white TV ... You can buy all of the seasons on DVD (Amazon has them; I don't).

Cheyenne still has a pretty good presence on YouTube (link to one clip), and I can still sing a lot of the theme song--and when I just listened to this clip on YouTube? Tears.

Philip Roth, RIP

Roth at 80--from Wall Street Journal

I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise. He was ... older (85). And, a few years ago (2012), he had announced his "retirement" from writing. (Link to story.) An odd thing for a writer: Many of them keep at it until they just can't. Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) was editing his final book while he lay dying in New York Hospital; John Updike (1932-2008) did the same. Many writers would consider it a Good Death to fall over while typing at the keyboard. (I would, and I'm not Philip Roth nor was meant to be.)

I first read Roth (1933-2018) back in the late 1960s. I'd already heard of him (Goodbye, Columbus--story and movie, 1969), but had not read him. But then I saw a provocative paperback cover "speaking" to me ... can't remember where. Some display. Somewhere. It was his novel When She Was Good (1967). I had no choice. I had to buy it. Read it. Love it. The image you see is that book that "spoke" to me.

Okay, perhaps the blurb at the bottom of the cover got me: A stunning portrait of the all-American bitch. Now there's a blurb you're not likely to see on a book cover in 2018!

I'm pretty sure I read all of his books--not necessarily when they came out. Sometimes they just accumulated, and I would eventually read several to kind of "catch up." Later in his career, this was easier, for as the decades rolled on, he was writing more and more novellas.

As the obits will tell you, he was one of our most celebrated/honored writers--won about everything (sans Nobel). (Link to today's New York Times obit.) Among the biggest honors? He was a living writer who nonetheless had his works collected in the Library of America--a publishing venture generally dedicated to the works of the Dead and Gone (Hawthorne, Jack London, Henry James, etc.). (Link to LOA's Roth books.)

I couldn't always relate to some of Roth's concerns: I am not a Jewish American (he was; his characters often were). But to many of his others, I could--passion, error, excess, obsession--and on and on. He knew what human beings were like--he knew, especially, what men were like. And he exposed them (and himself) with stark, brutal honesty. If you read Roth--if you're a guy--you're not always ... comfortable.

But since when are novelists supposed to make us comfortable? Discomfort is a necessary antecedent for learning.

And so ... thank you, Philip Roth. For all you wrote, for all that discomfort, for all you taught.

I Was (Am) a Stutterer

It was much worse when I was a kid in Oklahoma. It was bad enough, in fact, that one of my teachers at Adams Elementary School (1st grade? later?)  referred me to the school district's speech therapist. Years later, my mom told me that my one (and only) session with the therapist went like this:

THERAPIST: So, Danny, why are you here?

DANNY: I d-d-d-d-don't k-k-k-k-now.

And the therapist--seeing that it didn't bother me (hah!)--sent me back to class and told my mom it wasn't all that much of a problem.

Actually, it was. Other kids made fun of me. Which made my stuttering worse. I didn't really strike out, though--fists flailing--because I was a small kid; fisticuffs were not a wise activity for me. And, after some playground whuppings, I had grown ever more wise.

Later, the problem diminished. Though I had to think carefully about what I was going to say before I said it. And there were words I just had to avoid. One of them was statistics. I still avoid that word because I don't get very far into it before my six-year-old self returns and offers "Sta-sta-sta-statistics" instead.

There are a few other words like that--but I won't tell you what they are. I know you: You'll come up to me and ask me questions that will require me to say the very word I can't say.

During my 45-year teaching career, I occasionally encountered stutterers among my students. I always felt a bond with them and would tolerate no joking about it among the other students. Though, I have to say, such situations rarely came up. I think the kids knew I stuttered (a bit) and probably figured--wise ones--that making fun of some stuttering classmate was like making fun of the teacher--not usually a good plan.

Bullying is often about ridiculing someone for something he/she can't help. Height-weight-complexion-hair-accent-stuttering ...

We moved from Oklahoma to northeastern Ohio in August 1956 (I would turn 12 in November), and I hadn't been in town more than a day or so when, at a little pond near our house, I caught a frog. Some local kids saw me with it and told me I had to let it go. "Aw, c-c-c-can't I k-k-k-keep it?" I asked in misery.

"Aw, c-c-c-c-c-c-can't I k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-keep it?" echoed a local kid in what he must have thought was an authentic thick Oklahoma drawl.

I laughed. He was too big to do anything else. And I placed the frog back in the pond. Splash! And off to a lily pad, where he regarded me with disdain.

And did he mock me? "C-c-c-c-c-c-c-roak"?!?!?!?

Monday Musings & Muttering

I've been thinking about a few things--not one is worthy of an entire blog--so here they are, in no particular order ...

1. Even as a little boy--when I first learned what days of the week were, what a calendar was--I never really believed that Sunday was the first day of the week. I still don't.

2. Yesterday, part of a song lyric stuck in my head--"I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you." I could not remember any of the rest of it, but my portable recall machine (iPhone) quickly gave me the answer. The song: "I'll Be Seeing You." 1938. Myriads of artists--in several generations--have covered it. But here's Billie Holiday, 1944, the year I was born. ... LINK. (Lyrics at the bottom of the page.)

I was thinking of the song because near the end of the film RBG, which Joyce and I saw on Saturday night, we hear Ruth Bader Ginsburg read aloud, her voice breaking at the end, the farewell note from her dying husband. (They were married more than a half-century.) Final words. Wrenching and powerful.

3. Earlier this week I posted on Facebook a bit of doggerel I called "Peckerwood in the Neighborhood"--about a noisy, annoying woodpecker assailing houses near us (he has attacked us in previous springs). A former student posted that the word--near where he was living--meant a "redneck." I'd already done a little research on the word. See what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say (bottom of the page).

Oddly, my dad nicknamed our house in Hiram (11917 Garfield R.) "Peckerwood"--I'm sure because of the busy birds in the area.

4. On Saturday, I gave myself a paper cut (turning the pages of a writing tablet). A drop of blood. An ouch! A curse I will not repeat on a Family Site.

Pressure. The blood quickly stopped. The pain (sort of) went away. Every now and then I would do something that would invite the pain back--like knead bread on Sunday, etc.

And I was reminded of that film 36 Hours (I blogged about it last year), a film from 1964 with James Garner, Rod Taylor, Eva Marie Saint. Based on a story by ... Roald Dahl. It tells how the Nazis captured an American intelligence officer (Garner), drugged him, convinced him the war was over. What they were really trying to get him to do was to cough up the details of D-Day. When? Where?

Garner was buying it all (they had installed him in an "American" hospital), when he felt a paper cut he'd given himself the previous day on a finger--a cut the Nazi doctors had not seen. And their plan unraveled ...

Well, I had no such exciting time ... but I did remember that movie again! (Link to film trailer.) I see the entire film is now on YouTube. It's fun to watch.

“I'll Be Seeing You”

I'll be seeing you

In all the old familiar places

That this heart of mine embraces

All day and through

In that small cafe

The park across the way

The children's carousel

The chestnut trees

The wishing well

I'll be seeing you

In every lovely summer's day

In everything that's light and gay

I'll always think of you that way

I'll find you in the morning sun

And when the night is new

I'll be looking at the moon

But I'll be seeing you

I'll be seeing you

In every lovely summer's day

In everything that's light and gay

I'll always think of you that way

I'll find you in the morning sun

And when the night is new

I'll be looking at the moon

But I'll be seeing you

Songwriters: Irving Kahal / Sammy Fain

I'll Be Seeing You lyrics © BMG Rights Management US, LLC

peckerwood, n. and adj.

Forms:  18– peckerwood, 19– peckahwood, 19– peckawood.

Frequency (in current use): 

Etymology: < woodpecker n., with reversal of the two elements. With sense A. 2 ... (Show More)

U.S. regional (chiefly south. and south Midland).

 A. n. 1. A woodpecker.

[1835   in Daily Home (Talladega, Ala.) (1910) 28 Feb. 2/2   The mouth of Peckerwood creek.]

1859   J. R. Bartlett Dict. Americanisms (ed. 2) 314   Peckerwood, Western for Woodpecker.

1893   H. A. Shands Some Peculiarities Speech Mississippi 49   Peckerwood, woodpecker. Bartlett says that this word is Western. It is also heard very frequently in Mississippi, as in Tennessee.

1909   F. B. Calhoun Miss Minerva 140   A big, red-headed peckerwood.

1935   Z. N. Hurston Mules & Men i. vi. 137   Ah wasn't gointer kill no ole tough peckerwood for you to eat, baby.

1947   J. H. Brown Outdoors Unlimited 76   Watching the jays and peckerwoods and listening to the distant shrillings of a hawk.

1968   Harper's Mag. Sept. 61/1   I even liked what the kids at Tuskegee Institute called ‘those crazy li'l ol' peckerwoods’.

2. slang (esp. in African-American usage). depreciative. A white person, esp. a white person regarded as poor, rustic, or unsophisticated; = peck n.4

[1859   Southern Lit. Messenger May 398/2   You must be ixtreemly keerful uv yoself, my deare. I shall be back in a few days... To Mrs. Mozis Addums in rispect. Peckerwood Parrydice, near Kerdsvil, Buckingaim County, Va.]

1928   C. McKay Home to Harlem v. 46   What's the matter, buddy, the peckawoods them was doing you in?

1942   W. Faulkner Go down, Moses & Other Stories 255   Even a Delta peckerwood would look after even a draggle-tail better than that.

1967   C. Major in A. Chapman New Black Voices (1972) 299   How come so many Of us niggers Are dying over there In that white Man's war They say more of us Are dying Than them peckerwoods & it just Don't make sense.

1967   N.Y. Times 7 Sept. 42/4   When I tried to get into the black caucus, they said, ‘No peckerwoods allowed in here, Sonny.’

1974   E. Brawley Rap (1975) ii. xxiv. 374   And we done, peckerwood, we finished.

1995   High Country News 7 Aug. 13/3   Prisons..are often deep in peckerwood territory, where a black prison employee is going to feel about as welcome as a black escaped convict.

(Hide quotations)

 B. adj. Small, poor, inferior; (also) of, relating to, or characteristic of the (poor white) population of the Southern states of America.

1866   C. H. Smith Bill Arp, so Called 95   If it didn't rain any more and the entire crop was prudently gathered, he might probably make a peck to the acre of peckerwood nubbins.

1946   Newsweek 15 Apr. 68/1   Conditions encourage not the efficient experienced producers but the peckerwood..operators.

1989   New Yorker 11 Dec. 136/3   The stern, melodramatic portrait of Earl's older brother Huey as a fantastic demagogue—a Peckerwood Caligula.

1992   U.S.A. Today (Nexis) 10 Apr. 7 d   The redneck, coonass, peckerwood South that you thought had been eaten up by the developers of Sunbelt suburbs.

2003   Austral. Financial Rev. (Nexis) 5 Aug. 64   A glib Democrat with a peckerwood accent and no plans for raising taxes has a better chance than a north-eastern stiff.