Frank Walters
June 7, 2011
A draft: Part 1 of a 4-part nonfiction essay called "The Shadow of Assisi"
The Man Who Tells Stories
I begin by walking down Market Street toward The Embarcadero and pass a man wearing a sandwich sign advertising men’s suits. He is about fifty, white, of medium height and build, with a face that sparkles of intelligence. But we make eye contact and the façade comes down. He is handing out flyers to passers-by, but at the slightest sign of rejection he quickly jerks back, as if he’s suddenly noticed how filthy his hands are. A pale blush rises to his cheeks. I’m not sure why. We don’t know each other, but he seems to sense my inquisitiveness. Why is he here, doing this? What was he doing before? Is there a Microsoft paystub somewhere, some painful reminder of a lucrative past life gone irrevocably awry, tucked away in a drawer with the abandoned Stanford sweatshirt and the now useless white tie and cufflinks? He looks away as if he has heard my questions.
I turn left onto Montgomery Street and enter the gray canyonland of the Financial District. Under the canopy to the main door of the Transamerica Tower, I talk with two earnest college students who are passing out leaflets for the San Francisco affiliate of Planned Parenthood. “PPGG [Planned Parenthood Golden Gate] was dropped by the national organization last year,” one of them, a dark-haired woman in leggings and Converse high tops, tells me. “But we still need to provide services to thousands of poor women. No one hears their voices. No one speaks for them.” Her eyes grow moist and flare with anger. I describe the situation in Alabama, where I live, the high incidence of unwed teenage pregnancies, almost all of them carried to full term and delivered in the wasteland of a hastily-arranged marriage, an outcome viewed by clergy and lay alike as a seawall against the swell of liberal immorality. Her companion, a man wearing cargo pants and a golf shirt with PPGG sewn over the left pocket, asks me if I believe in a woman’s right to control her own body. I assent and give them five dollars.
I walk up Bush Street to Grant Street, the main thoroughfare through Chinatown. A few doors past Dragon Gate there is a shop bulging with Asian curiosities run by two Italian men who could be brothers, where I buy four small porcelain jewelry cases with dragon inlays for my wife. When I tell one of them where I’m from, he offers an exaggerated display of sympathy. “They let us out once in a while,” I joke. “Good football teams,” he says. He subtracts five dollars from the original price of twenty, adding that he really doesn’t know how much he paid for the cases. “So much junk here, you know? Who can keep track? Maybe I pay more than fifteen, maybe less. Who knows?” He shrugs and slaps my shoulder: “For the wife in Alabama,” he says. “She’s pretty, right?” “And Italian,” I add. I leave with an odd sort of Alabama feeling, like I’ve been thief and victim in the same transaction.
All along Grant I slip through throngs of entrepreneurs, lawyers, secretaries, tourists, shopkeepers, students, homeless, some pushing shopping carts laden with overstuffed plastic garbage bags. I cut over to Stockton, which crosses Broadway in the heart of North Beach. I’m now well away from the skyscrapers of downtown and their cold, permanent shadows. I thread my way among sidewalk cafes and in and out of the sunlight cast by the low buildings and trees. It is Monday, my third day in San Francisco, in late May. The temperature is only in the mid-fifties, the afternoon is brightly sunlit, and I’ve worked up a light sweat. But a stiff breeze, which threatens to blow away my baseball cap, has chilled me. My destination is the storied hairpins of Lombard Street, but when I stop at Washington Square for a water break, I discover that I’ve missed the Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, a block over at Columbus and Valejo. I’ll have to backtrack, but for the moment I’m content to sit on a bench and warm myself in the sun.
Before me lies the expansive east face of Russian Hill, covered with the snowy likeness of white Victorian homes. Across Filbert Street, which forms the northern boundary of the Square, loom the ivory cathedral spires of Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church. The Square emanates its own cathedral aura. A full city block in size, it is ringed by cypress and poplar trees, and in the center sits a stand of poplars, an altar in the expansive nave of lawn, which is circumferenced by an asphalt path along which walkers can trace pilgrim-fashion the precise outline of a pear. Not far from where I sit is the statue of that old Deist Benjamin Franklin, beside whom Richard Brautigan and an unnamed female companion posed for the cover of Trout Fishing in America. It is a rambling and troubled story, and perhaps somewhere in its murky depths are clues to Brautigan’s suicide in 1984, at the age of forty-nine, but there is nothing I can discern in this bucolic garden, San Francisco’s Gethsemane, to prompt depression, unless it is the ghosts of the Beat Poets who in mystical tantric verse chronicled the hopes and despairs of their most unusual lives among the believers in North Beach more than half a century ago.
I’d read on Wikipedia that somewhere on the grounds of the shrine is a small replica of the Papal Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi, the original of which overlooks the green Umbrian wine country where St. Francis was raised. Since then I’ve wanted to see it, for a reason that I admit combines my eye for absurd juxtapositions and a recently acquired interest in architecture. The juxtaposition can be found a block down the hill, at the corner of Columbus and Broadway. This is the site of The Condor Club, where history was made on the night of June 16, 1964, when a stripper named Carol Doda bared her breasts before a paying audience of admiring worshippers. By this act alone she became the first female topless dancer in America and the unofficial high-priestess of adult entertainment. She called her act the “Topless Swim Dance.” Five years later she added bottomless to her resume. A playbill from the old days called her a “true pioneer.” She has no doubt inspired, toward different ends, millions of pubescent girls and boys. She does not appear in E. D. Hirsch’s list of What Every American Needs to Know, but her place in cultural history was cemented when the State of California honored her with an historical marker (“WHERE IT ALL BEGAN”) on the brick wall outside the entrance to the club to commemorate her contribution to the nation’s attenuated nightlife.
What brings me to the Shrine is not the ancient quarrel between the permanent and the momentary, however. Stone and flesh will turn to dust in the end; that we know. No, what brings me here is a question that has nagged me since my first visit to San Francisco four months ago. Why do we build so ornately, with conscious attention to style and ornament, well beyond the functional need for protection from the elements and predators? It seems like such a hopelessly simplistic question—it’s like asking why we write poetry, why we cook for taste and presentation—that I’m embarrassed to raise it. But if you listen to the question closely, shift the emphasis just so, you’ll hear the voice of the inquisitor, whose question is delivered as a final judgment. In fact, the question is insidiously ambiguous, a thinly disguised command that we strip the ornamentation from our lives and all the possibilities for meaning it promises. The French architect Le Corbusier once called the “styles,” by which he meant the decorative features characteristic of Victorian architecture, “a lie,” and in place of the styles he proposed the “the mass-production house.” He thought the “House-Machine,” as he chillingly called it, superior not only as functional architecture, but as a better way of organizing modern life, healthier to the soul and body. The “styles” were the devil’s own noxious emissions, to be expunged like a disease. That is what I’m thinking about at the moment, scribbling in my notebook on a park bench. The desire for simplicity, which is a legitimate aesthetics, has been overtaken by a call for simpleness. Simplicity, which I find in the clear, sharp lines of a poem by W. S. Merwin, can isolate a truth and make it an object suitable for contemplation, a departure point for comprehending the complexity of the whole through its parts. The merely simple substitutes a phrase for an idea and tries to crush thought under the boulder of its ubiquity. Put simply, it expresses the fear of context and connection, the always possible new arising out of the old, and so tries to reduce the house, the written word, the drawing, tonight’s dinner to the bare minimum needed to keep us dry, to pass on some item of information, to show us what something looks like, to fuel us for another seven or eight hours of a gray and torpid existence.
I make a half-hearted attempt to render Saints Peter and Paul in pencil, but settle for a photograph on my phone. I can easily lose my train of thought, so I continue writing. Joseph Campbell was right: we can gauge the priorities of a culture by the relative prominence of its buildings: cathedrals in the Middle Ages, fifty-story office buildings in modern cities, football stadiums on college campuses. Architecture since the ancients has been the art by which we anchor ourselves to the earth and aspire to the heavens. Its purpose as shelter reminds us that our time on earth is short; nature will catch up with us sooner or later. Its achievement as art communicates our desire for immortality; we reach skyward for the permanent and immutable. Our bodies will crumble to dust, but we believe that marble will outlive rhyme. We build structures to enclose us, but in almost all cases we build larger than our bodies need. Vanity plays a part in this, no doubt, but there is also something in us that exceeds our own body’s physical limitations, and it needs room to stretch. Yet the paradoxical effect of standing in these enlarged spaces, the cathedrals, museums, hotel lobbies, concert halls, parliamentary chambers, which we don’t want to admit, is to feel diminished. Perhaps this is the answer to the question. Somewhere in the expansive volume of this shrine, I imagine that I’ll find a smaller church, small enough to fit on a tabletop, light enough to carry, as weighty as the soul’s transgressions, and a bit more comforting for this reason, a structure that will stand in counterpoint to the engorged and ephemeral object of veneration down the street. At any rate, from the Shrine it will be an easy jog back to Stockton and a turn north to Lombard Street. As an added bonus, there’s an Italian bakery en route, and a friend has admonished me not to pass it without buying some cream puffs.
I sling my backpack over a shoulder and go back the way I came. There is no missing it. When I reach Columbus and Green, the Transamerica Tower, center of the international banking order, poised like a spaceship for takeoff, is pinioned to the earth half a mile dead ahead. The twin alabaster spires of the shrine, elevated against a blue sky above a row of houses, reach skyward to the source of a different kind of wealth. I walk around the outside looking for an entrance to the grounds, but the gate to a narrow walkway leading to the back is padlocked. It is after 4:00 pm, and the shrine’s doors will be locked at 5:00 pm. Perhaps what I’m looking for is inside. I remove my baseball cap and climb the stairs to the main entrance and open the door.
The Parish of St. Francis was established on this site on June 12, 1859. Five days later the first parochial Mass in California was celebrated, possibly by the Blessed Junipero Serra, a Franciscan of the Mission Dolores, in a small wooden shack built by soldiers from the Presidio. Not long after, a larger adobe structure replaced the wooden shanty, but attending to the spiritual needs of San Francisco’s Catholic population, swelled daily by the Gold Rush, was more than a small mission church could handle. On October 2, 1859, parishioners laid the cornerstone of the building I am standing in now, and on March 17, 1860, the new church was formally dedicated. God’s thunderbolts may be tests of strength and faith or the wildly inaccurate tosses of a malicious and capricious will, but in either case the Shrine has seen its travails. The earthquake of 1906 badly damaged the building, as it did so many others below Russian and Nob Hills. The basic structure survived, but the brick exterior, spires and all, was scorched by the conflagration that followed. Everything inside the church was destroyed by fire. It would take engineers months to determine that the building could be saved and that the roof and floor were structurally sound enough to be supported by steel girders. The interior was rebuilt from scratch, with murals done by a migrant Italian painter named Luigi Brusatori and his students, sometime between 1912 and 1921. The rebuilt church was dedicated on March 2, 1919. In 1992, three years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Archdiocese of San Francisco, citing low attendance and seismic unsoundness, closed St. Francis, along with eight other churches, and earmarked it for demolition. The parish headquarters was relocated to the nearby Saints Peter and Paul, but in 1998, at the urging of prominent local Catholics, the building was reopened as a shrine to St. Francis, the only one of its kind outside Assisi. As of 2005, it still stood in need of a 3.8 million dollar seismic upgrade. That same year, something that more than one San Francisco Catholic has called a miracle began to take shape.
Once the echo of the closing door fades, I am surrounded by white columns which rise to white archivolts which are crowned by white arches that reach to a white ceiling that tapers to a point that extends endlessly upward into the great celestial vault of eternal whiteness. Without realizing it, I am craning my neck to look up, which has the double effect of making me feel small against the white vastness above me but a part of it as well. I have always loved old Catholic churches and cathedrals for their spaciousness, for their high vaulted ceilings and great arches and endlessly deep chancels--the newer ones being too modern with their sharp angles and low ceilings and minimalist, postmodern statues of Christ--because they encourage me to look up and so promote the belief that heaven is far larger and more accommodating than even the most liberal Christian can imagine, and because they echo the voices of the past as numerous as Whitman’s multitudes. If the intention of the architect of St. Francis was to represent the experience of passing from life through death to heaven, the journey from the colors and shapes of this world to the blazing white of the next, from the muted tones (the reddish-brown of the carpet, the dark brown of the pews) of the earth to the purity of the sky, then he has not disappointed.
I walk down the center aisle to the steps leading to the chancel. The architecture of every Catholic Church is the sum of its bricks and mortar, of the history written and painted on its walls, and of the carefully laid out geography of worship. Decades ago, when a communion rail separated the chancel from the nave, and the priest distributed the communion wafer directly to the communicant’s tongue, I would stand beside him, robed in a white surplice, and hold the brass paten to catch any wayward hosts that might otherwise fall to the floor. In those days he said the Mass in Latin at the sanctuary altar, his back to the congregation. In the wake of Vatican II the communion rails are mostly gone, and the priest conducts Mass in the vernacular at an altar located near the front of the chancel, facing the congregation. The only vestige of the old medieval geography that remains, besides the sanctuary, are the four or five steps that elevate the chancel, whose care is seen to by the rector, above the nave, the responsibility of the parish laity.
The Shrine of St. Francis reflects these changes, of course. No communion rail, and the main altar, draped in white linen and stationed forward of the sanctuary, is reached by five steps from the nave. The sanctuary altar sits under a ribbed dome, each rib projecting upward to a point from the top of an arch. Within the five arches, framed by columns, are murals, the center one of which shows Francis, who bore the stigmata, at the foot of Christ on the Cross. It is, of course, an imaginative representation of Francis’ devotion, but I notice that Christ’s arm is freed from the crossbeam and draped over Francis’ shoulder in a fatherly gesture. Francis has his arms around Christ’s waist, supporting him, which takes the dead weight of Christ’s body off the other hand, still nailed fast to the beam. Other murals depict moments in Francis’s life: he receives the stigmata above the side altar dedicated to him; he preaches to the birds at the right hand of the dying Christ; he dies attended by friars and seraphim. At the back of the church, overlooking the east aisle, the Virgin Mary, holding the Christ child, receives the prayers of Francis. But the crowning achievements of this church of achievements are the statues, of which I count ten. There is, of course, St. Francis; also St. Clare, Assisi’s lesser-known saint; St. Ann and her teenage daughter, Mary, the mother of Jesus; Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception; Our Lady of the Perpetual Miracle; St. Joseph and the Child; The Pieta, a heart-rending study in a mother’s grief; St. Rita of Cascia; St. Therese of Lisieux; and the saint whose own sickliness and poverty made him a friend of the sick and the poor, Anthony of Padua. The church was empty when I entered. Now it is filled.
It is almost five, and I have not found the basilica.
I exit the church and turn left on Valejo Street and walk under the long, late afternoon shadows of trees, across the street from a row of police motorcycles parked in front of Café Trieste, an old haunt of the Beat Poets. When I reach the corner at Grant, I am stopped by a voice: “I remember cherry tree summer and my mother’s tattered dress.” In truth, I cannot be certain now that these were his exact words; there was a tree and a mother’s dress. One sentence follows another, a litany of recollections that seem random and private. “The recoilless rifle shot of a word that burns the heart.” “Vessels of blood and a mind searing afar.” There is nonsense and lucidity. His mother again. I have read the beat poets, and I recognize images: nakedness, police cars, vacant buildings, bombs, corpses. He could be reciting bits of their poetry he remembers, and he has the look of a poet, which perhaps reinforces my impression. He wears a tattered brown jacket and gray pants, worn work boots, and his generally unkempt appearance is in keeping with the street. His Ginsberg beard makes it hard to guess his age. He sits on the sidewalk, back against the adobe wall, and I listen to him, and he never acknowledges my existence. Next to him are a small backpack and a paper bag, and spread out before him are pictures—they appear to be photographs, though from where I stand it is hard to tell. There is nothing to indicate that he is selling them, no cup with bills stuffed into it, no sign with prices. He speaks on, weaves stories that have an origin and that I want to believe have a destination. I have been told that he might have come from money and lives off a trust fund, which is parceled out to him in small amounts, and which he promptly gives away. The sun peeks through the trees, and shadows play across his lined face. In it I see pain and years, or simply nothing more than the long wear of life.
Across the street at the café, I buy a sandwich and small bottle of orange juice. He motions for me to set them down next to him without breaking stride. “Do we step on what we can’t see?” I ask him if he has a name, but except for a slight pause in his delivery, as if I’ve stepped on a fellow-actor’s lines, he does not acknowledge me. He remembers a childhood, a playground, a father’s stern warning, hunger. Love? Beauty? I suspect that he’ll forget me as soon as I leave. He appears to have become utterly lost within himself.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Going Ollie Airwalk at the MLA
I have been properly upbraided for neglecting this site, and by a former student. Role reversal! So here begins A Thousand Words (more or less) Every Two Weeks (more or less).
My thanks to fellow scribbler and Facebook companion Tiffany Clemons.
Going Ollie Airwalk at the MLA
In the lobby of the Los Angeles Convention Center, the professors come and go, talking of job searches, book contracts, the fate of theory, salary freezes, and the New Orleans Saints, who are in the process of losing to the Seattle Seahawks, which is adjudged by this observer as an event more portentous than the flipping of the globe: say tenure requirements that include the 40-yard sprint.
The occasion is the annual get together of the Modern Language Association, and it is in competition with more than 2000 high school students attending the annual meeting of the National Black Students Association. They’re talking of Ludacris, T.I., and Nappy Roots, but also Toni Morrison and Kobe Bryant, who will be playing tonight at the Staples Center next door. Another competition is taking place in the plaza between the Centers: skateboarders and BMXers performing can-you-top-this stunts. We conference goers and high schoolers, hundreds of us milling around the entrance, are obstacles to get around. Think of us as moving traffic cones on a driving skills course.
I’m sitting on a stone bench watching them, reading up on digital parasites as the new subject of the post-humanist age, in preparation for a session called “Whither Posthumanism?” I think I’m seeing whither it has gone. The boarders are sixteen at most, crew-cutted and long-haired, all wearing baggie board shorts, T-shirts, and variations on the Nike Encore. The intensity of their concentration belies their apparent indifference to social propriety. I watch one kid do a maneuver I’ll later learn is a Pogo Fingerflip, which involves standing the board up vertically then flipping it lengthwise while the boarder jumps high enough to give the board time to land on its wheels. Another one catches air doing the Helipop (also known as a Backside 360 Nollie), whereby the board does a full 360, over a short flight of steps.
The session on “Whither Posthumanism?”, at the J. W. Marriott, a short walk from the Convention Center, is focused on ability difference. We learn, for example, that posthumanist critique takes aim at “techno-determinism,” which asks whether we are losing our minds to the new digital world. The fate of bodies is of special concern. If we live, as one speaker puts it, in “universal woundedness,” then it is no longer possible to speak of disability as a category, which undermines the whole logic of the categorical imperative by which we judge ability. We are all, in some way, wounded. This leads the designated responder to speculate that posthumanism is what comes after poststructuralism, because the languages we use to reject the disabled are themselves the products of an amputated way of thinking. Woundedness, he says, is built into our ways of dividing up the world, and he wonders if posthumanism will usher in a new linguistic “After People” creative regeneration in what we say about the Other. I wonder too. A few weeks later The Washington Post runs an article (“Video Diaries Reveal Life for Those Committed to St. Elizabeths,” January 28, 2011) which includes a video of the criminally insane reflecting on their lives. It prompts one commenter to ask whether the next article will feature a “griping [sic] documentary” on cockroaches.
The BMXers have a more challenging task. They must negotiate their way among the throng, performing their stunts, without “dabbing” (touching their feet to the ground) or colliding with us. Being a mountain biker, I can appreciate the skill this involves. One of their favorite tricks is to go flying over the steps that lead from the plaza to a walkway that passes the Staples Center; it is crowded with people walking between the Conference Center and the Marriott. One of the bikers told me that they’ll do timed runs around Staples, but I don’t tell him, because he’ll learn about it soon enough, that motorcyclists will do timed races around the beltways in cities like Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.
I’m about to head inside for my next session, “The Currency of the Category ‘Creative Nonfiction,’” when I notice a group of boarders conferring near the sign that reads, “No Skateboarding, Bicycling, Inline Skating, or Roller Skating.” They break, like football players from a huddle, and one of them, a tall, lanky kid, with hair flipped to one side, wearing a black Nine Inch Nails T and black cargo shorts, skates a few feet away, pivots to face the steps, and stops. His eyes give away exactly what he’s thinking; they undergo a near physical transformation as he gathers his nerve. And then he pushes off, three hard kicks with his right foot toward the steps. At the very brink he executes an Ollie, which raises the front of the board off the ground. He grabs the rail (the side of the board) and, harnessing the laws of physics in a way never taught to him in school, launches himself into the air, like an F-16. The board’s trucks (wheel assemblies) catch the railing, and like Shaun White in the half pipe he slides to the bottom, catches air, grabs the board’s rail, lays back just enough to angle the nose up, and lands on the back wheels. He wobbles a bit—for a split second I think he’s going to flip—but steadies himself, stands up, kicks the back end out, and to the grating scrunch of plastic wheels against concrete comes to a complete stop. As a finishing flourish, he stands the board up with a swift kick, ala Marty McFly, grabs it by the front truck, and walks back to the huddle, grinning.
The currency of the category creative nonfiction is, as one speaker puts it, hard to locate on any literary values metric. Right now it’s wildly popular, like the stock of Silicon Valley startups in the 90s, and it’s taught under that name in colleges across the country. That’s my own metaphor, and I’m troubled by it, because as a practitioner I hope I’m not riding a bubble. I’m more intrigued by another speaker’s observation that CNF differs from fiction, not in the obvious requirement that the essay must be grounded in fact, but in the way that facts are represented. The baseline of CNF is to use the techniques of literary writing to understand something that actually happened. Writers reflect and interpret, and their reflections and interpretations begin at what the speaker calls the “actual.” This is the name she gives to the singular fact that initiates the reflection and interpretation that grow into the essay. Joan Didion has written of how a single photograph of a mob scene in an airport in San Salvador launched her book, Salvador. I found myself reflecting on the names of donors to a restoration of Coit Tower, carved into the steps leading to the top of Telegraph Hill, which led me to write about the architectural wonders of San Francisco.
But the actual, she says, is no more than a “shadowy image.” The body, the whole concatenation of events we experienced, now tucked away in memory, is lost to us. At best we have access to an indistinct outline, piecemeal remembrances; someone said something to us and we think we remember what it was word-for-word, but we probably don’t. So the “creative” in CNF seems to involve more than the mechanics of literary technique; or, perhaps more to the point, the mechanics become the midwife to a creative reconstruction of the story of which the actual is its shadow. I like the idea, because it justifies the creative but doesn’t authorize the fictive to give the story point. We still have to write the truth.
In my notes, beside the words “shadowy image,” I’ve written, “Plato?” She doesn’t mention the Allegory of the Cave, but the connection seems pretty clear, especially when I come downstairs into the lobby of the Marriott and see what’s on the TV monitors. On one, President Obama is speaking from the podium in the White House press room. The sound is turned down, but the caption reads, “Obama addresses nation on shootings in Tucson.” On the other TV, the Jets are wrapping up their victory over the Colts in the NFL playoffs.
I’ve often wondered whether the allegory, which says that we live in a cave and know only the shadows projected on the wall cast by an unattainable light from outside, was Plato’s invention or Socrates’s. It sounds like something Plato, curmudgeonly sequestered in his garret, nursing old wounds, would come up with. Socrates would have been hanging out at the plaza, and might have even tried to do a Nosehook Impossible or an Ollie Airwalk, though where he’d come up with the money for an Anti Hero Nothins Free is beyond me.
So, shadowy images. “What is truth?”, Pilate asked? I know the answer to that: sticking the landing.
As I walk in the dying afternoon toward the 7th Avenue subway stop, a BMXer whizzes past me, expertly dodging and weaving among the pedestrians, like Ali dancing around the ring. He approaches the street corner and at the last second comes to a near full stop, hops down over the curb, darts between two cars, and wheelies back onto the sidewalk. He blends into the crowd, only his bobbing and weaving blue Lakers baseball cap a clue to his whereabouts.
My thanks to fellow scribbler and Facebook companion Tiffany Clemons.
Going Ollie Airwalk at the MLA
In the lobby of the Los Angeles Convention Center, the professors come and go, talking of job searches, book contracts, the fate of theory, salary freezes, and the New Orleans Saints, who are in the process of losing to the Seattle Seahawks, which is adjudged by this observer as an event more portentous than the flipping of the globe: say tenure requirements that include the 40-yard sprint.
The occasion is the annual get together of the Modern Language Association, and it is in competition with more than 2000 high school students attending the annual meeting of the National Black Students Association. They’re talking of Ludacris, T.I., and Nappy Roots, but also Toni Morrison and Kobe Bryant, who will be playing tonight at the Staples Center next door. Another competition is taking place in the plaza between the Centers: skateboarders and BMXers performing can-you-top-this stunts. We conference goers and high schoolers, hundreds of us milling around the entrance, are obstacles to get around. Think of us as moving traffic cones on a driving skills course.
I’m sitting on a stone bench watching them, reading up on digital parasites as the new subject of the post-humanist age, in preparation for a session called “Whither Posthumanism?” I think I’m seeing whither it has gone. The boarders are sixteen at most, crew-cutted and long-haired, all wearing baggie board shorts, T-shirts, and variations on the Nike Encore. The intensity of their concentration belies their apparent indifference to social propriety. I watch one kid do a maneuver I’ll later learn is a Pogo Fingerflip, which involves standing the board up vertically then flipping it lengthwise while the boarder jumps high enough to give the board time to land on its wheels. Another one catches air doing the Helipop (also known as a Backside 360 Nollie), whereby the board does a full 360, over a short flight of steps.
The session on “Whither Posthumanism?”, at the J. W. Marriott, a short walk from the Convention Center, is focused on ability difference. We learn, for example, that posthumanist critique takes aim at “techno-determinism,” which asks whether we are losing our minds to the new digital world. The fate of bodies is of special concern. If we live, as one speaker puts it, in “universal woundedness,” then it is no longer possible to speak of disability as a category, which undermines the whole logic of the categorical imperative by which we judge ability. We are all, in some way, wounded. This leads the designated responder to speculate that posthumanism is what comes after poststructuralism, because the languages we use to reject the disabled are themselves the products of an amputated way of thinking. Woundedness, he says, is built into our ways of dividing up the world, and he wonders if posthumanism will usher in a new linguistic “After People” creative regeneration in what we say about the Other. I wonder too. A few weeks later The Washington Post runs an article (“Video Diaries Reveal Life for Those Committed to St. Elizabeths,” January 28, 2011) which includes a video of the criminally insane reflecting on their lives. It prompts one commenter to ask whether the next article will feature a “griping [sic] documentary” on cockroaches.
The BMXers have a more challenging task. They must negotiate their way among the throng, performing their stunts, without “dabbing” (touching their feet to the ground) or colliding with us. Being a mountain biker, I can appreciate the skill this involves. One of their favorite tricks is to go flying over the steps that lead from the plaza to a walkway that passes the Staples Center; it is crowded with people walking between the Conference Center and the Marriott. One of the bikers told me that they’ll do timed runs around Staples, but I don’t tell him, because he’ll learn about it soon enough, that motorcyclists will do timed races around the beltways in cities like Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.
I’m about to head inside for my next session, “The Currency of the Category ‘Creative Nonfiction,’” when I notice a group of boarders conferring near the sign that reads, “No Skateboarding, Bicycling, Inline Skating, or Roller Skating.” They break, like football players from a huddle, and one of them, a tall, lanky kid, with hair flipped to one side, wearing a black Nine Inch Nails T and black cargo shorts, skates a few feet away, pivots to face the steps, and stops. His eyes give away exactly what he’s thinking; they undergo a near physical transformation as he gathers his nerve. And then he pushes off, three hard kicks with his right foot toward the steps. At the very brink he executes an Ollie, which raises the front of the board off the ground. He grabs the rail (the side of the board) and, harnessing the laws of physics in a way never taught to him in school, launches himself into the air, like an F-16. The board’s trucks (wheel assemblies) catch the railing, and like Shaun White in the half pipe he slides to the bottom, catches air, grabs the board’s rail, lays back just enough to angle the nose up, and lands on the back wheels. He wobbles a bit—for a split second I think he’s going to flip—but steadies himself, stands up, kicks the back end out, and to the grating scrunch of plastic wheels against concrete comes to a complete stop. As a finishing flourish, he stands the board up with a swift kick, ala Marty McFly, grabs it by the front truck, and walks back to the huddle, grinning.
The currency of the category creative nonfiction is, as one speaker puts it, hard to locate on any literary values metric. Right now it’s wildly popular, like the stock of Silicon Valley startups in the 90s, and it’s taught under that name in colleges across the country. That’s my own metaphor, and I’m troubled by it, because as a practitioner I hope I’m not riding a bubble. I’m more intrigued by another speaker’s observation that CNF differs from fiction, not in the obvious requirement that the essay must be grounded in fact, but in the way that facts are represented. The baseline of CNF is to use the techniques of literary writing to understand something that actually happened. Writers reflect and interpret, and their reflections and interpretations begin at what the speaker calls the “actual.” This is the name she gives to the singular fact that initiates the reflection and interpretation that grow into the essay. Joan Didion has written of how a single photograph of a mob scene in an airport in San Salvador launched her book, Salvador. I found myself reflecting on the names of donors to a restoration of Coit Tower, carved into the steps leading to the top of Telegraph Hill, which led me to write about the architectural wonders of San Francisco.
But the actual, she says, is no more than a “shadowy image.” The body, the whole concatenation of events we experienced, now tucked away in memory, is lost to us. At best we have access to an indistinct outline, piecemeal remembrances; someone said something to us and we think we remember what it was word-for-word, but we probably don’t. So the “creative” in CNF seems to involve more than the mechanics of literary technique; or, perhaps more to the point, the mechanics become the midwife to a creative reconstruction of the story of which the actual is its shadow. I like the idea, because it justifies the creative but doesn’t authorize the fictive to give the story point. We still have to write the truth.
In my notes, beside the words “shadowy image,” I’ve written, “Plato?” She doesn’t mention the Allegory of the Cave, but the connection seems pretty clear, especially when I come downstairs into the lobby of the Marriott and see what’s on the TV monitors. On one, President Obama is speaking from the podium in the White House press room. The sound is turned down, but the caption reads, “Obama addresses nation on shootings in Tucson.” On the other TV, the Jets are wrapping up their victory over the Colts in the NFL playoffs.
I’ve often wondered whether the allegory, which says that we live in a cave and know only the shadows projected on the wall cast by an unattainable light from outside, was Plato’s invention or Socrates’s. It sounds like something Plato, curmudgeonly sequestered in his garret, nursing old wounds, would come up with. Socrates would have been hanging out at the plaza, and might have even tried to do a Nosehook Impossible or an Ollie Airwalk, though where he’d come up with the money for an Anti Hero Nothins Free is beyond me.
So, shadowy images. “What is truth?”, Pilate asked? I know the answer to that: sticking the landing.
As I walk in the dying afternoon toward the 7th Avenue subway stop, a BMXer whizzes past me, expertly dodging and weaving among the pedestrians, like Ali dancing around the ring. He approaches the street corner and at the last second comes to a near full stop, hops down over the curb, darts between two cars, and wheelies back onto the sidewalk. He blends into the crowd, only his bobbing and weaving blue Lakers baseball cap a clue to his whereabouts.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Guitar Chump Chronicles
Part I
I’ve been teaching college writing for more than thirty years, but never has a real guitar hero taken one of my classes. Plenty of talented, even gifted, musicians have, but the genuine name-in-lights, yacht-in-the-slip, private-jet-to-Monaco-for-lunch-with-totally-hot-babes rock star? Not one. My wife has one theory: “It’s called a mega-bucks recording contract. Who’s gonna go to college when he’s got one of those?” Point taken. (Here’s proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AcbSXnjJYA&feature=related)
But I have a different theory, which I call the Dirty Rotten Bastard in the Machine (DRBM, for short; see note 1). The theory asserts that for every activity human beings engage in that is fun, embedded in the very structure of the activity is an antagonist—the Dirty Rotten Bastard—whose sole function is to ruin all the fun by telling us that it’s wrong and that we shouldn’t do it. I’m not talking about our conscience, which is troublesome enough, but a real person, whose sole mission seems to be to create as many guilty consciences as possible within a single adult lifetime. Imagine your sixth-grade grammar teacher joining you on a hot date and making you sit through some old army “training” films.
What makes the DRBM descriptively powerful is that it meets two important conditions for theoryhood. First, the activity it denounces must indeed be fun. I call this the Efficacy Condition. We can test for it using something called Aristotle’s Premise Quantifier (abbreviated PQ). The PQ comes from a work of Aristotle’s called Topics, wherein he defines a premise as an assertion that is accepted as true by the majority of the wise. If we recalibrate the PQ to measure the things people do instead of the things they say, it will tell us if some activity is considered fun by the majority of those the culture believes to be wise (see note 2)
Second, there must be someone alive, at the time the activity is at its height of popularity (and of course, for some activities, this might be all the time), who strongly disapproves of the activity, preferably strongly enough to write a whole book about it. This second condition, known formally as the Embodiment Condition, lacks the rigor of the Efficacy Condition, since there is no reliable way for detecting who this someone is until it’s too late. But we can safely assert this: whenever you find yourself in the presence of a DRB in full throat, respond with liberal doses of adult humor: tasteless jokes, bawdy songs, Shakespearean double entendres, that sort of thing. They make effective antidotes. Don’t fret if the DRB misses the punch line.
Now, it so happens that the fun activity I’m speaking of is rock and roll (see note 3). And who’s the Dirty Rotten Bastard ruining all the fun? Many candidates have declared themselves, some more qualified than others, but if writing a book is a desirable qualification, then one obvious candidate is the late Allan Bloom (1930-1992), former professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, possibly one of the most disgruntled human beings ever to shuffle through the twentieth century, who wrote in his book, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), that pop culture, rock music especially, was ruining the kids.
Would you like to know what he really wrote? “Young people know that rock music has the beat of sexual intercourse.” I kid you not. (In fact, two I kid you nots: yes, young people know that, and, yes, it does. Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvPAurg7dmw&feature=related? ). To which one might be moved to respond: Izzatso? Well, there’s more to Bloom’s head-scratching aperitif than meets the eye. So, it so happens, does Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, which clocks in at just under fifteen minutes, about 5 times longer than the average rock tune. Ditto Igor Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, which sparked riots in the streets of Paris when it debuted in 1913. Likewise, though in a different medium, Howard Hawks’s film Ball of Fire (1941), wherein an almost dressed Barbara Stanwyck sings and cavorts her way through “Drum Boogie” accompanied by the frenetically orgiastic drumming of Gene Krupa.
It’s entirely beside the point that some Dirty Rotten Bastard blamed yet another collapse of the whole of Western Civilization on rock and roll. The real and more immediate point is that thanks to the whole family of DRBs, going all the way back to Socrates, whose valiant effort to reform an Athenian rock star named Alcibiades went major fail, our modern guitar heroes are avoiding the college classroom like the plague, and I think it’s because they realize that they might be exposed to the very thinking that produces DRBs in the first place, and the consequence of their absence is that I don’t get to meet them in the supportive and nurturing environment that is the bucolic setting of a college campus, where I can teach them how to write and they can teach me to play the guitar.
Which brings me to Todd Duren. Todd plays the guitar, is about to become a college graduate, and has taken upon himself the thankless task of teaching me a few of the basics. It all began rather innocently, at a party at Todd’s and Kat’s. We were sitting around a roaring fire in their backyard in the cool of the evening:
Frank: You play the guitar, don’t you?
Todd: Uh, yeah. Yeah, I do. (He takes a healthy swallow of his beer and begins to look over his shoulder.)
Frank: Could you, um, you know, like teach me to play?
Todd: (I think it was the condensation on his beer bottle that made him almost drop it.) Uh, um, well, um, yeah, sure, I suppose, um, yeah, be glad to.
And so it fell out that one warm and breezy Wednesday afternoon I leaned my bicycle against a tree in their front yard and joined Todd on the porch. Thus commenced my revenge against the Dirty Rotten Bastards. The first lesson was a basic exercise in scales: 1-4, 1-3, 1-3, 1-3, 1-4, 1-4. The numbers refer to the position markers (the little dots) on the neck between the frets. Beginning with the first (i.e., thickest) string, I placed my index finger on the first marker and plucked the string, then my little finger on the fourth marker and plucked the string. I repeated the process for each string, in the sequence noted above, and then in reverse, from the smallest to the largest string. Todd then impressed me with variations: blues, classical, expertly handling the guitar with a grace, even élan, that left me breathless with envy.
I won’t blame arthritis for what happened next. Perhaps it was simply my unfamiliarity with the instrument. But if it is the calling of every good student to make trial of his or her teacher’s patience and resourcefulness, then I am one promising student. Todd returned the guitar to me. I put the strap around me. I positioned my fingers on the position markers. I applied pick to string.
Todd was very understanding. “Happens all the time.” Even as he stood there circling the guitar over his head, tilting it this way and that, peeping into the sound hole (“I hear it, but I can’t see it.” “It’s pretty small, Todd”), shaking like Little Eva until the pick fell onto the porch floor with a soft plop, Kat cackling from behind her laptop (“You guys are idiots”), I was impressed with his steadiness of nerve, and that he returned the guitar and pick to me with a gentle smile.
“You’re not thinking of taking up the violin, are you?”
“No. Why?”
“You’ll poke your eye out.”
Notes
1 Some readers will recognize that I’ve borrowed the name for my theory from Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine (which Koestler in turn stole from the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who used it some twenty years earlier to trash Descartes’s mind-body split). Koestler argued that the human brain had evolved into a vastly complex system of higher structures, but that it had also retained the primitive structures—the ghost in the machine—that were home to our most violent passions. These primitive structures overpower the higher structures—hate trumps logic--causing us to do self-destructive things. In fact, according to Koestler, writing at the height of the Cold War, the human race was on the verge of blowing itself to bits with nuclear weapons. The ghost in the machine was finally about to annihilate the brain’s inner Scholastic.
2 It is generally agreed that the wise have fun. Doing what is a matter of feverish speculation. Cf: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KTFoMJi3uE.
3 Readers are invited to submit their own entries for “Most Fun Thing To Do as Determined by the Wise.” Use the Comment function.
Part I
I’ve been teaching college writing for more than thirty years, but never has a real guitar hero taken one of my classes. Plenty of talented, even gifted, musicians have, but the genuine name-in-lights, yacht-in-the-slip, private-jet-to-Monaco-for-lunch-with-totally-hot-babes rock star? Not one. My wife has one theory: “It’s called a mega-bucks recording contract. Who’s gonna go to college when he’s got one of those?” Point taken. (Here’s proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AcbSXnjJYA&feature=related)
But I have a different theory, which I call the Dirty Rotten Bastard in the Machine (DRBM, for short; see note 1). The theory asserts that for every activity human beings engage in that is fun, embedded in the very structure of the activity is an antagonist—the Dirty Rotten Bastard—whose sole function is to ruin all the fun by telling us that it’s wrong and that we shouldn’t do it. I’m not talking about our conscience, which is troublesome enough, but a real person, whose sole mission seems to be to create as many guilty consciences as possible within a single adult lifetime. Imagine your sixth-grade grammar teacher joining you on a hot date and making you sit through some old army “training” films.
What makes the DRBM descriptively powerful is that it meets two important conditions for theoryhood. First, the activity it denounces must indeed be fun. I call this the Efficacy Condition. We can test for it using something called Aristotle’s Premise Quantifier (abbreviated PQ). The PQ comes from a work of Aristotle’s called Topics, wherein he defines a premise as an assertion that is accepted as true by the majority of the wise. If we recalibrate the PQ to measure the things people do instead of the things they say, it will tell us if some activity is considered fun by the majority of those the culture believes to be wise (see note 2)
Second, there must be someone alive, at the time the activity is at its height of popularity (and of course, for some activities, this might be all the time), who strongly disapproves of the activity, preferably strongly enough to write a whole book about it. This second condition, known formally as the Embodiment Condition, lacks the rigor of the Efficacy Condition, since there is no reliable way for detecting who this someone is until it’s too late. But we can safely assert this: whenever you find yourself in the presence of a DRB in full throat, respond with liberal doses of adult humor: tasteless jokes, bawdy songs, Shakespearean double entendres, that sort of thing. They make effective antidotes. Don’t fret if the DRB misses the punch line.
Now, it so happens that the fun activity I’m speaking of is rock and roll (see note 3). And who’s the Dirty Rotten Bastard ruining all the fun? Many candidates have declared themselves, some more qualified than others, but if writing a book is a desirable qualification, then one obvious candidate is the late Allan Bloom (1930-1992), former professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, possibly one of the most disgruntled human beings ever to shuffle through the twentieth century, who wrote in his book, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), that pop culture, rock music especially, was ruining the kids.
Would you like to know what he really wrote? “Young people know that rock music has the beat of sexual intercourse.” I kid you not. (In fact, two I kid you nots: yes, young people know that, and, yes, it does. Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvPAurg7dmw&feature=related? ). To which one might be moved to respond: Izzatso? Well, there’s more to Bloom’s head-scratching aperitif than meets the eye. So, it so happens, does Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, which clocks in at just under fifteen minutes, about 5 times longer than the average rock tune. Ditto Igor Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, which sparked riots in the streets of Paris when it debuted in 1913. Likewise, though in a different medium, Howard Hawks’s film Ball of Fire (1941), wherein an almost dressed Barbara Stanwyck sings and cavorts her way through “Drum Boogie” accompanied by the frenetically orgiastic drumming of Gene Krupa.
It’s entirely beside the point that some Dirty Rotten Bastard blamed yet another collapse of the whole of Western Civilization on rock and roll. The real and more immediate point is that thanks to the whole family of DRBs, going all the way back to Socrates, whose valiant effort to reform an Athenian rock star named Alcibiades went major fail, our modern guitar heroes are avoiding the college classroom like the plague, and I think it’s because they realize that they might be exposed to the very thinking that produces DRBs in the first place, and the consequence of their absence is that I don’t get to meet them in the supportive and nurturing environment that is the bucolic setting of a college campus, where I can teach them how to write and they can teach me to play the guitar.
Which brings me to Todd Duren. Todd plays the guitar, is about to become a college graduate, and has taken upon himself the thankless task of teaching me a few of the basics. It all began rather innocently, at a party at Todd’s and Kat’s. We were sitting around a roaring fire in their backyard in the cool of the evening:
Frank: You play the guitar, don’t you?
Todd: Uh, yeah. Yeah, I do. (He takes a healthy swallow of his beer and begins to look over his shoulder.)
Frank: Could you, um, you know, like teach me to play?
Todd: (I think it was the condensation on his beer bottle that made him almost drop it.) Uh, um, well, um, yeah, sure, I suppose, um, yeah, be glad to.
And so it fell out that one warm and breezy Wednesday afternoon I leaned my bicycle against a tree in their front yard and joined Todd on the porch. Thus commenced my revenge against the Dirty Rotten Bastards. The first lesson was a basic exercise in scales: 1-4, 1-3, 1-3, 1-3, 1-4, 1-4. The numbers refer to the position markers (the little dots) on the neck between the frets. Beginning with the first (i.e., thickest) string, I placed my index finger on the first marker and plucked the string, then my little finger on the fourth marker and plucked the string. I repeated the process for each string, in the sequence noted above, and then in reverse, from the smallest to the largest string. Todd then impressed me with variations: blues, classical, expertly handling the guitar with a grace, even élan, that left me breathless with envy.
I won’t blame arthritis for what happened next. Perhaps it was simply my unfamiliarity with the instrument. But if it is the calling of every good student to make trial of his or her teacher’s patience and resourcefulness, then I am one promising student. Todd returned the guitar to me. I put the strap around me. I positioned my fingers on the position markers. I applied pick to string.
Todd was very understanding. “Happens all the time.” Even as he stood there circling the guitar over his head, tilting it this way and that, peeping into the sound hole (“I hear it, but I can’t see it.” “It’s pretty small, Todd”), shaking like Little Eva until the pick fell onto the porch floor with a soft plop, Kat cackling from behind her laptop (“You guys are idiots”), I was impressed with his steadiness of nerve, and that he returned the guitar and pick to me with a gentle smile.
“You’re not thinking of taking up the violin, are you?”
“No. Why?”
“You’ll poke your eye out.”
Notes
1 Some readers will recognize that I’ve borrowed the name for my theory from Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine (which Koestler in turn stole from the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who used it some twenty years earlier to trash Descartes’s mind-body split). Koestler argued that the human brain had evolved into a vastly complex system of higher structures, but that it had also retained the primitive structures—the ghost in the machine—that were home to our most violent passions. These primitive structures overpower the higher structures—hate trumps logic--causing us to do self-destructive things. In fact, according to Koestler, writing at the height of the Cold War, the human race was on the verge of blowing itself to bits with nuclear weapons. The ghost in the machine was finally about to annihilate the brain’s inner Scholastic.
2 It is generally agreed that the wise have fun. Doing what is a matter of feverish speculation. Cf: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KTFoMJi3uE.
3 Readers are invited to submit their own entries for “Most Fun Thing To Do as Determined by the Wise.” Use the Comment function.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Riffing On Old
A few background notes: A little over a year ago I took a half day motorcycle ride on some of the back roads north of Auburn, Alabama, where I live. My specific purpose was to photograph some old buildings along a ten-mile stretch of highway between Camp Hill and Lafayette. I thought that eventually I would do some research into them and write their histories. But ideas have a way of mutating, and I soon found myself speculating on the simple fact that they were old. I began to notice other old things that had been cluttering my life, or simply catching my attention: furniture, collectibles, books, my birth certificate, not to mention ideas, whose importance sometimes becomes trapped in the times they are linked to but which have, if we listen, something to say to us again. And I began thinking about the word old itself and the way we use it so casually, when it could be said that the condition it names, and the processes that get us there, are anything but casual, though they happen almost without our noticing them. And when we do notice them, it’s usually too late. I don’t have a particularly morbid fixation on the subject, however personally I’m embedded in it (as the calendar constantly reminds me), but because the subject seems so fertile, I composed these riffs on the word and the ideas it suggests. More, I’m sure, will follow.
"Riffing On Old"
Out there beyond the chain link fence, I can make out the ruptured gas tank of a 1994 Honda Nighthawk and the twisted frame of an old Triumph. Elsewhere, ripped leather seats, corkscrewed headers, pretzeled handlebars amputated from a missing triple clamp. A 2005 Suzuki GSX 1000 R shows signs that it caught, at full lean, the heat-softened ooze of a tar strip and flung its bewildered owner across the yellow line under a high sun and a Ford pickup. Front forks and frame tubes reach into the east Alabama air like imploring bones. Years of alchemic rain and humid summers have transmuted once shiny iron into the dusty brown of worn spark plugs. Many of these motorcycles were new rolling stock at the time of America’s troubled fin de siècle, fewer than ten years ago. And now here they are, a sundered remuda, forgotten objects good for photographic study but not much else. Like the times they evoke, they seem remarkable mostly for the damage that has been done to them. And yet it is in just this state of wreckage that they bring to mind a simple thought. To be damaged means to have lived. To be living is to be on the verge of enduring more damage, not merely to be alive, immobile and voiceless. Life cuts. More life heals. That’s the story.
A motorcycle has brought me here, and I’m leaning against it, reviewing the pictures I’ve taken. I don’t get too far before a dog with weight-lifter’s shoulders comes running toward me from the shade of a school bus. Dogs can dig under fences, so I stuff the camera in the tank bag, put on my helmet, and ride toward Camp Hill. Here the highway weaves a gentle S through a mostly-abandoned downtown, past the high school and football field and a few crumbling houses, unlivable by their looks but lived in any way. The shadow of a closed-down convenience store (COLD BEVERAGES, CIGARETTES, DELI) provides little relief from the sun. A police car is parked in front of the wood-framed two-story across the street. There is no breeze to speak of, but small tornadoes of dust rise from the front yard. A knot of people surrounds the officer, whose attention is divided between a gesticulating woman yelling something and a group of children jostling one another for a glimpse into his car. He is a thick, muscular black man, and every now and then a flash of blue light catches his face and puts a lavender shine on his finely-wrought cheekbones. The house badly needs a coat of paint. The porch sags, and missing shingles reveal bare spots on the roof. I would like to take a picture. There is an unstaged ordinariness to it, an everyday tableau of a run-down part of America as real and unchangeable now as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. It’s what I imagine Currier and Ives would have painted if they’d known about social realism.
Not everything old belongs earthed and stone-marked. I own three hand-cranked coffee grinders, still in use. One dates from the late 1800s. It looks like the one Claire Trevor uses in Stagecoach. On a bookcase sits an eight-day clock, still with the key, still beating. My wife had discovered a note tucked in the back: an aunt four generations ago had carried it from Pennsylvania across the Alleghenies into Ohio in 1868. In our kitchen is a Hoosier Cabinet dating from the Taft administration. We had rescued it one Christmas season on the literal eve of its destruction, in near ruin, in Tallassee, Alabama. You’ll see Hoosier Cabinets in movies with the unfortunately domesticated Myrna Loy or Claudette Colbert. One gets obliterated by a spaceship in the 1952 War of the Worlds. Ours, manufactured in Elwood, Indiana, by Sellers, a company defunct since World War II, lacks the flour bin and sifter, but the white steel table, scarred by cigarettes, slides, and I replaced the hardware attaching the shelf unit to the bottom cabinet, and the drawer knobs accept the screw (slotted, the so-called Robertson screw, midwived c. 1908, not the Phillips, patented in 1935) from the outside, visible to everyone, and therefore honestly, and the whole assembly sits on metal frame legs and cast wheels, wobbly and uncertain, true, but the roll top rolls smoothly like a window shade, and behind it sits a collection of prewar lusterware from olden Japan, of a time before the idea of crashing old airplanes into a ship full of young men had crept like disease into an old admiral’s brain.
Samuel Johnson delivers old of ten definitions in the sixth edition of his Dictionary (1785), including “not young,’ “not new,” and "not modern.” If repetitious, he is also comprehensive, sometimes playfully so. He leaves it for you to decide if something “decayed by time” is necessarily “of long continuance” or was “begun long ago” or has merely been “subsisting before something else.” My favorite is: “A word to signify in burlesque language, more than enough,” which sounds like another James Boswell/chorus girl hook up, and Johnson’s definition of burlesque in its adjectival form (now archaic) puts us in the ballpark: “tending to raise laughter by unnatural or unsuitable language or images.” He instances, however, Joseph Addison’s complaint that Homer created burlesque characters in violation of the somber grandeur of the epic poem. Just down the column from old you’ll find olden, “ancient,” but Johnson has been dead since December 13 the previous year (he was 75), and like one of the departed come back to scold us, he pronounces, “This word is not now in use,” though it most certainly is. The entry before olden is oldfashioned (out of alphabetical order, notice), “Formed according to obsolete custom.” If you’re thinking Hoosier Cabinets, Wedgewood china, or side valve flatheads, Johnson’s example is John Dryden’s rendering of Chaucer’s Middle English into modern (c. 1700) English. Finally there’s oldness, which Johnson unhelpfully defines as “not newness,” which seems beneath his usual standards. Missing from the 6th edition are some gems from earlier editions: oldish (“somewhat old”), oldsaid (“long since said” and “reported of old,” with examples from—who else?--Spenser), and oldwife, wherein the dictionary writer displays his occasionally off-putting ill-temper: “a contemptuous name for an old prating woman.” It is to be noted that ancient and half a dozen of its derivatives (all appearing immediately after anchovy, “a little sea-fish, much used by way of sauce, or seasoning”) use “old,” suffixed and not, in most of their definitions, illustrating one of the chief hazards of lexicography: recursive self-referentiality.
I spend the next two hours riding back and forth along the highway east of Camp Hill, stopping to take pictures of the numerous abandoned buildings. Of some there is nothing left but what the fire didn’t take. Others appear to have been simply abandoned, left to the caprices of weather, time, bugs, weeds, and gravity. Anyone familiar with the South knows that the natural world can surround and choke off the artificial world in a span of time so astonishingly short, that untended buildings the size of warehouses will be quickly engulfed in a sea of voracious green. The remains of a Pure gas station bear witness. It is imprisoned behind a wall of kudzu, poison ivy, and saw grass, and in a few more decades might disappear altogether, even though it sits no more than thirty feet from the road. Approaching it I see the trusses first, broken girders with ripped pieces of corrugated metal roofing that suggest wind damage. The “For Sale by Owner” sign appears recent, but there is hardly more than a shell worth buying.
A half mile down, on the other side of the highway, at the intersection of an unmarked, narrow road that disappears into the pines, is the white-washed husk of a dance club. It sits well back from the road, fronted by a large dirt parking lot, now grown over with tall grass and scruffy wild azaleas. A sign at the corner provides some provenance, and a glimpse into rural linguistics: “OPEN AIR MUSIC PARK ENTERTAINMENT AT IT’S BEST!,” and below, “CAMP HILL DRAG STRIP OPEN EVERY SUNDAY,” partnered with a Budweiser logo. Shingles are gone from parts of the club’s roof, and the rafters of an annex have caved in, giving the whole complex the look of a bombed out building. Along the highway between Camp Hill and Lafayette, a distance of ten miles, there does not appear to be a single structure suitable for human occupancy. You would think all of humanity had been driven out by a disease known by no other symptom than the emptiness it leaves behind.
If old things connect us with the past that existed before us, they also connect us to a future that patiently awaits our absence. A search of the Internet brought me to a 1929 Harley-Davidson Model B (for battery/coil), unHarley-like in its single cylinder 21 cubic-inch engine, once owned by Steve McQueen. He had restored it to its original khaki paint job with red and orange pinstriping. It sold at auction after his death for $37,440.00. The late actor also had owned a pristine white 1934 Indian Sport Scout, which sold, original in everything but the tires, for $177,500.00. A fondness for collecting expresses an indulgence and perhaps a belief that by surrounding ourselves with old things we escape the two-handed grip of time and decay. Montaigne surrounded himself with old books, which he thought “fuller and stronger” than new ones, which he didn’t care for, though he confessed a disinterest in the Greeks, whose books are the oldest. But his love of books reveals a contradiction. On the one hand, “I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion; after a charge or two, I give them over,” suggesting a dilettante easily bored. But we also find in the same essay (“Of Books”): “My sight is confounded and dissipated with poring.” There is no record that Montaigne suffered from blindness, and he lived an active life, though as he got older he occupied it more and more with contemplation in the enclosure of his library writing his Essais. In these we find the clues a peripatetic mind drops when it makes its own inner workings the object of its study, and Montaigne found his mind to be endlessly fascinating. He writes in “That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die” that we have “already outlived the ordinary term of life” (he was, he says, thirty-nine when he wrote this), and we are fools at any age to think we’ll be alive as soon as tomorrow: “who has assured unto thee the term of life?” All this one could expect from a Roman Catholic still feeling the heat of the medieval church (the light had gone out long centuries before). But there is no theology to explain how a man writing the work that would make him immortal could think himself, for all but the most practical purposes, dead, but here he is in his mid-forties composing his epitaph: “For my part, I believe our souls are adults at twenty as much as they ever are like to be, and as capable then as ever. A soul that has not by that time given evident earnest of its force and virtue will never after come to proof.”
What the ancient Greeks called arete—virtue, living to the fullness of one’s nature—followed you, they believed, to the grave and beyond, which contradicts Montaigne and possibly explains his aversion to their books. Arete included the injunction to live not only with the knowledge that you will surely die, but that your exit from the world will be either noble or contemptible. There was no in-between. You lived, to whatever age, for the purpose of earning a respectable death, but because the Greeks, like the Christians to come later, believed you deserved nothing better than a shabby and wretched death—for such was life--the formula for living well could be tricky. Our modern sophistication precludes such thinking. Death, like its precursor, aging, is unjust, almost unnatural, certainly undeserving in its wretched form, not something we should prepare for, so we have left the ancient logic of choice behind us. Perhaps this was to be expected. Examined carefully, the old logic refutes itself all the time; most lives end with no more drama than the sudden stopping of a clock. All the more reason, Montaigne and the Greeks would agree, that if you make the existential choice each day to ride—I speak not just of motorcycles--accept that you will end up in the graveyard of discarded appliances, partners in the clearing away of the rusty and shattered for the shiny and whole. That’s the story, too.
But there is much to be done in the meantime. The Pure gas station tells a story, one that was common across much of America, and still has not, I’ve observed, disappeared. It is of a man, about fifty, arthritic of back, wearing stained overalls and a grease-stained John Deere baseball cap. He is stepping out of a pickup truck. A headlight is missing and the rocker panels are poxed with dents and rust. His fingers are dirty and dabbed with dried blood, hard to make out against his black skin, residue from too many scrapes with rust-stuck engine bolts. The truck belches a final cloud of blue smoke as the engine dies. The soles of his boots are separating from the uppers. There will be hostile stares when he enters, and the usual language that greets the unwelcomed other. But he wants a pack of cigarettes and a cold drink, and surely no one nowadays can object to that, though they will (haven’t they always?). When he steps inside, into a wall of conditioned air, cold with malice, he is alert and guarded, a habit he has acquired over the long years. Three men are sitting at a table in the center of the room next to the potato chips and candy bars: in work clothes, he notices, work clothes like his, daubed in hand-prints of oil stains and dried scabs of earth, smoking, as he hopes to be, cold drinks before them, and they see him and their conversation stops. The clerk glances up from his newspaper and notes his presence, frowning. A throat is cleared at the table. He hears it, looks over, but only for an instant. He doesn’t want to make eye contact. The men lean in, heads almost touching, whisper, laugh. The clerk finally stands up. Money and goods are exchanged, and he turns to leave. There are now two men at the table. He sees no one when he gets outside, the emptiness a fragment of his fear, and gets in his truck. Hands shaking, he tears open the pack and lights a cigarette and pulls deeply and winces at the sudden tightness in his chest. He starts the engine and slowly pulls away. When he turns onto the highway he sees for the first time the folded piece of paper under the windshield wiper.
Readers who want to know what the note says may be depriving themselves of one of the chief pleasures of reading, and asking too much of the writer. In truth, I don’t know what the note says. But I can tell you this. He reads it and stuffs it in his pocket and resolves that he’ll go back there everyday until there is not one square inch of the place the kudzu has not reclaimed.
"Riffing On Old"
Out there beyond the chain link fence, I can make out the ruptured gas tank of a 1994 Honda Nighthawk and the twisted frame of an old Triumph. Elsewhere, ripped leather seats, corkscrewed headers, pretzeled handlebars amputated from a missing triple clamp. A 2005 Suzuki GSX 1000 R shows signs that it caught, at full lean, the heat-softened ooze of a tar strip and flung its bewildered owner across the yellow line under a high sun and a Ford pickup. Front forks and frame tubes reach into the east Alabama air like imploring bones. Years of alchemic rain and humid summers have transmuted once shiny iron into the dusty brown of worn spark plugs. Many of these motorcycles were new rolling stock at the time of America’s troubled fin de siècle, fewer than ten years ago. And now here they are, a sundered remuda, forgotten objects good for photographic study but not much else. Like the times they evoke, they seem remarkable mostly for the damage that has been done to them. And yet it is in just this state of wreckage that they bring to mind a simple thought. To be damaged means to have lived. To be living is to be on the verge of enduring more damage, not merely to be alive, immobile and voiceless. Life cuts. More life heals. That’s the story.
A motorcycle has brought me here, and I’m leaning against it, reviewing the pictures I’ve taken. I don’t get too far before a dog with weight-lifter’s shoulders comes running toward me from the shade of a school bus. Dogs can dig under fences, so I stuff the camera in the tank bag, put on my helmet, and ride toward Camp Hill. Here the highway weaves a gentle S through a mostly-abandoned downtown, past the high school and football field and a few crumbling houses, unlivable by their looks but lived in any way. The shadow of a closed-down convenience store (COLD BEVERAGES, CIGARETTES, DELI) provides little relief from the sun. A police car is parked in front of the wood-framed two-story across the street. There is no breeze to speak of, but small tornadoes of dust rise from the front yard. A knot of people surrounds the officer, whose attention is divided between a gesticulating woman yelling something and a group of children jostling one another for a glimpse into his car. He is a thick, muscular black man, and every now and then a flash of blue light catches his face and puts a lavender shine on his finely-wrought cheekbones. The house badly needs a coat of paint. The porch sags, and missing shingles reveal bare spots on the roof. I would like to take a picture. There is an unstaged ordinariness to it, an everyday tableau of a run-down part of America as real and unchangeable now as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. It’s what I imagine Currier and Ives would have painted if they’d known about social realism.
Not everything old belongs earthed and stone-marked. I own three hand-cranked coffee grinders, still in use. One dates from the late 1800s. It looks like the one Claire Trevor uses in Stagecoach. On a bookcase sits an eight-day clock, still with the key, still beating. My wife had discovered a note tucked in the back: an aunt four generations ago had carried it from Pennsylvania across the Alleghenies into Ohio in 1868. In our kitchen is a Hoosier Cabinet dating from the Taft administration. We had rescued it one Christmas season on the literal eve of its destruction, in near ruin, in Tallassee, Alabama. You’ll see Hoosier Cabinets in movies with the unfortunately domesticated Myrna Loy or Claudette Colbert. One gets obliterated by a spaceship in the 1952 War of the Worlds. Ours, manufactured in Elwood, Indiana, by Sellers, a company defunct since World War II, lacks the flour bin and sifter, but the white steel table, scarred by cigarettes, slides, and I replaced the hardware attaching the shelf unit to the bottom cabinet, and the drawer knobs accept the screw (slotted, the so-called Robertson screw, midwived c. 1908, not the Phillips, patented in 1935) from the outside, visible to everyone, and therefore honestly, and the whole assembly sits on metal frame legs and cast wheels, wobbly and uncertain, true, but the roll top rolls smoothly like a window shade, and behind it sits a collection of prewar lusterware from olden Japan, of a time before the idea of crashing old airplanes into a ship full of young men had crept like disease into an old admiral’s brain.
Samuel Johnson delivers old of ten definitions in the sixth edition of his Dictionary (1785), including “not young,’ “not new,” and "not modern.” If repetitious, he is also comprehensive, sometimes playfully so. He leaves it for you to decide if something “decayed by time” is necessarily “of long continuance” or was “begun long ago” or has merely been “subsisting before something else.” My favorite is: “A word to signify in burlesque language, more than enough,” which sounds like another James Boswell/chorus girl hook up, and Johnson’s definition of burlesque in its adjectival form (now archaic) puts us in the ballpark: “tending to raise laughter by unnatural or unsuitable language or images.” He instances, however, Joseph Addison’s complaint that Homer created burlesque characters in violation of the somber grandeur of the epic poem. Just down the column from old you’ll find olden, “ancient,” but Johnson has been dead since December 13 the previous year (he was 75), and like one of the departed come back to scold us, he pronounces, “This word is not now in use,” though it most certainly is. The entry before olden is oldfashioned (out of alphabetical order, notice), “Formed according to obsolete custom.” If you’re thinking Hoosier Cabinets, Wedgewood china, or side valve flatheads, Johnson’s example is John Dryden’s rendering of Chaucer’s Middle English into modern (c. 1700) English. Finally there’s oldness, which Johnson unhelpfully defines as “not newness,” which seems beneath his usual standards. Missing from the 6th edition are some gems from earlier editions: oldish (“somewhat old”), oldsaid (“long since said” and “reported of old,” with examples from—who else?--Spenser), and oldwife, wherein the dictionary writer displays his occasionally off-putting ill-temper: “a contemptuous name for an old prating woman.” It is to be noted that ancient and half a dozen of its derivatives (all appearing immediately after anchovy, “a little sea-fish, much used by way of sauce, or seasoning”) use “old,” suffixed and not, in most of their definitions, illustrating one of the chief hazards of lexicography: recursive self-referentiality.
I spend the next two hours riding back and forth along the highway east of Camp Hill, stopping to take pictures of the numerous abandoned buildings. Of some there is nothing left but what the fire didn’t take. Others appear to have been simply abandoned, left to the caprices of weather, time, bugs, weeds, and gravity. Anyone familiar with the South knows that the natural world can surround and choke off the artificial world in a span of time so astonishingly short, that untended buildings the size of warehouses will be quickly engulfed in a sea of voracious green. The remains of a Pure gas station bear witness. It is imprisoned behind a wall of kudzu, poison ivy, and saw grass, and in a few more decades might disappear altogether, even though it sits no more than thirty feet from the road. Approaching it I see the trusses first, broken girders with ripped pieces of corrugated metal roofing that suggest wind damage. The “For Sale by Owner” sign appears recent, but there is hardly more than a shell worth buying.
A half mile down, on the other side of the highway, at the intersection of an unmarked, narrow road that disappears into the pines, is the white-washed husk of a dance club. It sits well back from the road, fronted by a large dirt parking lot, now grown over with tall grass and scruffy wild azaleas. A sign at the corner provides some provenance, and a glimpse into rural linguistics: “OPEN AIR MUSIC PARK ENTERTAINMENT AT IT’S BEST!,” and below, “CAMP HILL DRAG STRIP OPEN EVERY SUNDAY,” partnered with a Budweiser logo. Shingles are gone from parts of the club’s roof, and the rafters of an annex have caved in, giving the whole complex the look of a bombed out building. Along the highway between Camp Hill and Lafayette, a distance of ten miles, there does not appear to be a single structure suitable for human occupancy. You would think all of humanity had been driven out by a disease known by no other symptom than the emptiness it leaves behind.
If old things connect us with the past that existed before us, they also connect us to a future that patiently awaits our absence. A search of the Internet brought me to a 1929 Harley-Davidson Model B (for battery/coil), unHarley-like in its single cylinder 21 cubic-inch engine, once owned by Steve McQueen. He had restored it to its original khaki paint job with red and orange pinstriping. It sold at auction after his death for $37,440.00. The late actor also had owned a pristine white 1934 Indian Sport Scout, which sold, original in everything but the tires, for $177,500.00. A fondness for collecting expresses an indulgence and perhaps a belief that by surrounding ourselves with old things we escape the two-handed grip of time and decay. Montaigne surrounded himself with old books, which he thought “fuller and stronger” than new ones, which he didn’t care for, though he confessed a disinterest in the Greeks, whose books are the oldest. But his love of books reveals a contradiction. On the one hand, “I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion; after a charge or two, I give them over,” suggesting a dilettante easily bored. But we also find in the same essay (“Of Books”): “My sight is confounded and dissipated with poring.” There is no record that Montaigne suffered from blindness, and he lived an active life, though as he got older he occupied it more and more with contemplation in the enclosure of his library writing his Essais. In these we find the clues a peripatetic mind drops when it makes its own inner workings the object of its study, and Montaigne found his mind to be endlessly fascinating. He writes in “That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die” that we have “already outlived the ordinary term of life” (he was, he says, thirty-nine when he wrote this), and we are fools at any age to think we’ll be alive as soon as tomorrow: “who has assured unto thee the term of life?” All this one could expect from a Roman Catholic still feeling the heat of the medieval church (the light had gone out long centuries before). But there is no theology to explain how a man writing the work that would make him immortal could think himself, for all but the most practical purposes, dead, but here he is in his mid-forties composing his epitaph: “For my part, I believe our souls are adults at twenty as much as they ever are like to be, and as capable then as ever. A soul that has not by that time given evident earnest of its force and virtue will never after come to proof.”
What the ancient Greeks called arete—virtue, living to the fullness of one’s nature—followed you, they believed, to the grave and beyond, which contradicts Montaigne and possibly explains his aversion to their books. Arete included the injunction to live not only with the knowledge that you will surely die, but that your exit from the world will be either noble or contemptible. There was no in-between. You lived, to whatever age, for the purpose of earning a respectable death, but because the Greeks, like the Christians to come later, believed you deserved nothing better than a shabby and wretched death—for such was life--the formula for living well could be tricky. Our modern sophistication precludes such thinking. Death, like its precursor, aging, is unjust, almost unnatural, certainly undeserving in its wretched form, not something we should prepare for, so we have left the ancient logic of choice behind us. Perhaps this was to be expected. Examined carefully, the old logic refutes itself all the time; most lives end with no more drama than the sudden stopping of a clock. All the more reason, Montaigne and the Greeks would agree, that if you make the existential choice each day to ride—I speak not just of motorcycles--accept that you will end up in the graveyard of discarded appliances, partners in the clearing away of the rusty and shattered for the shiny and whole. That’s the story, too.
But there is much to be done in the meantime. The Pure gas station tells a story, one that was common across much of America, and still has not, I’ve observed, disappeared. It is of a man, about fifty, arthritic of back, wearing stained overalls and a grease-stained John Deere baseball cap. He is stepping out of a pickup truck. A headlight is missing and the rocker panels are poxed with dents and rust. His fingers are dirty and dabbed with dried blood, hard to make out against his black skin, residue from too many scrapes with rust-stuck engine bolts. The truck belches a final cloud of blue smoke as the engine dies. The soles of his boots are separating from the uppers. There will be hostile stares when he enters, and the usual language that greets the unwelcomed other. But he wants a pack of cigarettes and a cold drink, and surely no one nowadays can object to that, though they will (haven’t they always?). When he steps inside, into a wall of conditioned air, cold with malice, he is alert and guarded, a habit he has acquired over the long years. Three men are sitting at a table in the center of the room next to the potato chips and candy bars: in work clothes, he notices, work clothes like his, daubed in hand-prints of oil stains and dried scabs of earth, smoking, as he hopes to be, cold drinks before them, and they see him and their conversation stops. The clerk glances up from his newspaper and notes his presence, frowning. A throat is cleared at the table. He hears it, looks over, but only for an instant. He doesn’t want to make eye contact. The men lean in, heads almost touching, whisper, laugh. The clerk finally stands up. Money and goods are exchanged, and he turns to leave. There are now two men at the table. He sees no one when he gets outside, the emptiness a fragment of his fear, and gets in his truck. Hands shaking, he tears open the pack and lights a cigarette and pulls deeply and winces at the sudden tightness in his chest. He starts the engine and slowly pulls away. When he turns onto the highway he sees for the first time the folded piece of paper under the windshield wiper.
Readers who want to know what the note says may be depriving themselves of one of the chief pleasures of reading, and asking too much of the writer. In truth, I don’t know what the note says. But I can tell you this. He reads it and stuffs it in his pocket and resolves that he’ll go back there everyday until there is not one square inch of the place the kudzu has not reclaimed.
Welcome!
Poesis is the ancient Greek word for “make” or “compose.” It is the source of the English word poetry, and both its ancient and modern meanings connote imaginative creativity. Techne, also from ancient Greek, means “art” or “craft,” or what Aristotle describes in Poetics as the application of knowledge of the principles of composition toward some end. This is the source of the English word technique, something akin to the skills associated with the mechanical arts. Put them together and you have the name I’ve given to my blog. What I create I then subject to the disciplining forces of craft, if not always with success, I hope always without becoming too mechanical to lose all interest.
Over time I’ll be putting up anything from creative nonfiction pieces (see “Riffing on Old"), short fiction (forthcoming: a man becomes obsessed with a woman in a painting before embarking on a walking tour of Savannah, culminating in his getting lost in a cemetery), and, beginning soon, an occasional continuing series of my misadventures in learning to play the guitar I’ll be calling “Guitar Chump Chronicles.” Not everything I put up will be finished. It’s in my nature to be experimental, so don’t be surprised if I pull something down and rework it. As I told someone a while back, once written, never finished. The essence of poesis techne.
I want to thank three people for encouraging me in starting this. Tiffany Clemons, a former student and now a good friend, prodded me to start a blog after her own blog (Breakfast at Tiffany’s at www.neologismsbytiff.blogspot.com/) got off to such a rousing start. Kat Privett-Duren (A Witchy Thought at http://009secretagentkitty.blogspot.com/), a long-time friend, loaned me her laptop and front porch while she walked me through the initial steps of setting up this blog site. This was right after her husband, Todd, taught me my first set of scales on his guitar. It was a most productive afternoon. Finally, and not least, my wife, Carol, has been egging me on to get back into writing for more years than I care to acknowledge. Her confidence is more than inspiring. I gratefully dedicate my first piece, "Riffing on Old," to her.
Over time I’ll be putting up anything from creative nonfiction pieces (see “Riffing on Old"), short fiction (forthcoming: a man becomes obsessed with a woman in a painting before embarking on a walking tour of Savannah, culminating in his getting lost in a cemetery), and, beginning soon, an occasional continuing series of my misadventures in learning to play the guitar I’ll be calling “Guitar Chump Chronicles.” Not everything I put up will be finished. It’s in my nature to be experimental, so don’t be surprised if I pull something down and rework it. As I told someone a while back, once written, never finished. The essence of poesis techne.
I want to thank three people for encouraging me in starting this. Tiffany Clemons, a former student and now a good friend, prodded me to start a blog after her own blog (Breakfast at Tiffany’s at www.neologismsbytiff.blogspot.com/) got off to such a rousing start. Kat Privett-Duren (A Witchy Thought at http://009secretagentkitty.blogspot.com/), a long-time friend, loaned me her laptop and front porch while she walked me through the initial steps of setting up this blog site. This was right after her husband, Todd, taught me my first set of scales on his guitar. It was a most productive afternoon. Finally, and not least, my wife, Carol, has been egging me on to get back into writing for more years than I care to acknowledge. Her confidence is more than inspiring. I gratefully dedicate my first piece, "Riffing on Old," to her.
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