Stephen McClurg's Blog, page 41

The Shilling of a Sacred Deer: Plutarch’s Sertorius and The White Fawn

I’ve mentioned my current long-term reading project is Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and how enjoyable the passages on Archimedes were. Another favorite sequence is on Quintus Sertorius.

If you’ve read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, then you’ve already got an idea of what kind of guy Sertorius was: a statesman, a member of the nobility, and a general. He died a few decades before the action of the play; however, he fought against the Pompey mentioned by Shakespeare. Sertorius went rogue (or was forced to rebel, I suppose) during civil strife in Rome. He was extremely successful–capturing an entire peninsula and having several disparate tribes come under his rule–until being assassinated in a way not dissimilar from the famous Ides of March in Shakespeare’s play.

One of the engrossing details in Plutarch’s version of Sertorius is his use of a white fawn as a means of maintaining political control. He received the doe as a gift (or payment for protection) and he was able to tame and take walks with it, even through military camps. Sertorius got the idea to use the superstitions of various groups around him to his benefit. He told them that Diana, the goddess, spoke to him through the deer. He then had his messengers and generals only speak to him about news coming from the battlefields and cities. He would then pretend that the deer was a channel through which Diana would reveal information to him. For example, if he knew about a battlefield victory, he would hide the messenger, have the deer garlanded. He would make a show of calling to the deer, and her giving the sign of victory through her decoration.

I found the white deer such an unexpected image of political and military control. I guess one could say it’s also a manipulation of superstition and belief–something much less unexpected.

From Plutarch:

Spanus, a plebeian who lived in the country, came upon a doe which had newly yeaned and was trying to escape the hunters. The mother he could not overtake, but the fawn — and he was struck with its unusual colour, for it was entirely white — he pursued and caught. And since, as it chanced, Sertorius had taken up his quarters in that region, and gladly received everything in the way of game or produce that was brought him as a gift, and made kindly returns to those who did him such favors, Spanus brought the fawn and gave it to him. Sertorius accepted it, and at the moment felt only the ordinary pleasure in a gift; but in time, after he had made the animal so tame and gentle that it obeyed his call, accompanied him on his walks, and did not mind the crowds and all the uproar of camp life, he gradually tried to give the doe a religious importance by declaring that she was a gift of Diana, and solemnly alleged that she revealed many hidden things to him, knowing that the Barbarians were naturally an easy prey to superstition. He also added such devices as these. Whenever he had secret intelligence that the enemy had made an incursion into the territory which he commanded, or were trying to bring a city to revolt from him, he would pretend that the doe had conversed with him in his dreams, bidding him hold his forces in readiness. Again, when he got tidings of some victory won by his generals, he would hide the messenger, and bring forth the doe wearing garlands for the receipt of glad tidings, exhorting his men to be of good cheer and to sacrifice to the gods, assured that they were to learn of some good fortune.

By these devices he made the people tractable, and so found them more serviceable for all his plans; they believed that they were led, not by the mortal wisdom of a foreigner, but by a god. 

And later:

He was now greatly disheartened because that doe of his was nowhere to be found; for he was thus deprived of a wonderful contrivance for influencing the Barbarians, who at this time particularly stood in need of encouragement. Soon, however, some men who were roaming about at night on other errands came upon the doe, recognized her by her colour, and caught her. When Sertorius heard of it he promised to give the men a large sum of money if they would tell no one of the capture, and after concealing the doe and allowing several days to pass, he came forth with a glad countenance and proceeded to the tribunal, telling the leaders of the Barbarians that the deity was foretelling him in his dreams some great good fortune. Then he ascended the tribunal and began to deal with the applicants. And now the doe was released by her keepers at a point close by, spied Sertorius, and bounded joyfully towards the tribunal, and standing by his side put her head in his lap and licked his hand, as she had been wont to do before. Sertorius returned her caresses appropriately and even shed a few tears, whereupon the bystanders were struck with amazement at first, and then, convinced that Sertorius was a marvellous man and dear to the gods, escorted him with shouts and clapping of hands to his home, and were full of confidence and good hopes.

From the Eunoia Archives: An Interview with Writer Emma Bolden

You can follow Emma on Twitter and at A Century of Nerve, and why not check out her new book House Is an Enigma, as well. It’s fantastic. Originally published at Eunoia Solstice in 2017.

It’s been a privilege to read Emma Bolden’s work for a decade now and a pleasure to be continually surprised by it. On the rare occasions someone asks me about poets they should read or poets from Alabama, she’s likely the first I mention.

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I love the frequently haunted personae of her poems, often women stuck in broken buildings, broken relationships, and even broken bodies. That may sound heavy, like all downer, but when there is melancholy, it’s never purely that. The poems reflect multiple emotive qualities, like small, chipped mirrors. There are lights in the darkness, no matter how small or far away.

The following is from a recent online conversation.

The first work I read of yours, How to Recognize a Lady, is influenced by an etiquette guide for women. One of the latest collections, Maleficae, is influenced by some interesting primary source reading about the European witch trials. You’ve also written some found poems using reality television as sources.

My feeling is that there is a through line here and part of it seems to be how we define or have our place in the world defined in some way for us, in general, as humans, and particularly in these works, as women. (And now that I think about it Geography V and medi(t)ations fit into this theme, but seem to have different inspirations.)

Were these projects consciously begun with these organizational principles and influences or were they developed through writing a few poems and then seeing a theme?

I have to confess that I don’t often know what’s going to happen when I head to the blank page; by the same token, I don’t usually realize when I’ve begun a new project. When I do try to intentionally begin a new project, I always seem to stop short — I’ve tried to write a book of poems about Anna O., off-and-on, for the past ten or so years, and I never quite seem to get there. The same has happened with a series of poems in conversation with the works of St. Teresa of Avila. I’ve just had to accept that I write best when I begin by wandering — or, I guess, allowing myself to wander — in a formless wilderness.

The same happens with sources: I’ll find myself working through an obsession in my reading, and then I’ll find it creeping into my writing. You are absolutely right that there’s a through-line, and that through-line has to do with the ways in which we are defined and documented by others. A lot of the time, that “we” is women. I wish I could say that I’ve been conscious of and consciously pursued that, but I haven’t: the through-line shows up in my whims, which often become my obsessions, which often become my work. I started collecting vintage etiquette books after coming across a couple of cast-off textbooks from the 1960’s at a thrift store in Alabaster, Alabama. I actually cut out a lot of the images and made collages on the covers of notebooks I used in college, and then some of the images found their way into drawings I made for a college class, and then, two years later, the language started to appear in my poems in graduate school (which later gathered together to become How to Recognize a Lady). I read obsessively about the witch trials and religicomagical practices in early modern Europe for about a year and a half before I realized I was writing a book; it took another year and a half to get that book on the page. The reality television poems came out of a kind of pop-culture-obsessed desperation: I’d been writing a poem-a-day for months while trying to balance my own writing with an intense workload. At the same time, I’d developed what I would like to call a healthy obsession with two kinds of reality television shows themselves obsessed with portrayals of women: the Real Housewives franchise and true crime series, like Dateline and 48 Hours. I was able to justify taking time to watch television by crafting found poems from the language I heard.

In a lot of ways, my technique, focus, and purpose in these projects is the same — finding my way inside of the kind of language and image used to portray women, breaking it apart and putting it back together to reclaim the point-of-view — but the subjects have been fields into which I luckily wandered.

I initially began by poring over the books and then I decided to look at the last two years on your blog and the publications over that time. I realized I had missed several, including the Barthelme Prize Winner “Gifted.” And then I felt like we could do the whole interview based around this one piece!

There are several wonderful lines here. Some heart-wrenching. I love “We were of an age but never of age.” The wordplay there, while being dark, also makes me laugh. A lot of this work deals in not only opposites, like the ending, but transitions. Like the doors and windows, openings, places of transitions, which mean “danger” in the poem when the traditional view is often of open passages being pleasant. And the girls in the piece, while looking like tough women (“We came to school with our breasts, with our combat boots.”) are also the children sliding in their socks on the tiled floor. Another symbolic antithesis of transformation is the skim milk versus the chocolate milk.

Did this work begin as a poem? Was there any struggle in finding its form? Did the symbolic antithesis develop or was it there at the beginning, since this seems like a threshold work–in the sense of transition and in a Campbellian sense (threshold guardians, caves, etc.).

Though it won a prize for short prose, I’ve always considered it to be a poem. It’s a bit far over on the edge, I think, and I can easily see it tripping and falling into the territory of short fiction (or nonfiction), but I still see it as a poem. This piece was a tremendous gift in that it came along with its form: I used the form of a prose poem along with poetic elements like repetition because the juxtaposition felt right. I wanted to combine the feeling of breathlessness with the pressures of the confines of prose because it felt honest to the subject.

It’s also about the abuses of power. And it’s doubly disturbing since we’re talking about children. Do you want to speak to the subject matter?

I’ve learned since this poem was published that these kinds of dangerous teacher/student relationships are more terrifyingly common than I’d feared. Every time I read it, someone in the audience tells me their own gut-wrenching version of this story. I think this is a pervasive phenomenon, especially in private schools and gifted programs. Some gifted programs get things very right when it comes to protecting students and making sure that they are safe. I went to a gifted camp at Western Kentucky University for two years and was lucky enough to teach in it one year, too, and it was wonderful. We were encouraged to take intellectual risks and grapple with some very grown-up academic ideas; at the same time, we were still kids, and the teachers and counselors reminded us of that by giving us spaces to be silly and creative and act like, well, kids. At other schools, gifted children are treated only like adults, which can lead to the kinds of dangers I describe in “Gifted.”

I recently read “After Auden,” which was a finalist for the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize. What led you to the hoopoe? It’s wonderfully specific like the bows on the necks of the doves in the Auden poem, but operates differently. The hoopoe’s calls also echo ideas in the poems: “Oop! Oop!” (The Almighty Oops–the deadly serious, yet often cartoonish aspect of life–Maybe the impossibilities of the poems.) “Char!” (I think of this as a kind of burning of the world in the poems.) And “Tii!” the sound of young hunger that seems echoed in the last image of your poem.

I honestly wasn’t aware at all of the sound the bird makes when I wrote the poem, and I am now thrilled to know that it’s relevant and even resonant. I used the hoopoe because of its connection to the underworld in legend, which I first discovered when I was researching religicomagical practices in early modern Europe for Maleficae. They were painted on tombs in ancient Egypt, and, like many birds, considered harbingers of death in parts of Europe.

The Auden poem is dark. The Millay poem reminds me of kensho (enlightenment) experiences I have read about. Your poem seems to start with the Auden, move through the Millay (the natural and ocean images also remind me of Maya Deren’s short film “At Land”), and then end with something that, in the way that Millay’s poem could be seen to unite light and dark or life and death, attempts to resolve the Auden with the Millay.  

I suppose that’s not really a question. Did anything in particular draw you to these poems?

I’m intrigued by the connection between my poem and Millay’s, which used to be one of my favorites — so much so that, during graduate school, I kept a print-out of it taped to my refrigerator. I still love the poem, but it doesn’t carry the same kind of resonance for me that it did then. At that point in my life, I felt very much tied to and rushed by my own race against my own fertility. I’ve known since I was very young — thirteen years old, probably — that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for me to have children, and that if I wanted to have them, I had to do it as soon as possible. My attachment to Millay’s poem grew out of my attachment to this idea, to this race against time, which, I felt, echoed the experience of that tree. My reading of it is very different now that I have had a total hysterectomy and I don’t have those same kinds of attachments (and obsessions, and anxiety, and constant preoccupation with the facts of time and my own body). When I read the poem now, I get to the part about the tree and I let out a sigh of relief. “Finally.” That’s the thing I think every time, because I’m thinking not of the tree as a lonely, sad thing but as a beautiful place of peace where so many of the body’s burdens have been lifted and left behind. Finally.

What’s inspiring you lately?

Hopkins! I doubt that I’ll ever understand sprung rhythm (though I also doubt there is a way to understand it completely), but I can’t get enough of the sound of his work.

Can you talk about your own experience and thinking about form in poetry? Have you ever felt like you’ve “figured it out” or finally have a philosophy about it and then watched your own work break all those rules you came to intellectually?

The things I love most about form is that I will never figure it out or fully develop a philosophy about it. I try, from time to time, but it’s kind of like developing a philosophy about breathing. Poetry and form are intertwined in my mind: when I’m writing in free verse, I’m thinking about form, and vice versa. Actually, I think of free verse in terms of form and prosody, so that’s a bit of a misnomer that illustrates how terribly difficult it is for me to even think clearly about what it would mean to separate the two. I was very lucky to have teachers who cared about form early on. One of the most difficult and rewarding classes I ever took was a Prosody class in — 10th grade, I think? It was tremendously hard and I admit that I spent quite a few bathroom breaks crying in the girl’s room (that was basically my sport in high school), but oh my God was it beneficial. I was also lucky to work with several New Formalists at the Sewanee Young Writers Conference, and working inside of form there led me to find ways to live inside form no matter what kind of poetry (or prose!) I’m writing.

I notice in some work you will use an ampersand. Given your sensitivity to form, how do you decide when to use an ampersand?

Ampersands have existed in my drafts for as long as I can remember. I tend to write my first drafts by hand (or in quick bursts on an app on my phone), and I tend to write them very quickly — the words always seem to come to mind faster than I can get them on paper — so I use ampersands. I started using them in later drafts as a way to make the poem feel more intimate. This may perhaps be a trick I play on myself: since it’s closer to the way I make language in my earliest drafts, it puts me in a place that’s more raw, open, intimate, direct. I often use it in poems that follow the process of my mind making meaning. There’s a formal effect, too: I’ve long been fascinated by the prosodic bones of free verse, especially in the work of poets like cummings and Creeley, who often arranged language on the page in such a way as to make it move with great speed down the page. The ampersand facilitates that, and it also created a shorter hop from idea/word/image to idea/word/image.

On the one hand, this makes sense to me. I feel like I get it. On the other hand, I feel maybe similar to the way you do when tackling sprung rhythm!

What are you reading, watching, or listening to just for fun? (If “just for fun” really exists for a writer.)

I’m going through a strange transition at the moment: after a lifetime obsession with reality TV, I find myself turning away from the screen, at least when the Housewives are on it. It’s been happening since the election, and perhaps the problem is that I just can’t celebrate that kind of petty cruelty on TV. I do still have a healthy obsession with Dateline/48 Hours (and Discovery ID, natch). In terms of listening: Beyoncé and Solange are always in the rotation. Lorde’s new album gives me life. I recently read Emma Cline’s The Girls (every sentence is a miracle of craftsmanship), which sent me into a Mamas and the Papas spiral.

I know you’ve had a variety of difficulties to face, but Best American Poetry and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, within a year of each other, right? How is it going? How does all that feel? Does it make the submission process easier or is there more pressure?

I admit that it took me a long time to answer this one, longer than the others, because I kind of just kept thinking to myself, “Well, how does it feel?” And the only answer I can really come up with is, “Well, it doesn’t feel.” I mean, in a lot of ways it does. Those were two of the most significant, amazing, beautiful, humbling, magnificent, frightening, wonderful events of my life. I look at it as a responsibility: I don’t think I ever really considered the question of readership intensely before because I didn’t imagine people would read what I wrote. Now, I feel like there’s a chance that people might actually see the things I make, so I have a responsibility to make better things, to say things that I feel are most important and vital to say, even if they aren’t comfortable. The part of the process this has affected the most is the process itself. I feel like I have a responsibility to push past my own fears and hang-ups to get to a place where the work may frighten me, but it’s a fear that feels right in the gut. That sense of responsibility is also a gift, and one that helps me to focus on the work itself, not where the work ends up. This may also be due to the fact that I’ve transitioned out of an academic position where frequency of publication stood above all else.

The submission process feels like a separate thing.

What’s next? 

I’ve got some poems coming out soon that I’m very excited about. I just finished a radical reconstruction of a manuscript I’ve been sending around for a while — it’s been a finalist a few times, but I think it needed some major work, and I’m hopeful about sending it out again soon. I’m finishing another round of revisions to my memoir and starting a collection about the Deep South.

Thanks to Emma Bolden for taking time for this correspondence.

Little Billboards #69

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Every banner says
“Now Hiring” victims.
The task of the branded.

Little Billboards #14

I feel as out of
place as the steel drums on the 
Commando soundtrack.

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Scary Stories Treasury: Alvin Schwartz, illustrated by Stephen Gammell
I missed this collection of revamped urban legends and folk myths when I was a kid. I went from Godzilla in kindergarten, to the TV edit of Jaws in first grade, to Stephen King books and adaptations by second. I can only guess, but I figure my response to Scary Stories was that it looked like kids’ stuff.

And it mostly is. And that’s ok. I can’t wait until my kids are old enough to share this with them.

I was surprised after sitting down and reading it that I had heard almost every story in some form or another. “The Hook” I had read in King’s Danse Macabre decades ago and in other places. I bet more than a few of the re-tellings I know can be traced back to this book.

Besides the artwork by Stephen Gammell–a perfect mix of realism and abstract grotesquerie–my favorite part of the book is all the bibliographic information. I love reading about the beginnings and variations of urban legends and the author documents all of his sources and some of the variants. The bibliography gave me chills. Intense dork chills.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
What I have heard most about the film adaptation is a complaint that it isn’t scary. I just figured it would be a kids’ movie, akin to Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), Monster Squad (1987), or The Lady in White (1988). In that sense, it didn’t disappoint.

I enjoyed the movie, especially watching it with my wife because she grew up reading and being scared by the books. The ghouls were a joy and straight off the pages of the book. Again, I hope to watch this with the kids when they get older.

I like how the film oriented its story around a town’s history and the larger setting of Vietnam-era America. There are real consequences for characters’ actions. Children are not spared, just as the young going to war are not spared. It does have me wondering, especially after a recent revisit of The Changeling (1980), do ghost stories have to be tied to former evil deeds? I’m interested in possible alternatives to ghost stories. Maybe that’s all haunting is. Maybe I may have not dug enough.

The early part of the film uses a muted color scheme with lots of light blues, yellows, and oranges, seemingly recreating older film stock. During the Pale Lady sequence, an HD look takes over that was jarring to me. I couldn’t understand why the look of the film shifted so much until it started getting into high contrast green and red lighting. The film seemed to continue with a digital look as more CG monsters began infesting the lives of the characters.

Overall, I liked that the myths were particular to the characters’ lives, and that they were all haunted in some way, suggesting we all have our own fears, our own personal scary stories.

It isn’t a glamorous thing to do, but you have to do it: Recent Reading

Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power: Sady Doyle

I gulped this down in one sitting, so I’ll have to come back to it in order to write more substantially about it. It hits many of my areas of interest: Gothic literature, monsters, mythology, horror movies (the title is a reference to Psycho), cultural criticism, and philosophy.

Doyle covers horror movies, Mary Shelley, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and the Brontës–all I needed to know before grabbing this one. Doyle covers true-life horrors, largely performed against women, along with fictional counterparts. It’s going in the re-read stack soon.

The Women of David Lynch: ed. by Scott Ryan and David Bushman
Speaking of dead blondes and bad mothers. The best part about this collection is that it contains a variety of feminine perspectives on an artist that I’ve been thinking about for almost thirty years. And even though all the writers are women, they disagree with each other. There isn’t one feminist or feminine perspective, which is something that gets lost on pundits who never define their terms–or just don’t want to because a straw woman argument is easier. I find the differing opinions interesting and valuable and challenging.

Initially, one of the challenges for me was the variety of approaches that qualify as “essays.” Some read like lists or journal entries. At first this bugged me, but later I appreciated these approaches. Maybe they just weren’t designed for me as a reader. Maybe I’ll be more open to them on a second read. I should have expected this, since it is not strictly an academic collection. Women artists, singers, and curators all contributors.

This is another one I gulped down in almost a single reading.

Also, Charlotte Stewart has a book out and I found out she was Miss Beadle!

True West: Sam Shepard
The first play I read by Shepard was Buried Child and I immediately engrossed in it. It felt like the first time I read Endgame. True West didn’t have the same effect, but it’s one that I want to see live because I felt I was missing something–I know that’s the case with drama, but sometimes the page experience can be akin to the stage.

On a first read, I appreciated the menace the older brother Lee had. There was a sense that anything could go wrong at any time with him around. And it mostly does.

If on a winter’s night a traveler: Italo Calvino
I posted about this one earlier and I feel like if you’re a book nerd and enjoy writers like Rabelais, Borges, and Stanislaw Lem, then this is going to be a lot of fun.

I’ve heard it referred to as hypermetafiction. It’s a book about making books and the act of reading them. The shifting genres and perspectives felt like reading straight through a Choose Your Own Adventure without following any choices.

Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #13: Palm’s Rock Island

You can read this at The Drunken Odyssey.

From the Eunoia Archives: Coker’s Para-Philosophical Advice

I took John Coker’s intro to philosophy class my first semester of college and eventually took a class or directed study with him every semester for the next four years. I spent hours talking to him about music, literature, and philosophy. I still have books he gave me. I feel lucky that I was able to tell him how much he meant to me. He always shrugged this kind of thing off. John died in 2015.

A few years ago, I worked with him at a literary website. I wanted him to do a sort of Anne Landers meets philosophy column, but knowing his duties (and how long he would converse in and out of his office!) I wanted to make it as easy as possible for him. We finished three entries and they’re below.

I sent questions for a fourth column but never heard back. Later he began posting about various psychological and health issues. I understood. We still talked once in a while and shared music. 

In the columns, he answered questions about applying philosophy to life, his own intellectual interests, his mentors, and music. Enjoy!

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1. How did you become interested in philosophy?

In undergraduate my original career plan was to become a Lutheran minister. I spent Freshman year (1974-1975) in an Honors Program at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana, where I took an entire course on Aristotle. I transferred to the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (the Hawkeyes), for my remaining three years (1975-1978). I decided to study both Philosophy and Religion, and I graduated, with Honors, as a double major in them. Iowa Philosophy was Anglo-American Analytic, but my favorite teacher in Religion was Robert Scharlemann, who had been a student of Paul Tillich (who directed his Ph.D. thesis) and who had also studied under Heidegger. From him I studied Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. All of that compounded into my love for philosophy.

2. What is a philosopher’s ideal day like?

Aristotle says that Philosophy requires hesuchia, leisure. I would spend morning having coffee and engaging in philosophical discussion (like Socrates), then go home and read and write the day away, and return to have dinner with excellent philosophical discussants.

3. What concerns are you thinking or writing about currently?

I am currently writing hybrid poetry (akin to the German Romantics) which I dub ‘para-philosophy.’

4. Do you have any favorite philosophical works of literature?

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus.

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1. Why is fun so popular?

This shouldn’t even be a question.  People (the populace) like fun.  Fun is enjoyable.  Also, each person is at full liberty to define what for him- or her-self counts as “fun.”  Perhaps that is why it is so popular.

2. Describe a mentor or mentors who changed your life. 

a) Robert Scharlemann, Prof. of Religion, University of Iowa (when I attended from 1976-1978).  He was a German immigrant who fled the Nazis, who studied and wrote his Ph.D. Thesis under the great Lutheran Theologian Paul Tillich.  He also took some courses with Heidegger.  He introduced me to the great German Philosophers (Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, et al.) and Lutheran Theologians (Tillich, etc.) of the 19th and 20th Centuries.  He was my Honors Thesis Director.  Prof. Scharlemann left Iowa over a decade ago to take up an Endowed Chair at the University of Virginia. [University of Iowa Philosophy, in which I also graduated with honors, was Anglo-American Analytic.]

b) William (Bill) R. Schroeder, a University of Michigan Ph.D. in Philosophy.  I took my first course from Bill in Fall 1979, and continued to take courses from him every semester,  including my Ph.D. Thesis courses (he was my Ph.D. Thesis Director) until I finished.   He above all introduced me to the world of ‘Continental’ Philosophy, especially Hegel, Phenomenology, and Existentialism.  Bill became a friend while I was a graduate student, and remains my friend to this day.  I visit him whenever I make it back to Illinois, which is only in August.

c) Lawrence Schehr.  When I arrived at the University of South Alabama in 1986, three members of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature took me under their wing:  Bernie Quinn, Carol Lloyd, and Larry Schehr.  Larry spent one year as a Medical Student at Johns Hopkins University [note: one of the most highly ranked programs in the country], but got bored and shifted over to study foreign languages.  He was a genius at languages and many other things as well.  Larry taught me HOW to deconstruct.  Together we attended three conferences at the University of Alabama, two of which had both Derrida and De Man and their students, and one had Derrida along with his and De Man’s students.  Schehr introduced me into the world of what in Philosophy is called ‘French Post-Structuralism’ and its equivalent in Literary Theory.  I became addicted (much to my friend Bill Schroeder’s disgust) to deconstruction/destructuration etc.  He left the University of South Alabama about 10 years ago to become Chair of the Department of Languages at North Carolina State, and then left to take up an Endowed Chair and become an Associate Dean at my Alma Mater, the University of Illinois.  I began losing contact with him.  He, alas, died about 1 1/2 years ago.

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It’s rumored that you were seen slam dancing at several Black Flag shows in the ’80s. Is this true? What are you listening to these days?

When I landed in Fall 1978 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to attend my first year of law school, I had only heard about but never heard any punk rock.  My first day there I tuned into the University of Illinois radio station, which exclusively played punk rock and new wave.  I was wowed!

In October 1978, I saw the Ramones perform live at the older auditorium on the quad on campus, and was blown away.  I also discovered a great campus-town bar that fall, Mabels, which over the years I frequented (Fall 1978 through Spring 1986) that brought in many L.A. hardcore bands.  (Aiding and abetting this invasion of L.A. punk into Chambana was a law school classmate whose father was a record producer in Los Angeles and who had the connections.)

Slam-dancing didn’t hit full throttle until around 1980 or so (before then we pogo-ed).  I not only attended two Black Flag performances at Mabels (slam-dancing, of course), but partied with them afterwards.  I remember that the second time I saw and partied with them was when My War came out.  Among other notable punk groups I saw at Mabels were the Circle Jerks and Fear, along with more new-wavey sounding punkers like the Motels.  I can’t remember all of them.  I caught the Dead Kennedys at a dive on the north side of Chicago when In God We Trust Inc. came out:  that was the most hard-hitting slam-dancing I ever experienced.  I still consider myself a punker, albeit a geezer punker.

Nowadays, I mostly watch and listen to ballet and opera DVDs.  I have loads of classical music CDs and mp3s of which I am an aficionado (including 20th Century composers that many people find unlistenable and who never get played on WHIL).

My favorite genres in rock, of which I have giant collections, are, in historical order:

1. ’50s Rockabilly
2. ’50s Rhythm and Blues
3. British Invasion [the first 33 1/3 rpm vinyl record I ever bought was The Best of the Herman’s Hermits]
4. late-’60s-early-’70s psychedelic (a.k.a. Acid Rock) [note: the second 33 1/3 rpm vinyl album I ever bought, in 1967, was Are     You Experienced by the Jimi Hendrix Experience:  it changed my life forever]
5. Metal [the third 33 1/3 rpm vinyl album I ever bought, in 1968, was Black Sabbath’s first album, and I continue to love all sorts of metal so long as it is high speed with lots of flashy fast guitar licks]
6. Punk Rock!!!
7. New Wave
8. Grunge Rock

The last group who I truly loved for their music and message was Rage Against the Machine.

*(Editors’ Note: You can ask about the meaning of life or ask about advice for the perfect gift for your husband, but be aware no one may like any of the answers [or even the questions]. Don’t let that stop you. Ask away–just know that Dr. Coker and Eunoia Solstice aren’t responsible for results–good or bad. We hope we may offer a service here, but also this is done in a spirit of fun. We don’t know what Dr. Coker will or will not answer and he has that right to choose. He might be able to tell you which translation is best for Plato’s works or why Derrida’s work is important or a sham. And he might not. He may be able to help you choose lemon or lime flavoring. And he might not.)

 

Sounds in the Mockingbird Mound with Scott Bazar

Here’s the second in a series of collaborations with Florida-based composer/improviser Scott Bazar. I can’t recommend his audio/visual work enough.

Here’s my post on our earlier collaboration. More on the way…(I have to finish a couple of videos first.)

Little Billboards #78

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Priorities
Growing, its package solid.

A tool movement portrait,
wake-up call, super-size serving.

This is a scantily examined anatomical portrait.
Talented. Considerable.

A good long time for this age of disease.
A flair–an arsenal–points the way.

We are the drive-through window,
a picture peppered with barbarism,

lets selves glint in gusto.