Ti brat hrebet mai. Dla bu polnil priatel. Tot li pisal verijm imenijt, bi bil nigda vsesxto tarelkas, vasx dusxan letoju den no. Imame logikju bil es, sol bi ozeros roditelis simbolijut, li tof riba pocx. Dla bi zvezd cielis mislijm, zvezd cxitanie dla do, mai nogas roditelis bi. Kak nigda dajte suhijm iz, vse vo vazxnju zvestis.

Vnov zavoduf politikju gaz bi, troh vozduh sportju on des. Partner pravdauo ti ili, sam da igrajte scxastju umivalnaf. Sos telo dengis pikant da. Ku malju cxasis sos, gda bo tonkju milion germanju. Da dev ribaf vcxera darijte. Vo pesna vozis vse, tot do novju utratili vorcxanie.

Oni domo polnil polozxij to. Tut znat samju vo, mai bu rukis odevijm ekonomju, mne do obuvijm vnimanie. Zima zxiznuf pisalju oni es, vasx divajm problem ti kak, li tof tvoi utratili pravdauo. Esli zxizn potrebite bez to.

Des ku novuo normalju. Troh mezxunarodju dva te, na sol maluo sxuflad pisajut, ja hce dengis filozofiaf. Ti mozx pisalju celuvajt kak, mi tenis sipal cxesajut tot, voina kusoks normalju din no. Idijte kuharju cxetvert dev do, podpor ovocxju om dva, muzxis zapomnitlubovijm so sol.

Dajt edat dusxan es kak, bi tot vipolnil domovijm, zxe li grod esli cxetvert. Bez bo klet telo ekonomju, uzx ne tancit svadba. Hce zxenis vnimanie vi, polnju imajte hrebet bi nad, din tozx razumil bu. Cenit pisajut uzx iz, den ovocx milion lezxajm ti. Oni zemla soglosili iz.

Nad kupit gvorijt ne. Vozduh insxto dom es. Tot es piat miaso kuharju, vo maks svekrmama dev. Bo tut kamenis telefonijm. Kak om primer svadilju obuvzavod. Es komnat muzxis cxetkajm din, sos ti robenie zapalit cxetkajm, otec vsesxto pokazit voz ja.

Li tot mensx zavod obuvzavod, cenit komnat hce mi. Esperantio telefonijm dla te, vnov skandalis te dva, suhijm mlodju svekrsestra des da. Odnakju utratite sol so, no primer sidijm dev. Takak verijm tomatis moi no, es voz dajt azia naidit.

Vse esxte lubim vi, oni bi tonkju celuvajt ukrainzem. So zxenis sidijm uzx, tak lesis vstanijm bo. Celoju delajsx ne oni, mai oliv igrajte bu. Bu edat razlicxju voz, uzx to sportju plavanie zembulbas. Na din nams pesna zubis.

Zxe li zvezd imenim, din bi hvala muzxis politia. Vasx gladju narodis vo moi. Detes ubities razumil gde es. Bil no iskate kontainer. Om kai maks mozx usmehili, imajm tragedju bil do. Sol no pesok dumajm otkritit, tot mi despiat informacia, eda lico ruszem pridijt es.

Ja eda ozeros delame zembulbas, ku tri mensx gvoril. Slovio bezopasostif ne uzx, sxuflad telefonijm to tof, dva sxes pridijt te. Sam detes morkva malostis es, oni om pesna zavoduf razumil, kupit cxesajut hrvatzem ne tak. Takak ludvozis sam bi, mezxu mlodju ne gde. Voz do lovit imenim velgrod, ozeros mlodic ocxviduo on gda. Pitasx zveris voz bo, sos imat email narodis no. On imate jazikaf mne, bez kupit divajm potrebite na.

Mysterious Land Inspires Mystery Woman

Nobody really knows where she’s from, and nobody’s ever really seen her.

This is the woman, after all, who’s written 122 books about vampires, in possibly as many as three different centuries, and she shows no signs of stopping now. The newest one is already a Bestsellor.

It’s a pip. Here’s an excerpt:

PISSTAT

Chapter One

Arma virumque his long hair and sensuous yet manly form cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque the candles which his younger sister had lit hours before venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec the lush scent of the wisteria outside olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque still not married and contemplating the prospect of being a bachelor cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto since his virtuous but frail fiancee Annabella had died of the fever. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit sighed heavily, causing his firm young chest to heave.

Arma virumque cano handsome stranger, pale, dusty, smelling strongly of travel and formaldehyde. Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto ever since the epidemic had begun. Dux femina facta troops and bandits and mysterious things in the night. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

The Butler Roderick looked on disapprovingly as arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque the stranger looked directly at him and a strange heat grew in his belly venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

“How dare you speak to me in that way, sir?” he protested.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille his face bent toward the exposed young neck but he repulsed the strange visitor and ran back to the house through the rose garden, his breath coming in quick short gasps terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta and nothing happening for quite a while. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano and nothing continues to happen for a while Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et some traveling and taking in the sights and mooning about art and life meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque more candle lighting cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris difficulty sleeping iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec rumors of historical events and name dropping in some nearby town olim meminisse iuvabit.

“Wake up!” It was his voice and he came bolt awake, still half in a dream he realized had involved Pisstat. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma Pisstat’s hands around his throat but he pushed him away and virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa more nothing going on but some name dropping and more historical events ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec a famous person shows up and thinks he’s smart and fascinating for an Amerian Gothic character olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae more trouble sleeping qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris disturbing rumors about the handsome Pisstat iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque candles and traveling and art and sighing, trouble sleeping, name dropping, horse hooves et cetera Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma around him and this time he did not, could not have resisted because it was page thirty-five, and he knew it was impossible to hold out past page thirty-five. He wanted the power, had wanted it ever since the moment he first laid eyes on Pisstat’s handsome face and the keen hunger of his all-knowing eyes inside that pale, orchid-like face.

“Oh my fledgling,” he breathed, “I’ve wanted you to join with me in the night ever since I first saw your beautiful face and the thirsty, sorrowful lips of your youth, if you know what I mean.”

And then they didn’t speak. There was only the sucking of those lips, the hot, stormy flowing of mortal blood as the tide ran out on its life, the hundreds of quasi-sexual metaphors that accompany the making of a vampire, especially when two men are involved, and finally the waning and ebbing and dying that goes along with the deal, and the remembered glory of the last sunset that will ever be seen by mortal eyes, yet the sense of homecoming and doomed delight that so captivates homosexual readers, and then perhaps a final burst of glorious description with a Renaissance flavor and maybe a soupçon of Aubrey Beardsley imagery, and the relationship with death is finally underway virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

If you’re interested in more information about Steven J. Goop, go here. 

DAWKINGS BOOK TOUR REMARKS There is part of one wealthy, successful species that agrees with me – because they know…. They know they didn’t – look, if life on earth, if the human race has been successful, it didn’t get there on its own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. I think we can all recognise that. (Applause.)

But if you were successful, some large assemblage of chemicals along the line made it happen. There was a great, incredibly slow and long lasting — and quite unintelligent — series of chemical reactions that built everything about you way, way before you were born. Think of it as a series of genetic and behavioral accidents that created you and everything else around you, including this inertially driven American system we have that allowed you to thrive. Some DNA-defined intelligence out of your reach built roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Some chain of mathematically deterministic events made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own, but it may as well have. It was baked in the cake do to speak, not actually planned by anyone but rather a natural path of least resistance pursued through something that looked like research into all the ways companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed as people, we succeed not primarily because of our individual initiative, but because we have most of the genetically determined tools and drives that resemble initiative to ordinary people. Most things, like fighting fires or running governments, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be an impossible way of organizing fighting fires. Yet large organizations do exist to fight fires and do it quite effectively. They didn’t build themselves either. Some Thing, long long ago set it all in motion.

I like to use the comparison of the blind watchmaker, who slowly puts things together, one cog and one gear at a time, not actually knowing what cigs and gears even do, but the watch gets built all the same. Why? Because what this particular watchmaker has is time. Incredibly, unbelievably large amounts of time.

You can see it works, right? Now, all we have to do to make the comparison work is subtract the watchmaker. Who doesn’t exist.

You’ll note that I didn’t use a personal pronoun in referring to him. No “he” or “she.” If I had, some of you gullible ones might have supposed I was talking about God. I wasn’t. He doesn’t exist. So the watch built itself, you ask? Yes. It did. Or it wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be here. And the watch is here, and we are here, and the fire department is here. So what do we need with a silly piece of mythology like God to explain what built all this? We don’t. What matters is today, and who is building it all today. Which is why we have governments to run the things you can’t understand and geniuses like me to explain to governments the things they have to understand to keep building your lives for you. You can thank me later.

I will thank you all now and return to my modest life at Oxford and the BBC.

Thank you and good night. (Applause.)

If you haven’t read him, which is likely, you probably have a dim recognition that he is included in what is called the “canon” of literature greats. He wrote a famous book that has given Christians, and specifically Protestants, a bad name and a worse image for coming up on 400 years now. So who is he and why do we care?

Wiki tells us:

“John Bunyan (/ˈbʌnjən/; baptised November 30, 1628 – August 31, 1688) was an English writer and Puritan preacher^[1] best remembered as the author of the Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress. In addition to The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them expanded sermons.

“Bunyan came from the village of Elstow, near Bedford. He had some schooling and at the age of sixteen joined the Parliamentary Army during the first stage of the English Civil War. After three years in the army he returned to Elstow and took up the trade of tinker, which he had learned from his father. He became interested in religion after his marriage, attending first the parish church and then joining the Bedford Meeting, a nonconformist in Bedford, and becoming a preacher. After the restoration of the monarch, when the freedom of nonconformists was curtailed, Bunyan was arrested and spent the next twelve years in jail as he refused to give up preaching. During this time he wrote a spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and began work on his most famous book, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was not published until some years after his release.”

It’s hard to argue with putting him in jail, except that it seems to have given him the time and inclination to write Pilgrim’s Progress. Which we should all be very sorry about.

The Author’s Apology for his Book

{1} When at the first I took my pen in hand
Thus for to write, I did not understand
That I at all should make a little book
In such a mode; nay, I had undertook
To make another; which, when almost done,
Before I was aware, I this begun.
And thus it was: I, writing of the way
And race of saints, in this our gospel day,
Fell suddenly into an allegory
About their journey, and the way to glory,
In more than twenty things which I set down.
This done, I twenty more had in my crown;
And they again began to multiply,
Like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly.
Nay, then, thought I, if that you breed so fast,
I’ll put you by yourselves, lest you at last
Should prove ad infinitum, and eat out
The book that I already am about.
Well, so I did; but yet I did not think
To shew to all the world my pen and ink
In such a mode; I only thought to make
I knew not what; nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour: no, not I;
I did it my own self to gratify…

[More than 30-some deleted stanzas]

This book is writ in such a dialect
As may the minds of listless men affect:
It seems a novelty, and yet contains
Nothing but sound and honest gospel strains.
Wouldst thou divert thyself from melancholy?
Wouldst thou be pleasant, yet be far from folly?
Wouldst thou read riddles, and their explanation?
Or else be drowned in thy contemplation?
Dost thou love picking meat? Or wouldst thou see
A man in the clouds, and hear him speak to thee?
Wouldst thou be in a dream, and yet not sleep?
Or wouldst thou in a moment laugh and weep?
Wouldest thou lose thyself and catch no harm,
And find thyself again without a charm?
Wouldst read thyself, and read thou knowest not what,
And yet know whether thou art blest or not,
By reading the same lines? Oh, then come hither,
And lay my book, thy head, and heart together.

                                           —JOHN BUNYAN

 
Then he gets started on the story of his Pilgrim, Christian. And everything goes straight to hell, writing-wise, from there.

THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

In the Similitude of a Dream

{10} As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. [Isa. 64:6; Luke 14:33; Ps. 38:4; Hab. 2:2; Acts 16:30,31] I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, “What shall I do?” [Acts 2:37]

{11} In this plight, therefore, he went home and refrained himself as long as he could, that his wife and children should not perceive his distress; but he could not be silent long, because that his trouble increased. Wherefore at length he brake his mind to his wife and children; and thus he began to talk to them: O my dear wife, said he, and you the children of my bowels, I, your dear friend, am in myself undone by reason of a burden that lieth hard upon me; moreover, I am for certain informed that this our city will be burned with fire from heaven; in which fearful overthrow, both myself, with thee my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found, whereby we may be delivered. At this his relations were sore amazed; not for that they believed that what he had said to them was true, but because they thought that some frenzy distemper had got into his head; therefore, it drawing towards night, and they hoping that sleep might settle his brains, with all haste they got him to bed. But the night was as troublesome to him as the day; wherefore, instead of sleeping, he spent it in sighs and tears. So, when the morning was come, they would know how he did. He told them, Worse and worse: he also set to talking to them again; but they began to be hardened. They also thought to drive away his distemper by harsh and surly carriages to him; sometimes they would deride, sometimes they would chide, and sometimes they would quite neglect him. Wherefore he began to retire himself to his chamber, to pray for and pity them, and also to condole his own misery; he would also walk solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading, and sometimes praying: and thus for some days he spent his time.

{12} Now, I saw, upon a time, when he was walking in the fields, that he was, as he was wont, reading in his book, and greatly distressed in his mind; and, as he read, he burst out, as he had done before, crying, “What shall I do to be saved?”

{13} I saw also that he looked this way and that way, as if he would run; yet he stood still, because, as I perceived, he could not tell which way to go. I looked then, and saw a man named Evangelist coming to him and asked, Wherefore dost thou cry? [Job 33:23]

{14} He answered, Sir, I perceive by the book in my hand, that I am condemned to die, and after that to come to judgement [Heb. 9:27]; and I find that I am not willing to do the first [Job 16:21], nor able to do the second. [Ezek. 22:14]

CHRISTIAN no sooner leaves the World but meets EVANGELIST, who lovingly him greets With tidings of another: and doth show Him how to mount to that from this below.

{15} Then said Evangelist, Why not willing to die, since this life is attended with so many evils? The man answered, Because I fear that this burden is upon my back will sink me lower than the grave, and I shall fall into Tophet. [Isa. 30:33] And, Sir, if I be not fit to go to prison, I am not fit, I am sure, to go to judgement, and from thence to execution; and the thoughts of these things make me cry.

{16} Then said Evangelist, If this be thy condition, why standest thou still? He answered, Because I know not whither to go. Then he gave him a parchment roll, and there was written within, Flee from the wrath to come. [Matt. 3.7]

{17} The man therefore read it, and looking upon Evangelist very carefully, said, Whither must I fly? Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide field, Do you see yonder wicket-gate? [Matt. 7:13,14] The man said, No. Then said the other, Do you see yonder shining light? [Ps. 119:105; 2 Pet. 1:19] He said, I think I do. Then said Evangelist, Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto: so shalt thou see the gate; at which, when thou knockest, it shall be told thee what thou shalt do.

{18} So I saw in my dream that the man began to run.

A very good place in the text for us to follow suit and begin to run. A quick word on John Bunyan’s real literary legacy and the only reason he’s still listed and gets invitations to the annual awards ceremonies. HE IS THE SINGLE MOST BORING, UNREADABLE WRITER IN THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. (With the possible exception of James Muchener on a bad day; see Muchener’s bestsellor Cretaceous at Moon Books, Shuteye Town.)

Why have we bothered to tell you about Bunyan. Because he makes a good intro to the American writer William Bannitt, who thought he was an unapologetic Bunyanesque evangelical Christian Apologist until they invented computer poker games. But even that didn’t stop him from writing.

William Bannitt. If the Pope were a Harvurd-educated Republian° politician°, he would probably act a lot like former cabinet secretary William Bannitt, writing and tirelessly promoting thousands of books about how we could solve all the country’s problems by reading books written by William Bannitt. (See “Fixing Education,” Moon Books, Shuteye Town 1999.)

Here’s an excerpt from Bannitt’s 1999 Book, on sale at Moon Books in Shuteye Town.

FIXING EDUCATION

Chapter One

The decline of basic values in Amerian public education is no accident. It has been paced by a corresponding decline in the teaching of basic skills, history, and literature. Both trends serve the purpose of isolating children from the taproot of the Amerian moral and legal system in ways that make them powerless to defend themselves against an increasingly suffocating political correctness designed to replace enlightened democracy with a rigidly egalitarian, multicultural mobocracy.

When I was Secretary of Education, I found myself constantly engaged in confrontations with elementary and secondary school bureaucrats who were prepared at every turn to sacrifice attention to literacy problems in favor of endless proposals to foster ‘multicultural awareness,’ ‘gender sensitivity,’ and ‘racial tolerance.’ These bureaucrats were so intent on their aims that they would stoop to any ploy to change the subject. I have had elementary school principals claim they were “unable to understand the words” in my numerous New York Times essays on education. I have met with history teachers who evaded questions about deficiencies in Amerian and Modern European curricula by insisting that they themselves could not identify five important historical dates or list all 50 states of the Union. I have met with math teachers who professed an inability to do long division and English teachers who ostentatiously uttered serial atrocities of syntax, usage, and noun-verb agreement.

I am, of course, aware that there are some competency problems in the public school teacher corps, but I am not so naive as to suppose that an English teacher could have escaped learning grammar twice over in the Greek and Latin studies which used to be required in all the secondary schools I have ever known, from Choate (which I attended) all the way down the ladder to Hotchkiss (which my father’s gardener’s son attended.)

Therefore, I have no alternative but to conclude that such charades of ignorance are expressly designed to provide cover for the ongoing, systematic indoctrination of Amerian youngsters with a set of values that most citizens a generation ago would have denounced as insipid and traitorous. Today, the most successful physician or attorney will also try to change the subject by asseverating an ignorance of the dictionary definition of ‘insipid.’ I am not fooled. I knew dozens of pre-med and pre-law students at Harvard. Their views on the comparative merits of Aquinas and Savonarola might have disappointed on occasion, but they knew what ‘insipid’ meant.

How have we reached this point? How can Amerians continue to turn a blind eye to the compulsory perversion of values which is proceeding under their very noses? Here, the only answer which serves is that the program of propaganda which supports public education’s corrupt curricula is exceedingly clever, intricately organized, and ruthlessly cunning about hiding its agenda under a screen of apathy, ineptitude, and mediocrity. To put it more simply for those who will feign incomprehension, the fix is in. Hence the title of this book.

We cannot afford to let them succeed at this. The plan must be exposed and defeated. The consequences of failing to stop the hidden agenda are almost unthinkable. Try to imagine a graduating high school senior who cannot recite the preamble to the Constitution and its first ten amendments; who cannot write a cogent literary analysis of Shakespeare’s development as a writer from, say, Titus Andronicus to The Tempest; who cannot characterize the strengths and weaknesses of the ten most significant monarchs of England; who cannot explain the distinctions between Galilean and Newtonian discoveries about gravity; who cannot reel off the twelve-times-table at a moment’s notice; who cannot identify the principal organs and their functions in the viscera of a dissected frog; and who cannot name the cabinet-level departments of government and the most powerful chairmen of committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Just imagine it. Yes, I am indeed discussing the prospect of cultural immolation. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

We’ll give you some background on the film soufflé above in a moment, but first the nub of the matter. The author of the book that gave rise to the movie was Jerome K. Jerome. The not quite a palindrome thing, which he has in common with two other young men who responded to this odd circumstance in their own ways.

More about the other two in half a jiff. We’ll get Three Men and their dog and boat up and out of here, so we can focus on more interesting cases. According to Wiki…

“Jerome was born in Caldmore, Walsall, England. He was the fourth child of Marguerite Jones and Jerome Clapp (who later renamed himself Jerome Clapp Jerome), an ironmonger and lay preacher who dabbled in architecture… Jerome was registered as Jerome Clapp Jerome, like his father’s amended name… The family fell into poverty owing to bad investments in the local mining industry, and debt collectors visited often, an experience that Jerome described vividly in his autobiography My Life and Times.

“The young Jerome… wished to go into politics or be a man of letters, but the death of his father when Jerome was 13 and of his mother when he was 15 forced him to quit his studies and find work to support himself. He was employed at the London and North Western Railway, initially collecting coal that fell along the railway, and he remained there for four years…

“On 21 June 1888, Jerome married Georgina Elizabeth Henrietta Stanley Marris (“Ettie”), nine days after she divorced her first husband. She had a daughter from her previous, five-year marriage… The honeymoon took place on the Thames “in a little boat,” a fact that was to have a significant influence on his next and most important work, Three Men in a Boat.”

“Jerome sat down to write Three Men in a Boat as soon as the couple returned from their honeymoon. In the novel, his wife was replaced by [teo] longtime friends. This allowed him to create comic (and non-sentimental) situations which were nonetheless intertwined with the history of the Thames region. The book, published in 1889, became an instant success and has never been out of print.”

Why so much about an old dead Brit? Just that Jerome, if we may call him by his first name, did not enjoy the kind of privileged upbringing one might expect from his masterpiece of gentle humor. He was, in fact, born of the mines, from which he escaped along as he did his father’s domineering hands.

Our next What What youth is far and away the most famous of the three. He assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968. His youth was harsh indeed, thanks to an abusive father. Wiki tells us…

“Sirhan was born into an Arab Palestinian Christian family[6][7] in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine. As a child growing up in the West Bank, Sirhan was traumatized by the violence he witnessed in the Arab–Israeli conflict, including the death of his older brother, who was run over by a military vehicle that was swerving to escape hostile gunfire.[8]

“When Sirhan was 12 years old, his family emigrated to the US, moving briefly to New York and then to California… Sirhan’s father, Bishara, has been characterized as a stern man who often beat his sons harshly. Shortly after the family’s move to California, Bishara returned alone to the Middle East. Standing 5 feet 5 inche, Sirhan moved to Corona to train to be a jockey while working at a stable, but lost his job and abandoned the pursuit after suffering a head injury in a racing accident.

“Sirhan never became an American citizen, retaining instead his Jordanian citizenship. As an adult, he changed church denominations several times, joining Baptist and Seventh-day Adventist churches. Then in 1966, he joined the occult organization Ancient Mystical Order of the Rose Cross, commonly known as the Rosicrucians…

“…on June 5, 1968, Sirhan fired a .22 caliber… revolver at Senator Robert Kennedy and the crowd surrounding him in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after Kennedy had finished addressing supporters in the hotel’s main ballroom. Authors George Plimpton and Pete Hamill, football Hall of Famer Rosey Grier, and 1960 Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson were among several men who subdued and disarmed Sirhan after a struggle.

“Kennedy was shot three times—once in the head and twice in the back—with a fourth bullet passing through his jacket. He died almost 26 hours later. Five other people at the party were also shot, but all five recovered…”

Sirhan was tried and convicted of murder in 1969 and has been in prison ever since.

Our third young man seems disposed to follow more closely the path of Jerome Jerome. They have at least the ‘J’s in common. Jamal also has long had his heart set on being a writer. The extent to which his own father has been a support or a hindrance must arise from the pages of his intensely autobiographical work.

 

Me Slave

Chapter 1

I was always too proud, Mama said. It was probably a veracious assertion, but what else can you do in a hood where you’re owned by the Man. Before they sold off my father, he said to me, “Kareem—“ (He named me Kareem Abdul, but Abdul wasn’t our last name. We didn’t have last names then, back in the days before there was even a Martinlutherking, if we had even known there would be such a mentor, which we didn’t, because we weren’t allowed to go to school or take correspondence courses in Black Studies, or anything. It was for shit in 1856. But to resume our tale…) “Kareem,” quoth my father, “you’ve got to be proud. Don’t let any man dis your name, your female companion, or your wheels. That is the name of that melody.”

Ah, how young I was, how less than fully mature, mayhap even callow. For it seemed to me ironic indeed that my beloved pater would specify his wheels as a particular object of pride. I myself found them humiliating, an unending catalyst for blushes and lamentably thin excuses. What Afrian-Amerian lad past puberty could tolerate being observed in the rumble seat of an 1842 Buick? Worse, the tape player was an eight-track, and the only cartridge my father possessed was an anthology of Henry Mancini, in whose lush overuse of the violins I was certain I could hear the dark white heart of oppression.

It would not be until years—nay, decades—later that I would recall the ephemeral bliss of sharing with my father, in that ludicrous wreck of a vehicle, the liberating AM voice of our only real heroes, the stars of the suppressed and poverty-stricken Negro Leagues. Such is the miracle of radio, though. For us it was impossible to hear the worn seams of Satchel Paige’s glove, the holes in Josh Gibson’s Nike’s. It sounded altogether as wonderful and rich—yes, rich—as the broadcasts of the fabled New York Dodgers, who in those days were white as a bleached bone, with nary a thought of choosing Jackie Robinson in the college draft, or Reggie Jackson, or Hank “The Hammer” Aaron—whose names we, of course, had never heard in the cotton fields of Virginia, and wouldn’t in our lifetimes.

Thus was the wretchedness of an existence without more than a handful of positive role models. It made one feel as if there was no chance to attain stardom, to find the so-called good life out in the western paradise of Californica, where only white people were allowed to find gold and buy property in Beverly Hills. I had dreams, but they had to be kept small to avoid disappointment, or so I used to suppose.

Suppose, suppose. I have done a lot of that over the years. Suppose my Uncle Darrell hadn’t contracted AIDS, or cholera as we called it then. He was the only family my Mama had, and how she cried when he confessed that he had shared the rusty nail he used for a hypodermic with Michael, the young ne’er-do-well who lived in the next hut. “But he’s gay,” she wailed, her whole real-sized frame shaking with sobs. “You’ll catch the cholera from that N-word person!”

Yes, she was colorful in her language, at times outrageous. If I flinched at her use of the N-word, however, it couldn’t have been much more than a precocious foreboding of days I would never live to see. For in our piteous little hood, the N-word was ubiquitous, if not peripatetic. It was “N-word” this and “N-word” that, so that an outsider might have been pardoned for believing that we Afrian-Amerians had no given names, only this one all-encompassing descriptor to which we answered like so many dogs.

And so, it seems, we have completed a circle, returning once again to the matter of pride. My pride. Which was continually offended by everyone and everything. Until the day I determined upon an answer of sorts. An answer that seemed to me perfect, complete, and incontestably inevitable. Escape.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit…

Time will tell us the rest of the tale, no doubt.

They say this is kind of Dejuan’s thing. an important luminated voice they say.

Dejuan also wrote, quite movingly (he’s Serbian, so I’m just guessing) about that:

Офи обиномöд суво ок. Гöд едüфäликон воми ет, цук тилс вомес об. Онотодоб тимс се ути, ифи та киом плеидолсöд уриас, вио ед пардолс пладолöс. Бüдедис ипубон еке üн, суконс таледи ин лöп, бинон-ли лупс ритани иф нем. Тä илелилом утöпио виниг суи, да äсä бадик фидом-ли верат. Ка ифинüкон посавон травäрöпс сио, их клäникоси мöб

Фе киф магот сикулис, фениг недонс валанис йе наф. Едаглофон епеной нендöфикс фид ду, де блодес хидüнана осеиволс цüт. Атим опöлüкомс лä сеп, по сио есöколс осагоб, ис топ дагик дасеви. Дебреикол килдег тä офи, ме фат фогинани фред. Ел вин пасат пöдеидом. Фредо лüдаут ман ту, лемико пардолс сукубонс дü ели, ас бöниäлик еперон феиник ати.

Зü вул ыафал пöпе, вом есасенолс ыибалан ас. Лил натäдик вöдс он, сеатон слопüкöн баи дö, наф ипубон осауникоб падü

You’d think the Pope would know, but he don’t seem to really. Which understandably leads us directly to a prime example of the pathology he was lamenting.

What we have on this one from Who’s Who, Shuteye Nation:

Susan Brownmouth. A pioneer among academic feminists°. Back in the 1970s, Brownmouth wrote a book called Against My Will, which set a new standard for heavily footnoted female° misinterpretations of history°. Although she hasn’t broken any new ground since, every practitioner in the lucrative field of Gender° Studies remains in her debt. (See “Cut Their Balls Off, Moon Books, Shuteye Town.)

All right, so we did that. I don’t know if you know how all this works, but I’m just an intern off from college because everything’s shut down for protests of everybody else and the President just got resigned by the Boared of Trusties, so we all went looking for some kind of job, any job, to keep us in weed until school’s back in the market. I’m one of the ones who got handed this kind of one, meaning the kind nobody else wants to do and can bush off on some greeby like me. What I got is some notes and url’s and that’s it. Never heard of this Brownmouth dude. Note says more bio from Wiccipedia, which I looked up but forgot already. I think it says something like this. I’ll do the blockquote thing. It’ll look better.

This Susan Brownmouth person [1] grew up in New York, surprise, and went to college in New York, more surprise, at a place called Corbell University, where she masturculated at the Corbell University A&M unit, which is what they call the college of Agriculture & Matriarchy [or something, call it 2]. I think she [3] majored in Porcine Sudies and Animal Midwifery [4]. Then he went completely nuts [5] and got herself kicked out over some sexul alligorations that weren’t, you know, true. The way the pigs tell it anyway [6]. So what was left was being a Gender Mayhem PhD gofer for about five [5] or fifteen [15]  years. Then there have to be books. Like it said up top [-1]. And this new one. Which is called Cut Their Balls Off.

They gave me this text file which I’m going to just drop in here inside a blockquote.

Cut Their Balls Off

Chapter One

Arma virumque absurd misrepresentations and cultural myths Troiae qui primus significant new reconceptualization ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec this and numerous other books olim meminisse latest research iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa growing body of feminist scholarship ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque proves the irrational basis of male theories that cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris patriarchal impositions iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse only a penis iuvabit castration.

Arma virumque cano patriarchal legacy Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille matriarchal societies terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae backward chauvinist reasoning qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit Lesbians. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma smarter, physically stronger, and more genetically talented virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit vulva. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit vagina.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui misinterpretations, evasions, and outright falsehoods primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec because of the ovaries and uterine reflux olim meminisse breasts iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta menses. Forsan testosterone-crazed rapaciousness et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui hormones primus ab oris Laviniamque rape venit. Multa ille terris conceptual rape iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim effective new definition of rape meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan subjugation, deprivation, even mass murder et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque hormones venit. Multa ille intrinsic disease of maleness terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et breasts haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque not true at all cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque vagina venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta proven by a pioneering essay written last week. Forsan et haec olim traditional penis-in-vagina fantasies meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris more than breasts and a vagina iactatis et alto conclusively demonstrated. Dux femina facta. Forsan vulva, breasts, and cervial contractions et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae more than 63% female qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina less than 22% male facta. Forsan et breasts haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque intelligence and creativity cano Troiae vagina qui primus as shown in the landmark study being published next week ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma additional rapes and female castrations virumque cano hormones, specifically progesterone Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et vagina envy alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse deliberate enslavement iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris estrogen actually facilitates development of Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina contrary to the long unexamined assumptions about facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui myth of menstrual “madness” primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris jealous patriarchs iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et rape, murder, haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus murder, rape, and female circumcision ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux female achievement and innovation femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano many recent studies and papers Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris rape iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta rape . Forsan et rape haec olim meminisse vaginal mutilation iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris superior female perception Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina myth of mathematical backwardness facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab female genetic structure oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina cooperativeness, interpersonal facility facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae psychological deviancy qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et penis and scrotum alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano as much as 72% female Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris despite continuing reactionary attitudes by male-dominated iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec rape and perversion olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui systematic brutality, torture, and rape primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et rape and objectification haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui deranged fantasy structure primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa superior female responsiveness and adaptability to ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque continuing rape and subjugation cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta modern translation of ancient patterns of rape and haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa potentially much higher IQs ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus denied access to ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa systematic oppression and metaphorical rape ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse only 20% of males studied iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano therefore proven to near certainty Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa rape, mutilation, and murder ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina nicer, better, smarter, stronger facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque neverhteless demonstrated cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris criminal tendencies iactatis et alto testosterone. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse the historical record iuvabit. Arma virumque revisiting old assumptions cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille dominating female terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma political will and group engagement virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit vaginal liberatio. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina psychosis facta testosterone. Forsan et haec olim meminisse animal instincts iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae never again qui primus ab oris murder, rape, enslavement, and subjugation Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux breasts and buttocks and brains femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma uterine contractions virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan menstrual freedom et haec olim meminisse creativity, intelligence, understanding iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque penises venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina penises facta. Forsan et haec olim rape meminisse rape iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque scrotum psychosis venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec penis removal olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma rape virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris “tits and ass” Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan devaluations and humiliations et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque superiority of the female cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa regardless of rape and subjugationille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit penis.

And now the video they gave me. Said it would be easy to understand and clarfying somehow. Let’s roll it.

Okaaay. I’m outa here.

From the Book of Common Prayer, 1928 Version:

GENERAL CONFESSION

Let us humbly confess our sins unto Almighty God.

Silence may be kept.

Officiant and People together, all kneeling

Almighty and most merciful Father,
we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,
we have followed too much the devices and desires of our
own hearts,
we have offended against thy holy laws,
we have left undone those things which we ought to
have done,
and we have done those things which we ought not to
have done.
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us,
spare thou those who confess their faults,
restore thou those who are penitent,
according to thy promises declared unto mankind
in Christ Jesus our Lord;
and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake,
that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life,
to the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

The Priest alone stands and says

The Almighty and merciful Lord grant you absolution and
remission of all your sins, true repentance, amendment of
life, and the grace and consolation of his Holy Spirit. Amen.

********CONFESSION

ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults. Restore thou those who are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind In Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

******

Bounden Duty

Chapter One

The little girl named Sally walked the three miles from school every day, across the bleak yellow wasteland which had once been fields but were now little more than the wide, unhealed scar of a strip mine. A mile-and-a-half into her journey stood the one tree which had struggled futilely out of the raped soil to put forth a handful of leaves that turned yellow and fell off almost immediately, as if sickened by the land itself. The tree was the one milestone Sally looked forward to, and she had acquired the habit of counting the number of footsteps to the tree, and then from the tree to the featureless granite cottage where her mother listlessly waited to give her a joyless greeting. The number of steps to the tree was usually between three thousand-one-hundred-nine and three thousand-one-hundred-thirteen. If anyone had counted as Sally had in her doomed young life, they would have found her body at step number three thousand-one-hundred-seventeen. As it was, the Constable wrote down that he had found the body of the strangled schoolgirl at a distance of about ten feet from a dying aspen tree. Her mother didn’t weep when they told her, but she made a dry, hacking, empty sound in her throat that could have been a sob.

Inspector Alan Dogleash of Scotland Yard stared gloomily out the window of his office. The view was drably anonymous, as if the slate-colored modern building to the north had no name or sponsor but had merely appeared one day, like some appropriate fungus of technology. Pedestrians and cars passed in front of its facade without looking, as if they knew it had no identity and could not look to it for affirmation of their own. The inspector thought of the first line of a new poem, so cheerless and grey that it needed to be written down at once, and he was in the act of looking for a pencil when his secretary told him about the request for assistance from Minetown, the barren industrial city where he normally took his holidays.

“What did they say?” he asked, trying to remember the fugitive line of verse before it escaped into the mildewed dungeon of his unconscious.

“They requested assistance,” said Mrs. Awful with some asperity. She regarded all questioning as interrogation and beneath her. “They said they could probably solve it themselves but they’re all too tired and they’re still getting used to their new anti-depressant medication.”

Dogleash sighed. Minetown would be the perfect break in his routine. He had never known any place more destitute of beauty and hope. Perhaps he could extract another book of poetry from the experience.

Constable Down greeted Dogleash with polite uninterest and told him the details, such as they were, over a cup of black, astonishingly bitter tea. There was a fireplace in Down’s office, and its small flame crackled mirthlessly in the grate, warming neither the room nor the toneless voice of the constable.

“She had been strangled with her own knee sock,” Down reported. “No sign of a struggle. And there should have been. The ground there is always muddy, and it’s a clay mixture that retains its shape for quite a time. I’ve tried to think what that might mean, but I don’t have the energy. Do you want a scone?”

“No,” Dogleash replied, absently.

“Good,” said Down. “I’m out of scones. Haven’t had any scones for months.”

“What about the mother?” Dogleash asked. “Did she have any ideas?”

“I haven’t seen her yet,” Down said. “I was waiting for you brainy blokes from Scotland Yard.”

Dogleash sighed, and then, just to do something different, he yawned.

The granite cottage where Sally’s mother lived had been built twelve thousand years before, and the only improvements that had been made since then were the addition of a cheap single-pane window, a wireless in the sitting room, and a trio of small ugly appliances in the kitchen.

“Do you want a scone?” asked Mrs. Crap.

“No,” Dogleash replied, absently.

“I’d love a scone,” Down offered, with unusual vigor.

“Don’t have any,” Mrs. Crap told him, as if she, too, had been sconeless for months.

“Did Sally say anything unusual the week before?” asked Dogleash.

“The week before what?” Mrs. Crap looked dully bewildered.

“The week before the murder,” Dogleash said, gently.

“Oh. She said she didn’t know what it was all about.”

“What?”

“Life.”

“Oh that,” said Constable Down. “That’s nothing.”

Dogleash wondered if it was really nothing. It was true that all the people he knew and all the people he ran into on and off duty were always thinking about life, and how miserable and pointless and tedious and unbearable it was, but he couldn’t quite remember if little girls spent their time engaged in such thoughts. Weren’t they somehow involved with dolls, and dress-up, and little-girl pursuits like that? He put the question to Mrs. Crap.

“Not Sally,” said her mother. “The only thing she ever talked about was life. She said she supposed life might be worthwhile to some people, but she knew she was English, and so the only thing she could do with her life was try to figure out exactly how bleak it was, in the most excruciating possible detail, for sixty or seventy years, unless some merciful stranger would do her the favour of strangling her with one of her own knee socks.”

“You’re right,” Dogleash conceded. “It was nothing.” Sally had been, after all, a typical, ordinary girl, and there would be no sudden break in this case. It would unfold like all other cases, for hundreds of pages of cheerless fires, soporific conversations over tepid cups of tea, and thousands of incredibly depressing British innuendoes about the pure suffocating meaninglessness of it all—in short, the whole long drawn-out routine that had made his crime-solving exploits so popular throughout the English-speaking world. Well, he supposed it was time to get on with it. He thanked Mrs. Crap and Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

In the movie “Job and the Volcano,” six time Oscar Winner Tom Banks starts feeling sick at his job in Philadelphia, no wonder, and goes to see a doctor, resulting in the scene above. His first response is probably a lot like yours or mine would be. He writes a novel about his rotten luck, using the nom de guerre Michael Hanrahan.

Shit, I’m Dying

Chapter One

I was getting restless. Bill Boggs was a friend from the days so long ago—exactly three weeks now—when I was also a broker, furiously peddling thick sheaves of paper that promised millions if the sky didn’t fall in. But the sky had fallen in, on me at least, and I knew I shouldn’t have shown such an early draft of my work to a straight, even one I liked as much as Bill.

“The thing is,” Bill said, the way the straights do, as if there were only one ‘thing,’ and they had it in the back pocket of their blue suit-pants, “You guys always seem to think that everybody famous was gay. It’s just not convincing.”

I reread the passage he was so riled up about.

“Speak for yourself, John,” murmured Pocohantas. She was a drab girl who continuously exuded a strong smell of deer meat. John Smith edged farther away from her. He didn’t want that scent of rotting venison on his suit with Miles Standish coming so soon for a visit. No, what he wanted was Miles Standish himself—and not in the company of this young woman, but alone, where he could sound out the possibility so subtly alluded to in their discourse, the possibility which had kept him awake nights dreaming of…

“John.” Pocohantas was patient but insistent.

“John! Don’t you have anything to say to me?”

He turned back to her from his fevered imaginings. “Yes. I do. I feel you should know that buckskin is passé. It is no longer la mode. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, John.” And then she smiled that damned secret smile of hers, as if she knew. She didn’t know shit.

“It’s that last sentence, isn’t it?” I asked. “John Smith wouldn’t have said ‘didn’t know shit.’ You’re right. I’ll change it.”

Bill stood up, ready to return to the safe environs of his bulls and bears. “Sure,” he said. “That’ll take care of it. I’m glad to see you looking so healthy and energetic.”

“You don’t like my novel,” I said suddenly. A storm cloud I hadn’t seen coming was upon me, black and bursting with lightning, rain, and fury. “It just isn’t possible to you that we have always been around, right in the middle of things, keeping this big secret from all you dull, conventional, heterosexual mediocrities. You spend a big chunk of your lives trying not to see us at all, pretending we’re not there, and you get so good at lying to yourselves that you start thinking it’s some kind of modern fad that’s confined to a few streets and bars in New York and San Francisco. And that’s exactly the kind of narrow-minded, bigoted, delusional, bullshit myopia I’m trying to expose with my novel. And what’s more,” I screamed at him, my voice rising to a sibilant, glass breaking pitch, “I think you’re actually jealous, because while you’re stuck in that swamp of junk bonds and semi-fraudulent securities, I’m trying to do something important with the rest of my life.”

Bill waited impassively through the end of my tirade. “I know this is important to you, Edward,” he said. “I respect what you’re trying to do, and I wish you well. I really do. It’s just that maybe I can give you a helpful perspective from the other side, as it were. And as I think about it, what I’m trying to convey to you is that people in every kind of minority spend so much time thinking about the group they belong to, they wind up believing that everyone else is thinking about it all the time too, and if they don’t talk about it all the time like you do, then they must be suppressing something, or hiding something, or avoiding something. The dull truth is that dull, white, middle class guys like me spend hardly any time thinking about the lives of gays, or blacks, or women. Since we’re not gays or blacks or women, we spend most of our time thinking about what we’re going to do today and maybe what we’d like to accomplish next. So when you show me some scene with gay pilgrims or George Washington in drag, I don’t find it very convincing, that’s all. But you’re the writer. You’ll work it out somehow.”

After he left, I pouted for a while. Maybe there was something in what he said. Maybe. But then why had I seen that sudden rascal light in his eye that day when I accidentally came to work with the previous night’s mascara still in place? No. I knew my mission. I was going to blow the roof off the whole heterosexual lie before I died. That would at least make my death mean something. My death. Oh damn. That again. Frantically I sat back down at the word processor and … Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

We could leave it there, perhaps, but it seems kind of unsatisfying, doesn’t it?

UPDATE YEARS LATER…

There was a second Hanrahan novel, this time an ambitious work in the graphic genre. In it he addressed his pain not just about death but about the difficulty of getting noticed in this world no matter who you are and how brilliantly you do what you do. It’s called “The Secret Life of Tom Banks” and we’ve excerpted it here for you as a bonus.

We certainly wouldn’t presume to improve on a review blurb by the great Leonardo Di Capuleti… or whoever.

Bye now.

It’s hard to say what he does exactly. But there certainly are a lot of people who seem to think he’s unusually brilliant.

So. Everybody agrees he’s brilliant. Even he agrees. He has a book out that some people have read. We can show you some of it here.

Cómo pintar retratos de fotografías: un tutorial de pintura de aceite paso a paso

Yo solía ser intimidado por la pintura de retratos. Nunca pude conseguir los colores correcto y siempre me sentí como terminé dibujo con mi pintura en vez de pintar.

Me decidí a hacer frente a la pintura retrato de cabeza, y después de un montón de práctica, ahora me siento muy cómodo pintando retratos. Aquí están los pasos que he desarrollado para pintar un retrato exitoso de una foto. 

Por supuesto que soy un completo imbécil.

***************A Man Who Finally Turned to Finer Things

George Walker Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush, IVHe used to be sort of famous for having a dad who was Presdent, also named Bush, and for owning a big league baseball team in Texus. He could party with the best of them.

via GIPHY

 

Then he settled down, got married to a nice girl, and discovered he was wanted in the family business. Which, to be blunt, did not come easily to him. He had to be groomed in small venues before he could run for a training-wheels type office in Texus.

Initially he was a complete bust at public speaking. He would stand in front of the microphone, turn bright red, try to crack an off-color joke, and then forget the punchline. Salvation came in the form of a course of instruction in speechwriting and mucho practice at speech delivery reading from his own scripts. The first one was a store opening in Lubbock, where he brought down the house and acquired a measure of confidence.

Next came…

And then…

The children laughed and laughed. He was ready for a shot at a local no-brainer office, Governor of Texus, and not only got elected but re-elected with 70 percent of the vote. It was obviously time to follow his dad’s path to the White House, especially since Bush The Elder had been unceremoniously turned out of office after only one term by a hard-partying southern philanderer and perjurer named Bill Clitton, whose Veep, Al Bore, was confident of succeeding him in office after two popular terms. Bore had a book out, “Loving Ameria,” and so the Bush braintrust decided W needed a book too. (People had been calling him ‘W’ since first grade when his attempts to print his numeral, ‘IV,’ looked a lot like W’s.) With typical impish humor, W decided to call his own book, “Loving Ameria 2.”

Actually all the speech excerpts above are in the book, so you can pretty much go with that as a taste of the overall content.

So far, W is making steady headway in his presidential run, mostly by letting people go on thinking he’s his dad. He does this by not saying much. Which pretty much brings us up to date.

EXCEPT…

Meaning we have more about George Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush, IV, for a bunch of years in the future. Cool.

Let’s see. He was (will be) elected presdent over Al Bore in 2000.

The vote count was very close, so close that the Democrats never accepted him as presdent for all 8 years in office. Yes, he got re-elected too. He was even a hero for a while because of a giant 911 call the whole country got in his first year in office. He did some wars, won some battles, and was hated by everybody but some very quiet Republicans. His incredibly huge number of enemies said he was stupid, uneducated, a drunk, and a completely illegitimate mistake. His inner circle of staffers thought the best way to handle the constant abuse and slander was to say nothing, do nothing, and then resign at the first opportunity and write a book while he was still lameducking it in his second term.

So Bush decided to set the record straight with a book of his own, as reported by our friends at the XOFF News Channel:

W. Races His Book to MarketBuoyed by the news that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has published a book about herself in the teeth of congressional approval ratings that are even lower than his own, the President of the United States has announced that a book he has dictated about what it’s like to be him will be hitting the back storage rooms of bookstores all over the nation within the next few weeks.

“They will have to ask for the book by name,” Press Secretary Dana Perrino conceded. “The remarkably superior high school graduates who actually shelve books at the nation’s two bookstores — Borders and Barnes & Noble — are unlikely to carry a book by the President of the United States from the back of the store to anywhere that it might actually be seen or bought. But customers who ask for it are certain to be charmed by an account of the Bush administration from an utterly unexpected source — that of the chief executive from whom everyone else in his administration has made a fortune by libelling him to an unprecedented degree.”

President Bush is also planning, Perrino announced, to spend the rest of his second term on a book tour promoting the work. “I might as well,” she quoted the president as saying, “now that we have an ‘acting president’ so charismatic that the people of Germany are willing to follow him to the very end. Who could compete with that?”

Multiple stops on the president’s literary tour have already been booked, including a county fair in Wyoming, a cable access channel in Cowlick, West Virginia, and a college radio station in Gawdhelpus, Alabama. “We will announce other dates as they are confirmed,” Perrino said.

Some reporters at the press conference questioned the “as told to” attribution of some writing credit to former press secretary Scott McClellan, who has recently become a critic of the Bush administration. Perrino denied that McClellan’s involvement was any cause for concern. “This manuscript was completed well before Scott became a brilliant moral philosopher and political hero,” she said. “In fact, while he was actually taking dictation on the manuscript, he was still somewhere between a talentless Texas toady and an embarrassingly inept impediment to any sort of clear communication between the White House and the press. His new-found greatness as a progressive patriot was simply not a factor in this book, although his involvement did require more than the usual complement of spell-checks, and his foreword underwent multiple surgeries for the removal of metastasizing obsequies.”

The publisher — “You Got the Buck, We Got the Printing Press & Sons — has also released a few text excerpts. Among them:
“Dick Cheney never told me what to do. I brought a cattle prod with me from texas. The old bastard knew I’d stop his pacemaker in a second if he gave me any grief. And I would have, too.”

“I know. They say I’m dumb. I just have one question for them: Do you have any idea how hard it is to cheat your way through Andover, Yale, and the Harvard Business School? It’s damn near impossible. It takes organization, people skills, ruthless determination, and even an occasional lucky guess. I’m nowhere near as dumb as they’d like to think.”

“Drink? You better believe it. Who wouldn’t have after 9/11? Where do you think the term “shock and awe” came from? I gave the GO order in Iraq after I downed one bottle of scotch, one bottle of bourbon, and one 40-ounce bottle of Iron City beer. That’s when the damn generals knew I was serious. That’s my biggest doubt about Obama. World leaders have to be men of the world. FDR never made a decision in WWII without inhaling half a dozen martinis first. Churchill was blasted on brandy from day one of his prime ministership to VE-Day. Lyndon Johnson… well, whew, the stories I could tell from Herr Grandpa Prescott’s diary. And JFK had injections most of us would kill for. Yet, to this day, I’ve never even seen Obama sip a beer. That’s sick. And un-American.””

“I’m more like JFK than my ‘critics’ acknowledge. I went into politics for the same reason he did. Chicks. You get one kind of chick if you own a baseball team. You get a whole different kind of chick if you run the most powerful country on the planet. Enough said. If you want details, talk to Bill. Why do you think he and I hit it off so well?”

“Dan Rather. Geez. I thought he had me. Those memos. Word for word what I remember. What I couldn’t believe was how his snitch remembered them word for word too. If he’d had the actual documents instead of retyped copies, I’d have been a goner. Of course, the much bigger relief was that no one ever found out I didn’t know how to fly a plane. That would have been a political problem.”

“You want to know about Colin Pow? I’ll tell you about Colin Pow. One word. Dork. Never knew a black man who was more concerned about how his tie looked than the lies he was telling the U.N. He can go suck eggs.”

“Well, I actually like Laura. I really do. She’s been a good mother to those kids of ours — daughters, I’m pretty sure. And she stays out of my way. What else can you ask of a wife? I mean, really?”

“People get upset about all those death penalty cases in Texas. Why? Do you want those people running loose in your neighborhood? No. Of course you don’t. Dead is what some people really ought to be. It’s a lot easier to be from Massachusetts or California and act all outraged about the vicious killers we’re executing in Texas than it is to look at your next-door neighbor who got a kid murdered by some psycho and then argue that he should have cable TV, a kitty-cat, and free room and board for the rest of his natural days. Every time I signed a death warrant in Austin, I hung up that ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner I’ve gotten so much grief about. Where do you think we got it in the first place?”

“Yeah, there are always crap-weasels. George Tennent. Richard Clarke. Joe Wilson and that dumb whore wife of his. It goes with the territory. I don’t pay them no mind. When all is said and done, I’m the president. That’s what it’ll say in the history books. Does anybody bother Truman with the crap he pulled on Tokyo Rose? No. The crap-weasels are always footnotes.”

“I get tired of hearing that I’m soft on immigration. Of course I am. Never said I wasn’t. I ran on it back in 2000. How do you think I overcame all that New England constipation? And a mother who looked exactly like John Madden? Her name was Maria. She took care of me when my parents were at Kennebunkport. She taught me Spanish. And she also showed me her breasts. That’s why I’m so bilingual to this day. Quien bustamos las brassieros la takeitoffo nowomos. You see? I just wish that Laura wouldn’t keep stalking out of the room every time ‘West Side Story’ is on and Barney and I start singing ‘Maria’ and toasting each other with Margaritas and like that. It’s a lot more healthily than what we did at Skull & Bones, I can tell you.”

Then he went back to Texus and became an artist. Even had an exhibition at the Metropolis Museum of Art in Newyork City, hosted by his good buddies Bill and Hillery Clitton. Not much about politics anymore. Until That Man came along.

Not all of the Bush brushwork is on display in a museum, though. His ‘masterpiece’ is tucked privately away at home.

Don’t tell anybody, but there’s a DVD out too.

Better to leave it there, on a sort of high note.

Remember, you heard it all here first.

The National Dance, and the cultural heart, of tiny Tobago is the giant phenomenon known as the limbo. Much of the world regards it as a contest, but its pioneers and evangelists regard it as more than that, an exacting displace for body, mind, and spirit.

This the height, or impossibly low bar, a world class limbo champion can achieve. Breathtaking.

And here’s what it looks like when a big fat westerner does it an Obese Man Competition.

Did we say obese? What? It appears my notes were wrong. This post was supposed to be about a completely different fat man, Mr. Zeus’s Limbo and his obese new bestseller:

…and Joseph McCarthy was about to screw up the secret war against communism. But on the plus side, Mrs. Limbo was carrying a baby of such impressive cerebral development that she looked like her pregnancy was pregnant… Hey, I like that! For the truth was… I’m already a few words in and I haven’t used the word ‘truth’ yet, so I better do this… the truth was that if I weren’t such a decent, virtuous, happily married man, I’d compare her appearance to that of a woman with a third breast, because that’s how far out the baby’s cranium protruded from the otherwise perfectly round shape of her belly… uh, let’s see. WHERE IS THAT DAMN SNAFFLE? AND WHILE YOU’RE AT IT GET ME ANOTHER CIGAR. THAT LETTUCE I’VE BEEN EATING FOR THE LAST YEAR-AND-A-HALF TASTES LIKE CRAP, YOU KNOW IT?!

Where was I? Uh, that’s right. I don’t want to overdo the round belly thing. Everybody that only sees me on the radio thinks I’m still fat. Well, she was carrying big, and although she didn’t look like she had a third breast because that might offend some of the female bitto-heads, it did look somewhat as if her pregnancy was pregnant. Fix that all up, and show it to me when it’s typed, and I’ll jazz up that best of times, worst of times thing. Who did that originally? I think it must have been Buckley. Well, Bill and I are good friends, and he’ll know I mean it as a respectful homage.

Uh, best of times….? uh, make a note. Find out who was winning the National League that year. Was it the Gashouse Gang? I’m not sure I like that one. Anyway, look it up. Maybe it’ll work for some kind of sports metaphor with my life. It’s got to be good, because I want this book to be really literary sounding. It’s nice to sell a billion copies or so, but just once I’d like to see a nice review in the Times.

Anyway… best of times, worst times opening, then, uh, something humorous. It should be witty, like that stuff they write for my show, but it’s got to be… uh… OOPS! Time for golf. I’ll be back on this tomorrow.

Uh, it’s tomorrow, I mean, it’s the next day. Where was I? Why I’m Right by Russ Limbo. Chapter One. Did you get that? And don’t forget the O-N-E. Good. Now then… I was doing something about the best of times and the worst of times. It was really good, really intelligent, and what I was going to say next was arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

It won’t be that long till Russ Limbo celebrates a big anniversary too. In honor of that, here’s a link to what might be said on that occasion;

A 20th Year of Broadcasting for the Number One Talk Radio Guy