Kentucky notes: Loud and louder

 

    Somehow "Texas Notes" didn't seem to suit this week's report from former Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey, just days now from her new home. So an adjustment seemed in order. Times change, and we change with them.

     Paducah Kentucky, where the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers converge, has been my home for a week now. Each state I travel through has its own special tone. Kentucky folk seems a bit less prideful than Texans and a bit less laissez faire than Arkansans. They say hello with an unreadable look on their faces indicating “you will say hi to me because we speak to each other here, but I am not going to be too excited about it.” In Arkansas, they ignore you
     While sitting at an outdoor restaurant earlier this week, Harleys and hotrods sharply pieced and jabbed at the silence the patrons were trying to enjoy. The lady at the next table and I looked at each other and shook our heads, and I exclaimed “Whyyyyyy??” When I realized I was not going to win this one, that they were going to keep going on and on revving their engines while we ate their dust I decided to try to join them. I told the lady “I am going to try to enjoy the sound.” She asked if I was joking. I was not, since what’s the point of fighting against the unavoidable? I mean, I could have left and it was my choice to stay.
     One of the culprits was a diner in our midst. He and his girlfriend rolled up on a motorcycle, leather vests and all. He backed the bike into a spot and they jumped off. The noise level was moderate when they arrived. But then the performance commenced. He sauntered back out to the bike and hopped on. As he rode off — I'm guessing to get cigarettes — he revved the engine and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Lovely. Thanks dude. I wasn't not in acceptance. I shook it off and tried to focus on the beautiful sunset.
     When he came back it was a little less dramatic. He got off the bike and I watched his slight frame, which was weighed down by leather, huge goggles propped up on his forehead, and steel toed riding boots. He looked small and unsure under all the regalia. His girlfriend jumped up to open the gate for him.
     I decided I had to talk to them. On my way out he was sitting alone, partner off to the restroom. I said “I am really curious to know what you think about making all that noise with your bike? Does it bother you that it bothers others?” “Not at all!” he said, with a smirk. His girlfriend came and sat back down, also looking amused. They excitedly launched into explaining things to me. “Loud music and loud bikes make us happy, just like peace makes you happy.” That stopped me in my tracks. Nick continued. “I grew up in Joliet [Illinois] and bikes were all around me. I know 80 year olds who still love to ride loud Harleys.” Alli jumped in to share how much she loves loud bikes too. They also shared a bit about how hard it is to raise six kids and find ways to enjoy life.
     I saw them differently after that. Instead of the plebeians who were assaulting me with their fumes, they were a young couple, working hard to support their family, and using the only kind of escape in their repertoire. Sure, I wish they had more to chose from such as Aida and The Art Institute— but they don’t. Who am I to judge? I used to keep earplugs with me at all times to dull the sounds of the screeching subway trains or the loud music coming out of headphones all around me when I lived in Chicago. Seems wise to keep them with me in rural America too.
     I won’t tell you that Nick said he likes “that the noise aggravates people” since I kind of want you to like him, and also because he tried to backpedal from the statement when he realized that it did not sound good. I saw a flicker of wise discernment cross his face.
     I have many more Paducah folks stories but will leave you with my favorite one. While I sat on a restaurant patio with the manager of a local eyeglass shop who told me that he and his wife “are not crunchy but we knock on the door of it a lot” (meaning they are open to whole grains and some good down home health nut stuff), a tattooed man with sparkling eyes sat down to join us. He was raised Southern Baptist here in Kentucky, and found himself in trouble a lot as a kid. 

      “They called the preacher in on me. He told me I have to have faith. But I wanted the facts.” 

      After 33 years working in a factory he realized he needed something more. “In a meditation I went to that much higher level of consciousness and I met God. God is not a white guy in white robes but he’s a giant orb of energy.” This man, David Dean, now offers massage therapy and Reiki healing He sees himself as a channel of good energy.
   The funny thing is I’d looked him up earlier and the only reason I did not call him for a massage is that I prefer female therapists. I set something up with a woman but when I got there today I noticed she did not follow the COVID protocol outlined on her website. In our meet and greet I told her I am vaccinated and she let me know that she is not, does not trust the vaccine and will not be getting it. I told her that I’d have to cancel the massage; it’s the home stretch! I will be hugging my family and beloved friends in less than 48 hours from now and I’ll be darned if I am going to consort with an anti-vaxxer this state of the game. See y’all soon!

Maybe "Lift Up the Wronged Garden"....

     Art gets a bad rap. Ponderous, often. Incomprehensible, or else too apparent. Trivial, derivative, unskilled—the list of flaws goes on and on.
     But art has its place.
     My hometown of Berea, Ohio, is looking good. And we wandered the downtown, where children played and adults relaxed amidst the gazebos, playgrounds and walkways. We headed to the Triangle to assure myself that the plaque to the U.S.S. Maine was still there—I think figuring out what the "Maine" might have been kicked off my lifelong habit of learning about history. We even strolled into the MetroPark, which looked lush and lovely.
     So it is perhaps unfair for me to focus on this little tableau by Coe Lake. The Victims of Crime Memorial Garden.
     But it bothered me, in previous visits, and bothered me again Wednesday. More so because I couldn't put my finger on what the trouble is. That it's a downer? No, bad stuff happens, and it helps to memorialize it. That it passes itself off as a "garden" though has no flowers that I noticed? I didn't think of that until later, puzzled as to what the problem is.
     It finally came to me: artless. "Victims of Crime Memorial Garden." You can't get more direct than that. It's like an urban planner's note scrawled on a city map denoting where the victims of crime memorial garden will go when the proper poetic sorts figure out how to create a fitting tribute that is soothing and appropriate. Only nobody ever did, and through some awful miscommunication the dashed off scrawl became the name of the thing.
     And don't get me started on that grindstone. Yes, Berea was the Sandstone Capitol of the World. And yes, there are a lot of them still scattered around, with every august house sporting one in the garden. And yes, we are proud.
     But did anyone consider the optics of using a grindstone to announce the garden where those ground down by having their loved ones fall to crime seek refuge and comfort? (If indeed it is intended for them. By it's name, it might just be done on behalf of the dead, and we living don't factor into the equation. That would explain a lot).
     Did they consider they were pushing a grindstone under the nose of the ground down? Or at best offering up a historical non sequitur to safe suburban sorts untouched by a whisper of crime as they are reminded that upon an unfortunate few falls the shadow? The optics of that? Perhaps that is what the little garden statuary angel was stuck there to counterbalance, but the poor cherub just isn't up to the task.
     As my wife and I drove east, after a lovely night with our friends, three types of homemade pizza and two types of homemade ice cream—we Ohioans know how to host company—she mentioned in passing the one thing that had bugged her. "The victims garden?" I replied. Bingo. I asked her why. She wasn't bothered by the name so much as the typography.
     "Stark," she said. She had a point. All caps, like something off a bowling trophy. Here a few flourishes and curlicues might have gone a long way. 

     Not that figuring out a proper name is easy. Just as when I criticize a headline, I make myself come up with a better one, on the road the next day I tried to come up with a better one. "Victims: is reductive, like "slaves." It implies that's all they were. "Enslaved people" jars in its own way, I but I get what they're driving at.  Maybe "violence" instead of crime, since I'm assuming it isn't intended for those who cope with graft. "Comfort Those Touched by Violence Garden" seems a start. I'll welcome suggestions—800 miles driven in two days, it takes a toll on the creative abilities.

     So my intention isn't to criticize the Berea civic types who took the minimal time, least effort and lowest possible expense to put this together. Yes, they tried. But c'mon guys, rise to the occasion next time. There is nothing wrong with comforting the bereaved or remembering the fallen. But if you're going to do it, do it right.

'Man and mother's son take heed'

     Not many events require even the most basic ceremonial dress nowadays. You can be a pall bearer in jeans, get married in a t-shirt. People do it all the time.
     But graduation from college, with the years of efforts and boatloads of money, robes and special hats are still in order, and while I haven't done a study, I'd be surprised if one student in a thousand fails to fall in line, despite being young, a period otherwise associated with nonconformity.
     New York University scrubbed their in-person graduation, but sent my older son a charming velvet cap. There was something vaguely Florentine about the flat, eight-sided flat hat, it spoke of courtiers and dirks thrust into knee socks,. I delved a bit.
     The cap is called a "tam," and is the traditional headwear for doctoral candidates, as opposed to the undergraduate mortarboard and tassel. A law degree is technically a doctorate, "juris doctor" or "doctor of jurisprudence," though lawyers mercifully do not use the title "doctor," for reasons that are murky, a law degree being about as difficult to achieve as, say, a doctorate in education.
      Despite its Scottish name, the academic tam is not descended, stylistically, from the Scottish cap, but from the Tudor bonnet.
     There was no entry for "tam" in my Oxford English Dictionary, but I dimly remembered that "tam" is short for "tam o' shanter," and there is an entry for that. "In full, tam o' shanter bonnet cap," the Oxford explains after letting us know—to my surprise—that it derives from "the name of the hero of the Burns poem of that name (i.e. Tom of Shanter)."

     Scotland's national poet, Burns lived and wrote in the second half of the 18th century, and his heavy local dialect can make the poems thick slogging to modern readers. But I worked my way through "Tam O' Shanter," a tale of drunken camaraderie, and was rewarded with a number of sharp lines. It begins, perhaps oddly, reflecting on the wife at home, growing angry:

We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

     "Nursing her wrath to keep it warm" seems a handy phrase to have in your back pocket.
      It gets murkier from there. Tam is, in his wife's estimation, "A bletherin, blusterin, drunken blellum" ("blellum" = "a lazy, talkative person"). After drinking away days at market, he blunders home. He looks into a brightly-lit church, at first hopefully, then finds  some kind of grotesque festival of witches and warlocks and the appliances of murder. He finally makes it home, thanks to his intrepid horse Maggie.

   How did the name of the poem's ne'er-do-well hero get grafted onto a Scottish hat? Being on the road, I haven't had the time to dig deep enough for an authoritative source, but I think we can guess successfully. "Tam O' Shanter" is perhaps Burns' most popular poem, one that might actually be known to non-Scots, and it would be natural for them to attach its title to the odd headgear they were encountering. I've found evidence of that.   
   "Now the milliner's name for a flat broad hat, based originally on the blue bonnet of Scotland," the Cornhill Magazine wrote in 1890, that "now" making it sound a recent development. Though I found a poem in Punch  about the hat in 1880. Before then, the references I noticed were to the verse, not fashion.   

     Checking into this also solved a mystery I had never even thought to ponder. There is a Passover cracker that Manishewitz makes called the "Tam Tam." Not the most Jewish-sounding name.  Yet, probably because I've been familiar with them all my life, I had ever paused to wonder why they call them "Tam Tams." And now I don't have to. 

From Babylon to now, fight goes on and on

 

    The Bible is not the gateway to history that some wish it to be.
     The Passover story? Enslaved Jews making bricks, Moses, plagues, escape from Egypt? None of it supported by a shred of historical evidence.
     Oh, the ancient Egyptians were there. The mummy of the pharaoh in Exodus, Ramses II, is on display in Cairo. As are the pyramids. Somebody built them. But the Egyptians who, like the Germans, were sticklers for documentation, are tellingly mum on this topic. The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is jammed with hieroglyphics recording everything from tax receipts to recipes for beer. But nothing about a certain people being let go through means miraculous or mundane.
     That said, it is generally accepted that the armies of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II, really did lay siege to Jerusalem in 589 BC, culminating in the destruction of the city, as laid out in 2 Kings 25. Archeologists have found pottery shards, bronze arrowheads and distinctive jewelry, leading them to believe the invasion took place. Score one for the Bible.
     But even if it didn’t, even if those broken pots led scholars astray, the continual warfare over this patch of land can’t be denied. From Assyrians to Macedonians, Romans to Persians, Turks to Brits ... the list goes on and on.
     Which is a long way of explaining why I’m leaping to add my two cents about What Needs to Be Done about the latest bloodletting over Jerusalem and the area around it. Which puts me right in the swim of popular thought, because though loud, neither side has the faintest clue what to do next.

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"The stickiness will always remain."

     Never write in books.

     I certainly can't do it.  Underlining, highlighting, jotting notes in the margins, even folding over the corners of pages, it all seems immoral defacement, like spray-painting graffiti on a Roman temple or carving your name into an ancient oak tree. Galleys—those half-books sent out for review—yes, that's what they're for. They're disposable. Writing in them is like writing on a notepad. Text books too, since they by nature are meant to become dated and replaced by more up-to-date editions.
     We're speaking about physical books here, needless to say. While my wife consumes her continuous reading on a Kindle. But the habit never stuck with me. I'm sure it will, eventually.
     In the meantime. The challenge I have with paper books is, as a writer myself, is when I hit a phrase or thought that I might want to quote, or at least recall, at some later point. I've marked them with business cards, torn scraps, bits of string. Because if you don't, good luck remembering, never mind retrieving the tidbit that caught your interest.
     For the past two or three decades, I and everybody else has had an ideal solution to this problem, so can't let the death of Spencer Silver on May 8 go unremarked upon.
     Silver invented Post-it notes. Or rather, he discovered the not-that-sticky adhesive that led to them. A chemist for 3M, his given task was to concentrate on "creating a new superstrong adhesive." That's what he was supposed to do. What he ended up inventing was a superweak one. Which is a lesson right there. Because rather than sigh and abandon the failure, as most would, 3M set out to find a use for this new semi-sticky stuff, a process which, it is also important to note, took years. During that quest, Silver held seminars at 3M, brainstorming with coworkers about what purpose his not-at-all-super adhesive could have. One was attended by colleague Art Fry, who sang in the choir in a Presbyterian church, and knew how annoying it was when he opened his hymnal and the bits of paper marking his various cues and places would flutter to the floor. In 1974, he had his ah-ha moment.

     More years passed. It wasn't until 1980, a dozen years after Silver found the weak adhesive that didn't lose its gripping power when peeled off a surface, and didn't damage it, that 3M introduced Post-it Notes.

     And even then, they weren't an immediate hit. People had to be taught how to use them. 3M gave away a lot of freebies until people suddenly realized they are for, well, everything. I put one atop a clip I was sending this morning. No need for a paperclip, and nothing encourages brevity like writing on a space 2 x 1.5 inches.
     The ideal size. For me, the original 3 x 3 pads are too big—I'd end up tearing the sheets, to make each last longer. I scatter those tiny pads in every desk drawer, night table, end table and briefcase. I'll peel off 10 and use that thin chunk as a bookmark, peeling off sheets as I encounter the noteworthy, leaving them behind like bread crumbs, marking my way through the book. It's a great thing. Thank you, Spencer Silver. You can read the New York Times obit of him here.

    Although ... looking at the photo I chose to illustrate this, my well-thumbed copy of James Boswell's "Life of Johnson," I must point out an irony that would otherwise not be apparent. I prefer this edition of the great biography above all others because it alone, as far as I know, contains marginal notes by Johnson's friend, landlady, and, perhaps, sadomasochistic gal pal Hester Thrale Piozzi. The comments that she scribbled in her copy of Boswell's book, now at the Houghton Library at Harvard (and, from a different edition, in a private collection). My copy is a three-volume set published by The Heritage Press in 1963, and I recommend anyone tackling Boswell to seek it out, as Piozzi adds to the fun. She exclaims, "It is true, tho!" She denies. "Which Johnson never would have done." She elaborates, she ponders, she queries, and takes continual potshots at "Bozzy," whom she obviously despises. It's like having a comments section on a late 18th century work. So amend to my original edict: Never write in books. Unless you intimately know the subject at hand. Then go for it, if only for posterity's sake.

Mauldin urges us to always face the truth

Bill Mauldin

     “Who is Bill Mauldin?” reads lamppost banners outside the Monroe Building, where “Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin & the Art of War” opened Friday at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, 104 S. Michigan.
     A sad, almost a shocking question. But the truth, which he so revered, is that in 2021, Bill Mauldin’s name will evoke nothing to many, or else be a distant ping. If fame were doled out according to impact, Mauldin would stand today among the best-known Chicagoans.
     Alas, people forget.
     Mauldin not only changed how Americans viewed World War II but how we think about war and the military. At a time when the Army was presenting its shiniest spin, when a photo of an American casualty would never be seen in a newspaper, when cartoons about Army life were Sad Sack peeling potatoes, Mauldin created Willie and Joe, a pair of exhausted, bedraggled infantrymen flat on their bellies in the mud, hoping to live long enough to smoke another cigarette.
     Nor did his influence end on V-E Day. After the war that made him famous, Mauldin advocated liberal causes decades before they became common. Odds are, if you believe strongly in social justice, Mauldin was advocating your core principles before you were born. He was fighting for civil rights when Martin Luther King was a teenager, for gay rights in the mid-1970s. He wasn’t just a cartoonist but an artist, a Chicago artist.
     OK, “Chicago artist” might be a stretch. Mauldin lived most of his life in the Southwest, born in New Mexico, settled in Arizona. But in between, he came to Chicago for a key year to learn his art at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. And was an editorial cartoonist on staff at the Sun-Times for almost 30 years.

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When "batshit" just won't suffice.

  

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     

     Molly Jong-Fast first registered on my radar about a decade ago, when collecting quotes for "Out of the Wreck I Rise," the literary companion to recovery I was writing with Sara Bader. Jong-Fast had told the New York Times something typically concise and piquant about secrecy and recovery that fit right into our chapter about Alcoholics Anonymous.
     "It seems crazy that we can't just be out with it, in this day and age,"she said. "I don't want to have to hide my sobriety; it's the best thing about me."
     After the book came out, we started to occasionally communicate through Twitter. I saw her as a Manhattan wit ("loud, arch and snappishly funny" as the Guardian recently described her), heir to Dorothy Parker. I called her a couple times, when I needed a particularly incisive quote. She never let me down.
     Then Jong-Fast upped her game by joining forces with The Lincoln Project folks, a band of Republicans who never got the memo about the entire party groveling before the great orange godling, and decided to resist the liar, bully, fraud and traitor, no matter how completely their confreres submitted. After COVID locked everyone down, Jong-Fast started a Tuesday and Friday podcast with Rick Wilson, "The New Abnormal," which I recommend highly. It allows me to generally ignore the endless jaw-dropping mouse shriek of the post-Jan. 6, 2021 Republican Party, and instead keep tabs indirectly on important developments via the podcast, at a remove, second hand, filtered through smart, humane people who condense the ocean of bile and deliver it to me in significant drops. The New Abnormal is like the special smoked goggles used to view a solar eclipse: a way to contemplate a fiery phenomenon without burning your retinae or going blind.
     One challenge facing Jong-Fast as she boldly considers the current political hellscape is that it beggars language. If "crazy" seems apt to her when describing a culture where people are embarrassed to admit they're in recovery, what word could she use to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene? "Crazy" still fits, but it also seems a little inadequate without some kind of intensifier, and one of Jong-Fast's favorites is "batshit." "Batshit crazy"—she used the phrase three or four times in a single program last week.
     Which got me pondering about how Chiroptera guano got associated with madness. Etymology, like the GOP, is a nexus for mistaken amateurism, and online there is a common theory that "batshit" somehow devolved from the "bats in the belfry," an early 20th century trope to jocularly refer to lunacy.
     That strikes me as fanciful. Even "batty" only refers to batlike qualities in my Oxford English Dictionary. I would sooner lump "batshit" in with other "-shit" terms: apeshit, bullshit, chickenshit, horseshit. "Batshit," like much evocative slang, is thought to stem from the military. There's a wink at it in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 with the character "Col. 'Bat' Guano."
     As with "apeshit," (or the current GOP, for that matter) in its original usage, the "crazy" is implied. "Most of America's males were in Korea or World War II or I. They killed, and they aren't all going batshit," Lt. William Calley is quoted saying in the 1971 "Lieutenant Calley."
     I found the term as far back as the Fall, 1953 Carolina Quarterly, of all places, in Gabriel Boney's "Epiphany in E Flat." "A coarse voice answered sharply, 'Batshit!'"
     So "batshit crazy" is really a pleonasm—using more words than necessary, for effect. Like "cash money" or "tuna fish." So when did the redundancy, "batshit crazy," begin to be used? It seems to be a creature of the mid-1980s. I found it in the 1985 novel "Night Moves," by Walter Jon Williams:

     "I thought Harvey, the guy who was helping me, was batshit crazy."

      For an even older usage, all I have to do is look at the wall in my office closet, at a cartoon that I've long admired by P.S. Mueller that ran in The Chicago Reader in 1983. 

     "Full blown batshit crazy and still holding down a productive job." It spoke to me (and thanks to Jim Mueller, Pete Mueller's brother, a long ago regular reader who got me a signed print). 

     Allow me to offer Mueller's "full blown batshit crazy" as my thank-you gift to Molly Jong-Fast, to tuck away for when things in our country go from bad to worse, as they very well might. In a few years, when Matt Gaetz becomes the 2024 Republican nominee for president and Evangelicals guiltlessly dance around golden idols of Donald Trump, beating timbrels and buffing it with their long hair, when "batshit crazy" begins to seem, well, tepid, she'll be able to remember this and deploy the more powerful "full blown batshit crazy." What a sad day that will be.