It wasn’t a big deal or was it? Keifer stared at the baby for a long time. Archie was sleeping, right? He put the slobbery dog toy, next to Archie’s little red ear, SQUEAK-SQUEAK-SQUEAK. Archie didn’t move—not even an eyelash.
Better than his stupid fucking crying, thought Keifer. “Good boy.” Like Archie was the dog. Who always ran, like a chocolate streak, for the bedroom when Keifer trounced down the hall in his shiny paratrooper boots. It was rough being a dad when you’re seventeen.
It was hot, but after he jacked-off—all sweaty. Keifer preheated the oven to 425 degrees for a Tombstone Pizza. He sat on the couch, eating a thick slice with hot cheese and red sauce dripping on his olive green PTSD T-shirt, watching WAR movies.
The explosions, helicopters flattening the elephant grass, M-60 machine gunfire, were so loud, people walking by the dirty white bungalow, with big yellow dandelions sticking up, ducked for a second, thinking an active shooter was on the loose.
If the baby had been crying, Keifer couldn’t hear it, anyway.
CJA
(Ed note–CJA is also a great photographer and we would like to refresh the readerships’ memory with a few of our favorites by him–Leila and Dale)
When he was five years old, his mother got down on his level, as she often did. But this time, she told him something different, something he’d never heard before.
She told him he was going to spend the summer with his Grandmother.
And that she herself, his mother, would come to visit him a lot, with his father; but they also wouldn’t be seeing him for a while.
And she immediately informed him, before he panicked, that this was a good thing – NOT a bad thing, and certainly not a punishment of any kind.
She reassured him about how much both she and his father loved him (and he already knew that very well, since they had showered him with love and attention since day one).
Then she told him that he was going to stay with his grandmother for the summer because his grandmother had things to teach him that only she, his grandmother, could teach him.
He couldn’t wait to get going.
…
He wasn’t scared or nervous at all as his mother drove him north from their very modest Detroit suburb to the thumb area of Michigan, where his grandmother lived in a trailer park on the edge of a small town.
It was a town that was made up mostly of German American and French American people who almost all claimed Indian blood of some kind, usually Chippewa or Iroquois. All the small merchants of the town were former farmers who served all the many farmers who lived spread way out all around the town. It was, and is, some of the most fertile land not just in the USA, but in the world. The town was (and is) fifteen miles away from Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes.
His grandmother was what can only be called a kind of German mystic, although no one called her that.
But they all came to her when they needed something.
Not when they needed money, because she didn’t have any of that.
But when they needed consolation, needed healing, needed advice, needed a friend, needed someone to listen to them without passing judgement, they came to her.
His mother dropped him off in front of his grandmother’s trailer with his little suitcase. She didn’t make sure he was safely inside or anything. She just picked him up, hugged him, kissed him, said goodbye, then gently put him down and shoved him toward the door of the trailer, where his grandmother was waiting inside.
And then she drove away.
…
At first he and his grandmother didn’t do anything special.
And he almost never got bored, because whenever he started getting too bored, he retreated, and entered a world that no one else around him could see. They thought he was in a trance, but he knew he was somewhere special.
It was a world of the imagination, filled with wild characters, wonderful animals, amazing adventures, the ability to literally fly wherever and whenever he wanted, and also to turn invisible and roam around, wherever and whenever he wanted to.
And they watched a lot of TV.
And she sometimes told him stories about the family, in her quiet voice, what it was like on the ship coming over from Germany, accidents or good things that had happened to people on the farm, wild and crazy things the farm animals had done, stories about weather and storms and harvests, stories about sickness and healing.
And sometimes she read to him, especially about Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh, and even more often than that, from the Bible, stories about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark and the animals and the rainbow, Moses, David and Goliath, Joseph and the coat of many colors, Job and the Whirlwind, Jeremiah and the well, Jonah and the whale, Jesus and his mother, Mary, and the adventures of Paul while he was spreading the Gospel, like Johnny Appleseed in America, who she also told him all about, many times. There was only one picture on the walls of the trailer, and it was a picture of Jesus’ face. He wasn’t being crucified in the picture. In the picture, he was quietly smiling upward with mysterious eyes and a weird kind of halo light falling down behind his head onto his shoulders out of the clear blue sky.
And then one day they started planting things.
Some of the things were flowers, and other things were other, small, green plants.
And she showed him how to plant, how to dig in the soil, how to treat the plants tenderly, how to place them where they now belonged, how to put the dirt back on top, how to pack it all down snugly, but not too snugly, how to water the earth.
And they planted things all in and around the trailer park on the edge of the town.
Then one day when he was sitting on the couch looking at a Bible picture book with all the grown men with their long hair and beards, and the beautiful women in their flowing robes with their flowing, long, beautiful hair, he smelled something wonderful. It was a loaf of bread she was baking.
A little later she showed him the loaf of bread under a kitchen towel. His mouth watered and it looked wonderful.
She told him they needed to go take the bread to a man she wanted him to meet.
…
She drove slowly, cautiously, patiently, calmly, and fearlessly.
She had strong, gnarled hands, a simple bracelet on one wrist, and her long, graying, pretty hair was pulled back with a simple blue ribbon around it.
They drove for a long time.
They didn’t talk, and they were completely comfortable around one another not talking.
They both enjoyed just going, the wheels flying over the road, the farm fields all around them always with trees in the distance.
The man they were going to meet was called Old Joe.
That wasn’t his name, but it was what they called him.
Old Joe was a local legend.
He was such a local legend that stories about him had appeared in the local newspaper a few times, and even on the local TV news station one time.
He lived way out in the middle of nowhere, alone, in a shack, in the middle of a huge, vast field with trees and a river in the distance, and a few huge trees that loomed over and sheltered his shack with their leaf-filled arms.
Except he didn’t live alone.
As the boy’s grandmother pulled the car over to the side of the road by the field where the shack was way over there, she pointed, and he saw that there was a whole, huge pack of gigantic dogs lounging around on the ground around the shack.
She told him that there were at least twelve dogs.
And then he saw the goats.
The little goats were all leaping and jumping and playing and shivering with joy in the tall grass of the field. They were bumping into each other and munching and chomping on grass and little scrub trees in the field. A goat shot away from the rest of them and one of the dogs leapt up and shot after the goat and circled around it, bringing it back, and they looked like they were playing a game on the way back.
His grandmother and himself got out of the car, and started walking across the field toward the shack and the dogs and the goats on a little trail. They held hands as they went and his grandmother held the loaf of bread under her other arm, wrapped in the towel.
The dogs all came over in a pack wagging their huge tails and greeting them. The goats kept to themselves but seemed to start jumping around even more, almost like they were excited by the visitors.
But Old Joe was nowhere around.
They sat down in a couple of old, broken-down chairs that were sitting outside the shack and they waited for him in the warm sunlight as they petted the shaggy dogs and talked to the shaggy, friendly, wagging-tail dogs, and laughed and waved at the goats, some of whom started approaching them and looking at them with curious eyes before bounding away again.
And before very long they saw a man approaching them across the field from the direction of the river.
He walked slowly and steadily and when he was about half way toward where they were he raised his hand and waved at them one simple time.
When the man got to where they were, the boy was shocked, and almost terrified for a few seconds, but then just fascinated.
Old Joe wore a beat-up old black hat that came down very low almost covering his eyes. His eyes beneath the brim of the hat were the darkest, most intense eyes the boy had ever seen. The man’s nose was large and he had a gigantic mustache covering his mouth and a huge, dark, graying, tangled beard that came down to the middle of his chest. He wore a suit of old, black, tattered clothes that was dusty and filled with patches. He had old, battered boots on his feet.
And he never said a word, not even hello.
He just came over to the boy’s grandmother who handed him the loaf of bread. As Old Joe went over to take the bread into the shack, a bird swooped down out of one of the trees over the shack and landed on his shoulder. It rode his shoulder into the shack, and when Old Joe came back out of the shack, the bird flew back up into the tree again and landed in the leafy green branches.
Old Joe pulled over another old, broken-down chair from over behind the shack, and then he sat down right next to the boy. Old Joe leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and just sat there, very close to the boy, while his grandmother continued to pet the dogs and talk to them. Old Joe never said a word. Not one word.
Pretty soon the boy’s grandmother and Old Joe just looked at each other. They both had tiny, small smiles in and around their eyes. No one ever said a word.
Then the boy’s grandmother said it was time to get going. Old Joe just sat there, elbows on knees. The dogs surrounded him, like they were protecting him.
The boy and his grandmother held hands again as they walked back to the car on the little trail through the beautiful, glowing green field that was now popping with harmless grasshoppers hopping all around them.
As they drove away, she told him that Old Joe was her brother; his great-uncle.
…
There was one more thing from that summer that the boy would never forget.
He didn’t remember his grandfather, who’d died right before (right before) he was born.
She told him that his grandfather visited her almost every night (but not every night), just for a few moments.
She would know when he was about to appear because she could suddenly feel it; and then he would sit gently on the other side of her bed, the bed they had shared together, only for a few, dreamlike moments that only seemed half-real.
And he came to tell her that, though it was hard to believe, everything was (even when it wasn’t) okay: now, yesterday, tomorrow, forever, and always.
(Ed. Note: I find it sad though not at all startling when people freak out over nudity. Somehow we have been trained to hate ourselves. I’m afraid that the various churches and faiths (not all–Thelema is okay with it) are responsible for it. And like war, it has caused much in the way of pain, shame and fear. We are lucky to have smart readers, but if anyone should feel a bit “off” from viewing these, I would say that you should ask yourself why? LA)
“Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing…” – Jack London, The Call of the Wild
I realized recently how much I love going outside when I couldn’t go outside.
I couldn’t go outside because I live in Chicagoland, and the other day we had, by far, the worst air quality in the world. The AQI was at nine hundred million billion zillion or some such number.
The air was truly toxic and as soon as you stepped outside, as soon as you stepped outside, you knew it.
It was like a yellow and grayish toxic fog of smudge filling the air everywhere that made your lungs burn. The dogs, too, started coughing. You literally could not stay outside unless wearing a mask, and last time I checked, dogs can’t wear masks, thus, you had to take them out quickly to do their business (if you have dog/s) and then right back inside.
It was wildfires from Canada, hundreds of miles away, that were causing this dystopian, toxic situation.
The smoke blew down from there to here, mixed with the city air and the 105-degree F “real feel” temperature, and created the toxic air.
Even the professional baseball games were canceled. All the Lake Michigan beaches (28 straight miles of free public beaches in the city of Chicago alone) were closed.
I am not a person who needs a mountaintop, a seashore, or a desert on a daily basis, although I have been known to travel to those kinds of places frequently in the past, and I go down to visit Lake Michigan pretty frequently. (Lake Michigan is 307 miles long and 118 miles wide at its widest, with a maximum depth of over 900 feet: i.e., an inland sea, connected to four other inland seas and forming the Earth’s largest fresh water system, or 20% of the world’s surface fresh water. There will be a lot of people trying to move to this area by the end of the century.)
But all I need on a daily basis is some trees (or even one tree), some flowers, some grass (or snow in winter), a few parks, or the local, humble forest preserves, which look modest and are actually filled to overflowing with such creatures as: frogs, toads, snakes, turtles, bees, beetles, butterflies, dragonflies, praying mantises, other insects, hawks, herons, ducks, geese, song birds, other birds, deer, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, skunks, rabbits, river otters, muskrats, and even some beavers. And even the fish in the river must’ve been coughing during the latest Toxic-Sludge-Air Event. (Hemingway roamed this area as a teenager and John Wayne Gacy dumped bodies into this river 25 miles upstream which, to me, shows the best and the worst of humanity all coming together at the river.)
And when you can’t go outside, you start to get cabin fever. (Or: when I can’t go outside, I start to get cabin fever.)
Cabin fever usually denotes not being able to go outside because it’s too cold and there’s too much wind and snow; but now it also means not being able to go outside because when you do, it makes your eyes and your lungs burn, your hair and clothes smell like smoke, your healthy adult dogs cough, and the fact that it’s hard to breathe out there starts giving you the fantods (and the heebie-jeebies) because there’s an onslaught of toxic particles infesting your lungs and eyes – literally, seriously; like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft horror story (not exaggerating here) and that self-admitted weird guy could really make up some creepy stuff. Weird Tales, indeed.
If you start feeling like you’re in the middle of an H.P. Lovecraft short story and it’s real life, do something!
I suggest putting your mind above it all, like Jesus on the cross (even though there’s also a time to shout out, “Why have you forsaken me!?”).
Sitting Bull used to sit down in the middle of bullets whizzing all around his head, pack his pipe calmly, and sit there smoking his pipe, calmly, while all the bullets continued whizzing around his head.
No one knows why, but all the bullets missed, all of the times, except once when he was younger, and at the end.
And I realized that when I can’t go outside, I start to go insane.
Then we had a Noah’s Ark and the Rainbow moment here.
I woke up today and the sky was blue and clear, and the air was okay again, just like that: and the temperature was perfect enough at a “real feel” of just 90 degrees F.
When I was a little kid, about fifty years ago (I’m 59 now), 90 degrees F was VERY HOT and very rare.
Now it’s normal for a midsummer day here in the middle of the American Midwest in the middle of North America. Just like tornadoes and floods are much more common here in Illinois now, and in the wintertime we sometimes get a thing called “thundersnow” (thunder storms and snow simultaneously) which is a thing that did not even exist around here at all when I was a kid. The first time I saw it I was so flabbergasted and amazed that I felt like Moses on a mountaintop being shown the Burning Bush almost.
And I still love, as do my dogs, going outside.
Crucial Dog Notes: I have the dogs for a literal multitude of reasons, one of them being that I don’t get along with the vast majority of herd humanity very well on a face-to-face basis most of the time because they give me the fantods and the heebie-jeebies (the people I do get along with I get along with fine, and very well, usually) which is why I always appear to be running away from people or hiding and lurking behind doors, like Emily Dickinson; or faithfully wearing my sunglasses, like Lightnin’ Hopkins or Jeffrey Lebowski; and another of those huge, crucial reasons is that we all love going outside together so much.
END NOTE: The wildfire smoke is back today (but not as bad).
“The Dream Songs have given me more pleasure than any other poems I have ever read.” – Nick Cave
The American poet John Berryman (1914 – 1972), author of The Dream Songs, once famously said that he wished to be given cancer because it would test him.
In the context of the full quotation, one can tell that he was probably being metaphorical and even ironic.
But he was also not kidding. Because that’s the kind of guy he was.
Berryman, who was a severe, chain-smoking alcoholic with a bad case of Bipolar Disorder (known as Manic Depression while he lived), was a badass.
Too many people in our global society today, as in far, far, far too many millions or even billions of people, are far too soft. They are far too soft, too enormously large, too enormously corpulent, gigantic, obese, overflowing, slow, flaccid, slow-moving, slow-thinking, spreading, steady, useless, entitled people.
If they were all attacked by a single samurai warrior they would be toast.
Not all heavy, or even enormously fat, people are lazy, despite all the stereotyping that goes on. John Belushi, John Candy, Chris Farley, Harold Bloom, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, Orson Welles, Madame Blavatsky, Shakespeare’s Falstaff, all were or became enormously fat folks.
And they had energy; they had life; they had spark; they had liveliness; they had chutzpa; they had attitude; they possessed what one needs to be and become (a process that never stops) who one is.
But too many enormously overweight people have let themselves go, are addicted to poison food and sugary beverages, and they don’t move enough, and what’s more, they don’t want to move – ever. Or barely.
John Berryman leapt to his death from a bridge over the Mississippi River in Minnesota at the age of 57 years. He was massively, manically depressed, totally intoxicated, utterly drunk, woefully strung out, completely burned out, and totally done when he did so.
Hart Crane, the American poet (born on the SAME DAY as Hemingway, July 21, 1899, exactly one-hundred-and-twenty-seven years and two days ago from today) leapt from a ship into the Gulf of Mexico at the age of thirty-two and was never heard from again.
Right before he did so, he happily shouted out to a bunch of travelers, “Goodbye everybody!” They all knew who he was and some of them weren’t even surprised.
He too, at the time of his death, was manically depressed, intoxicated, drunk, strung out, burned out, and done. He went out with a bang, not a whimper – like Berryman, Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Hunter S. Thompson, Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, Anthony Bourdain, and many other artists, near-artists, and sensitive souls in the world’s history. Having been suicidal myself in the past, I know it’s almost always what should really be called a kind of accident. (And I believe that God catches these people when they fall for the final time, NOT sends them to hell.)
Berryman’s famous magnum opus The Dream Songs helped establish and create what was and is called “confessional poetry,” which is both a good and a bad name for what it tries to describe.
Berryman’s book is oftentimes awfully overwritten. Frequently, one can tell that Berryman was, without doubt, blasted out of his mind when he wrote this stuff, like William Faulkner when William Faulkner wrote much of his (later) stuff. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once pointed out (from personal experience) that it was really good to write while you were drinking because it freed the mind and inspired the writer – but only up to a certain point. Once a person is too blasted on anything (whether it be benzos, weed, booze, cocaine, all of the above, or whatever), the writing is sure to suffer, and sometimes it will take a dive straight into the toilet, depending on how blasted the writer is.
Sometimes, when Berryman wrote, he was far too blasted, on booze and pills; and it’s obvious.
But the highly flawed Dream Songs is still a landmark in twentieth century American poetry. It’s one of those often-unreadable books that everyone should have on a shelf. See Dream Song #107 for a wonderful poem about a drunk writer’s encounter with the wonderful animal called the raccoon, which deeply characterizes not just the raccoons but the writer.
And Berryman (though he could very, very often be seen just lying around, at least half the time) was not a lazy, soft, snarky, sarcastic, useless, entitled person.
He was a badass!
Crucial End NOTE: The term “badass,” like the word “cool,” both originated in their current form/s within the African American jazz culture of the 1940s. Those folks were badass/es; and they were totally cool.
John Berryman, like Hart Crane before him, was hugely influenced by jazz and blues. Berryman’s book The Dream Songs could not, and would not, have been written without his love of jazz and blues, which inspired the form/s, the spirit/s, and the meaning/s of his poems, as he himself so often admitted and said, and preached and talked about.
The American poet Ted Berrigan (1934 – 1983) said (wrote), “I don’t feel / a necessity for being a mature person in this world. I mean / all the grown-ups in this world, they’re just playing house, all / poets know that.”
Among other questions this beautifully plain-spoken quotation raises, it raises the question of what, or who, a (real) poet is.
A guy who (sometimes) calls himself “The Drifter” (because he synthesized Samuel Johnson’s “The Rambler” and “The Idler”) came up with an answer for this.
He broke it down into three simple parts (or things) – or requirements.
One: a modern poet cannot be, cannot be, CANNOT BE, a cheerleader for The System, not matter what system you mean.
The modern poet MUST BE, must be, must be, an outsider; in one form or another.
Wallace Stevens was a married insurance executive with a kid (and a house) and he still managed to live as one of the most profound lone wolves North America has ever seen. And when it comes to lone wolves, America is second to none.
Secondly, the poet must have an original vision. Many poets have been literally blind, starting with the very first known and named modern poet (in the West) of all, Homer.
Their inner visions were so intense and so original that they lost their outer sight.
That is what the Homeric myth of outer blindness and inner seeing really means.
Next, the poet must be able to say what they see.
Not to a billion-plus people all at once. Once it gets to that level (or even a million) poetry has turned into propaganda. Donald Trump used to be able to give some wickedly effective “poetry” readings about immigrants being snakes. But these readings were propaganda in the form of (simplistic) poetry; they were not “real” poetry.
The poet must be able to say what they see that no one else sees.
BEING A POET HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH USING FANCY WORDS OR “PRETTY” VOCABULARY (although almost all good poets have a wickedly large vocabulary).
Real poetry is about ELEVATED LANGUAGE and the circumstances that rightfully call for elevated language; and that does not mean elevated language is pretty.
Elevated Language is often harsh; very plainspoken; savagely angry; obscene; heartbreaking; hilarious; haunting.
Elevated Language is always intense, but very-much oftentimes, intensity comes in a whisper.
Much or most of the best poetry is AWKWARD, at least until you get used to it. (Awkward, NOT “pretty.”)
And its intensity is often calm, quiet, whispering, mumbling, clipped, pungent, brief, startling, something on the wind over the waters: memorable.
Marlon Brando mumbling on screen in some of his best roles is kind of like poetry. He can do it so well you don’t even know he’s faking it: maybe because he wasn’t (quite) faking it (he was bringing it up from a real place inside himself).
An outsider with an original vision who can communicate that vision to at least one other person in words because the right words make you think and feel more deeply, privately (not publicly): that’s what a real poet is and what real poetry (and who a real poet) is.
My psychiatrist (who is employed at a very well-known and well-respected hospital and medical establishment in the city of Chicago) calls the time we are living in right now The Psychedelic Renaissance.
He calls this time that name because of all the research that is currently being done on what are known as “Magic Mushrooms” on the street. Magic Mushies, or psilocybin, are being researched right now as an effective treatment for a wide array of modern issues, including, but not limited to: treatment-resistant depression; Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder; adult ADHD; and Substance Use Disorder.
To those not in the know, it may sound ironic, and even ridiculous, to give someone who has been addicted to alcohol or opioids Magic Mushrooms instead; but, trust me, the difference between these substances is profound, and one important name for this kind of treatment is: “HARM REDUCTION.” I.e., taking a few Magic Mushes now and then might be beneficial, and is not deadly in the way a full-blown addiction to alcohol and/or opioids is deadly.
HOWEVER: lest anyone think that Magic Mushrooms are perfectly harmless and you can take as much as you want whenever you want, I offer a few examples (taken straight from life, and experience) to make you think again.
If you take too many Magic Mushes all at once, accidentally or on purpose, you can really, really get yourself into some big trouble. Number one, it raises your heart rate and can trigger strokes or heart attacks.
Number two: it can make you paranoid. It can make you very, very, very, very paranoid. It can make you so paranoid, if the dose is large enough, that you become, temporarily, psychotic, which means, totally out of touch with reality.
Taken every day in large doses over, say, a two- or three- or four-week period, a person can slowly, steadily start to become separated from “reality” in a very, very serious way, as in believing you are being watched by the police when you are not being watched by the police, or thinking that your neighbor is out to get ya.
(I am not saying I know these things from personal experience; but I know these things from personal experience.)
Magic Mushrooms have their street terminology, like all drugs. One term is: “hero dose.” It means taking a massive dose and going on a long, strange journey, or trip. Another term is: “micro dose.” It means taking a small, controlled dose, kind of like having a single cup of coffee instead of nine or ten cups of coffee, or a few puffs on a cigarette instead of the whole pack. A third term is really beautiful: “afterglow.” This is what happens when the hero dose or the micro dose starts wearing off, but is still “there.” This phase of the experience is, very often, the very best phase of all. And sometimes it lasts for days (on and off). Literally.
I have seen a grown man sitting on a couch weeping like a little baby and asking the people around him to call his mother because he “wanted his mommy,” even though mommy had been dead for twenty years. This man was not me (I only witnessed this) but damn and wow, did it make an impression.
I have also seen a teenager hiding her head in a bucket for over six hours while believing that “THEY” were at the front door and about to “get her,” because she took a massive “hero dose” accidentally and then freaked out so bad she literally went insane for a while.
Again, it wasn’t me that happened to but I witnessed it, up close and personal, and damn and wow, did it make an impression.
Magic Mushrooms are A DRUG. They are a much safer drug than ALCOHOL, the most dangerous drug of all, along with crystal meth, fentanyl, cocaine, etc. etc. They are a much safer drug than “the hard stuff.”
But if you think you can take as much as you want without losing your shit, you are wrong.
END NOTE/s: They also affect your balance and coordination and can make you fall down.
Never drive on these things unless you are Paul Newman!
The Editors of Saragun Springs (L and D, Seattle and Chicago, USA) share a mutual passion for William Shakespeare. We revere him for the same reason/s that almost everyone who likes him likes him: he’s the greatest single writer in the English language and everything that has been written in English since him has been massively influenced BY HIM, even if that particular writer is not familiar at all (on a personal level) with his work/s.
I could go on and on about Good Will, but I can’t say it any better than Ralph Waldo Emerson did almost two hundred years ago. The following 305-word quote (at the end of this little essay) is NOT a cut-and-paste. This quotation was typed out by hand, from memory, by me; and I checked the text afterward because I knew there would be a few mistakes (there were quite a few mistakes, which I have since corrected).
Anyone who reads, rereads, and studies, this quotation will have their mind stretched in the right kind of way, even if they’ve never heard of Shakespeare.
I was not able to type this thing from memory because I have a photographic memory. I have it memorized because of two things: repetition and concentration (I’ve read it a lot and I always concentrate deeply when I do: it is a form of meditation, and prayer).
Shakespeare cannot compete with the world’s best-selling and most well-known book (BY FAR), the Bible, when it comes to characters: and not even close; and he himself knew this very well.
Adam and Eve, The Serpent (Satan), Yahweh, Cain and Abel, Moses, Noah, David and Goliath, Solomon, Samson, Job, Jonah, Jesus, Mary, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalen, Peter, Judas, Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son are now and will always be more well-known, globally, than any of Shakespeare’s characters.
(The Bible is the world’s greatest story collection, and I am speaking here of The Bible as literature. I also believe, personally, that the individual authors of the Bible were divinely inspired, very much so, each in their own very individual, very particular, very different ways.)
Some of Shakespeare’s most famous personages are: Hamlet, Falstaff, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet (he did not actually invent any of them, which is also true of most of the Bible’s main characters and their authors, just as it is true of Rabelais and Gargantua, Goethe and Faust, Lord Byron and Don Juan, etc. etc. etc….).
I once heard two little kids running around on the sidewalk talking about Romeo and Juliet in Arabic.
I believe R and J are WS’s two most famous characters.
But even they cannot even come close to competing with Jesus and Mary (as characters; I also happen to believe, personally, that each of these were also holy; but my definition of “holy” does not match “the world’s” definition of holy, unless it is the Russian definition of such).
But Shakespeare added something new to the presentation of character that every single writer who has written in English since then, has been influenced by (to say nothing of his influence in other languages as well, like German, where he is, if anything, even better known than in English).
Now that I’ve blathered on for over 600 words, I leave you with the Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation. I would say, pay close attention to the title of this little article and the way it appears in the following quotation. Emerson wrote this quotation when the world thought Shakespeare was just a cheap entertainer. Emerson was among the first to see deeper on this issue (not the first, but among the first, which amounts to the same thing; because there are no “original” ideas):
“Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare valuable that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand…He is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which gave the saint’s meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America; he drew the man, and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of men and women, their probity, and their second thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother’s part from the father’s part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature; and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice.”
“I’m so tired because I’ve been driving for almost eleven hours straight in a row with hardly a break at all,” he told himself out loud while continuing to drive his small car down the abandoned-looking highway in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
All of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the “middle of nowhere.” There is really nowhere, he told himself, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that is not the middle of nowhere. And, after all, that is why you have traveled here, Sir (for some reason he called himself Sir inside his head although it was not a term he usually applied to himself; but she (who was now gone) had sometimes used to call him Sir; sometimes tenderly; sometimes satirically; and now that he was alone and far from her he was carrying on the tradition).
You are here, Sir, because it is the middle of nowhere. That and HEMINGWAY.
“Big Two-Hearted River” is one of the greatest American short stories ever written. It is set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the story, Nick Adams, Hemingway’s alter ego, travels to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to get away from civilization because his body, mind, heart, and soul have been damaged by his service in WW1.
Hemingway himself got blown up over there. Over two hundred pieces of shrapnel in the legs at the age of eighteen while working as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. Anyone who thinks Hemingway loved war is wrong. Sometimes he thought it was necessary. That is a very different thing, and a very questionable belief. But Hemingway was not a war monger. He also worshiped the animals he killed in the way Native Americans did and some still do. He once wrote, of an animal, “It is not a sin to kill him if you love him.” Crazy Horse said the same thing. Such a statement has a different weight when it’s said with utter, deadly seriousness. Everyone who eats meat is a killer even if they don’t actually do the killing themselves. Too many animals have been killed and we are in the most massive age of extinction the world has ever known (except for the dinosaurs) and all of it should stop. Should stop, not will. But Hemingway was born when McKinley was president. It was a different era…
These are the kind of thoughts he kept having as he drove down the road, chain-smoking Marlboro Light cigarettes and chain-drinking black truck stop coffee. Later he would have a small stroke and develop stage one emphysema before he was sixty because of such habits as these (and the drinking in the bars (which were so loaded and thick with second-hand (and first-hand) smoke that it was like sitting in the middle of a cloud of beautiful poison for years), and the drugs, and the depression, which he called The Triple D’s) (and tonight alone in the cheap motel outside of Sault Ste. Marie, this shit would give him a panic attack; that and not having eaten any food (almost) in two days); but right now he was thirty-three years old and strokes and emphysema were the last thing on his mind; and he would never regret a single thing, which is, after all, what badass Nietzsche really meant by the thought-experiment concept of Eternal Return…
He took a drag of his cig’ and a healthy slug of the lukewarm coffee.
He had one hand on the steering wheel and the burning cigarette was in his other hand between his cigarette-stained fingers as he slumped there, exhausted and alert, behind the wheel.
The abandoned-looking road here was literally crowded with pine trees right up to the edge of the road, making a darkness, but sun fell down, between the trees, all over the road, making the road a bright yellow ribbon (follow the yellow brick road) of possibility for a few moments at least.
He drove with his knees and lit another cigarette with the smoking butt of the last one. Then he poured more black coffee from the thermos into the cup between his legs, and in doing so, he spilled a bunch of the coffee all over his crotch and felt the warm wetness all over his shorts (it was summertime) and all over his…
He laughed and called himself “Sir” again, almost hearing her voice out loud as he did so. She had also sometimes called him “Bear,” because his last name sounded like it had the word “bear” in it (even though it was spelled differently).
So he called himself Bear, there, alone, in the car, while driving, smoking, meditating, and drinking coffee, and just as he called himself “Bear” (like she had done), he looked up to see a bear standing in the middle of the road right in front of him. And it was a WHITE BEAR!
He slowed down fast then slammed on the brakes so he didn’t hit it because it wasn’t moving, at all.
It just stood there on all four gargantuan paws in the middle of the empty road (there had been no other cars for a very long time) staring at him.
And how the fuck was there a white bear in the middle of the road in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula!?
He knew that black bears lived here. Not only did they live here, many places in Michigan’s U.P. have more bears than people in them, by far.
He’d studied polar bears in books and documentaries, and at the zoo, and he’d seen wild grizzly bears from a Jeep in Alaska (the guide had said they weren’t too close). He knew enough about bears to know that this wasn’t, surely, a polar bear, a grizzly bear, or a panda bear who had escaped from a zoo (or something). He also knew that not all black bears are black; some are brown, or cinnamon-colored, etc. etc.
But this bear was utterly WHITE, as white as freshly fallen snow, as white as Snow White, as white as Moby Dick, as white as the whitest hair on the oldest person who ever lived (there was probably someone somewhere in the world who’d once lived to be 130), as white as heaven, as white as you can think of, or imagine. (He also knew that albino creatures have pink eyes and noses, and he could clearly see that this white bear’s eyes and nose were dark – very dark.)
And within that split instant of time that stretched itself out like a pink light beam shooting out to the edge of the universe (and then beyond) he knew that this might get him killed, mauled, sent to the hospital, whatever, as he opened the door of his stopped car and stepped out into the road not too far away from the white bear who was standing there in the middle of the road, looking at him.
And he and the bear stood there and stared at each other as the sun fell down into, and upon, the brightly yellowed road between them.
Then the bear stood up, massively, on its hind legs and sniffed the air in his direction.
Then it dropped back down onto all fours, and with its head lowered, it stared, and stared, and stared, at him.
They were about forty feet away from each other and black bears can run faster than horses.
And as they stared at each other, the man (the young man) felt the power of the bear SURGE through him – marking him for life.
And then the bear swung around and ran away into the trees.
The Antiquarian book fair recently came to Manhattan for it’s annual visit and it didn’t disappoint as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Kerouac were joined by Salvador Dali and Jim Morrison in a potpourri of rare books and fascinating ephemera. Among the items on display was a smoking jacket worn by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a first edition of On the Road by Jack Kerouac and some pulp novels inspired by the Beat Generation. In addition, there was an illustrated version of Edgar Allen Poe’s, The Raven illustrated by the artist Edouard Manet, original copies of the Strand Magazine featuring Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a rare photo of Jim Morrison —used for the cover of the Absolutely Live Doors album that the lead singer didn’t love —as much as the record label —because it obscured the faces of his bandmates.
Fans of the popular TV show Pawn Stars visiting the book fair were delighted to be able to chat with leading rare books expert Rebecca Romney, the beautiful and brilliant bookseller who reminded us that the Great Gatsby, with it’s tales of fabulous estates and parties had just turned 100 years old recently. The book, in part, inspired our own publisher, Chase Backer, a visionary bon vivant in his own right, to create 25A magazine to celebrate the fabulous mansions and estates of the area.
AK: Rebecca, why is the Great Gatsby still so popular?
RR: The Great Gatsby came out in 1925 and in fact it wasn’t a big hit for Fitzgerald …he was better known for his earlier novels and Gatsby only did OK… and by the time of his death it was not his best known work and he thought he was going to die with it unnoticed and it was one of the books that came back into the popular circulation in the post-war period and now we look back at it in 2026 and we just had it’s centenary- 100 years —and it’s one of the American classics …you never know which book is going to become a classic at the time.
AK: Why is Gatsby such a classic?
RR: I think it is a great way to engage with the idea of the American Dream and its complexities…the hopes and the failures that are built into it. I think that people respond to it because it is a very human investigation of a concept that a lot of us wrestle with in this country, so it makes sense that it is part of so many high school’s curricula —and when that happens it becomes part of our shared cultural experience —our vocabulary.
AK: What about Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald—were they friends or frenemies?
RR: They were certainly friends but there was competition there and one of the best ways to read about that is actually Hemingway’s own book called A Moveable Feast. That’s where you really get his side —it’s Hemingway not to the benefit of Fitzgerald. If you are interested in that rivalry and want to get a sense of it —read A Moveable Feast.
AK: I’ve seen an original copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac in another booth— but you have a whole Beat Generation section here too.
RR: We are showing how that Beat movement translated into pop culture through mass-market paperbacks -so you take the Beats who were sort of the rebel generation after WW2 …the movement before the hippies…and instead of Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs you have “Naked Brunch” so, you can see how a literary movement is digested into popular culture and comes out the other end that comes out as cheap paperbacks that people could buy at drugstores. This collection is called the “ Beatsploitation “
collection.
AK: That’s so funny! Catch us up on you— we all love watching you in the TV show Pawn Stars talking about rare books
RR: Well, the New York Fair is the big event of the year —everyone comes and shows up and there’s a lot of energy here. When we are not at the fair we are back at the shop, Type Punch Matrix, where we do catalogs and we are always looking to do collections. I do videos now. I try to do a little education in the rare books space. A lot of people think these are just expensive books that are too fragile to touch but it’s also these mass market paperbacks where you can see a book as a time capsule of that moment in history …all of that is part of the rare books world.
AK: most popular rare book you have dealt with?
RR: a first edition of Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen always sells quickly
AK: Are you still doing Pawn Stars?
RR: I was just in Las Vegas shooting new episodes.
Saragun Springs 