Category: Books

Posted on

The Waw

General Jubilation T. Cornpone, from Li’l Abner, Paramount Studios, 1959.

Before we went to Vicksburg I listened to Jeff Shaara’s novelization of the Siege of Vicksburg, Chain of Thunder, because Vicksburg is a good place to think about the effect of the Civil War on the white South. The citizens of Vicksburg were besieged, starved, bombed. They lived in caves. They ate rats. From May 18 through July 4, 1863, the War was in their home, and if the War began for the defense of slavery it ended with the failure of that defense and other things besides: a deep and culturally inbred resentment of the invader, and conviction as to the superior virtues of the defeated. The misery of invasion still resonated in 1971 when Joan Baez’s cover of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down was at the top of the charts. The Band’s version is pretty good too.

And notwithstanding the modern world the resentment and conviction probably aren’t done yet either.

From The General, 1926, MGM. The General is the funniest movie ever made and is in the public domain because somebody didn’t bother renewing the copyright. Go figure.

From Twain’s Life on the Mississippi:

IN the North one hears the war mentioned, in social conversation, once a month; sometimes as often as once a week; but as a distinct subject for talk, it has long ago been relieved of duty. There are sufficient reasons for this. Given a dinner company of six gentlemen to-day, it can easily happen that four of them—and possibly five—were not in the field at all. So the chances are four to two, or five to one, that the war will at no time during the evening become the topic of conversation; and the chances are still greater that if it become the topic it will remain so but a little while. If you add six ladies to the company, you have added six people who saw so little of the dread realities of the war that they ran out of talk concerning them years ago, and now would soon weary of the war topic if you brought it up.

The case is very different in the South. There, every man you meet was in the war; and every lady you meet saw the war. The war is the great chief topic of conversation. The interest in it is vivid and constant; the interest in other topics is fleeting. Mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set their tongues going, when nearly any other topic would fail. In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it. All day long you hear things ‘placed’ as having happened since the waw; or du’in’ the waw; or befo’ the waw; or right aftah the waw; or ’bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo’ the waw or aftah the waw. It shows how intimately every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, ch. 26, 1883, James R. Osgood & Co., Boston, Ma.

There’s a strange statue in AsiaTown in West Houston, a larger-than-life bronze of a South Vietnamese infantryman in full battle gear walking side by side with a bronze American G.I., also in full battle gear. It’s the Memorial to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The statue is in a district where not long ago a Vietnamese city council member was defeated at least in part because he had accompanied a former mayor on a trade mission to Vietnam. He visited the Yankees. Sometimes it’s just hard to get over it. Ask the Scots or the Irish or any given Cuban in Miami. Go visit Napoleon’s Tomb. Visit Quebec. Not everyone’s a good loser.

Now mind, there is no defense of the Lost Cause, there’s no getting over the moral indefensibility of many of my ancestors going to war to defend slavery: to paraphrase Grant, pretty brave guys but man did their cause suck, and for black Americans it really sucked.

University of Alabama Students burn desegregation literature, 1956, Library of Congress.

Beginning in the 1950s and 60s, with desegregation and voting and civil rights, our insights into the causes and effects of the War changed, or should have changed, not just in the South but the North as well. Maybe they did for some, but its symbols also became the symbols for a new conflict, or at least a refocused conflict carried over from the old. Notwithstanding that it was during the centennial of the War, I’m not buying that in 1962 Dixiecrats in South Carolina for the first time raised the battle flag at the state capitol because they got hyped up about history. I do suspect that a television show starring a Dodge Charger named the General Lee with a battle flag on its roof was dreamed up in Hollywood as a live-action cartoon, was innocent if naive, and that if anyone should be offended it should be white Southerners, but there you are: there are no longer any frivolous uses of that flag, and there are certainly no innocent uses. I may miss General Jubilation T. Cornpone in the Sunday funnies, but you can’t go home again.

* * *

Meantime we’re packing for Mississippi, and Saturday we drove to New Braunfels where I caught a nice rainbow on a red and black zebra midge under a flashback pheasant tail under a tan worm under some weight under a bobber, and I caught it right at the top of a run, right where it was supposed to be. Plus notwithstanding all that hardware I only got tangled twice. On the way out of town we ate at Krause’s, which has reopened and constructed a great beer hall next to the old restaurant. At our shared table we met a couple from New Braunfels with a place for rent in Arroyo City, on the Laguna Madre. Kris loves fishing the Laguna Madre. Unlike Florida I can catch fish on the Laguna Madre. She was ready to move to Arroyo City.

Posted on

Mississippi

I read too much Faulkner too early, and I didn’t understand much of it. I had an excuse for reading it: Faulkner and I were both born on September 25, different years but it seemed like Kismet. Kismet maybe, but Kismet didn’t aid comprehension. Do you know how incomprehensible Henry Sutpen or Joe Christmas can be to a young man? To an old man?

I had this notion that Faulkner would help me understand the South and what it meant to be Southern. Faulkner taught me many things: how to spell ya’ll, that classy folk come from Virginia and failed folk slide off to Texas, and that well-placed Southern dialect sholy is fun, if only in my head. He taught me that if a white guy had black ancestors then all sorts of hijinx will ensue, and that folk, black and white and in-between, are going to die violently. Because blood, maybe, or maybe just cultural failure.

Carl Van Vechten, William Faulkner, 1954, Library of Congress.

I suspect you can’t be filled with a young man’s optimism and get much out of Faulkner, except maybe The Reivers (which oddly enough is his old man’s novel). Faulkner didn’t write about glories, he wrote about failures. Notwithstanding my expectations, Absolom, Absalom! wasn’t Gone with the Wind, Intruder in the Dust wasn’t To Kill a Mockingbird. He wrote about the failures of history, personal and social, old and new, and that’s not the sort of message a young man will understand. At least I didn’t.

I don’t remember Faulkner ever talking about fishing. Maybe Faulkner should have written about fishing. I would have understood not catching fish.

Mississippi State Flag, Museum of Mississippi History.

All that incomprehensible Faulkner gave me an early and perhaps strangely skewed focus on Mississippi. Other than my friend Byron and a couple of quick drive-throughs, I haven’t had a lot of personal contact with Mississippi except Faulkner, and Byron, an expat (once for money and once for love), always seemed equally entranced with and reticent about the place–and notwithstanding a strong literary inclination has refused to read Faulkner. I had at least one second great-grandfather who landed in antebellum Marshall County, Mississippi, near Memphis at the top of the state. He stayed there long enough to marry a second great-grandmother in 1845, apparently his cousin, and then the two slid off to Texas in time for the birth of my great grandfather in 1848. Their sojourn in Marshall County was pretty much a drive-through. They didn’t start in Mississippi and they didn’t stay long after they got there.

Immediately west of Marshall County the Mississippi Delta runs for 200 miles south from the Tennessee border along the east side of the Mississippi River, to Vicksburg. At its widest the Delta spreads east for 80 miles. It is an alluvial plain, and has the richest soil on earth. West of the river there’s the Arkansas Delta, culturally and geologically and economically similar to the Mississippi Delta, but nobody talks much about Arkansas. It’s Mississippi that grabs the imagination.

Delta wealth was built on slave labor growing cotton. Cotton is still rich enough, but agriculture is mechanized, and doesn’t require the labor force that in the 19th century worked the land. Of the Delta counties 42 are considered distressed, only four are not. Why is Arkansas glad there’s a Mississippi? Because Arkansas isn’t last on every list.

Robert Johnson, c. 1935, Wikipedia.

Mississippi isn’t old, which is another thing I didn’t understand in Faulkner. Antebellum Mississippi was still the Wild West, and Faulkner knew it. In the 1850 census there were 606,526 people, less my second great grandparents who had GTT, having boomed from a population of 7600 in 1800. By 1900, the population was 1.797 million, 2.967 million in 2018. Statewide the population is 59.1 percent white, 37 percent black. About one-third of the Mississippi African American population lives in the Delta, where the African American population is 46 percent of the total. Some Delta counties are 85 percent African American. On the other side of the state, in Alcorn County, the population is 87 percent white. It’s not important, except that it highlights what is often not obvious about Mississippi: Mississippi isn’t one thing.

Jimmie Rodgers, 1935, Wikipedia.

But it is some things: it is the poorest state in the Union, between whites and blacks the most racially complex and more often than not the most tragic, the place where income, education, health care, poverty, life expectancy, teenage pregnancy, STDs, and history walk extreme racial and class divides. Within the state there’s a division between east and west, with the coast thrown in for good measure. A hundred years ago the Mississippi east was populist and progressive, and the Mississippi west was Dixiecrat planters controlling the votes of African Americans. Now things are flipped. In the 2016 presidential election Mississippi voted 57.86 percent for President Trump, but unlike much of the rest of the nation the split wasn’t urban/rural, the split was Delta and southwestern counties versus most of everybody else, black versus white. This map lays it out:

2016 Mississippi election map, stolen from Wikipedia. Forgive me.

Mississippi is also the source of some of our best good things. It’s the place of the Blues, B.B. King, Jimmie Rodgers, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson. It’s the place of a good half-dozen of our finest writers, past and present, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, and Jesmyn Ward, all are from Mississippi. There are whole hosts of novelists like John Grisham and Greg Iles who write pretty good if mostly forgettable novels. It can be argued that as the principal home of the blues it’s the principal home of rock-and-roll. It is certainly the home of Elvis (and directly across the River from Natchez in Louisiana Jerry Lee Lewis). All of this in one of the least literate states in the nation. Where the heck did all that come from?

Mississippi also gave us Jefferson Davis, the post-Reconstruction Mississippi Plan, 589 lynchings (539 of blacks–the most in the South), Emmett Till, and more than its fair share of the violence of the Civil Rights Movement.

We go to Ocean Springs in March to fish the salt marshes with Richard Schmidt. Ocean Springs is apparently the most charming city on that odd geographic panhandle that makes up the Mississippi Coast, Biloxi having been taken over by casinos, and it’s about an hour east of New Orleans. It is also the site of the 1699 French landing in Mississippi/Louisiana by Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville. Who doesn’t like to say Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville? The French accomplished many things in Louisiana, including the decimation of the Native American population by disease and warfare, the eradication of the Natchez Indians, and the introduction of African slavery. They didn’t accomplish permanent French settlement, losing out to the English who lost out to the Spanish who lost out to the new Americans, though the French did found Biloxi and Natchez. And New Orleans.

Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville. National Library and Archives of Quebec.

On pretty much a whim over the long Martin Luther King holiday we drove to Mississippi and visited Natchez, Vicksburg, and Jackson. Oddly, Natchez is closer to Houston than my hometown in Texas, but driving six hours west from Houston through Fort Worth and Wichita Falls is a decidedly different experience from driving through Louisiana and Mississippi. Natchez is full of sometimes pretty and sometimes magnificent Antebellum homes turned into bed and breakfasts, but as Byron had pointed out to me, nobody wants to stay in the slave quarters. We didn’t fish–it was cold, and there was flooding because of winter rains. At the Vicksburg National Battlefield, I realized that my Union great-great grandfather from Missouri via Eastern Tennessee was probably shooting at one or more of my Confederate great-great grandfathers. I could have ended right there on that battlefield more than 90 years before I got started.

At a popular restaurant in Vicksburg black and white Saturday night diners ate under decidedly Lost Cause paintings of the Siege. On the flip side, a popular country-clubby restaurant in Jackson populated by black and white churchgoers, Char, was decorated with old photos. Prominent in the entry of the place was a copy of a 60s photo of Medgar Evers. As I recall I had the catfish, or maybe the fried chicken. I definitely had the fried green tomatoes. I also kept wondering if I’d misidentified the portrait photo of Medgar Evers. It is a strange place, Mississippi, and the past there really is never dead. But black and white diners are eating happily at Sunday brunch under a photo of Medgar Evers. I reckon things are changing.

Maybe someday soon I’ll make my pilgrimage to Oxford and finally understand Faulkner.

Posted on

Key West Packing List

Books

Short of England or Ireland or Manhattan there’s no island anywhere that’s the subject of more literary output than Key West. It runs from the sublime, Wallace Steven’s The Idea of Order at Key West, to the famously bad, Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, to the fine, 92 in the Shade, to the sublimely ridiculous, Dave Barry’s Trip to Key West.

But what Key West and Florida generally are best known for is crime novels. If Oxford, England, has the most literary murders per capita of anywhere in the world, Key West must run it a close second. In novels by Randy Wayne White, Carl Hiassen, Lucy Burdette, Laurence Shames, Tim Dorsey, James W. Hall, and Michael Reisig (and I’m surely leaving some scribblers out) there are folk committing murders and mayhem and whatnot at a fierce pace down in the Keys. I don’t remember any John D. McDonald or Elmore Leonard novels set in the Keys, McDonald was Lauderdale and Leonard Miami, but if there aren’t they should get busy and posthumously take care of that. The remarkable thing about Florida crime fiction isn’t that it’s very good (and some of it is), but how little of anything else good is written about Florida. God is causing the Keys to sink under the ocean either because he thinks all those novels are true, or maybe because they are all true enough.

So I listened to a bunch of crime novels, particularly by Laurence Shames. They’re all entertaining (if not quite the thing as travel guides). I also read Jack E. Davis’s very fine Pulitzer Prize history of the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf: The Making of the American Sea. I can’t remember where or when I bought the book. It was on my bedside table and I was thinking about Mississippi and Florida so I read it. It didn’t have one of those gold stickers on the dust jacket that told me it was important, and I was mostly through it before I realized it was not just any old book but an Anointed Prize Winner.

As much as I’d read and thought about Louisiana last year Davis highlighted my limits. I didn’t think about the destruction of the marshes or deep water drilling or inshore damage from chemical production or the great agricultural dead zone in the Gulf, which are things that should be first to mind. I hit my personal dead zone. For Houstonians the environmental damage to the Gulf is so personal, so much both a part of and separated from our daily lives and so much of our own damn fault that it’s forgotten. We trust oil and chemical companies because we are oil and chemical companies. I loved the first 300 pages of Mr. Davis’s book. I suffered during the last 200.

When I went to my annual physical this week Dr. White and I talked about the book. Last year we talked about the new Ulysses S. Grant biographies and David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage: my annual physical is my annual book club. Anyway we talked about the devastation at the end of Gulf and he told me not to worry about it because he was convinced humanity was doomed anyway. It was oddly comforting. Don’t worry that we’re destroying the planet because it’ll sort itself out after we’re gone.

There were two other minor take-aways from Gulf: Davis (Jack E., not David Brion) quoted off and on from the poet Sydney Lanier, particularly his Florida travel guide but also from his poems, and he wrote at length about the apparently mad painter, Walter Anderson. Lanier I knew as a Confederate soldier because of a local school-naming kerfuffle, but Anderson I didn’t know at all. I’d like to know more about both, but thus far I’ve found Lanier unreadable. It’s something I need to work on.

Rental Car

In Florida we rented a Nissan Rogue from National. Before last September I rented cars from Budget, mostly out of habit and because I always remembered which rental counter to go to. After bad rental experiences in Portland and Baltimore I looked online for car company reviews. I switched to National. I didn’t think it would make much difference, but in Chicago, Hawaii, and now Florida, they’ve been remarkable. They’ve been what customer service should be, and I’ll pay the few additional dollars to National for the customer care.

Meanwhile the Rogue had adaptive cruise control, which unlike when it startled me in Hawaii I expected. For the drive from Lauderdale to the Keys it was the best thing ever. Ever. I’ve seen worse drivers than South Floridians, in Naples and Mexico City the drivers are lawless and remorseless and mad, but South Florida drivers are their own peculiar brand of awful. There seems always to be a septuagenarian cranking 45 in the passing lane while a 20-year old in a Dodge Whatnot screams right and left through traffic, and all of it bordered by lines of 18-wheelers. Plus general heavy traffic and road work. It’s special. The adaptive cruise control helped sort things out.

Fly Fishing Stuff

Given that this was nominally a fly fishing trip I should be telling you what gear we used. We took some reels. We took some rods. Our guide, Andrew Asher, tied a crab pattern onto the 10 wt., and then we didn’t use anything but a 10. We didn’t use any other rod or fly until late in the day when I tried to cast for barracuda.

It was a beautiful day. There was some sun. There was some wind. There was some clear water. I think I’ll go again.

Bakeries

Glazed Donuts on Eaton St. in Key West has great donuts, and if you buy six they give you a box (so of course one always goes for the free stuff). That’s a bittersweet dark chocolate, and the key lime is filled with key lime pie. Quite an accomplishment.

Playlist

You know the Beach Boys are from California, that George Gershwin was from New York, and notwithstanding his current residence in Hawaii Willie Nelson is from Texas. You know the Allman Brothers are from Georgia, but they’re not. The Allmans are from Jacksonville.

You know that Jimmy Buffett is from Florida (except that he’s from Mississippi), and he’s defined how Florida is supposed to sound (which really isn’t quite to my taste), and Arturo Sandoval sounds like Miami, but all in all there’s not much there there when it comes to Florida music. There are great musicians–the Allmans, Sandoval, the Mavericks, Tom Petty, Ray Charles–and travesties, NSync and the Backstreet Boys and Lynyrd Skynyrd, but other than what came out of Cuba or Buffett there’s nothing that says Florida.

The Allman Brothers Band, 1973, from Wikipedia. Those were the days.
  • Dean Martin, Powder Your Face With Sunshine. This really isn’t about Florida, but I found it on a Florida song list. This is what Florida should sound like.
  • Zac Brown Band, Toes. This song is the love child of Jimmy Buffet and Michael Franks performed by a Georgia country and western band.
  • Jesse Harris, Secret Sun. Pretty.
  • Frank Sinatra, Let’s Get Away from It All. A useful song that mentions every state except Nevada. Ok. I’m lying. It doesn’t mention Hawaii or Alaska either, since there were only 48 states when it was recorded.
  • Nanci Griffith and Mac McAnally, Gulf Coast Highway. This was on a list of Florida songs, and it’s lovely, but it’s about Texas. Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris cover it, which is the best,
  • Enrique Iglesias, Ballando. This is what Miami sounds like in the soundtrack in my head.
  • U2, Miami.  John Mellencamp, Miami. Counting Crows, Miami. They’re all different songs. The Counting Crows is the best of the lot.
  • Mel Tillis. Tillis is Florida’s most famous country & western singer, and he predates modern Nashville production. If you listen in the car you can pretend you’re driving a big rig coast-to-coast in 1969. For so long, I wanted you/To be my pretty queen./Now you’re mine, my purty one,/You filled my every dream.
  • The Allman Brothers. You can’t have enough Allman Brothers. I even made Kris listen to the entire 44 minutes of Mountain Jam. I think that will get us into the Guinness Book of World Records.
  • Tom Petty. You can’t have enough Tom Petty, but I did erase that song about zombies from my phone. What was he thinking?
  • Gram Parsons. GP. Everything’s better with Emmylou Harris.
  • Cannonball Adderly. In addition to Arturo Sandoval, Archie Shepp and the Adderly brothers, Nat and Cannonball, are from Florida. That’s pretty good jazz. I grew up with Adderly’s Work Song, and it makes me smile every time I hear it.
Nat and Cannonball Adderley, John Levin Enterprises-management/photographer-Bruno of Hollywood, 1961, reported on Wikipedia as public domain, but if not they can come get me.
  • Archie Shepp. Shepp was born in Florida, but raised in Philadelphia. I guess his connection to Florida is pretty tenuous, but that’s ok. So is mine.
  • Arturo Sandoval. I saw Sandoval and his band a couple of years ago, and he’s a master. He’s Cuban, and closely tied to Dizzy Gillespie. He sounds like Miami.
  • Jimmy Buffett. I’d rather not, but you have to. It’s state law, with stiff penalties for violation.
  • John Vanderslice, Romanian Names. Whenever Vanderslice came up on the play list I thought there’s nothing else in Florida that sounds like this. If I’d been playing a Brooklyn play list I would have thought, oh, another one of those guys. In some ways Florida is more mid-America than Kansas.
  • Lynyrd Skynyrd, What’s Your Name? This is why we should all despise Lynyrd Skynyrd. What a stupid idea for a song. It makes one think that Mr. Young was right after all.
  • Matchbox Twenty, How Far We’ve Come. This is why we should all despise Matchbox Twenty, if we have any clue who they are.
  • The Mavericks. Who knew the Mavericks were from Florida?
  • Ray Charles. Who knew Ray Charles was from Florida?

Coming back from Key West on the Overseas Highway we listened to Debussy’s La Mer (which was a bit oceanic for the calm seas) and two or three versions of Charles Trenet’s La Mer. It gave the drive a very French cast.

I took a guitar, but we went to bars instead.

Posted on

Another Interlude

On Thursday we leave for Hawaii, which for some odd and I suspect Southern reason I pronounce Huh-wah-yuh, which Siri can’t understand when I call up my playlist. We should spend today packing, which we won’t. What do we take? Some shorts, some shirts, some wading boots. The couple of 9 wt rods we gave each other for Christmas. A guitar. We fish with Captain Jesse Cheape of High Tide Fishing, a full day on Friday and a half-day on Saturday. After that we’ll sightsee. I think sightseeing is required by the nature of the thing.

It is the second farthest distance we’ll travel, closer than Alaska but further than Maine. I’ve actually practiced casting some, which is frustrating and unrewarding. I’m such a mediocre caster. I’ve tried to keep up my Hawaii reading, and have been through a couple of additional Hawaiian books–The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings, which was very likable, and Dreams from My Father by Barrack Obama, which was about his birth in Kenya.

I guess my thoughts have moved on to Mississippi, which I’ve been working on for May, and Florida which I have to go to in February. I’m beginning to despise Florida and its uncatchable fish, but the Astros open there in April, and if we fail again in February (with a one-day fishing trip to the Keys) maybe we’ll make a fourth trip in April.

Hawaiian music hasn’t really grabbed me: it’s melodic, sweet, all major keys and thirds and fifths and pure tones. I’ve been cheating on Hawaii with Mississippi Blues. It shares a slide guitar, but not much else.

Frontispiece, Life on the Mississippi, The Baton Rouge, 1883, Gutenberg.org.

I also cheated on Hawaii with Mississippi books, and re-read Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. It is such an essential book. It’s only a bit more than a six-hour (read eight-hour) drive from here to Vicksburg, and we could visit the battlefield memorial and the National Cemetery over the long Martin Luther King weekend. Of course with the government shut-down nothing at the National Cemetery would be open. It’s too bad all presidents aren’t required to be born in Kenya.

Early on Twain also traveled to Hawaii (née the Sandwich Islands) and wrote a series of letters from there for a San Francisco newspaper. I didn’t find the letters particularly illuminating, though Twain liked the place immensely and always talked of going back.

I’ve tied some leaders which won’t turn over, and some flies which won’t catch fish. I’ve also bought some flies, almost all of which are some kind of spawning shrimp, which is the only fly I can ever seem to remember on Captain Cheape’s list. I do own a bunch of bonefish flies, almost none of which are on said list. I’ll haul them along anyway.

Meantime the weather here in Houston is as good as it gets: clear, windless, dry, and cool, 61 degrees this morning with a high of 71 degrees. There’s a mockingbird singing through the open door to the porch. Maybe I’ll go look for black bass this afternoon, or spawning crappie. Yesterday we took the skiff out on Galveston bay, and the combination of cold weather and still air left the water clear. We saw some redfish, too.

Didn’t catch those either. We did get some excellent oysters and ceviche at the Black Pearl Oyster Bar on 23rd Street.