In Transit

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I was on the train last night heading home. Two young brothers–early teens–were standing in front of me. Both were wearing worn but clean clothes, one had his hoodie up, the other didn’t. Both had light jackets—too flimsy for the weather and knockoff hightop sneakers. It was a look I knew all too well. It reminded me of an entire winter I spent with a blue double-knit jacket as my “winter coat.”

They were chatting usual urban teen talk. I paid little attention until I heard one of them mention what Trump had said earlier in the day about the Pope.

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The Witnesses

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Whittaker Chambers is my idea of an exemplary conservative. He dug Beats and Sorrow Songs, did in Ayn Rand in a definitive National Review piece, distanced himself from William Buckley, hung tight with his old friend James Agee, and tried to convince other conservatives Khrushchev wasn’t Stalin.

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The Revisionist Museum of Neoliberal Eternity

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I was out walking, sweaty and with hair plastered/to my face/when I saw Ernesto Cardenal approaching/from the opposite direction/and by way of greeting I said:/Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven/that is communism,/is there a place for homosexuals?/Yes, he said./And for impenitent masturbators?/For sex slaves?/For sex fools?/For sadomasochists, for whores, for those obsessed/with enemas,/for those who can’t take it anymore, those who really truly/can’t take it anymore?/And Cardenal said yes. –Bolaño

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Minds of the South

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It is, by now, well known that Atticus Finch, beloved hero of the late Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, is revealed to be a segregationist in Lee’s recently published novel Go Set a Watchman.

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Street Life…and Death

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Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy, Spiegel & Grau, 2015

I was raised during the Seventies on a cramped block of rundown tenements in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. Each building on my block was a five-floor walk-up. Each apartment–two to a floor–was a railroad-style flat. And in those apartments lived poor families raising passels of kids. Not only was this pre-gentrification but by modern hipster standards, this was downright prehistoric.

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Group Grope: The Theory of Microaggression

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Eugene Goodheart has invited responses to his new First piece (posted below) which takes in student protests against microaggressions and the more macro analysis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.[1] I’m skeptical of Goodheart’s attempt to hook-up the world-view of those students with Coates’s World. (More on that anon.) But his critique of the protesters has pushed me to think through the theory of microaggression.

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The Price of Victimhood

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Instances of police brutality and killing of unarmed Blacks, first revealed by social media, have been a catalyst for widespread expression of grievances about racism in colleges and universities.  According to 538, “the most frequently requested data by protestors was for a survey on the atmosphere in classrooms that would collect information as part of end terms evaluations of subtle forms of racism, often called microaggressions, that are committed by specific professors and lecturers.”  Microaggression: “everyday verbal, non verbal and environmental slights, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.”

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Emma Quangel’s Spooks

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Just remember this. All agents defect, and all resisters sell out. That’s the sad truth, Bill. And a writer? A writer lives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is, he files a report on it. – William Burroughs

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Morning in Iowa

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A report from an Iowa Caucus-goer.

It looks to be a long winter; Ted Cruz woke up this morning, saw his shadow, but then absolutely refused to go back in his hole.

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Fly Girl

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It was moving to read those final four pieces in First‘s tribute to Estrellita. Her writing (only one aspect of her work) seemed to just get better and better. At one point, stupidly, I thought the songy stuff was both contrived and oversimple, now it seems like the genius it was.

When I moved to a certain block in downtown Charlottesville with my ex in ‘93, Susan and I started noticing this Olds 88 (or was it a Cutlass Supreme? anyway something hilarious) always parallel-parked on the street. And it WAS old, beat out, gray. Across the back of the trunk was painted I BRAKE FOR OCD. This caught my attention since like Carmelita I was/am a sufferer. Side panels: TEXACO logo with that DO-NOT-ENTER circle painted over it, drops of blood dripping down. I could imagine talking to this person.

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Estrellita’s Last Quartet

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Carmelita (AKA Natalie) Suzanne Estrellita died last Friday.  She was 60 years old.

The transgender rhymer  was a world-class wit who realized, per Oscar Wilde, “those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.” Like Wilde, Estrellita got off some of her best shots in conversation, but many of them made it into lyrics she published in “First of the Month/Year”:  “anguish as a second language”…”loss is more”…”Am are I?”…”knee-jerk heart”…”jerk de soleil”….”you don’t know me from ishmael/I don’t know you from dick…”

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“Slow Fade” Revisited

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What follows is (a slightly compacted version of) Alex Cox’s introduction to the Drag City reprint of Rudy Wurlitzer’s novel “Slow Fade,” which takes in the screenplay Wurlitzer wrote based on the novel (and his encounters with Sam Peckinpah).  That screenplay, according to Wurlitzer, is now “in L.A. crouched in a waiting room.”  Let’s hope film scum won’t keep it in limbo…

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