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Soundtrack Sunday: Speed of Sound

7/31/2011

Years ago I was driving across Tennessee and came down toward Chattanooga just at dusk, and it looked so pretty looming up out of the impounded waters of the Tennessee River. I was moved—and I thought of moving there. I told a girl I knew then about my dream of Chattanooga, but she was unimpressed.

“You probably won’t be any more happy there than you are here,” she said. “Or unhappy.”

Which might have been true. Heck, was probably true. I never found out, though, for I never ran away to Chattanooga. But still—the main impulse is right, I think. Sometimes you just have to pack up and go. Hit the road and leave everyone and everything behind….

Janet put on a jacket and gathered up her purse and a battered Rand McNally road atlas. Seven times in the last eight weeks she had dropped Jay off at Steve's, then set out on long drives out of town, driving eight or ten or twelve hours, thinking, thinking, stopping late for a motel room—twice sleeping in the front seat of her car—then turning back in the early morning and heading home. Each drive—to Dalhart, Clovis, Carlsbad, El Paso, Big Bend, Wichita, Little Rock—she saw as a dry run, practice for when she really left town for good.

The opening scene with Janet and her son is taken from one of my earliest memories, a morning when I was sitting at the table with my mom when we were startled by a sonic boom….

“It's when a plane goes faster than the speed of sound,” Janet said. “You know what that is?”

Jay shook his head.

“Okay, let's say that airplane came busting through the wall just now”—Janet pointed with her cigarette at the wall just behind Jay—“and I yelled 'Get down, Jay!' But no matter how fast I yelled at you, the plane would still run you over, 'cause it would be going faster than my words.”

Jay twisted around in his chair and looked at the wall, as if judging the likelihood of a jet bursting through it at any moment. Then he turned back to his cereal and began eating, every now and then looking up at his mother. He didn't say anything.

Janet thinks, “…at the speed of sound, you could get a long way away, maybe before anyone even noticed you were gone.”

Several people have pointed out, correctly, that Janet’s decision to flee—to bolt and leave her kid behind—would be a selfish one. But sometimes we write about selfish people, and sometimes we are selfish people. Life is like that.

There are jets--RF4Cs, in fact--in this story, and so I'll run this video again....

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Soundtrack Sunday: "Reliction" and Amy Winehouse

7/24/2011

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The tragic and untimely death of Amy Winehouse provoked many responses among my social network pals and on the various blogs I read—and most of the responses were sober and thoughtful and sad, though some were vicious, and some just clueless. It’s the clueless ones that here attract my attention.

“It was not a matter of if but of when” was a comment I saw in half a dozen places on Facebook. And reading these comments I thought, What? Huh?

Oh, clueless friends of Facebook friends, go look in the goddamn mirror. You see a person there? The one that looks somewhat like you? For that clueless person, too, death is not a matter of if but of when! Your reflection and you and me and all of us are sadly mortal, and death could come tap us on the shoulder at any moment.

The question that then faces us all is pretty basic: what should we do in the meantime? How should we spend these few precious remaining hours?

When she looked back on her life, Bonnie Chamberlain could see that she had always lived in a tortured world. Not just tortured through the normal heartbreaks of dying parents and stupid boyfriends and husbands—though, of course, like anyone else she had experienced those minor personal tortures—but tortured by time itself, vast, scary time, a span where mountains rose and eroded, oceans flooded and withdrew, where earthquakes and volcanoes went off, and strange creatures walked and flapped and swam.

She felt the pain of the world most of her life; when she was nine years old, some 45 million years after the last seas finally receded and the land that would become Texas emerged wet and steaming from the gunk, Bonnie found a fossil shark’s tooth in the bed of a dry creek on her grandparent’s farm. Long as her finger, black and gray and still sharp and scary-looking ages after being shed, the tooth was suddenly precious to her, a link to a hidden world—holding it in her hand, even as a child, she could almost feel the power, the mystery, the danger, the delight, the very life of the long-dead shark. Later she remembered looking up into the hills above the creek and being thrilled and scared to know that this had once been the floor of the ocean—and before that, a mountain range—and before that, and that, and that—something had always been there. She could feel the world spinning back, endlessly.

In the story “Reliction,” Bonnie’s response to mortality is to find solace in the physical world. Some people create art. There are other possible responses. Some are more dangerous than others.

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Soundtrack Sunday: "Wildlife Rehabilitation"

7/17/2011

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This is the little story that didn’t go away.

So: a way long time ago, circa 1979, when I was a student at the University of Texas, I was seeing a girl named Susan, who had a roommate whose name I forget, who had a boyfriend whose name I forget. The boyfriend was a volunteer with a wildlife rescue organization, and he took care of injured and orphaned birds—primarily raptors. He’d come in and out carrying these birds around—a red-tailed hawk, a golden eagle. One day he had the eagle sitting on a tether in the backyard, and the eagle killed an old lady’s cat that chose the wrong time to wander by. I was totally pissed off—said that I’d kill the eagle if it killed my cat.

That’s the origin of the story. Bad eagle kills good cat. I carried the idea around with me for years, and then when I was writing my MA thesis I pulled it out and tried to do something with it. The end result was the basic draft of “Wildlife Rehabilitation.”

Where I live in Texas the hills level out and rise into the plains and the sky opens up to swallow everything. In the fall and winter fronts blow through, cold dark clouds and wind rattling the brush and pushing birds down from the north—most notably, great numbers of hawks and eagles. When I was a young man, people hated those birds. It was not an uncommon thing to see dead eagles and hawks strung up on fenceposts along our roads, shot dead and left to rot, a warning to all other varmints. Crows and buzzards would drift by and pick at the carcasses, and most of the dead birds' feathers would float off into the brush, and finally, after a few months, by summertime, all you'd have left to see would be maybe a skeleton with one wing and a head, hanging there from a clawed foot like a grim vision of the future that awaits us all. It was something to see, all the dead birds hanging from fenceposts, but it's not so common anymore. In fact, it's not something I had seen in years, or even thought of, until my cat—his name was Festus—was killed by my neighbor’s golden eagle.

And no one liked it. My fellow writers in workshop were dissatisfied with the ending and with what they saw as the sentimentality the story as a whole, and my thesis director thought the ending was absolutely dreadful. He thought the story sucked too much to go into my thesis, and it didn’t. I kept working on it, though, adding more and more, making it increasingly complicated and dense—one version actually cracks 50 pages, and has fun and weird scenes of drugs and sex and arson and kidnapping. I came up with at least four different endings. And I didn’t like any of the changes.

But I still believed in the basic story—no kidding, I liked it! I thought there was something there!—and I submitted it to a few journals, and was rejected, and then I presented it at the Western Literature Association conference in 2007. Twister Marquiss of Southwestern American Literature was there, and he liked it a lot, and offered to publish it, and so about a year later it came out. Other people liked it, too. “Wildlife Rehabilitation” was later chosen as an honorable mention for the anthology Best of the West, edited by Seth Horton.

So, in the end, with a lot of help, this story found an audience….

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The Dope-Smokers of Leakey, Texas

7/12/2011

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I really love these photographs. No up or down about it.

I came across them when searching through public
photo archives for work I could use for the cover of my book, Long Time Ago Good—and from first glance I was wholly captivated. They’re the work of Marc St. Gil, who produced them for the Environmental Protection Agency as part of the Documerica Project.

Documerica hired 100 or so photographers to document the American environment of the mid-1970s. Over 15,000 photos were taken for the project, and every one I look at I find consistently amazing and astonishing and miraculous. I can—and have—lost hours staring into the computer screen, connecting with this past world, or trying to….

Though the project as a whole covered the entire US, I’ve concentrated on St. Gil’s Texas pictures. They really fit well with the stories in my book.

Who are these kids? What happened to them? There is an intense mystery here in these images that totally captures my heart…they're part of the great forgotten....

I don’t just love the photos—I love these people, too. I hope they’re all alive and well and happy….

In addition to the book cover, I used a series of these St. Gil photos to make a trailer for Long Time Ago Good:

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was the original shot for the book cover….

Which became this….

Documerica website is here

http://ej.msu.edu/documerica/Home/home.htm

A flickr gallery of St. Gil’s work is here….

http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/sets/72157621172730860/

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Soundtrack Sunday: "Dry Line"

7/9/2011

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Here is a story about being depressed and then having your life turn to shit….

I had only been working at my new job for seven weeks but I was already dreading going to work. Every day I grew increasingly depressed. It wasn’t the job itself that depressed me—I corrected billing statements, boring and repetitious and stupid billing statements, for a big law firm—but the woman I worked with, Debbie Peterson, who shared my office cubicle, and who seemed to be slowly, steadily, scarily, going mad.

Each morning’s elevator ride up to our office was stressful: sometimes Debbie would show up early to answer the phones until the receptionist arrived, and the doors would slide open and Debbie would be behind the reception desk grinning at the doors, at me, grinning happily but with cold blue glittering eyes. I hated that. I so much preferred to start my day calmly, to step off the elevator into an empty, quiet room.

And on my last day at work, I got what I wanted—got that much, at least….

The first time I read this in public, a woman in the audience asked, “So, did that really happen?”

I was an inexperienced performer then. I was surprised and thrown off by her question.

“What?” I asked. “No, not really.”

“Well, how really? Is that crazy woman based on somebody?”

“Uh…I’ve known a lot of crazy people.”

Some crazier than others, some crazy like this bat in the audience, right?

“But are any of them the inspiration for the woman in the story?”

“Uh…no.”

Fuck no, crazy! I thought with an exclamation point, but I answered with a mumble.

I handle some things better now—I hope….

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A Quick Book Trailer

7/5/2011

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I put this together quite quickly, but it kind of works! I guess I'm advertising Google at the same time I'm advertising That Demon Life, but, oh well....

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July 4, 1976

7/4/2011

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The Bicentennial Fourth!

I was still living in Mankato, Minnesota, and it was the summer after my father died, the summer after I graduated from high school….

On Friday the 2nd I was at a party—I can’t remember now the host, some kid I knew, I remember talking to KM and KB, and then later I went home and fell asleep listening to the radio. I very clearly remember the dream I had that night—dinosaurs, brontosaurs stomping and marching through the neighborhood, through my bedroom. I was scared but unable to move or get away as they came stomping….

Saturday the 3rd was my friend BP’s birthday, and his mom felt sorry for me or something, and so invited me along to go the family—BP, brother SP, momP and dadP— to 4th of July festivities in the town of BP’s grandparents, Cherry Grove, down on the Iowa border. BP was on home on leave from the army, and, I think, rather unhappy with the world. We drove down in the afternoon and had a birthday dinner at IHOP, and then on to Cherry Grove. Spent the evening with P-cousins and slept out that night in sleeping bags in the backyard—a vast field of stars overhead. CousinP talked about the local pastime of shooting out old televisions with shotguns. “You don’t want to breath the dust from the tubes,” he said, “you’ll get cancer….”

The morning of the 4th we took a walk down along a nearby creek and I packed out some interesting chunks of water-worn limestone. Then to Cherry Grove for the parade! How many cars and marchers were in the parade I don’t know, but it was small community and anyone who wanted to march in the parade, did. I was struck then—and am struck now, in memory, so many years later—but the total sweetness of the parade. It was nice. It made me feel good.

Then we headed back to Mankato. SP drove, and BP gave him a hard time about his driving. At home, I showered and then headed up to Blakeslee Field, the football stadium, for the fireworks show, and as I stood outside the stadium, I encountered PK, a girl I’d had a crush on since the 3rd grade. I haven’t seen her since….

Top photo: '''Fireworks''' taken by Kabir Bakie at Blue Ash Fireworks Display July 4, 2005

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Note from a Student

7/1/2011

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I hang on to student work for a long time—probably far longer than I need to—waiting for someone to stop by and ask for their final paper or portfolio back. A few do, most don’t, and the papers pile up until at last—after years, usually—I get tired of looking at them and off to the recycling they go….

And so yesterday I attacked a pile of pile of final portfolios from a creative writing class that closed up some four years ago. And written on the back of a folder was the following message:

Hi, Dr. White

I had a crazy weekend for my birthday! At the pool party I got drunk, beat the shit out of my man-friend, then got dropped on my head/face, and went to the ER. What a birthday huh? I also had a relative die Saturday :( I thought you would enjoy my little anecdote :)

Have a great summer!

FN

Notice that FN is not making an appeal to my sympathy. Nor is she using her “little anecdote” as an excuse—in fact, her portfolio, and all of her work in that class, was turned in on time. She is just an energetic kid enjoying her youth—though no doubt applying her energy in inappropriate and nonproductive ways.

Note to current and future students: don’t do this at home!

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Ordinary Horrors

Soundtrack Sunday: Speed of Sound

Soundtrack Sunday: "Reliction" and Amy Winehouse

Soundtrack Sunday: "Wildlife Rehabilitation"

The Dope-Smokers of Leakey, Texas

Soundtrack Sunday: "Dry Line"

A Quick Book Trailer

July 4, 1976

Note from a Student

Lowell Mick White

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