Sunday, December 25, 2011

Old Christmas in Holly Pond

When I was a boy in the 1960s, the majority of my extended family lived no further than twenty miles from my home in north central Alabama, so I pretty much took it for granted that I would see just about everyone fairly regularly, but not always in big groups. We kept many scheduled family reunions then, the summer ones usually corresponding to decoration Sundays at family churches, a couple of more modest meetings at Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, and the big Christmas one, with my lone surviving maternal great grandmother being its focus. Usually, on Christmas mornings (the lone exception's being the year my younger brother had the mumps), we two kids and our parents would open presents, eat breakfast, and then head out to Holly Pond for the noon meal, the house full of relatives and the weather usually accommodating the many cousins' spilling outside to play all over the farm. The old house couldn't contain everything that was in it.

My maternal great-grandmother lived in a house trailer next to the house of my mother's younger aunt, Jean, and her husband, whose given name was Charles but who was usually called "Chuck" or "Chunk." Uncle Chunk Yeager was a tall, happy man, with tanned skin and a salt-and-pepper mustache, sometimes, and I have always associated his leathery, comfortable look with cowboys. He was consistently one of the most cheerful men I have ever known, easy going and hospitable. He made every child who visited his home feel welcome, and I have always wished that he had lived long enough to meet my younger children. Jean was just as loving, and it meant a great deal to be around her. After we lost Uncle Chunk, she seemed diminished in a way she could not overcome, and our subsequent gatherings always missed someone. Their children, Richard and Melanie, were lucky to have them both.

My maternal great-grandmother, Eula Snuggs, surprised me all the time. An awfully energetic and matter-of-fact woman, she made an early impression on me when I once saw her injecting insulin in her abdomen, standing right in front of the open refrigerator door with syringe in hand. One Christmas, someone thought it would be funny to give her a pair of Tobasco-red panties, and she held them up to herself and showed them off to everyone in the house, deflecting the joke from her. Her trailer was her own choice for her own independence, and I hope that when my own mother reaches that age, she will preserve those best aspects of her grandmother's character.

My favorite times in Holly Pond were at the old farmhouse. Jean and Chunk later sold that land and built a new house about a mile from it up the dirt road and closer to the main road, but I associate big Christmas with the old house. First of all, no matter what the weather happened to be, there would be the same feeling walking in. We would enter through what was essentially a utility room, through the back door. In this narrow room of the house, basically a hallway, was a closet, the chest freezer, the washer, and the dryer. On these appliances, the guests would place the various desserts they had brought. The kids would usually eat Christmas dinner there, standing with our plates on the appliances and eying the desserts. This room passed for the "big kid" table, the transition between being tended to as an infant and later tending to infants of one's own; eating there marked a stage of maturity.

Every Christmas (and, for many years, the first Sundays of May), I had to brace myself before going into the kitchen from the utility room, because suddenly there would be so much heat (ham and turkey and dressing and rolls had been in the oven for hours; every eye on the stove had a bubbling pot on it; the percolator had been running full bore since daybreak) and so many cheerful voices and good smells that I still cannot distinguish the emotions from the sensations. This was not the good cheer so often promoted in the mass media, the elegant cocktail party, the ski lodge fireplace, the sleigh ride through snow-covered landscapes. We rarely saw more than a few flakes of snow, and it was usually jacket weather, and my cousins were rarely in gowns except for proms and weddings, where the tuxes were rented, and if there were a little wine on the premises, its consumption was furtive. It was a comfortable, family, come-as-you-are, covered-dish Christmas of affection and fellow feeling, the shared delight of one's accomplishments and the unbounded sympathy for one's problems.

Later, when I got engaged, my wife-to-be was accepted and fit in immediately; years later, our oldest child was brought in just as quickly, just as I have seen so many new family members welcomed (I still remember his giggles that first Christmas there, when he got a plush ball with a sleigh bell inside it). Jean and Chunk always remembered every child who was to attend, and each received a modest gift until he or she graduated high school and became, sort of officially, an adult.

I miss those voices, the nasal twang of Jean's welcome, Granmaw Snuggs' saying "here" as if there were a Y in it ("come hyeah"), my grandmother Portis' mispronouncing her own married name (Henderson) as "Henneson." I miss the heartiness of the Yeager men's voices, even as Richard came to sound more like his father. I can still hear the crackle of the gravel on the long dirt road as I would doze off in the backseat after a long, full, happy day.

Today, in Johnson City, our family visits' having already taken place in the past few weeks, my kids are in the main room, playing video games; my house smells of the food I am preparing for supper tonight; my wife takes some personal time to read a fantasy novel before, more than likely, falling asleep in a needed nap. I have spoken to my parents, and they are well; I have texted my brother and his family, because it is Sunday and they have church activities; I plan part of the new year and hope the best of what I cannot foresee or affect. We are making a different Christmas now, preparing for the future when our children will come to visit us and associate Christmas with this one of many homes we love. Still, every time we go to visit family in Alabama, we drive through Holly Pond, and I yearn to turn from the two-lane state highway onto the familiar country road each time we pass it. Just now, in my heart, I have made that turn again.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Oh, Rejection!

I have received two rejection notices in the past few days. One of them came from a literary magazine in west Tennessee, and all it contained was a slip of paper about the size of a business card, offering some vague comment about how my work did not suit the magazine's needs. The paper looked as if it were cut by hand from a larger sheet. My work had been with the magazine for just a couple of weeks. I felt dumped.

The other rejection notice was on stationery, and, while it contained a typed, likely canned rejection, someone on the staff wrote a note of thanks on it and signed it with initials. This journal had had these poems for a couple of months, and, to be fair, I had to contact them twice because I had simultaneously submitted the poems, and three had been taken by other journals.

Here at the end of the year, I imagine I will be receiving more rejection slips as various journals complete their selections, but I hope that they are not as discouraging as a processing slip from an anonymous inspector.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

About Karen Cajka

When I was putting together my application for promotion to professor here at East Tennessee State University, I was having a bit of difficulty writing my teaching philosophy. I had written one a number of years ago, back when I applied for my position here, and I had, of course, read a number of them in my serving on many hiring committees for my department. I was struggling with this particular one, though. I wound up writing a personal account, describing how key professors in my own experience as a student shaped the way I teach and think about students. I just could not separate myself from the document enough to determine whether I had what I needed.

Fortunately, as I was walking around campus on that Saturday, clearing my head a bit away from the keyboard, I found Karen Cajka coming in to get some work done in the Women's Studies office. As we were talking, she found out how I was stuck and offered to look at what I had written. I returned to my office and e-mailed her a draft; half an hour later, she invited me to come over to her office to talk about it.

Karen had a lot of strengths as a teacher, and one was that she was up to date on the education jargon I do not know. Her review of my teaching philosophy document was essentially taking what I had described and explaining what terms I needed to include in introducing those experiences. With her background in education, her understanding of what reviewers might be looking for, and her appreciation of nuance--she didn't ask me to change my writing voice, just to incorporate more terms--her suggestions helped me feel more confident in expressing how I go about teaching. Clearly, one of her other strengths as a teacher was to help others understand how they, too, are teachers. I will always be grateful for her helping me to put that understanding into words.

It's the other stuff that is difficult for words now. Karen and I disagreed on a lot of small things. I am a morning person, and she just did not care to start the day so early. We disagreed about whether first-semester composition students should have creative literature for a subject ("We're not trying to make them into English majors, Alan!"). We disagreed about traditional grammar teaching methods, as well, in spite of my pointing out the irony of her being an expert in The Forgotten Women Grammarians of Eighteenth-Century England. We've had good-spirited, but definitely spirited, arguments over the modern tendency to offer "their" as a catch-all referent to any singular noun (as in Karen's preferred "The student has their priorities" instead of my preferred "The student has his or her priorities" or "The students have their priorities"). "Language evolves, Alan!" she'd say, and I would concede it does. It does. But these exchanges, friendly back-and-forth stuff, really, were nothing compared to her ability to persuade folks on major points. I have served on many committees with Karen, from revamping our department's composition series for first-year students, to refining our curriculum for the next decade, to selecting new faculty members to join us in our department, and Karen was always armed with all the information she could get, often with charts and tables to illustrate what she had discovered. I have also turned to her more than a few times when I had questions about particular social issues where I did not want to reduce my wrestling with a problem to mere categorization. For the longest time, for example, we discussed whether "ginger" is a derogatory term in reference to a group of people. She understood how seriously I was taking that question and helped me deal with it.

Karen's professional accolades do not offer a full picture. She has influenced too many people to count. Just Karen--her students adore her, her colleagues admire her and depended on her, and her friends are having such a difficult time now, starting back up. She knew what was needed and how to help.

A few months ago, for example, when I was feeling dogged and blue, she asked me what was going on. And I explained, aside from the administrative and professional stuff that was going on at work that home life was shifting, with firstkid's soon moving away to college, and my needing to pick up even more household responsibility with my wife's returning to school on top of her full-time job, and the younger two kids' having so many activities requiring my logistics. After I described my usual day, she laughed and said, "Alan, you're a working mom." From a director of a women's studies division, that's a pretty high compliment. From a friend like Karen, though, it was affectionate understanding. She was so good at seeing how things matter, and her advice was direct and clear and thoughtful.

She laughed without reserve, she had a facial tic of twitching her nose once or twice to indicate she was thinking, and she agreed with a happy, embracing "I know!" Yes, she did. She knew a lot, and we were all fortunate she shared it with us, and we will preserve as much of it as we can.

I haven't written how I feel about her, but she knows.

Karen Cajka, 1966-2011 offers a tribute by our colleague, Phyllis Thompson.

For another fine appreciation of Karen, please see this entry on Amber Kinser's blog.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

About Christmas Music

A couple of weeks ago, a sales representative in the Johnson City, TN, Books-a-Million told me that I should have asked permission before taking a shot with my camera phone of one of the displays. I was photographing a Christmas display that had gone up in the middle of October. Already, like many of the other stores in my area (I suppose around the country), the retailers are getting in another early shot at the holidays, fearful that we consumers may forget that the holidays are on the way and that they will not be able to make sales quotas yet again. I am not going to go all nostalgic about the days when people hardly mentioned Christmas until we had begun eating the Thanksgiving meals, but something shook me this morning in a way I did not expect to feel. I was in a local supermarket, and I thought I heard Christmas music playing in the background. I nearly bolted.

Some of you may not know that I was a disc jockey at a small country station in my hometown, and, since I was a part-timer, I had a lot of the impossible holiday shifts. One year, the management thought it would be a good idea to run Christmas music for the entire programming day. I had exposure to Christmas music that hardly anyone would want to hear, and I had a lot of exposure to it.

Basically, there are two main problems with Christmas music. There is not a lot of good Christmas music, and the good Christmas music there is rarely gets the performance it deserves. These problems are particularly related in the music industry, so some explanation is in order.

Remember that performers earn money on Christmas recordings in two ways. The first has to do with performance rights, in that sometimes a performer offers such a definitive recording of a song that it become the version that just about everyone wants to hear. The other way is to write a Christmas song and to earn royalties from it. The second method offers a surer way to earn money from a song, because it is, bluntly, easier to sell folks a song than to make a lot of people love a recording so much that they want to buy it and hear it a great deal (when one factors in that a fan is going to buy practically every album an act releases, then one can see how easy it can be for a Christmas album to serve as a quickly produced product--hardly any new songs need to be written, it requires less marketing, and the company has a rough assurance of how many units will sell--there's a Lynyrd Skynyrd Christmas album still available). If all one is concerned about is turning a quick profit, Christmas songs have only to contend with other Christmas songs that will make for immediate competition.

For example, one of my favorite modern Christmas songs is Mel Torme's and Robert Wells' "The Christmas Song," the one that starts with "Chesnuts roasting on an open fire." The Nat "King" Cole recording of that song has become the standard. I imagine that Torme probably earned more money from that song than anything else he ever wrote or recorded himself, and, while Nat "King" Cole likely made some money from it, I doubt that his earnings came anywhere near Torme's and Wells'. Generally, performers make more money from their live performances than from their recordings, unless they are fortunate enough to have hits with songs they have written themselves.

Now, with Christmas music, we face the situation where people want to hear the traditional songs, but there is no real money for the performers in recording songs written by someone else. For that reason, most Christmas albums will feature an original song or two, usually written by the recording artist, so that when the albums sell, the artists will derive some extra income from the songs that they have written. Sometimes, these songs can be awfully good. Patty Loveless co-wrote three of the songs, "Santa Train," "Christmas Day at My House," and "Bluegrass, White Snow" on her Bluegrass & White Snow: A Mountain Christmas, and the songs convey a genuine sweetness contemporary songs rarely achieve. I also have to mention Tim O'Brien's "Making Plans" as a heartbreakingly good song about looking forward to coming home for the holidays. At the same time, Alan Jackson's "Merry Christmas to Me," on his Honky Tonk Christmas, is about as derivative a regretful break-up song as you can expect, only with Christmas trappings. Unfortunately, many of the new songs fall into this category of profitable album filler. I have to give Jackson credit, though, because another song on that album, "The Angels Cried" by Harley Allen and Deborah Nims, offers a perspective on the Nativity story one does not always encounter, the poignancy of the angels' knowledge of what the Christ Child would have to endure. Like few other contemporary Christmas songs, such as "There's a New Kid in Town" (written by Curly Putnam, Keith Whitley, and Don Cook). Joni Mitchell's "River," and Robert Earl Keen's "Merry Christmas from the Family" (a genuine O'Connoresque short story), these songs avoid the overt attempts at novelty hits and wearying retreads of "Twelve Days of Christmas."

I also face the problem during the holidays of hearing so-so versions of legendary songs so that we wonder how anyone could have considered them good ideas. To be fair, every once in a while, someone will record a familiar song in such a way that it comes to rival a classic performance. For example, Bruce Springsteen's take of the Crystals' version of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" (John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie) has an expression of joy in it that trumps the preciousness of the more traditional arrangements. As derided as Bob Dylan's Christmas in the Heart has been in recent critiques, his version of "Must Be Santa" (William Fredericks and Hal Moore) makes the traditional arrangements of all the other songs on the album seem anemic by comparison. Unfortunately, given the sales imperatives of making new seasonal profit, all too often the newer versions of songs seem ill-judged at best (Stevie Nicks released a version of "Silent Night" that attempts a solemnity but manages somnolence--I am sorry, Ms. Nicks, I have followed your career since "Frozen Love," but I have to be honest), and malicious at worst (Winger's "funky" acoustic version of "Silent Night," which begins with a fine traditional approach but turns into the sonic equivalent to getting a beautifully wrapped Tupperware pasta steamer in a "dirty Santa" exchange). What promises to be "heavenly peace" does not always turn out to be so.

Honestly, I understand that there will be a wide variety of taste and experience in selecting Christmas music. Madonna's "Santa Baby" (Joan Javits and Philip Springer) is an amusing "material girl" take on Eartha Kitt's version, but I like them both because I know them both. My younger children like the novelty songs, even the one where a drunken grandmother dies by reindeer hooves. And, frankly, there are times when I could hear Sarah McLachlan sing just about anything, so when she offers variations of "What Child Is This?" I go along. Still, I find some solace in selecting recordings and playing them rather than risking whatever might show up on the radio, and I dread what I might encounter in the store public address systems.

I am still looking, though, and finding treasures. Just recently, Sting released If on a Winter's Night . . . and I found on it versions of "Gabriel's Message" and "Cherry Tree Carol" that illuminate the lyrics. When Emmylou Harris released an expanded version of Light of the Stable, I was pleased to find yet another version of "Cherry Tree Carol" there. And, a couple of years ago, I found on James Taylor's A Christmas Album "Some Children See Him" (Wihla Hutson and Alred Burt), a song I remembered from my boyhood. But it seems, at least to me, that some of these songs have been performed for the joy of recording them. No one sings "The Cherry Carol," particularly in our political/social climate, expecting a hit.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

I Am Tired, and This Entry Is So Wrong

As a graduate student, I spent the majority of my semesters teaching two classes a semester. During my MA years, I taught first-year composition exclusively, and as a PhD student, I got sophomore survey assignments. I usually taught two classes a semester while taking two myself, so every evening I had class prep for my dual roles. That demanding pace helped me to develop a resilience necessary to satisfy a work ethic my conscience could tolerate.

I feel as if I have not left that pace. About three years ago, I became an associate dean of my college, and my administrative duties require a great deal of attention; I also teach two classes a semester; as I professor in my department, I also perform research and write as much as I can. As a result, even though I am more than two decades out of graduate school, I find myself working at about the same rate with even more weight piled on top.

And, here I am, writing a blog entry about my situation. I better keep an eye on myself.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

How Some Literary Magazines Decide

After my last post about what it is like to receive rejection slips in the context of my having been a long-term member of a literary magazine staff, I have gotten a question from a former student about how literary magazines decide what material to keep and what material to reject. I base these comments on my own experience, but I will discuss various situations as I have seen them. Please do not take these comments as the definitive answer but rather some approaches to understanding how some literary magazines make their decisions.

First of all, just about every literary magazine advises that potential submitters read back issues of the magazine to see what types of material they publish. Small magazines and journals make this recommendation because they each have a sense of their own identity as a publication. I understand that the cynical will assume this recommendation serves to boost sales, but, quite frankly, most literary pubications do not earn a lot of money, anyway. They often have the support of a university and/or sponsors/subscribers who believe in the publication's attempts to preserve the arts. I have seen some that struggle just to cover expenses from issue to issue, but the dedication of their staff make the sacrifices worthwhile. Subscribers are all nice, but school funding, sponsors, supporters, and out-of-pocket commitment make the difference between a small magazine's survival and its vanishing. When the magazines ask potential submitters to read back issues, they are signalling that they want particular types of work, as they develop and expand their notions of art and creativity.

I understand that just about every literary magazine will say that it has the aspiration to publish work of a lasting literary quality. They may not all agree how to accomplish that goal, however, because not all magazines and journals will have the same sense of what "lasting literary quality" means. Some journals will state that they have a particular political/social ideal in mind, and they seek works that present that ideal. Some journals emphasize spirituality but not necessarily matters of conventional orthodoxy. Some journals mention that they have a particular readership and that they seek submissions that target that readership, not that they are toadying to a readership but that they have a mutual interest in particular types of literature. Even if a journal's submission instructions do not mention a call for a specific type of material, reading a couple of issues gives one a sense of whether that journal prefers experimental works or more traditional forms, if it prefers nostalgic, romantic pieces or prose that tends to present a reserved tone, whether it is interested in genre pieces, fixed forms, or long narratives, or whether it requires specific types of pieces. One must pay attention to what they request and what they feature. If a journal considers itself in the vanguard of literature and tends to offer experimental pieces, then the likelihood of their accepting a traditional narrative would be pretty low, for example. Further, magazines that do not change editorial boards often will have a definite character that one must consider before submitting anything to them. That is not to say that they are stuck in a rut; those magazines affirm their values by presenting new, engaging work that illustrates those values.

I do not believe that there is any one secret or plan in successfully finding publications that will accept one's submissions. As I have noted in an earlier blog entry, good material will not necessarily find a place with a publication just because other factors, such as the sheer amount of material submitted and the acceptance of earlier pieces, will not permit the newer submission to fit in. I have had some modest success over the past few months in particular, however, so I can at least offer some suggestions that one might find helpful.

Read all the time. I know, I'm an English professor, and it just figures that I would write that comment. I confess that I do not get to read as much as I want to--I thought, as a much younger person deciding on a career path, that should I be lucky enough to become an English professor, I would be reading books all day, and I would be surrounded by others who did the same, and I did not take into account committee meetings, paperwork, and the genuine needs students have that require attention and make my wanting to hide out with a book appear absolutely selfish. Fair enough, I guess, but I steal time to read as much as I can. If you are fortunate enough to be near a library that subscribes to literary journals, spend as much time as you can in the periodicals room.

Go to readings. When an author comes to your area to present a reading, go to hear how the author presents his or her work. Listen also to how the audience responds. The reading aloud will reveal nuances of the material that you might have missed when reading the work silently. The audience's response will indicate how you might communicate to such an audience, too.

Attend writing conferences. I know that there is a cliche that successful writers are esoteric flakes, but the majority of them I have met are down-to-earth everyday people. Meeting them will remind you that you do not have to transform what you are to write; you have to devote attention and energy to writing. If you are already creating poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose, you are writing. I'm not saying that you should stare into the mirror every morning and go through a self-affirmation routine, repeating "I am a writer" like a mantra, but reminding yourself from time to time that you are a writer is not a bad thing to do.

Share your drafts with people who respect you enough to tell you when you make mistakes. Constructive criticism is an act of kindness, best when reciprocated. Listen to what your readers in your circle say. Sometimes they will be wrong, and sometimes they will be wrong when they praise you, but as your friends they are invested in you, helping you to see what you have missed.

Look in a new volume of poetry or short stories to see where the pieces originally appeared. You will find that some of those works have appeared in journals you have never heard of, and seeing that will help you to break away from the idea that success as a writer comes only in the form of a nationally renowned publication. Also, if you have an affinity with that writer, it may be that those publications would be interested in your work, too.

Remember that writing is work, and seeking publication is work, too. Lucky people like their work a lot.

That is about all of my list. I discuss these issues with various people, but, frankly, I do not know how to market oneself as a writer, and this blog and my Twitter account are about all the self-promotion (if you can call it that) I have. I hope that folks may find this entry helpful, however. Having stolen this time to make some notes (the sun is just rising), I'll get back to the paperwork now.

Monday, October 10, 2011

A Pact

Some awfully good students, another professor, and I agreed that we would each send a bundle of at least three poems to three different journals/small magazines by today. They did not have to be brand new poems, and they could been sent already to other places, but we were to get them out today. I am pleased to say that I kept my part in this pact, and I am confident the others did as well.

Last Friday, though, I received a rejection slip from a publication. Having worked for a number of years for The Black Warrior Review, I understand this situation from both sides. As a staffer, I would sometimes see almost one hundred new submissions a week. This situation was complicated by the fact that most of the BWR staff was not around during the summer months, because graduate students, most of them in the MFA program, composed the staff and would need the summer to have adventures, earn money, and write. (If you are a person given to sending creative writing to literary journals, please pay attention to the reading times they post, because you may be setting yourself up for disappointment merely by mailing in submissions at the wrong time of year.) In any case, when there was a big pile of submissions (unfortunately often referred to as "the slush pile"), material had to be spectacular just to survive the first cut. Poems would have to catch attention in just the first few lines; prose had to snare a reader by the top of the second page. In a slush pile, material that did not start strong would not have a chance to finish. For the BWR, the worse times for material to show up would be during the summer right up to the fall semester and during the winter break--both of these times would result in slush piles at the beginning of a semester. It was better for a submission to arrive about a month into the sorting process, so that it could get a better reading and, with any luck, perhaps be superior to pieces already kept. I know this process sounds brutal, and it does bruise egos, but that is how it worked for us then. I see no reason for it to work any new way now.

I should also note that, usually, the longer a journal has a piece, the more likely that its editors are giving that piece consideration. Up to a few months, that poem, article, or story has captured someone's attention. If I have not heard from a publication after six months, I am concerned that perhaps the piece has been forgotten, but I do not mind the hope in the first five months. As discouraging as it can be to receive a submission back within a couple of weeks, I prefer the anticipation of a few months' wait.

The other matter one must keep in mind has to do with the fact that the sheer number of pieces these journals receive means that work of merit will not be included for publication. These journals have budgets, they have only so many pages to allot to content, and, as is often the case, they begin to build an issue around one or two notable pieces that they have decided to accept. Even if the editorial staffs have only subconsciously put a theme or a correlation together, these choices matter as they develop the entire issue. A wonderful piece of material just may not fit with what the staff has already developed. When a person receives a rejection slip that says, "Your work does not fit our current needs," that note does not automatically mean, "we think you are a talentless hack, and, if you had any soul at all, you would not inflict your demented, illiterate, cliched, sociopathic, immature, hackneyed bear spoor on anyone ever again." That note usually means precisely what it says--it does not mean that your submission will never find a place at all. In the past, I have gotten the prefab rejection note with scribbled encouragement to send something else. I do not interpret the slip as a sign to stop. I send that journal something new.

I will also send the returned material somewhere else. There are many fine journals out there, established by people who want to encourage creativity, who hope they will have the opportunity to discover a new worthy talent, who understand that in a culture of vanity presses and internet submersion that permits anybody to place any digital presentation on the web practically forever (sort of like, you know, a blog entry), we still value the confidence an editor grants when sending the acceptance note, affirming that one's accomplishment deserves the attention of like-minded others.

I kept my pact with some like-minded others, and I look forward to hearing that they have kept their pact with me.

Friday, October 7, 2011

A Pact for a Pack

I am part of a small circle who has agreed that by Monday, October 10, we each will send a bundle of at least three poems to at least three small magazines, prompting us to get material out in hopes of publication or at least some constructive criticism that might come along with a rejection slip. I have some acquaintances who regularly post their own creative compositions on their blogs, but I choose not to, perhaps because I cannot always rely on my own judgment. In any case, should those works I submit find places, I will be sure to make a note here.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Perspective

Last week, on the day R.E.M. announced that they were breaking up as a band, I tweeted a comment to one of the cable tv morning news programs, and it in turn retweeted my comment to its 9,000+ followers. That means, though, that my one-off comment, something that had by Twitter's constraints to be no more than 140 characters long, likely reached more people than a majority of my writing has reached.

I do not often have such epiphanies while looking at a smartphone. With my efforts to write essays, edit books, present papers, and offer creative writing, my top three distributed pieces, if I go only by number of people reached, would be a letter to the editor of Entertainment Weekly, where I offer a comment about a misquoted film critic on their staff, a fanboy letter to Detective Comics, where I express appreciation that after the wrenching year following the death of Jason Todd, the second Robin, we got some funny relief in an encounter between Batman and The Demon (obviously, I am letting my geek flag fly today), and that tweet to the morning show, where I quote "Pop Song '89," asking if we "should talk about the weather? Should we talk about the government?" That has been a pretty big realization in just a moment.

Today, I am going to finish grading a stack of essays, and, if I am lucky, I will write a comment on some of them that will help students have a better understanding of the effects of how they express their ideas. I am working on a collaborative project that asserts the place of country music lyricists in the American literary canon, and that project may help others to appreciate those contributions. I will be talking to a graduate student in a couple of days about her thesis; I will offer suggestions to my daughter about a PowerPoint she is creating for elementary school. I have made a mutual challenge with some friends to send some poems out to small magazines in the next few weeks (Friday of last week, such a small literary magazine accepted one of my poems; the poem describes the creative influence of a valued older colleague).

It is time to get back to writing, not being concerned about number of those who read what I write, but concentrating on the benefit I might do those who do read my work.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Unlearning

As a member of the East Tennessee State University faculty, I get to take one class for free every session, should I choose. I do. I have taken graduate-level courses in incorporating software into teaching, a number of entry-level fitness classes with the ROTC program, and, lately, guitar lessons through our Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music program. They have all presented challenges, but the guitar classes have required me to unlearn years of habit, assumption, and seeming familiarity.

I got my first guitar when I was in my early teens, and I never had formal lessons. With the guitar, I got a book that offered chord diagrams, and, in those days before the Internet, I had to resort to music books and playing by ear. I was pleased to learn particular patterns in learning rhythm guitar, and, since I was playing mostly to relax myself, I felt comfortable with what I had accomplished. There lay the problem, being comfortable.

In the intervening years, my relationship to the guitar changed. I took it to college, and even before my wife and I had children, I was still playing regularly at home, mainly to relax. When the kids starting coming along, though, I had to start putting some personal things aside. They required so much attention that between home responsibilities and work responsibilities, it was all I could do to keep up. I still feel that way, but as the kids got more and more self-sufficient, other matters arose.

About three years ago, I decided it was time to start reclaiming some of those parts of myself that I had neglected. I started getting up earlier in the day so I could have some selfish time. I started running. I started paying more attention to my creative writing. I decided that I wanted formal guitar lessons. I found out that I should have always been running. I found out that I missed creative writing. I found out that there are a number of ways to play guitar, and I had cornered myself for years.

My guitar teacher, Dave Yates, started my off by asking why I was thrashing, a churning style of playing chords that I grew to understand could compromise my effectiveness in accompanying a soloist. He encouraged my playing by ear. He emphasized that there is more than one way to play a chord, and that it is better to select a particular configuration for the given situation than to assume that the same configuration is right every time. He wants me to "stop thinking too much."

Why is it that so many people tell me that I think about things too much?

He means that I should practice and let a combination of growing familiarity and muscle memory take over until I can talk while playing--maybe singing later, but he should be wary of that step--and I am working to get there. Right now, he is wanting me to learn to play "When You Say Nothing at All," a song covered by Alison Krauss, and even when I get the guitar part to where I will be comfortable to play in front of others, my vocals will never be as sweet.

Someone will probably tell me that I am thinking about it too much and that I should just sing.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Ten Years Ago This Morning

This morning, I have already been awake for hours. In a while, I will call my parents, and I will get in touch with my son away at college. I have already prepared barbecue pork for tonight's meal, and I am about to return to the weekend chores, both housework and paperwork. This afternoon, my wife is going to a "grandma shower" for a friend who will need stuff in her house for when the newborn grandchild visits, and I will have some time alone with the younger kids. It feels a lot like a regular Sunday around here.

On television, they show depictions of ceremonies in remembrance of the immediate victims of the 9-11 attacks as they acknowledge how much so many of us globally have been affected, and I am finding these ceremonies much more moving than I expected. I had forgotten how powerful uncertainty can be.

On that morning ten years ago, I was the undergraduate director for the East Tennessee State University English Department, and that position, as well as my teaching assignments, required a great deal of attention. My wife and I had dropped our children off at school and daycare, and I was running music in my office as I dealt with that day's paperwork. I always keep my office doors open when I work, and I could tell that something different was going on in the hallways. One of my colleagues, clearly shaken, told me what had happened, but she had only sketchy information. My wife called, too, and we talked matters out, assuring ourselves as best we could with the limited information we had. I remember, though, that we both were frustrated that we could not pull up the CNN website, and at about the same time we realized that we could tune into National Public Radio for information. We decided to leave the children where they were--the schools were permitting parents to pick up children, but we saw no point in rushing home to huddle--rushing anywhere seemed beyond question, and as much as I yearned to have all of the family members together, I knew that our running down to Alabama would still need to wait for a couple of weeks. We needed to hold out for a bit of information before acting; it was a time to curb reflexes and to avoid being overwhelmed by emotion. We needed to grieve, but, as with other circumstances calling for grief, we had to remember and prepare for living the next few hours to preserve our own hope and to preserve it in our community and families.

I do not think about 9-11 specifically every day, but I do think about how our world has changed so much in the past decade. Every day, our nation is at war. Every day, our elected officials (I cannot bring myself to refer to the majority of them as "public servants" any more) disagree over philosophy and neglect pragmatism. Every day, I see the increasing gulf between the creed that all are equal and actual practice, in both domestic and foreign policy. Every day, I find myself romanticizing a past where life seems much more simple from today's perspective, even though I know better.

Then, with any luck, I will catch someone smiling, I will hear a lyric, I will have an opportunity to show kindness, I will share a laugh about pure absurdity, I will disagree in a friendly way with someone, I will remember someone, I will overhear a loved one in another room.

These 9-11 commemorations touch tender places, and, as with other mourning, I adapt as many of us do, with gratitude for those who help us and hope for those we help in turn.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

How Was My Football Weekend? It's Easy to Figure Out . . .

For me, there is no other worthwhile spectator sport than college football, particularly Southeastern Conference football. I will sometimes watch a pro football game, and I enjoy Olympic events, but for consistent emotional wringing, I go to college football. So, for the convenience of any blog readers, here is the easy way to figure out how my college football week has gone.

I always want Alabama to win. If Auburn is not playing Alabama, then I want Auburn to win. I always want the western division of the SEC to win over an eastern division rival. I always pull for an SEC team who is playing for someone outside the conference.

My reasoning is that I always want Alabama to play the absolutely best opponents possible, and, given conference commitments (SEC teams play eight conference rivals during the regular season), Alabama, like every other SEC team, needs all its conference opponents to prove themselves against teams outside the conference. Georgia's loss to Boise State in the 2011 season opener, for example, hurts the entire SEC and will inflate Boise State's rankings. While Alabama will not play Georgia this year (unless they meet in the conference championship), the SEC needed that Georgia win.

So, Roll Tide! I bleed crimson, but my family is full of Auburn fans, so War Eagle, too, 364 days of the year.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Like Michael J., Tim, Jack, Hank, and Me

Yesterday, while I was teaching a class about Huckleberry Finn, I noticed a couple of students in the back corner as they were gesturing and giggling a bit. Since it is the beginning of the semester, I did not make an issue of it, because even university students tend to settle down a couple of weeks in. After class, the two came up to speak, and I thought that it was likely that they were going to ask a question about the material that I had just covered. I thought that I would be nice about repeating myself, and then the next class would go a bit smoother. One of them smiled and said, "You know that show King of the Hill? You look just like him. You are so funny."

They were thinking of Hank Hill, the lead character of King of the Hill, an animated series about a socially conservative Texan who deals with the shifting standards of contemporary American life. Of all the responses that ran through my mind, I told them that I had won a look-a-like contest at one time, and they both offered that "compliment" again and left smiling. That is not the first time that a student here on the ETSU campus has told me that I look like Hank Hill, and I have to admit that I have difficulty imagining a situation where one welcomes the comment that he resembles a cartoon character (unless attending a comics convention or joining a cosplay group), but I just felt unprepared to hear it yesterday, and I really did not want to hear it from a couple of my students.

Part of that unpreparedness comes from my being accustomed to being unseen by so many of the students here on campus when I am outside the classroom. The fact of the matter is that I do resemble Hank Hill a bit. We are both relatively tall, we are both a bit thicker in the middle than we would like, and, while Hank is a bit younger than me (I think he would be in his mid-forties or so), when I have a short haircut and wear my usual style of glasses, the similarities between our facial features appear more prominent. I was even wearing a blue work shirt yesterday, and I wear jeans every day. I was just a bit more like Hank yesterday than usual. I might as well also admit that my consciousness of their comparing me to Hank will affect the way I conduct the class, at least for a while. And, while I am at it, I might as well further admit that being told by pretty young women that I resemble an ordinary-looking cartoon character wounds a bit.

It shouldn't. They certainly did not intend to be hurtful and would likely feel shamed were they to understand what the comment did. And I have coped with this face for a long time--about twenty years ago, I looked in a mirror and realized that instead of looking like Tim Robbins, I looked a lot more like Michael J. Pollard. When my self estimation slipped from Nuke LaLoosh to C. W. Moss, I dealt with it. Even years later, when I posted a still image from Eraserhead on my office door and a student confused Jack Nance for me, I just smiled and shook my head.

I am more likely to see specific facial features when I now look in the mirror, the similarities of my eyes' shape with those of my father, how I have my mother's nose, even how I've seen that same hair curl on two or three of my family members. I see myself in such a context that I do not see Hank Hill unless I look for him. With any luck, over the semester my students will see enough of me so that they do not see Hank unless they look for him.

Physical vanity, and at this stage of my life, too--sometimes I surprise myself.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Submission

"Submission," a term used for sending material for the consideration for publication, has a number of other not necessarily related meanings that do not necessarily correlate with this activity, but I cannot help but think of those other meanings. A few years ago, as the faculty advisor for The Mockingbird, the literary arts magazine composed by students at East Tennessee State University, I had to explain to an otherwise intuitive student that posters reading "Submit to the 'Bird" could have unintended results. The answer, of course, was to make the poster even more forceful, by adding a jabbing, pointing finger to indicate the absurdity of the word's ambiguity.

So, I am aware of these meanings as I have made a recent challenge to a couple of friends that we would send at least three poems out for consideration by the end of the week. I have plenty of other writing to do--I have a co-editor who has been fairly patient in my finishing one essay in particular--but I am also thinking of the various other writing that requires my attention, such as developing this quasi-informal blog entry to get myself warmed up for even more writing later tonight.

I find a contrast in this approach to finishing the writing. Part of me argues that I need to go ahead and complete the routine forms, recommendations, and reports so I can devote more attention to the creative, scholarly material, and I tend to hold that as a key position, so I grind that material out. It will be correct and carefully crafted, but it will also be plain and virtually untraceable to me, except for its being attached to an e-mail I send. That product should have those characteristics, though, because the mundane processed writing does not need to have a specific identity behind it. I can concentrate instead on the more personal material, the essays and creative writing that I want readers to identify with me.

I am concerned about having a lot of projects in the works at once, but I have had to become accustomed to performing many jobs at the same time. I contrast my mother's cooking style with that of one of my aunts. My aunt notoriously would cook only one food item at a time; a big meal would take her hours, and we sometimes risked food poisoning as the first-prepared foods waited on her counter for the remaining dishes to be complete. My mother, on the other hand, can have all the stove eyes, the oven, a crock pot, a convection oven, the usual oven, and a food processor all going at the same time, and the food is always good, and there's always plenty of it, too. I would not have six or seven writing projects going at the same time, but I am relatively accustomed with two to four, knowing that if I get stuck in one, I can move another along.

So, Roxanne, if you happen to be reading this blog, I am working on the Merle Haggard essay, and I am outlining the Johnny Cash one, too. Judy, I will have that faculty activities report to you in a couple of days. Catherine and Adam, I am polishing those poems while waiting in parking lots for my kids to come out of school. I will not forget the class prep, either.

By the way, please get a look at the 2010-2011 issue of The Mockingbird by clicking this link.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Affirmation

Firstkid came in last night from college, a doctor's appointment today the reason. I cooked some of his favorite food last night, and he made a comment about how there was not cooking like that down at university. He seemed happy and engaged in his studies, he's making friends, he's proven that he is getting more and more self-sufficient, and, later, he referred to going back down to Knoxville as heading "home" and then caught himself and made sure we understood that our house is still his "home," too.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Restless

Last night, I watched Michael Cody, a colleague in the ETSU Department of Literature & Language, give a solo acoustic concert in a coffee shop in neighboring Kingsport, Tennessee. He played a mix of his original songs ("Genesis Road," "In the Jaws of Modern Romance," and a song I think he titled "There's Always a Train") and some cover material, notably Bruce Springsteen's "Gypsy Biker" and Golden Earring's "Radar Love" (the latter without the extended instrumental break). He cannot stand still when he performs, he has a surprising range as a vocalist, and he has a canny ability to put together a set list. He was happy and comfortable, and everyone had a good time.

. . . except the evening made me restless. During performances I have to endure one of two kinds of restlessness. The bad one has to do with my yearning for the ordeal to end. The other kind, the kind I suffered last night, was the urge to start making something. I was listening to Michael, but I was also watching his left hand to figure out chord progressions. It was all I could do, when I got home, to keep from grabbing a guitar and working out how he had played some of the songs. That is always a positive experience; it comes from readings and workshops, from particularly successful classes, from conversations with friends over shared interests; a lot of my best work comes from this restlessness.

Michael made me restless. He performed songs, and he sometimes performed them as if there were no one there to watch him, lost in the pleasure of playing, making self-deprecating acknowledgment when he came back to us in the audience. It was in no way a selfishness on his part, because he erased himself in a way, giving himself completely to the performance and making himself his own instrument. It was a pleasure to see his happiness to perform.

You can enjoy his studio-recorded performance of his original song, "Homecoming," here, and you can feel some of that restlessness, too.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Walking to Work

Some mornings, particularly on days when a car is in the shop, I walk to work and then make adjustments to my schedule accordingly. Since I tend to be an early riser, fairly often I get started before the sun rises, and I have learned which of the neighborhood dogs mind their own business, where the walnuts will be on the sidewalk when I might miss seeing them, and even, lately, some of the disturbing names people assign their wifi networks between my home and my job. I get about an hour of thinking in, writing rough drafts of material in my mind, figuring out how to handle a particularly thorny meeting, planning new projects, and hoping to see or hear something that provides just a moment of taking me out of the everyday routine.

This morning, as I was crossing the railroad tracks near old downtown Johnson City, I saw the relatively flat land between me and East Tennessee State University, and it occurred to me that the gritty feel of the dirt was of about the same consistency of the sandy soil in my hometown, Cullman, and in Tuscaloosa, and the traces along some of the highways in eastern North and South Carolina, and northern Georgia, too. It was just a flash of recognition, and then I was thinking about an experience as a boy, when a ball rolled into the weathered clapboard garage on my family's lot, and how I ducked into it to grab the ball, stood up, and saw that I had ducked under an orb web bigger around than I could reach. There, in the center, was what appeared to me to be the biggest spider I had ever seen. It did not move as I ducked back under the web and scooted away from the garage.

Only the sound of the gravel and gritty dirt, like the driveway in our backyard, prompted that memory.

Monday, August 22, 2011

"But don't the trees seem nice and full?"

I wish I could take credit for that line, but it came from an e-mail my brother down in Tuscaloosa sent me this morning. Just as we here in East Tennessee have been adjusting to our oldest's moving away to college, my brother and his wife have been adjusting to their youngest's moving to college.

The line above is from an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, "Opie the Birdman." The episode starts with Opie's killing a mother bird with his new slingshot and his taking on the responsibility of raising her three young. The birds mature in the course of the episode, and Opie does, too. It is a hard thing for him to release the birds once they are able to fend for themselves, and he tells his father, Andy, that the cage seems "empty." In his wisdom, Andy replies, "But don't the trees seem nice and full?" Andy feels awfully proud that Opie has taken on those responsibilities, but as viewers we can tell that he is steeling himself for the time when Opie will move out to be on his own.

My brother and his family have had a lot of life-changing experiences down in Tuscaloosa this year, a devastating tornado, loss of friends, new jobs, blessed opportunities, growing relationships, and all sorts of trials of resilience.

Sometimes the promise of a tree full of birdsong helps to keep perspective.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

That Business about Leaving Pieces of One's Heart

In August 1996, with the assistance of family, I dug every lodged piece of heart out of Knoxville I could think of, only to plant a big piece back in it just a few days ago.

These conversations keep arising at work. One of our newer professors has one daughter, and, when he sees how I am weathering firstkid's moving to college, he starts thinking about how he and his wife will feel when their daughter leaves for school. "You have two more kids at home," he said today, a bit wistfully, and I didn't tell him that they are feeling different feelings, too, the way the house is different, the curiosity of how firstkid will change, the anticipation of their times to leave, too. I haven't told the other two kids about these things, like the surprise of how my wife and I will suddenly seem to have aged a bit, even when they are gone only a couple of weeks, how small but comfortable the house will seem when they first get back, but how cramped it will be by the end of summer vacation, how much we will ache when they move to a home of their own and they cannot decide what all to take and what to leave behind. I could tell them, but they won't remember it when they need it, and I am not sure I could convey to them just what it feels like to get that independence and to feel the two-purposed tug of the family tie, a bond one sometimes strains against, a tether someone often relies upon.

About my friend's comment, though, yes, I am grateful that there are two more kids at home, yes, I dread the coming high school tensions that are going to happen, yes, I want them to have every chance firstkid has, but, no, I am not going to console myself that it will be any easier. I will appear a bit more stoic, I think, but I doubt that familiarity will make this experience blunter or duller.

It did feel kind of funny to text this message to firstkid, though: "Text your mom."

Monday, August 15, 2011

"I'm running down the road, tryin' to loosen my load . . ."

Yesterday, our family took firstkid to live in Knoxville, where he begins
life as a University of Tennessee student on Wednesday. I am convinced that the difficulty of moving has the function of diluting the disorientation of
starting anew with the relief of a completed task. I am proud and excited
for him, and I miss him, and the house did feel emptier when we returned
without him last night. I do not know how long it will be before the house
feels "usual" in its new way.

On the way back from Knoxville, my wife put in an Eagles mix CD, and there
it was, "Take It Easy," one of the songs that defined freedom when
released just before school let out for summer 1972. Written by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey (Browne recorded it for his For Everyman album the
next year), "Take It Easy" crackles with sunny possibility,
wide-ranging good feeling, and some lines I have not considered enough lately:
Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you
crazy--
Lighten up while you still can,
Don't even try to understand,
Just find a place to make your stand, and take it
easy.
It occurs to me, I was two months from being a teenager when that song came out, and that philosophy made sense then. Now, I hear my own wheels, and I struggle to understand, but for about three minutes, this song offers respite. I hope firstkid has his own “Take It Easy,” and I hope, by chance, that I will hear it, too, when I need it. Life has worked out where I no longer dream of “standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,” and I am proud to watch him work his out as well.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Steve Earle Is Right

In "Hometown Blues" on his Train a Comin' album (1997), Steve Earle sings, "'Home is where the heart is,' ain't that what they always say? / My heart lies in broken pieces scattered along the way." When I first heard these lyrics, I did not understand them the way I understand them now. Before, I thought the lines had to do with a series of disappointments, that the speaker has gone from one heartbreak to another. In the past few years, I have gained a different perspective. It occurs to me now that every place one has loved is home, and everywhere a loved one lives is home, so that over the course of our experiences, we wind up leaving pieces of our hearts in many places. They may be "scattered," because we never know just when or how a person or place or experience might affect us. After all, "scatter" does not always have a negative connotation. We think of casting seeds, and we have all heard the fairy tales of leaving a breadcrumb trail.

2011 has brought me back to this idea time and again, as I watch the older members of my family age, as my older son prepares to go away to university, as my younger children enter adolescence, as two of my nieces have married this year with yet another newly engaged, as my younger colleagues have new babies in their families, as my two hometowns, Cullman and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, have suffered devastation from tornadoes, as I wrestle with my knowledge that all kinds of change must occur and that there would never be any one moment perfect enough to fix as the permanent moment, that the hope and satisfaction of creating, serving, and loving free us from the stasis of perpetual mourning.

As the title character of Tennyson's "Ulysses" states, "I am a part of all that I have met." Ulysses asserts in this line that he has affected every circumstance in which he has been involved, and he has created a legacy across all those interactions. At the same time, however, we acknowledge as readers that all those experiences and relationships have created Ulysses in aggregate, that like all of us Ulysses is a patchwork creature whose idea of self relies on orientation to others.

Scattered yet integral, cast and rooted, broken but feeling in a broad swath from Tuscaloosa to Johnson City, my heart has to grow bigger and more resilient as I exchange pieces from place to place. I have to be grateful that it remains tender with each new break.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

White's Grocery in August

Just a quick note today, as the heat seems to have ebbed a bit--

When I was a boy, there were small grocery stores in my neighborhood, more like tiendas one now sees in my hometown than like convenience stores. About two blocks away in opposite directions from our house, there were two. Mann's Grocery was about the size of a two-car garage, and, in fact, the new owners of the house to which it is still attached have converted it into a garage. It was always dark inside there, and it smelled of must and its oily concrete slab of a floor. I do not remember much more about it except that the old woman who ran it had unfortunate hennaed hair that frizzed out from the sides like a weathered Bozo wig. Mrs. Mann had been unkind to my mother a number of times, and I did not frequent that store.

Mr. Perry White (yes, the same name as the editor for The Daily Planet--there was a man named "Donald Duck" in my hometown, too) ran the other store, which was more the size of a convenience store, and it, too, still stands today, but new owners have consciously made it into a convenience store. When I went there, it was more like a full-fledged grocery. Mr. White even butchered meat there, I remember, and Mom bought the great majority of our groceries there, well before our town got its first full-fledged supermarkets. Almost all the change I could scrounge went to that store. He sold small bundles of "stripped" comic books--an illegal, bootleg practice ("stripped" comic books have their covers removed; retailers were supposed to return covers to distributors to get credit for unsold copies, and they were to destroy the remaining comics, because the comics were worth less than the cost of returning them). I bought a lot of penny candy there, learning to make modest purchases to avoid the sales tax that would kick in at eight cents. Before I outgrew the store, just as my neighborhood eventually did, I loved to buy bottled soft drinks from Mr. White.

My parents were teenagers in the 1950s, and they drank Coca-Cola--I cannot remember that Mom ever brought home any other soft drink. On occasion, I would get a soft drink in Mr. White's store, though. He had a large, horizontal cooler, about the size of a huge chest freezer, along the front wall of his store. While it had lids on it--heavy, metal lids with black plastic handles, hinges in the middle, and black rubber stripping on the sides--the lids were rarely closed, because they did not have to be. Open on the top, that big, red cooler kept water icy cold all day without a single drop condensing on the white Coca-Cola logo embossed on its front. The cooler would contain all kinds of soft drinks: Royal Crown cola, Nehi fruit-flavored sodas (peach Nehi--I haven't seen one of those for decades), Sun-Drop citrus sodas, and Coca-Cola. A kid my size would have to lean over the cooler and stick an arm down into the icy water, fishing around for the best available flavor, and would ache to the elbow with the fun shock of the cold. White's was a shady store, not dark like Mann's, and it did not smell musty, and he was happy to see us. The lady who worked for him, Mrs. Flannigan, was patient when I made one seven-cent purchase and then one six-cent purchase. They didn't care if a kid brought in a dirty bottle instead of paying deposit.

Cold water and clean concrete, dripping before jumping back into the elementary school pool, laughing while Dad sprayed my brother and me with a hose beside the neighbor's cinder block garage, standing tiptoe and barefoot while fishing for a peach Nehi in White's Grocery--the clinical display of today's upright fluorescent soft drink coolers offers none of small respite of mystery and adventure of a scavenged cold drink during a hot Alabama summer in the mid 1960s.

Please forgive the nostalgia.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Springsteen and Empty Streets

I was driving to work this morning at about 5:15, hoping to get a jump on the workday, enjoying temperatures at 70 degrees instead of the 90+ we will have later, and listening to Bruce Springsteen's Magic (2007). I realized this morning that Springsteen to me is what Roy Rogers has been for my father, in that both embody a type of American ideal, somewhat romantic and principled, rooted in the same traditions of aspirations, yearning for freedom, willing to fulfill duty, thinking of legacy. This morning, the moist air was cool enough not to be oppressive, and rolling the windows down in my truck let me feel the fresh day before it got fully started. Then the track "Gypsy Biker" started, and the theme of being sold out by the Powers That Be had so much resonance with our current political ordeal that the song shook me again. Just as Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) has helped to shape this path of American Romanticism, Born in the USA (1984) defines the Reagan Era in its contrasting American hope ("No Retreat, No Surrender") with deteriorating American standards (the title track), and The Rising (2002) gives us a much-needed, cathartic 9-11 requiem, Magic evaluates the George W. Bush administration time and again; these songs still apply to the legacy of that administration, as the darkness creeps from the edge of town, deeper and deeper into our neighborhoods, our neglected parks, our underfunded schools, our crumbling infrastructure, and our distracted and frightened electorate.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

On Wile E. Coyote

I tweeted earlier tonight (as T_A_Holmes) that I was watching Road Runner cartoons with my younger children and encouraging them to feel sympathy for the Coyote. The fact is, I didn't have to encourage them all that much. They kept expressing surprise at how things just don't work out for the Coyote, and "poor Coyote" was repeated a number of times. I understand that some people consider Wile E. Coyote a villain, but I just don't buy that perspective.

There's a reason. Wile E. Coyote is an intelligent, inventive character. He comes up with elaborate, creative plans. He has resources at hand to realize those plans. However, no matter how carefully he works, his plans fail.

We have to remember that Wile E. Coyote's problem is not starvation. Clearly, if he has the funds (or at least the credit) to order all those devices and materials from Acme, Inc., he can surely buy food. He makes these plans because he contends with the irrationality of his world; the Roadrunner, who is not the Coyote's enemy, merely represents the capricious nature of the Coyote's world. The Roadrunner, for example, will taunt the Coyote with a placard that says, "Roadrunner's can't read." Random events never help the Coyote. Emotion does not help him--he might get so carried away that he falls prey to one of his own traps, having forgotten that he has planted it. Even his own skills work against him, especially if his plans work much better than he has expected, as when a rocket far overshoots its predetermined trajectory, because even the laws of physics provide no reliable, assured foundation for the Coyote's experience. Capturing the Roadrunner would symbolize the Coyote's victory over the controlling forces of his crazy universe. He persists, he survives, he endures, and he hopes. For all his Rube Goldberg failures, he just will not quit. He is brave in his resistance to despair. Sometimes he is smarter than his own good, and it is painful to watch him foul up, and (especially in the cartoons when he can talk), he can be awfully vain. There are days, though, when he makes perfect sense to me.

Perhaps one of the most highly visible if unacknowledged versions of Wile E. Coyote would be the character Frasier Crane from Cheers and then Frasier. You can see another version in the Sideshow Bob character on The Simpsons (voiced by Kelsey Grammer, who plays Frasier Crane in the two series mentioned previously). If you are interested in a solid metaphysical analysis of Wile E. Coyote, consider looking up Grant Morrison's "The Coyote Gospel," which is issue #5 of his Animal Man for DC/Vertigo; in this story, Crafty Coyote questions what kind of creator would put such a character through such repeated agony, drawing a parallel between Job and Wile E. Coyote. In many ways, we have to give Morrison credit for drawing attention to such an obvious parallel, but we cannot forget that Warner Bros. itself, in the short feature "Duck Amuck" (directed by Chuck Jones, 1953), presents an animated Daffy Duck manipulated by animator Bugs Bunny, who addresses the camera at the end of the torturous exercise and asks, "Ain't I a stinker?" Since we laugh along with him, I guess we all are.

Sunday Morning Coming Down to the Wire . . .

You know, I don't want a "super congress," and I don't want the Democratic administration to give it all away, and I don't want a handful of radical Republican activists to control the entire federal government, and I really don't want taxes to be "off the table" as far as negotiations go.

Right now, I want a clean bill, just a one-sentence authorization for the debt limit to go up. Getting his House in order should have been Boehner's first piece of business about business--he had to know that the debt limit debate would be coming up--and the House instead spent so much time on social legislation that they didn't get any job creation agenda done.

And, Mr. President, I understand the need to get health care fixed, but you should have pushed through economic platforms, like building the nation's infrastructure, when you had a chance with a friendly congress. You got your timing wrong. I hate to say it, but I believe it.

We've had Reagnomics for thirty years, and that philosophy hasn't worked. The government's best investment is its own people, the people it is supposed to serve. If it educates its people, assists them to have dependable health care, and works on creating and maintaining a solid infrastructure, ours can continue to be a strong nation.

Fear can move an electorate, but it cannot strengthen one. When congress doesn't work, fewer and fewer of the people it serves work.

A clean bill, please, and if we don't get that, Mr. Obama, please exercise your fourteenth amendment prerogative. There will be heat, but you can take it. Don't let us slip into a new depression under your watch.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Paper

This morning, I sent two poems out for consideration for publication, in hopes that the journal's reading staff will consider my work and find it suits their journal, in hopes that my work will not merely trip a range of associations that will serve as the basis of their evaluations.

I send the poems out knowing that it will be a hard task for me to keep my mind on the student's essays, but I will read them as I hope to be read.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

A Novel Approach to Raising the Debt Ceiling, with Respect, Mr. Obama

Dear Mr. President:

I supported you in your last election, and I am most likely to vote for you again. I believe that you have tried to work for the best interests for the majority of Americans, and, while I have been uncomfortable with some of your administration's associations with some of the Wall Street insiders who always seem to have inroads to the more powerful political figures in the country, and while I wish there were a clearer explanation for some of our foreign policy, I think that at heart you want more secure civil rights, health care for all Americans, a robust economy, and a stewardship for our nation, both now and for the future.

I am concerned, however, that you have made some strategic errors so far in your administration. I think, for example, that you have overestimated the GOP's elected officials' willingness to follow logic, persuasion, and good faith negotiation to reach accord. I believe that instead of pursuing "filibuster-proof" majorities, it would have been better just to let the opposition talk and demonstrate the vacuity of their positions. I am convinced that, at times, you did not take into account the anti-intellectual bent harbored by many voters and exploited by various political agents. I know that you did not expect the degree of vitriol directed against you by various pundits who would make you a one-term president at all costs, no matter how much our country suffers in their selfish pursuit.

The time has come for you to make a move so cunning and unpredictable that it will change American politics forever in a way that will benefit us all. You have stated that you are more interested in helping Americans than pursuing your re-election, and I will take you at your word. Frankly, I think it would be better to re-elect you than to choose any of the current Republican presidential candidates, but I am going to recommend something that will make the upcoming presidential election even more memorable than 2008.

It appears that the most likely success for your programs would be bipartisan support between your Democratic base and centrist Republicans who have not signed some pledge and who have true conservatives (not NeoCons) as their base electorate. This situation is particularly true now, when the debt ceiling debate has become a point of major contention rather than the semi-procedural vote it has been in the past. It appears that these centrist, pragmatic Republicans have so many problems attempting to convince the Tea Party wing of their party to act in a reasonable manner that they face a quandary similar to what you face. Perhaps it would be a savvy move to throw your lot in with them.

Mr. Obama, maybe you should consider switching to the Republican Party, but conducting yourself as the kind of Republican you wish the Republican leadership to be.

Please, remember that this suggestion comes from someone who supports you.

The immediate disadvantage would be troublesome, I know. There will be some Democrats who will brand you as traitorous--but many of them are already uncomfortable that you are not as far to the left as they would wish. Your administration can still count on them, however, because they recognize that you will still remain their most powerful friend in office, willing to listen to their advocates. And, let's face it, this late in the game it is unlikely that there would be a serious Democratic contender for the presidency in opposing you, who would then be the incumbent Republican candidate. Besides, you have the strongest Democratic opponents from your last campaign on your cabinet already. With Hillary Clinton as your Secretary of State and Joe Biden as your vice president, you would enter the upcoming presidential election practically unopposed. You could even, as Chris Matthews has suggested, make Bill Clinton your Secretary of the Treasury. Your cabinet is your prerogative, and you would not have to follow party lines, as you have demonstrated.

I am making this recommendation with the assumption that the GOP would not be likely to oppose an incumbent president who is a member of their own party. Even if it did, the contenders on the other side would just be in your shadow. Who are the strongest polling candidates now? Mitt Romney will still be attempting to distance himself from a health care plan that closely parallels yours, and Michele Bachmann will be falling back on her Tea Party base. The Tea Party base, in turn, may be so incensed by your candidacy that they would split from the GOP.

The other main consideration would be the effect on the Democratic ticket. I know that many voters select a straight ticket. I am thinking, however, that there will still be a good, solid Democratic representation in congress, because your supporters will recognize the power of a split ticket. The numbers on the Republican side will be worth watching, though, because your running as a Republican will force the division of the party. You will separate the statesmen from the demagogues. You will expose the prejudices behind some of political stances. You will demonstrate that people can run on governmental policy rather than hot-button moral issues. You will liberate the true conservatives from those who would take their party away from them, and you will free them from having to embrace extreme positions in order to shore up a fractious party.

Imagine what benefits our country would derive from the split of the Republican Party. A three-party system requires bargaining, compromise, and negotiation. There will be times when the right will be able to build a coalition on some points, but there will be others where forward-thinking policies will get through. There can be a centrist, progressive agenda that will not attempt to answer to both far extremes at the same time.

Now, I understand that there may be a question about your being able to change parties. Frankly, in the recent debt ceiling negotiations, it was clear that you were willing to accommodate a number of proposals offered by the GOP. They just were not able to take "yes" for an answer. They would have to take it from a president of their own party.

I also have to admit that I would enjoy the "journalistic" backlash that will occur in some of the media. Your switching parties would expose many vulnerabilities of your most vocal opposition. Fox would have to agree that your ideas make sense, and just imagining Rush Limbaugh's reaction cheers me up. The ripple effect through the blogosphere will be seismic.

I understand that in an ideal political system, we would have an informed electorate who would be interested in the common good, with elected officials who practice stewardship and refuse to bow to pressure groups, corporate johns, and ill-considered ideology. Unfortunately, we do not have these conditions in our current political climate. We need a reboot. Your becoming a Republican would be that reboot.

Then, after the 2012 election, let's see how the three-party system works out. Maybe you'll feel like returning to the Democratic Party, but maybe you'll decide that giving the Republican Party needed leadership would be a better route to take. In either case, with the likely splintering of the Tea Party from the Republican Party, you will have made the GOP the distinguished opponents they should be, making them better but not necessarily more powerful.

Ask yourself: who would be the best leader of the Republican Party--Boehner, McConnell, Limbaugh, Norquist, or you? The answer is clear.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Sudden Changes

A number of years ago, HBO ran Oz, an original series about life in a maximum security prison. The series begins with the arrest and conviction of Tobias Beecher for vehicular manslaughter, having killed a child while driving drunk. The series depicts the transformation of this confident, brash attorney into a survivor of a brutal environment. Significantly, as presented from Beecher's point of view, the program at first hardly deals with remorse over the child's death and instead focuses on Beecher's suffering as a consequence of his selfishness. As much as the program depicts the conscientious but pragmatic prison staff, it is clear that the prison has two interdependent hierarchies, and Beecher must adapt to the horrors of the new environment. Tom Fontana, who created the carefully crafted, compelling Homicide: Life on the Street series, created Oz. It is well worth one's attention; both series have had a profound effect on my thoughts about how people interact, the balance between justice and mercy, and the immediacy unexpected consequences could have on one's life.

This week, I have witnessed a situation that has underscored how quickly one's life can change. Someone asked me to accompany him to traffic court, and I was not certain what to expect. I have been in court only twice before. When I was a graduate student, someone had broken into my car and stolen an FM converter (before cars came with AM/FM, one could buy an FM converter to receive FM signals), a device that was worth only fifteen dollars at the time. I basically had to appear, identify my property, and look at the pitiful kid who screwed up so badly. It was a "yes/no" exchange between me and the prosecutor, and that was it. When I worked at the University of Tennessee as an instructor, I had a moving violation because a break in a median did not exactly line up with the entrance to a parking lot, and I did not realize that my driving from the break to the driveway was driving on the wrong side of the street. I compounded my naivety by taking pictures of the alignment of the street, hoping to explain to the judge why I had done what I did. He was experienced enough to keep me quiet and let me off with a warning, and I changed my behavior accordingly, not only in how I drove but also in recognizing that people in authority ask for the information they need. What the accused might consider mitigating circumstances can mean little in a context outside one's immediate situation.

I witnessed a stronger example of this point this week. My acquaintance has considered himself a "good driver," a belief most people, I think, hold about themselves. However, this "good driver" exercised the bad judgment of speeding in a school zone. I, frankly, had no idea what was going to happen, because speeding in a school zone presents a great deal more danger than speeding on the interstate. The judge described the violation in a way I did not expect. I did expect the judge to mention how driving is a privilege, but I did not expect him to describe an automobile as a potentially lethal device. That perspective, that a driver has the responsibility to control such a device, particularly in the presence of children likely unaware of potential danger, struck home. The judge also mentioned consequences of an accident--not only the carnage and harm at the immediate scene of the accident, but also the lingering effects, from the deep hurt suffered by the victim's family and the sudden changes in the life of the driver, being overwhelmed by the guilt of having caused such harm, being the target of potential bloodlust from the victim's family, being imprisoned for recklessness rather than for intent to cause harm, being the cause of the dissolution of one's own family who must cope with how their lives, too, have suddenly altered. At the end of the lecture, I had no question that the judge had every prerogative to levy the stiffest penalty permitted.

The judge, however, showed mercy. My acquaintance will be going to defensive driving school, an eight-hour class that will present graphic depictions of some of the scenes the judge alluded to. I could see the fellow stiffen as the judge was about to pronounce his decision, and I felt just sick at heart immediately before learning the decision. I am certain that this experience has had a profound effect on him as it has on me.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Please Don't Take This Post as an Invitation to Clip My Name

"Why am I soft in the middle, now, / When the rest of my life is so hard?"--Paul Simon, "You Can Call Me 'Al'"

Monday, July 25, 2011

The Third Adult in the House

Son number one is nineteen now, and he has been attending ETSU for the past year, due to begin at the University of Tennessee in just a few weeks. I have been learning a great deal in the past year when thinking about being the parent of a grown up. I had, of course, gotten some of the information from my own parents, and my brother, who became a father a couple of years before I did, has been giving me up-to-date comments as well. Going through this experience has not been that easy. I am excited for the opportunity Firstkid has, and his prospect of being engaged in a major away at university reminds me of the real pleasure of being a university student. I wouldn't swap places with him, but I wouldn't mind being a full-time student again with the background I now have.

This past couple of years, though, my wife and I have had to deal with the other adult in the house, the neo-adult who has started developing a life pretty much separate from our day-to-day lives, with a number of friends we are not likely to know past names and faces, and activities we would not be likely to pursue, and a sense of "normal" that we are not likely to share. I would like a general bit of information about these things, but I really do not expect an exhaustive report. Sometimes, I would settle for synchronizing supper schedules. On occasion, I guess what I want is for Firstkid to try the old trick of offering too much information, thinking that I will ask him to taper off the detail. It wouldn't work--I am patient as a rock--but it would be fun to watch him try it for now, my knowing full well that in a few years it will be more of his offering information as a means to make an indirect request for advice.

My friend Michael Cody has gone through this process twice, and he is still lucid and vertical. So I hope to be. In the meantime, I have two more younger kids at home, and I will just have to see how I fare in these two more attempts to get it right. While Firstkid has suffered from having novice parents, he does not seem all that much traumatized by the experience. Maybe parents don't see through their own trauma from parenthood. I still look into that angular, whiskered face for the pie-faced toddler who still surfaces, just briefly, in an unguarded moment.

I am grateful for the thought that perhaps, at times, he looks for an earlier me to surface in my eyes, too.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Thinking about Names Lately

Part of it has to do with my age, I admit. In the time before cable television brought a wider variety of viewing options to after school kids, the broadcast stations would rely on local programming (mainly a bleacher full of kids hosted by a regional personality, my favorite being "Cousin" Cliff Holman in Birmingham, Alabama) and then syndicated situation comedies past being re-run on prime time. A number of Southern people my age watched so many episodes of The Andy Griffith Show (the best ones, of course, the black-and-white episodes with Don Knotts) that we had a full curriculum of how to be neighborly well before Sesame Street hit the air. The sitcom Gomer Pyle, USMC, spun off from Griffith and offered the cautionary tale of what can happen to a naive but well-intentioned Southern boy out of his element. So many of us who yearn to be Atticus often find ourselves Gomer from time to time.

Gomer Pyle's DI is Vince Carter, played by Frank Sutton as a perfect comedic foil to Jim Nabors, whose tall, lanky affability contrasts so well with Sutton's compact, gruff toughness. That name, "Vince Carter," has stuck with me all these years, and whenever I hear a sportscast about Phoenix Suns player Vince Carter, I wonder if his mother watched Gomer Pyle too, and if as a result the name "Vince" just seemed to her to fit well with "Carter." Of course, maybe she was just an old-school Packers fan.

This issue of naming has been on my mind a bit lately for two reasons. Younger members of our English faculty have had children in the past year or so, and it has been fascinating to hear how they have made decisions to name their children, either to honor family members or to associate them with particular values or to create a cultural marker--all legitimate, reasoned decisions behind naming. I have, I admit, more than a little curiosity about how authors name children, so when a poet friend became a new father in just the past few weeks, I was ready for a story and was not disappointed. (Well, to be frank, a mutual friend suggested naming the child "Odin," but that would have been selfish fun at the kid's expense had the new parents agreed on that name.)

But the other reason I have been considering names lately is the "same name" syndrome. In my department at ETSU, we now have three faculty members who share names with internationally known performers. One of them is older than his famous namesake, and he had established himself professionally before the entertainer broke into national consciousness. A second, a bit younger than a famous guitarist, for a time had a hyphenated last name that distinguished him from the other person. The third, still in the beginning of his professional academic career, has made his middle name his familiar name to avoid association with his famous namesake. Each of these men has acknowledged the "same name" and has made, in my view, good decisions about keeping their names their own.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Open Mic at the Acoustic Coffeehouse, 20 July 2011

Today, I find writing a bit more welcome, if only because I had the opportunity to see two favorite writers in action last night, during the (usually) monthly "Open Mic" night at the Acoustic Coffeehouse in Johnson City, Tennessee. Kevin O'Donnell of East Tennessee State University's Department of Literature and Language organizes these events, and during the school year a number of ETSU's faculty members and an increasing number of ETSU students participate. Writers of varying degrees of experience and talent read, and one has the opportunity to watch how people grow as writers. These events usually happen on the third Wednesday evening of each month, so anyone in Johnson City at the time should check the Acoustic Coffeehouse website's calendar for information.

Current ETSU L&L faculty Jesse Graves, Thomas Crofts, Kevin O'Donnell, and Sean Bolton often read there. Some talented students, such as Brian Bowman and Maggie Colvett, sometimes read. Last night, we had an opportunity to see the range of creativity in our community. Ron Giles, a professor retired from our department and a perennial favorite at Open Mic, and Adam Lambert, an ETSU English major and emerging writer, both offered poems.

Many of us attend in hopes that Ron Giles will read. He expresses a thoughtful joy in his poems, offering insight in descriptions of boyhood experiences and overseas duty, moments of quotidian epiphany, and just plain good feeling in a comfortable, learned voice I admire a great deal. After a humorous warning of what kind of love poem not to write for one's wife (bringing up age, Giles advises, is counterindicated), he read a piece describing a moment of togetherness that balanced a sweet affection with just a bit of earthiness, too. One could feel the appreciation in the room.

Adam Lambert read a poem about picking blackberries with his mother, and I admired how well he avoided the too familiar formulae one often hears in such works (what Appalachian Heritage refers to as "'Papaw Was Perfect' poetry and the 'Mamaw Moved Mountains' manuscripts"), admiring as well the care he has taken with the sounds of the language in descriptive phrases and vernacular speech.

These two writers create work deserving attention, and I could not help but feel anxious to get to my familiar spaces and resume writing. That kind of experience means a great deal to me. I will sing along with a recording, and, if a guitar is handy, I will play along, too. When I read or hear good writing, I want to write.

For a while, Ron Giles and Adam Lambert will be my immediate collaborators, only because they have made me want to write.

That's my first blog.