writing

CIRCA 1956 IN SOUTH CAROLINA

Late summer. Bluejays squawked in bellicose tones distinctively bluejay, ganging up in trees in the median parkway of Florence Street.

Out back, chickens wandered in a pen, wheezy and trepidatious. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote in his perfect way that chickens sound asthmatic)

A eucalyptus tree a century-old stood by a tall lawn spigot with brick splashguards. In the grass were faded sticks from an old croquet set. An antique gun workshop hid behind a bamboo grove. A homemade motor boat slept in a back shed. Broken-down polo mallets tacked up to bare studs. Farther away a defunct camper trailer, a wrecked rowboat, on flats of sandy dirt loaded with red ants.

After lunch Neapolitan ice cream out of the carton. The strawberry section had bits of fruit, tart to balance the sweet. Lots of infants and grade school cousins occupied the house. Among the adults, concerns about baby formula and potty training ran below their everyday kitchen conversations.

The uncles were comics. Midday meal, the big one, had prayer, ha ha.

Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat.

An afternoon car ride in gramma’s Buick if you were nice. The heat pounding down on the way back. 8oz Coke bottles from the icebox. Rules required you read aloud the city of origin imprinted on the bottom. A sack of boiled peanuts, chilled, always on the top rack.

Nighttime we ate again but ate light, like leftover bread, biscuits, doctored-up casseroles. Sliced tomatoes from the yard.

Retiring to the family room, we saw the golden clocks that moved silently inside inverted glass jars. A floor fan hummed.

The night heat was heavy and still.

From the cabinet TV, Adlai Stevenson’s summer convention speech played loud. Mixed support. An ancient magnolia tree loomed outside like a giant.

Windows were opened cautiously. Everyone was afraid of black people.

Reading Tom Gold Weathers, Jr.

Most likely, Tom would not believe it: my recent reading binge of his indie-published books.

I’ve read them now, but for a while I had yet to finish a journey through several of his paperbacks. Some I read were were small storybooks or collections of verse (those items he called “poem things”). There were also essay-like ruminations, and engaging articles observing people around him. I read all of these and for good measure re-visited a favored older book or two.

Many of us called him “Stob” back in the 1970s because he once worked part-time staking out house foundations, literally hammering stobs into the ground. He compared it to structuring written pieces.

Tom Weathers has an author persona that straddles the line between a Southern gentleman writer of intelligence and refinement and a Waffle House good ole boy scribbler. He can pull the mix off. His writing is congenial and well-constructed, wide in its readability appeal.

Tom’s published ventures are in sum his crónicas. His reports of life as he sees it, come from vantage points often located in Shelby, NC or Gastonia, NC. Most accounts are humble and honest, almost none are showy. He also produced a wealth of travelog writing and photos based on his roadtrips throughout America and Canada in his pal Conservative Bob’s BMW Roadster.

With Weathers in general, here are a few things you get: inside accounts of close family events, astute profiles of friends and work peers, clever cosmic realizations, tales of his uphill veneration and loss of certain women very dear to him, the odd twists of fate and Vonnegut-like moments of karass, or as we called it, intertwingle, where lives magically cross other lives. e.g., Who among us but Tom would have someone like a tanned post-pubescent George Hamilton drift in and out of his personal history chapters?

I stumble over the riffs about physics and engineering that are beyond my grasp. It’s in Tom’s DNA. Once when we traveled together on an Amtrak to NYC, he talked about the theory of relativity as our train ran next to another train going in the opposite direction.

He is an admirer of Faulkner as well as Castaneda and Hemingway. His writing is often understated, and he withholds content that could be considered “unseemly.” Part of doing so is brought by the caution of being un viejo wary of being too brash.

Tom’s writing has always put me in the spirit to write a little bit myself. After all, he was my editor and supervisor in my first writing job out of college. His stuff has always influenced the way I write.

I’d tell him that. It’s praise. In previous times, hearing it would please him. But for now he’s conspicuous in his absence. O Lost, and by the wind grieved…Stob.

Novella “Pedro Páramo” – A Little Book Report about a Gigantic Book

Its sparseness and preoccupation with power and death and doomed love is in the best Spanish literature tradition and brings to mind Garcia Lorca. Beyond that, the story’s drift into the surreal (or anything-can-happen world of magic realism) precedes and sets the table for the later extravagances of Borges and Marquez.

In his younger days as a rising writer in a circle of other rising writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez reportedly took this book to the woodshed and studied it for a solid year. That alone is testimony to the brilliance of Juan Rulfo.

The first person POV narrator, name of Juan Presidio, is sent off on a journey by his dying mother to the town of Calmay to find his runaway father (Pedro Páramo) and to pass along her bitter reprimands. Juan encounters a mule-driver along the way, and they travel together toward the town. In these opening pages to the book, the mule-driver provides some background and chilling forebodings about the town.

The tension of narrator Juan Preciado’s trip into a land that God forgot is heightened by the details. We begin to feel uneasy when Juan takes to his initial lodging, a frightening room with no windows or furniture and a dirt floor in a house operated by a spirit, or maybe she’s just a zombie witch. The narrative has its share of ghouls, fools, hucksters, and angels.

Calmay is by most accounts a hell hole filled with death and doom and ghosts. Juan is already entangled in a purgatory of sorts. Much later in the book, Juan emerges from his dark existence into the town plaza where he meets his fate. Again there is dirt, and he swallows it. It’s dirt of the final grave variety, perhaps merciful.

In contrast to the claustrophobia and doom of Calmay, Pedro Páramo has a spread of open ranch lands outside town in the hills of Media Luna. Most of the latter part of the book centers on Páramo, an influential and tyrannical big-shot in these parts. Various locals provide accounts on his shady dealings, his extortion and land-grab, and the deaths of his son, his wife, and ultimately Páramo himself. Pedro is very much in love with his wife, and stricken because he doesn’t deserve her.

Points of view and passages of time shift often in this book. It’s a short read and unusual attention is required. Things can be up to interpretation. Readers will be helped by reading the Afterword notes by the translator. His description of varied usages of quotation marks – some foreign to us English readers, like learning about the European use of << >> for example, helps explain some dialog that seems misplaced.

[ The story is mercurial. Updates & additions are likely to this post. ]