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Pray for Kevin Foley
Monday, November 16, 2009
I'm just collecting my thoughts on the news that my friend from graduate school, Kevin Foley, has entered hospice care after more than two years of fighting a very rare cancer, epitheliod sarcoma. I don't have anything to say right this second, so I'm going to post this
profile of Kevin, written by our friend Chris Serb and published in the Medillian.
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The Good (?) Eccentric
Walker Percy wrote in bed. Flannery O'Connor had her peacocks and chickens, and her thermos of sherry and tea. Faulkner dressed as Count No-Count.
Ways I Cultivate Eccentricity, and Their Relative Values on the Eccentricity Scale (1-10):
1. I shave my head. (2): Me and every other balding middle aged man who remembers Ian Mackaye in Minor Threat.
2. I live in an old house. (5): The TLC channel says that's not exactly unusual.
3. I live in an old house and can't fix a thing in it. Can barely change a light bulb. (8): Purposely living someplace that reminds you, every day, of your inadequacy, now that's an eccentricity winner! It's also high on the Self-Loathing Index (SLI)
4. I wore only black t-shirts every day for a year, 2008. (4) Obviously, I was trying too hard. IlLooked like crap most of the year, and that bumps it up the eccentricity scale just a little. SLI is high, in the 7 range.
5. I play the mandolin. (6): Eccentric among my peers in the urban centers, not so eccentric out here in central North Carolina, the mandolin nonetheless registers high in Twee Factor.
6. I prefer to write in the dark. (7). There are certain obvious drawbacks to this, including not being able to see the page, but the Needless Difficulty Correlative (NDC), high in this case, pushes it to the top. The fact that Franzen also writes in the dark keeps this from being an (8).
7. I have thirty-five gourds I grew still hanging from nails in my basement, four years later. (10) The gourds are not even up for discussion. I intend to do something with them. Someday I will, I promise. Quit asking me about it. I am not throwing them out.
8. I have four hot dogs in my freezer that are now 23.5 years old. (9) Would be a (10), but I know of someone in Raleigh who kept a ham for more than 40 years.
9. By confirmation name is Ignatius (7). Would be higher, but I think, again, I was trying too hard, this time to avoid "John" and "Matthew" and "Francis."
10. I collect canes, and sometimes I like to walk around with the cane, limping. (9) This one I can't explain.
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Reflection Friday
Friday, November 13, 2009
News from the publishing world has depressed me this week. A book that should be cherished was remaindered because of a publisher's neglect and laziness. For future reference, if you print 120,000 copies of a book, you ought to at least pretend to market it. "Why don't
you market it?" is not the answer a writer wants to hear from her publisher, but it's becoming the most common answer.
This week my agent told me that I will need to do nearly everything to sell my book except print it, and I'm shitty at things like networking, publicity, marketing. But I want to keep doing this, writing, and so I will try. Here is my blog, please love it. Soon there will be my newsletter,
Professor D's Gazette of Essential Ephemera. I'm twittering and facebooking and god knows what else I'll be doing in a couple years. Possibly I'll be tattooing my book onto my body and running naked through Times Square.
I very nearly decided to give up during these last two weeks. I've been working by myself for more than seven years now. I know hardly anyone anymore because I've thought, for a long time, that I could do this on my own.
I may have been saved, though, by this decision: That I can't be alone anymore, that I don't have to be, and that if I want to keep writing I'm going to have to do something. I know other writers who came to this realization several years ago, and I'm embarrassed it's taken me so long to accept. Literature won't take care of me, the reverse is the actual truth. And so, here I am, making my thin apologies and resolving to do better, to worry less, to write more, and to say hello more often. Hello.
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The Bluegrass Lament
Thursday, November 12, 2009
My father courted my mother with a mandolin. They both lived in Siler City, which isn't much of a city more like a town, maybe a village. It used to be bigger when the chicken plants were all working, but that isn't the case anymore. Daddy liked to walk to my grandfather's house to visit my mother, and the whole way he'd be playing the mandolin and whistling the harmony. Old fiddle tunes, "Turkey in the Straw" or "Bill Cheatham" maybe. People thought he was strange, but not my mother. Finally, when it got dark, my grandfather would run him off, though he himself played the guitar and admired my daddy's playing. It wasn't proper to stay too long.
This one here is Big Red. It's a Gibson, though it's been modified quite a lot. When I was young I set out learn every break in every song Bill Monroe ever did, and I pretty much got there. It was me and my friend, Saul, with the 78's on the player, sitting back to back with our mandolins, competing to see who could get it the most perfect. I think I was a better musician but Saul was a better mandolin player. He insisted that it be perfectly like Mr. Monroe did it, something that old Bill probably didn't even require of himself from performance to performance. That's just the way Saul was. Later he drank a lot and died. I miss him. There's a picture of him over there when we were young.
Ralph Stanley asked me to be in his band, but I told him no. I was married, we had the kids, and I didn't want that life. On the road, never home. This was home, Siler City. I had a job in the plant and that was what I had always wanted. People thought I was crazy, but I reckon I liked my life well enough, and there was plenty of music in it already. One time Mr. Monroe played Big Red, this one right here. It's a Gibson, it looks like it's falling apart, but it's a hoss. I played "Bluegrass Breakdown" with the Bluegrass Boys once. Lots of folks have cut my song, "Rocky Run." There are some mighty famous folks who say hello to me every once in awhile. I bet Ralph Stanley remembers me.
I was an engineer, I designed and built machines for the plant. One time I had my arm in a press, trying to fix it, and I suppose I didn't tell the fellow in the booth that he wasn't supposed to turn it on. It took pretty much all the muscle in my right forearm. Stamped it right out. See the scar? My right forearm, my picking hand. Doctors thought I'd be crippled, but pretty soon I tried to play the mandolin again, and it was terrible hard. My muscles in other parts of my arm had to learn to move my arm differently, and it made me get down on myself. But I still practiced, and after awhile those muscles learned their lesson and I began to play well again. The doctor was amazed, said he didn't expect I'd be able to play ever again. Big Red here, he's been through it with me. What would Ralph Stanley have done if his mandolin player had lost the muscles in his arm? Get a new mandolin player, that's what. That's what I'd have done. But I play just fine now.
I don't build machines anymore, but I'm trying to invent a new bridge for the mandolin, going to patent it. It makes modest, quiet little mandolins sound like Big Red. Why? Here, play it. Play Big Red. Go on. See? Who wouldn't want to sound like that?
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My Neighborhood
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
I have tried several times today to write something about John Allen Muhammad, who was executed last night in Virginia. He and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, as you recall, killed eleven people during a few weeks in the fall of 2002. Five of the victims died within a mile or so of my parents' house in the Aspen Hill area of Rockville, Maryland, where I grew up.
There's no meaning in those deaths, unless being murdered conveys meaning, and I don't think it does. There is nothing to understand, there is only a sociopath's explanation. There can be no musing about the old neighborhood and how my opinion of it has changed (though it
has) because I have learned to hate that instinct that drives me to memorialize myself in the memory of the dead, the dying, and the destroyed. The irony of that last sentence, which embodies the very thing it rejects, is not lost on me.
I can't say that I'm glad that Muhammad is dead, or that I hope he experienced pain during his execution. There is no lesson in that death, either, and no relief.
There isn't anything I can say, and yet I feel powerfully moved to say something. I'll say this: Premkumar Walekar, pictured above, died on October 3, 2002, in Aspen Hill, Maryland. He drove a cab, he was married, and he had children. He died pumping gas at my favorite gas station, at the pump I liked to use. The pump is no longer there, either.
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Born at the Bar
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Happy 234th birthday, U.S. Marine Corps. It's been nearly 15 years since I was discharged and I miss you sometimes. Thanks for everything.
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Cooking the Pig
Monday, November 9, 2009
The first thing we do is make the coals. Make our own coals, yep. Right there in that barrel. It's looked better, but it's made coals that cooked maybe a thousand pigs and more chickens than I could count. See them bars right in there, sticking out of the barrel down there at the bottom. Stainless steel. Used to use rebar but it melted. You'd a thought I'd have figured that out thirty years ago, but I just done it. Works good.
Got to make your own coals. Hickory. No one uses hickory in their backyard no more, can't get it hardly in the hardware store or wherever they buy them briquettes. You got to light it up with kerosene or what not? Smells like shit and tastes worse. Or they use gas good lord. You can't do it that way if you care much about that pig. Eating the pig I mean. Got to do it the right way. I'm glad to be telling you this cause no one every asks much. Used to have kids following me around to asking questions, throwing the wood on the fire. I'd give em the pieces of the butt, all hard and crispy, mmm, yes. But yeah, not many ask me about it no more.
So, we get them coals, you see how they fall down to the bottom of the barrel through them steel bars? Scoop em up. Go on, get the shovel, I'll show you. Got you some gloves over there. Right. Bring that on over here and shove it through that little trap door in the bottom of the cooker. Now get some more. Bring it all. The coals been cooking for more than an hour, they good. Get some more wood on that. That's it. Now. We got heat, but we need a little more smoke. I got pecan right here soaking in water. Just throw that up on them coals, they'll smoke and steam and what all, I don't know, it tastes good.
Now. Help me with this pig. Got to make your own pig, too, like them coals. This one comes off my own place, got him butchered special, got to cook the whole pig. Fed him out on grass, scraps, just a little feed. Feed makes em good and fat but no one at the farmers market wants that no more. Got to feed em grass, so I feed em out in the pasture a little. Got to bring them in every day though so they don't get worms. I don't mind, they friendly enough. Everyone should meet a pig once, get to know one some, but no one come out to see pigs no more. They just dirty as far as most folks think. My daddy used to say a pig know you better than you know your own self. Smart thing, a pig.
As far as these kids here know, a pig is just what come on a sandwich, but damned if that sandwich better be organic. I don't know what that means, really. We're flapping gums while that fire gets cold. So, right here. We put that pig on down the grate there, he's a little one for a pig but fair good size for barbecue. Lay him right down there. Don't yank him round, just let him rest there in your arms. There. Let him down. He didn't have a name, no. Got that heat just right, see that? Holding steady, wheww. Gone to be eight hours now. Close the lid. Close it. Right there, the latch. Close it up. Looks like a coffin, don't it?
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The Comfort of Science
When I am low, I often pull out some works of natural history to read. I'm not entirely sure why these books and writers calm me, and I have occasionally try and fail to name the feeling I get from their descriptions of the natural world as it exists outside of myself. I think I am still a good Catholic when when I say that I recognize a certain way of talking about God in the way scientists and writers have occasionally described their encounters with the beauty and order of the natural world. There is an affinity between the language Augustine uses in his
Confessions, when he describes his surprising moment of conversion, laid out below the fig tree in Milan, and this from William Bartram's
Travels:
Again, when in my youth, attending my father on a journey to the Catskill Mountains, in the government of New York; having nearly ascended the peak of Giliad, being youthful and vigorous in the pursuit of botanical and novel objects, I had gained the summit of a steep rocky precipice, a-head of our guide, when, just entering a shady vale, I saw at the root of a small shrub, a singular and beautiful appearance which I remember to have instantly apprehended to be a large kind of Fungus which we call Jews ears, and was just drawing back my foot to kick it over, when at the instant, my father being near, cried out, A rattle snake my son, and jerked me back, which probably saved my life; I had never before seen one, this was of the kind which our guide called a yellow one, it was very beautiful, speckled and clouded. My father plead for his life, but our guide was inexorable, saying he never spared the life of a rattle snake, and killed him; my father took his skin and fangs.
I don't mean to harp on the fuzzy-headed notion that there is some equivalence between natural beauty and God, as if they were one and the same. (That idea does neither science nor God any favors.) I only mean that the thing both writers constantly try to describe, namely the strange love of what one fears and can't understand, of the thing that will always be comfortingly inscrutable, seems not just incidentally human, but fundamental.
This blog takes its name, rattlejar, from the jar of rattles my parents kept in our West Virgnia house, up in the mountains. They are both biologists, and they took no pleasure in killing the snakes that moved into the area around our house, where my sister and I used to play on the rocks and old tree falls. They kept the rattles in a mayonnaise jar, not as trophies, but as totems to a beautiful and fearsome creature. That rattle in the jar up there in the photo, that's from a very large rattler, maybe eight or nine years old, that got a little too close on one of my very last days up there in the mountains.
I read Bartram's
Travels, or Wilson and Holldobler's
The Ants, or Marais's
The Soul of the White Ant, to remind me that the whole thing is beyond my ken but not beyond my ability to love and admire. That comforts me sometimes.
Here are some books I love. Not
all the books I love, just some of them:
The Ants, by Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson
Travels, by William Bartram
The Soul of the White Ant, by Eugene Marais
Darwin and the Barnacle, by Rebecca Stott
The Tapir's Morning Bath, by Elizabeth Royte
Darwin's Dreampond, by Tijs Goldschmidt
In a Patch of Fireweed, by Bernd Heinrich
Lives of a Cell, by Lewis Thomas
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