Morrison knew he could get that bug if he wanted it bad enough.
by James Brush
Author: James Brush
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
Several postcards hang next to my computer. Here’s one of them…
Daydreaming
Sometimes I’m the last alive inside this hidden land.
Dreams speak louder, visions brighter
than mere newspapers in that other world.
My eyes drift to the bulletin board, confront that angry photo of Geronimo.
He clutches his rifle in gnarled old warrior’s hands and says,
“Get back to work.”
Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain is a book that I probably wouldn’t have picked up had I not suddenly found myself having to teach it after the recent tragedy at work. It’s a book for young readers that somehow I missed when I was growing up.
The story is simple: a kid named Sam runs away from New York City sometime in the 1950s to go live in the woods. He spends a year living alone in the Catskill Mountains, hunting and trapping for food. He learns to live off the land with the help of a falcon named Frightful that he stole from her nest and then trained to hunt for him.
It’s a sweet and touching book about living in harmony with nature, a kind of fictional Walden for young readers that even references Thoreau on a few occasions. Most impressive are George’s vivid descriptions of the woods and its animals and how they all change with the seasons. George never idealizes nature, choosing instead to just describe the natural world through young Sam’s eyes, yet what emerges is an ideal world that slowly changes Sam as he discovers that true independence has its price.
My Side of the Mountain is a pleasant (and quick for an adult) read that reminds me of camping trips during my New England Boy Scouting years and makes me want to run away to the woods and live off fresh fish and berries.
I love it when politicians say stupid things. I guess that makes me a perpetually happy man.
While reading Paul Burka’s latest Texas Monthly Article “The Tax Man. Yeah, the Tax Man” (no link, subscription required) I came across a quote I’d read a few years back, but that Burka resurfaced for our amusement. Said Debbie Riddle (R-Tomball):
Where did this idea come from that everyone deserves free education…[I think she also mentioned children’s healthcare, but Burka ellipsed it out]…? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It came straight out of the pit of Hell.
I bet you had no idea.
I sure didn’t, but then I suppose I’ve always believed that democracy can’t function without an educated populace. Of course, educated voters would probably not continue to elect the kind of incompetents we currently have ruining running our state.
Well, I suppose I should get back to planning for tomorrow’s black masses… er, I mean classes.
(By the way isn’t the Dark Lord Voldemort’s real name Tom Riddle? I’m just saying.)
This week we remember Nigel “Bubba” George, my parents’ dog, who after a long and happy life went off on Friday to chase after the great tennis ball in the sky. My parents’ dogs have always outlived their expected lifespans and Nigel, who was a big guy, was no exception.
Nigel was a lover of opera. He enjoyed standing by the stereo speakers, waiting for the tenors to start singing and then he would howl sing along. He liked hiking, but had to be carried across creeks so his feet would stay dry. His favorite game was ball. And don’t forget Nigel’s cameo appearance in this blog a few months ago…
Dogs and cats really become part of the family and so it’s hard to see them go, but it’s good to remember that he was happy and always up to something to make people laugh. Take care, Bubba, and here’s hoping your feet stay dry.
At long last, the Talking Heads have gotten into the business of remastering their albums. CD technology changed sometime in the late ’90s which is why old CDs such as all the Talking Heads CDs I bought in the ’80s sound so flat compared to newer CDs.
I’ve picked up remastered CDs by numerous jazz artists as well as a few rock bands that I especially like. Buying a remastered CD is like discovering a favorite album for the first time all over again. It’s one of the few times when you can truly relive the experience of discovering something new and wonderful.
Remastered CDs are always worth the money for any artist whose music is especially dense or that involves complex interplay between musicians because the biggest difference between remastered CDs and the originals is the separation of the instruments. John Coltrane claimed that you couldn’t tell if music was good or not until you’d listened to a record once for each instrument and followed just that instrument all the way through. A well done remastered CD makes that possible, opening windows into musicians’ playing and style that had previously remained difficult to penetrate.
Today, while running errands and listening to the remastered version of American Beauty by the Grateful Dead, I decided to stop in and buy the remastered Workingman’s Dead. I got to the store and there on the shelf was what I had waited for, lo these many years: remastered Talking Heads CDs.
They were all there: ’77, More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, Remain in Light, Speaking in Tongues, Little Creatures, True Stories, Naked… Oh, embarrassment of riches!
What to do? I looked closer and saw that not only were all the albums remastered, but they included alternate takes and unfinished experiments. The CDs are all dual-discs meaning that they have a DVD side with videos and the original albums remastered in DVD 5.1 Dolby Surround. Holy crap, I would have to discipline myself and only purchase one. There was no choice. It would have to be Remain in Light.
Well, no, not mine…
From the time I first read the dense and lovely Autumn of the Patriarch I have been amazed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. More than any other writer, his work takes me to a place that is as real as my own street and as distant as another’s dreams. Reading Garcia Marquez is more than picking up a book. To read Garcia Marquez is to enter another world, a parrallel dimension in which myths and magic are as real as a South American traffic jam. The worlds he creates feel modern and yet ancient like old film reels and sepia-toned photographs depicting events that happened only yesterday.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is my favorite novel. My favorite short story is his “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” I’ve read many of his other stories and novellas all of which created a huge mountain of expectation for his latest, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which I finally got around to reading.
Memories is slim book, simple and elegant in language, that relates the tale of an old man who on his ninetieth birthday arranges a gift for himself: a night of wild love with a teenage virgin. Arrangements are made at the local brothel and when the night arrives he finds that the girl has been drugged to ease her nerves and as he watches her sleep, he falls in love.
Each day, Rosa Cabarcas, the madam, demands that he show up and take what he has paid for, but each night the narrator falls more deeply in love with the sleeping beauty, afraid to touch her, afraid to wake her and content to be in love for the first time in his life.
Like much of Marquez’ work, the novel has a languid, dreamlike feel that works perfectly in this tale of a romantic’s dream of love that might finally be acknowledged as real. We follow the narrator through his ninetieth year as he comes to realize that there is much life left in him, that age is but a state of mind, so long as there is love.
Memories of My Melancholy Whores does not rely heavily on the kind of carnival magic atmosphere that has characterized so much of Marquez’ magical realism style, but the magic is still there, lingering after the tents have been folded up and put away and the carnival has moved on to the next town leaving a few stragglers on the shore of some Columbian sea. It’s a work suffused with the kind of quiet magic that one might feel when falling in love for the first time in ninety years.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover blogging…
I’ve heard that bloggers are supposed to commemorate their 100th posts (here’s mine), but I failed to do so. However, I noticed that the next post posted would be my 200th, and so I moved it to 201 so that I could post about posting, celebrate this momentuous nonoccasion, and lampoon a favorite writer whose latest book will be the subject my my 201st post.
Off I go now to celebrate this milestone and drown all sorrows by closing every bar and watering hole between here and… well, and the refrigerator.