Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 964 Editor's Choice: 127
-
There is Still that "Third" Washington
[Read the article: Destination: Washington, D.C.]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]While I would highly recommend "The Night Gardender", "The Man Who Loved Children" and anything by Henry Adams (whose brooding memorial to wife Clover has haunted my all my life), there is - or was - also the Washington of those of us caught in a certain time in that certain space, as black and white members of "The Silent Generation" ran together like the entire sienna spectrum, and for a brief, fleeting moment labored under the impression that a New Age had dawned even as our parents plotted against us and that stillborn renaissance, that "future that never arrived."
Perhaps no one (other than me, and my piece on the subject is in the works, so hang in there)has touched upon this Third Washington than the late "Father of American Primitive Guitar" and DC icon John Fahey, in his short story collection titled "How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life." While sometimes seemingly surreal in an almost William Burroughs sort of way (as were all Fahey's copious album liner notes as well - also all about this mysterious Washington seen through the eyes of a Takoma Park resident), there is substantial fact in the book, and even if it were not so, it would be entertaining at least. But for those of us who were actually there, right upon the cusp of our idiot parents' White Flight lunacy, it is very real, with a ginsu-sharp edge to it.
The Federal City, that thing Gore Vidal skewers so jovially, deserves no better. The freak shows of writers like Blatty, whose "Exorcist" actually took place across the Maryland line in blue collar Mount Rainier (but I am nit-picking here - it's all part of that "third" Washington)teach us nothing about the coming and then, in Fahey's own words "disembowelment of the New Age." Until I can get my "monster in a box" to press, dig into Adams' notes and the works of Edward P. Jones, as Black Washington is far closer to the "third" and most real and tragic Washington of them all, while Adams' love for the city helped to create the setting for the coming denoument and eventual rebirth.
I prepare even now to make my return to that Holy Ground where I was born and where I lived for 57 years, where Fahey bestowed on me the name "Calhoun". Only then will I be able to finish the work started with the return of my own repressed memory of that "third" Washington. It just can't be done here in southern California, where there are no catalpas in bloom, and no lingering memory, no ghosts, no sweaty, sleepless nights, and no visits to Auguste Rodin's haunting, tormented sentinel and permanent mourner at the grave of Clover Adams.
-
Don Juan was not a Buddhist
[Read the article: I'm a Buddhist in Big Pharma -- is that cool?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]but he made a grand point with Casteneda in the desert one evening, when they both had to eat and he directed Carlos to construct a trap, hoping to catch a rabit which would provide adequate sustenance for them both. Carlos, having done as he was told (he then being "apprenticed" to don Juan) discovered the trap had, indeed, caught a rabit, but when directed to remove the animal to be killed and cleaned for eating, became so disgusted - or guilt ridden - over his own need for survival at the cost of the "innocent" rabit's life, that he became angry and frustrated and in attempting to free the rabit from the trap, broke several of the members of the construct and, in so doing, broke the rabit's neck. When he begain to wail and moan over "his" bad fortune in having tried to do something noble, don Juan merely pointed out to Casteneda, who often referred to himself as "an idiot", that "it was that rabit's time. There was nothing you could do to change that. We eat tonight."
Buddhism is so often an affectation rather than a direction, and as William Burroughs observed, unsuited for use in the west, that the whole question posed by the LW here buggers the foundation of the "religion" he is attempting to observe.
-
And for the fall semester...
[Read the article: Honey, I read "The Stranger"!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I know another short book Shorty could do a report on to equally good effect. It's called "Acts of Aggression" by that Jew guy Chomsky, Pansy Clark and that A-rab friend of theirs. Quick read and it had a real good ending. It's not written in Jewish or A-rab, either, just Liberial American. I think Condi's already been through it, so she could help Dub pronounce some of those college words Chomsky likes to use when it's his turn.
Hey, I just noticed this, and it's probably not PC, but doesn't Camus almost rhyme with "anus"? If you change a letter or something? Haw haw haw.
This was too realistic. It's gonna gimme bad dreams.
-
Captain Queeg, White Courtesey Telephone....
[Read the article: Israel's debacle, courtesy of Bush]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sorry, he's busy declaring air strikes from his bicycle going uphill in 100 degree heat. What is troubling about this is that there are people who will run after him simply for the prize of a t-shirt advertising that they did such an idiotic thing; He could do the same thing with his imaginary friends and spare the potential for a cardiac arrest out there in the flatlands among those fools who run after him.
The same could be said for Israel's current leadership. Willy Loman's boys are milling about aimlessly in their own desert right now, trying to figure out what went wrong, when all they had to do was watch one of those "Hundred Degree Race" fiascos to know, if they needed any clarification, that they had been led down the primrose path by one of the planet's pre-eminent idiots-of-state.
All this would probably be funny if it weren't so horribly tragic. Then again, pride most certainly doth go before a fall. The arrogance of Israel combined with the arrogant stupidity of the Bush administration has paved this road to hell. There's nothing more dangerous than a true believer who doesn't remember where he read his "truth."
The bed is made. Now both will have to lie together in it.