Author archives

King George Days, and Some Sociology

Mostly wooded, on the Potomac River, Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground the biggest employer, with a fair number of kids who got up at four-thirty in the morning to help their fathers with commercial crabbing on the river. There was nothing special about the class of 1964, or about King George High, except for those of …

A Treatise on the Nonexistence of Art

Art is mostly fraud perpetrated by narcissistic academic quacks on a public easily gulled. They should be prosecuted. This is as true of literature as of painting and sculpture. If modern sculpture were placed in a junkyard, art critics couldn’t find it. Most of what we are told are great works are great works only …

Life in Moon’s Curious Church: The Worship of Ammunition

The tall scrawny freak with the red hair converted in the spring of 1972, several months before Jerry wandered, roaring, onto the scene. I had recently graduated from both Vietnam and college and, not knowing what else to do, was living with a collection of hippies at Stafford Court House, Virginia. The other freaks were …

The Future, If Any, of Work, If Any

So the other day I was thinking, which I know better than to do, and started pondering the American economy, which ain´t got the chance of a frog in a French restaurant. Nobody else´s does either. It´s just that we got there first. Start with work. Just about nobody likes it. I hear folk like …

In Saigon’s Alleys, a Place I Loved

Dawn comes to the alleys around Tan Son Nhut Field with a faint grey light seeping past the graveyard and up the dusty road toward the banana market. Pots begin to clatter and red charcoal dims in brightening court-yards. A hungry dog sniffs in the ditch. A cyclo, a motor-driven coal scuttle equally useful as …

Up the holler with Uncle Hant: Space Aliens

T’other day I walked up the holler to ask Uncle Hant about space aliens. It’s because Hant knows everything ? most nearly. It was spring and birds were hooting and hollering in the rail cut through the woods to Hant’s place and bugs were shrieking. The he-bugs, anyway. They rub their legs together like fiddle …

Elvis His Own Self

You gotta understand the grip Elvis has on the automobile-loving basically Iro-Celtic libido of the southern United States. Maybe you think Presley was just the first white rock-n-roll singer. Naw. He’s a state of mind. Anybody who has spent time in the smoky evening fields of the Mississippi Delta, where people talk slow like sorghum …