Psychedelic icon and former presidential candidate Wavy Gravy (above with Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy) turns 73 today. Not familiar with his political career?
It all began back in the 1960's when many people voted for Lyndon Baines Johnson over Barry Goldwater because they thought that Johnson was the peace candidate, only to discover later that, in Wavy's words, "LBJ teamed up with Bob McNamara to kill more people, more efficiently than anybody since Attila the Hun." In response, four years later Wavy Gravy countered the lack of good candidates by running a swine for president called Pigasus, "a Hampshire hog of great stature, and the first black and white female candidate."
In the next election cycle, Wavy Gravy decided to run a Rock n' Roll ticket, consisting of an actual stone for president and a jelly roll for vice-president. At campaign events they would pass out jelly rolls so that the audience could devour the vice-presidential candidate at each rally. The Rock n' Roll campaign came to an abrupt end however when Wavy Gravy (who used to be known as Hugh Romney, a friend and contemporary of Lenny Bruce, before he changed his name to Wavy Gravy after an LSD trip in which he experienced himself melting into an undulating pool of gravy) lost the rock he used as the presidential nominee by leaving the candidate behind in a taxi cab.
Totally frustrated by the political process, Wavy decided that Nobody should be President, declaring the office "an insult to the intelligence of a free people and a complete waste of money." At that point he decided to become Nobody's Fool and devote himself to campaign for abolishing the presidency by electing Nobody for President.
Indeed the more he thought about it, the more it became apparent that Nobody was really qualified for the presidency. After all, Nobody was president before George Washington, and of course Nobody can make apple pie better than Mom. In fact no matter what the issue was, it was obvious that Nobody has all the answers!
Who will keep their campaign promises?
Nobody!
Who will lower your taxes?
Nobody!
Who will bring peace in our time?
Nobody!
Who should be running your life?
Nobody!
Who should have that much power?
Nobody!
What can be done about apathy?
Nobody Cares!
And so ever since, in each presidential election year, Wavy Gravy works like Nobody's business to elect Nobody instead of somebody because Nobody is better than the candidates that are actually running.
In 2008 Wavy Gravy did not run Nobody for president. As you can see below, for once there was a mainstream candidate he could support.
There is an award winning documentary on Wavy Gravy you should make a point of seeing sometime.
You can also buy some clown gear from Wavy Gravy for the next time you're in a funny mood. For example you could buy a clown nose. It looks really sharp with a tuxedo!
You might also want to buy some bubbles to blow at your next concert or protest rally.
How about this rainbow propeller beanie for the gay activist with a sense of humor?
Actually, hippies were using rainbow colors long before gay rights activists adopted it. Ken Babbs has written about how he sometimes gets mistaken for a gay activist when attired in full Prankster regalia.
You can get clown gear and other Wavy Gravy products by clicking here.
Among those other products is collage art that Wavy Gravy creates, such as this Beatnik Mount Rushmore with the presidents replaced by Corso, Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg.
Now that's a true Mount rush more!
For many years Republicans have been trying to get Ronald Reagan placed on Mount Rushmore.
However Democrats have other ideas.
But Heavy Metal heads are holding out for Ozzy!
This Morning
How come I never noticed this weird sculpture beside the Hotel Northampton before?
Nearby is the courtyard leading to the courthouse.
Few people enter those buildings with happiness. Generally, if you're hanging around courthouses it's because something in your life has gone wrong.
But such troubles are better than not being around at all, as these purple hoods all along the street reveal that someone has passed on.
Everyone's death is important to someone - at the very least to the person who died.
At UMass
Someone was doing equations on the wall of the Fine Arts Center.
As students complete each final exam, they rush to the campus center to exchange the books they never intend to open again.
Some of the money will be spent this weekend in downtown bars as Amherst braces itself for the last big party weekend of the semester.
Many times as I've gone down Rte. 9 I have noticed a battered old sign standing alongside the road. I could never quite make out what was written on it, and I always intended to stop some day and see what the heck the sign said. I finally actually did so and here is a picture I took of it:
When that sign went up Route 9 probably more resembled a country road than the busy highway it is today. How many in Hadley are still alive who can remember that tricentennial?
I was puzzled and intrigued by the sign's mention of "regicides." Frankly, I wasn't sure what the term meant, but on looking it up discovered that it means the killing of a king. The murdered king in this case was England's Charles the First, and when his son Charles the Second was restored to power, the jurors who put his father to death had to flee Britain for their lives. Two of them ended up in America and came to Hadley, where they were hidden for the rest of their lives by the Reverend John Russell.
In my research, I discovered that colorful legends have sprung up over the years about the king killers. The most famous, and one that I recall hearing in school as a child in Springfield, was of "The Angel of Hadley." This was supposedly a mysterious man with a long white beard who suddenly appeared as Hadley was about to be attacked by Indians. The mysterious old man led the settlers to victory, only to vanish just as suddenly as he appeared. Legend has it that the elderly hero was actually one of the regicides, coming out of seclusion just long enough to save the town before retreating back into hiding. A great story, but is it true?
Local historian Libby Klekowski has this to say about the legend:
There were rumors of war up and down the Connecticut River. King Philip and his warriors were attacking the colonial outposts of Deerfield and Northfield. The inhabitants of Hadley (approximately 50 families) were observing a Fast Day service when the attack came. The villagers were unprepared. Even though they rushed out of the Meeting House, guns ready to fire, they were totally unorganized and ineffectual. Suddenly there appeared among them an elderly man, a man whom no one recognized. Who was he? Where did he come from? This stranger took command, arrayed the townspeople in a military manner, and helped them repel the warriors. As suddenly as he had appeared, he disappeared. The villagers could not explain what had happened so proclaimed their savior an angel sent by God.
What the good people of Hadley did not know was that their minister, John Russell, had been secretly housing two men, General Edward Whalley and General William Goffe, for eleven years - since 1664. These two men were on-the-run, dodging the King of England's agents, hiding out in the wilds of the recently settled colonies of New England.
What had these two respectable men done in England to gain the enmity of their king? The answer to this question is not hard to find. How would you feel toward someone who signed your father's death warrant? Generals Whalley and Goffe were 2 of the 76 judges of the High Court of Justice who ruled that Charles I of England was to be executed for the crime of treason and were 2 of the 59 men who actually signed his death warrant in 1649. In 1660, Charles II, son of the beheaded king, was restored to power. Immediately the hunt was on to find the judges, known as the regicides and to bring them to justice in England. Charles II was willing to pardon those who had fought against his father in England's Civil War (1642-1649). But there was to be no pardon for the Regicides!
Whalley and Goffe sailed from England as soon as possible. They arrived in Boston in July, 1660, and they lived there openly under assumed names. In August of that same year, Charles II issued a royal writ for their arrest and execution, the man-of-war bearing these warrants set sail for Boston. Friends of the two regicides found out and secretly chartered a fast sloop by which to send a warning. The sloop over took the King's man-of-war just off Cape Ann, pressed on to Boston Harbor where it arrived too late to reach the city that night. The ship's captain, taking his mission very seriously, manned his small boat with his strongest men and rowed to shore. Governor Endicott was having a party for the two regicides that very evening at the State House. The captain, still dressed in his seaman's clothes, refused to be turned away from the door, arguing his case at length. Governor Endicott overheard the discussion and listened to the captain's message. Realizing that Goffe and Whalley were facing apprehension, the governor ended the reception and sent the two men out of Boston that very night.
From 1661-1664, the two fugitives were housed in and around New Haven and Milford, Connecticut. When the King's men started looking for them in Connecticut, Whalley and Goffe decided to hide out at the back of beyond, in the small settlement of Hadley. Reverend John Russell hid them in his house in the center of the village until Whalley's death in ca. 1674 and Goffe's death some time around 1680. Although a few trusted people knew the two men were secretly hidden in Hadley, everyone involved kept the secret because if the truth were revealed, John Russell as well as the two fugitives would face death.
Site of the angel's appearance as it looks today.
What in this story is fact and what is myth?
The regicide judges existed and were hidden in Hadley during the time stated here.
John Russell secreted the men in his house and never revealed their presence.
Few people knew the truth, but those that did carried letters to and from the men and their families in England.
Whalley, it is almost certain, died in Hadley and was secretly buried there in 1674.
Goffe's burial place is uncertain, but a good case can be made for Hadley as the site.
But....
According to historical records, Hadley was not attacked by King Philip's warriors on September 1, 1675.
There is no basis to the story of General Goffe's sudden appearance to lead the villagers to victory that day or any day.
The myth seems to have been started in the following century in History of the Three Judges, written by Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College, and published in 1794. President Stiles based his statements on an anecdote printed in a footnote in a published work by Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts and published in 1764.
So, even though General Goffe did not save Hadley in 1675 and therefore was not the Angel of Hadley perhaps both Generals Whalley and Goffe would have thought Reverend John Russell was their special savior and, therefore, could be called the Angel of Hadley.
Darn, so the legend is almost certainly not true, although because it contains no supernatural elements, it can never be completely dismissed as totally false. The legend has inspired a number of creative people, such as painter Frederick Chapman and author Nathanial Hawthorne. Certainly what is known to be true is quite remarkable - that two men who helped to kill the King of England found safe refuge in our area, showing that our Valley's well-known anti-establishment tendencies date back more than three centuries.
The Man Who Loved Equality
"Equality, I spoke the word as if a wedding vow." -Bob Dylan
Afterwards it was never clear to anyone precisely how he had fallen so far out of touch with reality. With the advantage of hindsight, there were those who pointed to an early incident or a specific detail, which initially suggested that something was amiss.
There were those who had noticed a certain absent mindedness about him. At times they had caught him staring into space at what seemed to be nothing. Some had spoken to him without receiving a response, under circumstances when neither not hearing nor a distraction could have been the reason. Later some claimed that he had always been odd, so that nothing about his fate had surprised them. In time most people held this view, which they expressed with an indifferent shrug, as if it that had always been their opinion.
In fact they understood nothing. The point at which he really began to lose it for good was when he first chose not to make any value judgments. There was no special significance to that moment. It couldn't really even be called a decision. It had come on gradually, a certain lack of focus, a strange yet somehow welcome inability to determine degrees of quality.
It was as if anything could attract and hold his attention, but not in any compelling way. The world was there to be noticed, but only with everything to be noticed equally. This pleased him because he had always favored equality in all things. Sharp differences of any kind dismayed him. Differences demanded judgments, and he hated to judge. That was the way he had felt as far back as he cared to remember.
He secretly wished for everything to be the same, but had never explicitly said that, to himself or to anyone else. It was just as well, no one would have known what he was talking about and in any case he couldn't have put it into words. All he knew was that he felt it, and he had always had faith, if in nothing else, in the supremacy of feelings; so because he felt it, he believed it, and that was that.
Then one day, unexpectedly, seemingly miraculously and to his great delight, the world began to conform to his feelings. It began slowly at first, and that was the phase when people began to take note of what they called his spaciness. Soon it became hard to differentiate between what was important, like the presence of others who were trying to communicate with him, and a fly on the wall or a sunbeam through the window or a crumb on the table or even just the air moving in the room.
This unfocused, undifferentiated, all inclusive awareness, divorced from all attempts to assign it any values, eventually reached a point where existence had become a perfect fog of grayness. No longer was anything considered attractive or repellent, interesting or boring. In the past, the present or the future, there was no distinction between the I and the you, the me and the mine, the bright and the dark, the good and the bad or the start and the end.
And in that perfect moment, the man who loved equality saw death.
Stuck Up
Someone went all over UMass putting up Insane Clown Posse stickers.
When former Boston Herald columnist Don Feder (above) was heckled off the stage last March at UMass, the incident attracted national attention. However, here in the Valley there was the typical veil of silence from our local media and the University itself. Then in April an op-ed column appeared in the Boston Globe. An excerpt:
America's campuses are seeing a growing movement by students to shut off debate by organized groups and silence speakers with whom they disagree. Rather than engage in the give-and-take that should be characteristic of the university as a "marketplace of ideas," these students have decided that opposing views don't even bear hearing. And all too often they are aided by administrators whose policies reward hecklers rather than students who wish to engage in civil debate and dialogue.
UMass is one of those campuses. After word got out that students were planning to protest Feder's speech, the UMass-Amherst Police Department pressured Feder's hosts, the Republican Club, into paying nearly three times as much in security costs for the event as they had planned. Of course, the student hecklers disrupted the event anyway with no interference by the police.
Feder's hecklers were thereby handed a double victory by the university - not only did they manage to silence Feder, but they also succeeded in forcing their political enemies on campus to pay a huge security bill for little return. This tactic was so successful it's hard to imagine that the same UMass students won't do it again, and it's unlikely that the lesson has been lost on students who sympathize with Feder.
The real casualty of the heckling "arms race" fostered by such policies will be the possibility of getting a truly liberal education. The more violent and disruptive the threatened protest, the higher the security costs will be demanded of the host, giving those most willing to be violent the strongest veto over campus discourse.
At the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), where I work, we tell students that if they have gone through four years of college without ever being offended or having their beliefs challenged, they should ask for their money back. John Stuart Mill, in his 1859 treatise "On Liberty," observed that nobody is infallible, and that an opinion we detest might be right, or, even if wrong, might "contain a portion of truth" that we would otherwise have missed. Might Feder's opinions have contained that "portion of truth?" UMass students may never know.
Several days later, the following letter appeared in the Globe:
PEOPLE FAMILIAR with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst know that it has a long tradition of fostering discourse and the open exchange of ideas, and that groups from the left, right, and in between vigorously exercise their free speech with great frequency.
Given this history, it was perplexing to read the April 9 op-ed by Robert Shibley of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education ("Why no one should be silenced on campus"). His interpretation of events misses the mark.
UMass-Amherst did not place a surcharge on the Republican Club because we anticipated protesters for a speech delivered by columnist Don Feder. Rather, the police increased the charge because the number of anticipated attendees changed, and because the Republican Club representative declined to move the event to a venue more suited to the presentation. While Feder was heckled, the police handled the situation in the room without difficulty, which included removing one person. Feder chose to discontinue his speech.
The figure in dispute is less than $500. The university does not wish to perpetuate the perception of a controversy. So, to emphasize our commitment to free and open debate, the university has decided to refund the difference between a fee for a 70-person event and a fee for a 150-person event.
Ed Blaguszewski Executive director of news and media relations University of Massachusetts at Amherst
I don't like the tone of that letter, which falsely implies that free speech is not an issue on campus and hasn't been in the past. It is also unfortunate that one must read out of town papers to discover these things. However, it is at least a formal, public commitment by the University to free speech, and more importantly they dropped the fee. In other encouraging news, controversial right-wing academic Mike Adams, who was heckled off the stage a few years ago, returned to UMass recently and spoke without being shouted into silence. So that's progress.
Laid Off
I'm saddened by the news that Hampshire Gazette/Amherst Bulletin reporter Mary Cary (above) has been laid off due to increasing budgetary pressures at those papers. But at least Carey is now free to dive unimpeded into the exciting new internet revolution, with all the economic opportunity and adventure that entails. The real sympathy should go out to Carey's former co-workers who are still stuck onboard a sinking ship. Unlike Carey, who has been blogging for years, most of them have failed to establish an independent online presence to serve as a cushion once their own inevitable pink slip arrives.
Bike Week
When passing through downtown Northampton this morning I stumbled upon this rally for Bike Week. There were people giving earnest speeches in favor of biking.
Naturally many people attended by bicycle, creating a sort of bike parking crisis.
I will be joining the Valley biking brotherhood next month when I get my own bike! You can be sure to see many future posts about my biking adventures.
Balliet Archival Material
A prominent former classmate of mine at The World Famous Thomas M. Balliet Elementary School sent me this clipping. I refuse to figure out exactly what year that would be - it's too depressing.
Today's Video
Grace Slick has been somewhat reclusive in recent years, but surfaced for an interview in which she discussed why she wrote songs such as "White Rabbit" which were based on the work of Lewis Carroll:
The thing I like about Alice is that she did what she wanted. When you get old it's not what you did that you regret - it's what you didn't do. Alice went for what she wanted and I like that about her. When we were kids our parents would sit there, reading Alice in Wonderland to us kids, with a glass of scotch in their hand. Then when we grew up they would say, "Why are you taking drugs? Where did you get that idea?"
Let's think about the books they read to us. In The Wizard of Oz they fall asleep in an opium field - and wake up to see an Emerald City! In Peter Pan, sprinkle a little white dust on you and suddenly you can fly! In Alice in Wonderland Alice takes at least four drugs - literally, it isn't even an illusion or anything. She takes a bite off a magic mushroom, smokes a hookah with the catepillar; she eats something that makes her literally high, and then has to take something else to come back down. When our parents used to read us these stories, were they even listening to what they were reading?
"White Rabbit" is a song that even after 40 years keeps resurfacing, like this techno version made for one of the Resident Evil films.
It was an enlightening evening (in January 2005) in Memorial Hall at UMass, when noted historian, author and publicist Dennis McNally gave a speech about making history more accessible to the general public. McNally is best known as the long time publicist for the Grateful Dead, and while there was no shortage of Dead t-shirts in the audience, those who came primarily to hear anecdotes about Jerry Garcia may have been disappointed. But they shouldn't have been too disappointed, because the talk McNally gave was excellent even without much in the way of rock star gossip.
McNalley has close ties to UMass, having completed his doctorate in history there in the early 1970's. In fact his doctoral dissertation on Jack Kerouac was accepted as a book by a major publishing house before he even graduated. At the time Kerouac was not considered a suitable subject for scholarly research, having just recently died. Generally the academic history establishment dislikes accepting writers for serious study until they have been dead for over a decade and have shown signs of "passing the test of time" such as numerous articles on the author in scholarly journals. Only at that point would the professional historian consider the author as the possible subject for a book.
McNally pointed out that any such delay would have been impractical, in part because Kerouac was part of a very alcoholic, self-destructive scene where as McNally put it, "all my sources were dying of cirrhosis of the liver." Still McNally was given a hard time by some in the UMass history department who felt that a beatnik author was simply not a proper topic for a serious scholar, despite the fact that in getting his doctorate dissertation published as a major commercial release McNally had already surpassed the achievements of many of the professors who were judging him. Of course, the passage of time has proven McNally's critics to have been utterly wrong.
The Kerouac book caught the attention of the Grateful Dead, the experimental and improvisational rock band which grew out of the beatnik scene and who were looking for a historian to hire in order to handle their enormous archives of music and pop culture history. That evolved into a job for McNally as the band's fulltime press publicist, during which he made limited use of his historian training, except for keeping extensive notes on what he experienced with the band.
Those notes and his historical research in the Dead's archives eventually became McNally's second best-selling book, A Long Strange Trip , which is a history of the Grateful Dead from its origins in the Beat Generation to the band's essential ending with the death of its songwriter and guitarist Jerry Garcia in 1995.
Can a book about a rock band be considered an important historical document, even by academics? This was just one of many aspects of McNally's career that was the subject of discussion at the lecture. Yet whatever scholarly controversy McNally may have stirred up at UMass in his youth, he was returning to his old school with no hard feelings, as he was praised like a hometown boy done good by the Dean and many of the faculty members present.
McNally's lecture was quite complicated, too complex at times to be effectively delivered orally, and one hopes it will one day be available in printed form somewhere, perhaps online. He basically said that historians should not write as academics writing for the sake of each other, but direct their writing more to the general public. While that may mean writing in a more novelistic style, McNally said that helping the public to understand and relate to their own history is part of what a historian is supposed to do. McNally felt historians should make accessible writing their top priority after accuracy. Whether the academics in the audience were buying that I don't know, but I did see a few of them sitting out McNally's standing ovation at the end.
There was a short question and answer session, where one graduate student asked McNally whether he believed it was possible to be purely objective when writing history. McNally replied that he didn't believe in objectivity, but said one should strive instead for "fairness" in presenting all known sides of an issue. He pointed out that many Grateful Dead fans, the natural core audience for his book, were displeased that McNally had portrayed Jerry Garcia's private life as "a mess" due to his heavy drug use. McNally also said that Garcia had been "a neglectful parent" to the several children he had with his wives and others. Deadheads didn't want to hear that their hero had such human foibles, but McNally said that the honest historian must include all aspects of their subjects in their work, including those that might be unflattering.
Another person asked whether McNally felt that something similar culturally to Kerouac and the Dead would be possible today. He said that he was sure that "there's stuff going on somewhere" but said it was difficult for authentic cultural movements to arise today because of the way anything remotely novel gets immediately exploited as a fad. "There is no gestation time anymore," he said, "as soon as something appears with the slightest cultural significance it is co-opted, marketed and sold, only to be instantly replaced by the next cultural product. The Beats and the Dead operated for a long time beneath the commercial radar before they became famous. I'm not sure you can do that anymore."
In all it was a very interesting lecture, well worth attending and providing considerable food for thought.
McNally Back at UMass February 23, 2006
The last time best-selling author Dennis McNally spoke at UMass it was a rather formal affair at Memorial Hall featuring a fairly esoteric discussion of historical scholarship. Yesterday he returned to campus and spoke to a much smaller and informal group at Butterfield Dormitory (above) and the topic was what it was like to spend over a decade working for the Grateful Dead. That was not the original intent. McNally was invited as part of a program to help liberal arts college students get tips from professionals on how to break into the writing racket. It started out that way, with McNally telling the students the encouraging (?) news that the society has become so dumbed down that even someone with only modest writing skills should be able to get a job.
However, the talk soon drifted to the far more interesting topic of what it was like to be a publicist for one of the world's most popular bands. In two words: Big Fun! The Grateful Dead were about as loose and free flowing an organization as could exist and still make money, while their employees were always encouraged to be as creative as possible in a completely supportive environment.
Yet, it was not a stress-free job. McNally recounted the time that the band, which could be whimsical in its decision making, suddenly decided to cancel the invitations given to the press to one of their New York concerts. McNally had the very challenging task of trying to explain to the Dead why you simply cannot disinvite someone like the top music critic for the New York Times without there being serious journalistic repercussions. The band's attitude was, "We've never cared about what the New York Times thought of us in the past, why should we start now?" Finally McNally succeeded in changing their minds, but only after convincing them that it would be professional suicide for himself as a publicist if they did not. In other words they did it as a favor for him, not because he could convince them to give a damn about the New York Times.
Again and again McNally returned to the theme of taking risks and making unorthodox choices in life, offering the Grateful Dead as an example of succeeding without ever selling-out or compromising your core beliefs. McNally warned the students against being trapped by "other people's expectations of what your life should be." He said many people spend their lives doing nothing but "chasing money and acquiring things." Instead he said they should seek a life of "adventure and spirituality" even if that means struggling financially or living on the margins of society.
Leaving the Geocities archives and returning to the present, at UMass this week is the last week of classes and everyone is studying like mad.
At the Amherst Survival Center today everyone was surprised when a whole lot of pizza supplies came in. We were even more surprised when we found out where it all came from and why. The River Shark pizza joint is going out of business!
Too bad, I liked that place.
Today's Video
Two Massachusetts residents named Yo Yo Ma and James Taylor on a front porch in Western Mass.
The first time I heard about the Ludlow Witch was around the campfire at Boy Scout camp. I was never much of a Boy Scout, the organization seemed too religious oriented and militaristic in style for a free spirit like me. But I did like to go camping, so whenever news reached me through the boyhood grapevine (more efficient in its own way than the Associated Press) that the Boy Scouts were preparing for their annual camping trips, I would hurry over to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church and join.
I took absolutely no interest in their merit badges, paper drives or assorted good deeds, and never participated in them. I joined the scouts strictly to go camping, fishing, swimming and to goof off with my buddies far from the dull, hot mean streets of Springfield. When the camping trips ended for the summer, I'd quit the scouts until the next year.
On many nights on those camp-outs we would participate in what may well be the oldest continuous communal activity in human history. I'm talking of course about sitting around a campfire telling stories. Besides being the most ancient, it may also be the most human of activities. An anthropologist once defined human beings as "story-telling animals."
Many of the tales told around the crackling flames were creepy ones. The scary story is believed to be the oldest of all the literary forms. The ancient cave drawings of the Stone Age show stick figures being attacked by monsters. Psychologists have theorized that the scary story persists because it fulfills a deeply essential socialization need, which is the necessity of acquiring courage. Being frightened in the safe environment of an imaginary tale, and learning to handle that abstract fear, is practice for how to handle fearful emotions in real life.
In everyone's life will come moments of physical and psychological danger. As Ayn Rand once said, "Courage is not a mere virtue, it is a purely practical necessity."
Once upon a time, in Eastern Massachusetts during the colonial era, a terrible hysteria broke out in which several innocent people were tortured and killed as witches. One of the accused, a harmless, nature worshipping Pagan who came under suspicion as a non-Christian, escaped the Boston area and resettled in the tiny town of Ludlow in Western Massachusetts. The tolerant citizens of Ludlow left the Pagan woman alone, which was easy to do since she bothered no one and kept to herself. However, one day a small child went missing and could not be located. A panic arose that focused on the superstition of witches stealing children for use in their allegedly unspeakable rituals and recipes for stews.
Panic soon led to hysteria in which a mob marched on the Pagan's home and set it afire. Fleeing the inferno she was chased screaming through the streets, until finally arriving at the area where the bridge now stands connecting Ludlow with Indian Orchard. In a last desperate attempt to escape the bloodthirsty mob, she threw herself into the river. But instead of escaping she hit her head on some rocks and drowned. Her body was never recovered.
The next day the missing child showed up alive, he had simply gotten lost in the woods. The people of Ludlow realized too late that the Pagan woman had been completely innocent all along. But the soul of the Pagan demanded vengeance. If she was driven to her death by false accusations of attacking children, then she would show them through supernatural means what real danger to their young could be! Therefore it is said that forever after she has haunted our Valley, looking for wayward children that she can snatch away to some mysterious realm where they are never seen again, each time causing the community to grieve in guilt over how their false accusations had now come true.
Of course I don't believe that any of this really happened, but I'll admit it's easier to say that now, sitting in my well lighted den surrounded by modern luxuries, than it has been on some nights alone on the Connecticut River. I'd be a liar if I said I haven't occasionally heard things that sounded strange, or thought for a moment that I saw something that was more than just a shadow. But I simply remind myself that logic dictates that it is really nothing. Of course. Really.
There is a great scene from the movie The Shining where the character played by Scatman Cruthers is telling a small boy (who is about to be left in a hotel full of ghosts) what he believes ghosts actually are. Scatman says that they are the traces of things that once happened, sort of like when you burn toast. You may throw the burnt toast in the garbage, and put the toaster away, but the smell will linger in the air as evidence of what happened for a long time afterward. He told the boy that ghosts are like that, leftover traces of what happened.
So who knows?
Hellraiser Howie
Boston media legend Howie Carr was at the Holyoke Mall signing books, as seen here with blogger Bill Dusty.
I've read Howie's The Brothers Bulger and recommend it highly. In fact there is much about the mentality of the Bulger Brothers that is very similar to the mindset of Valley political machines such as in Springfield, where Howie's guide to political conduct definitely applies: 1) Nothing is on the level
2) Everything is a deal
3) No deal is too small
In Springfield I would've added this rule - the bigger the scoundrel, the higher the honors!
Hamp Today
The Green Bean in downtown Northampton is becoming the essential Sunday morning hotspot for Hamp hipsters to meet to discuss the night before.
I've seen this painter all over downtown Hamp, even on arctic cold days, painting Northampton landmarks.
I'd say he stroked the historic Calvin pretty damn good.
I first read Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs when I was in my early twenties. I remember liking it at the time, perhaps because it had a lot of queer stuff in it and was sorta funny in parts. Therefore, I'm a little surprised to say, upon reading it recently for the first time in a quarter century, that I liked it less than I expected.
William Burroughs was perhaps the oddest of the major figures of the Beat writers. Considerably older than his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he had a profound influence on both of them, and not necessarily always a positive one. A junkie on and off for most of his life, Burroughs completely lacked the idealism and love of life that the rest of the Beat writers expressed in their writing. Burrough's work primarily represented the dark side of the Beat Generation.
Ken Kesey used to like to say that Burroughs was "the first person to do something totally original with the English language since Shakespeare." Perhaps, but original doesn't always mean good, and some of the most unique things Burroughs did, such as cutting up magazines and pasting the words together at random, was certainly different, but as literature it sucked.
Yet, Burrough's had some unique insights. He was obsessed with the concept of words and their ability to multiply and spread like a virus. It was a concept we are familiar with in this age of the internet, where everything online is endlessly copied, re-arranged and spread through cyberspace in a way very much resembling Burrough's concept of word viruses.
In that sense, Burrough's both predated and predicted a key component of modern language in the computer age - it's endless, virus like ability to reproduce and spread, all the while mutating as it passes through multiple users. Ironically, Burroughs himself became a kind of cultural virus in his last years, when he appeared everywhere in mass media, with frequent appearances in advertisements and in popular music, such as this piece with the Doors.
The other main pre-occupation of Burrough's writing is addiction, drug addiction in particular, but all forms of addiction as well. Indeed, Burroughs suggests that drug addiction is just a metaphor for the all the other addictions that he claims are everywhere in society, but which people pretend are respectable - such as addictions to money, to people, to stale and destructive ideas and routines.
Naked Lunch is supposed to be about these kinds of addiction, and in parts it is. The book is at its most readable when Burroughs discusses the details of drug abuse and the colorful if sometimes sordid details of life as a needle junkie.
Although I've been a drug addict, I was not a needle user. In fact have a fear of needles; a fear which I believe probably saved my life. Every drug I ever tried I liked too much, and I'm pretty sure if I'd ever overcome my fear of needles long enough to have actually tried it, I feel certain I would have taken to it immediately and that I would not be alive today. Needle users are unique among addicts for their blood rituals and almost erotic fascination with the penetration of the body, all of which are foreign to other forms of drug use.
So I wish Naked Lunch had more of Burrough's insights into that world. Alas, the book as a whole is mostly a lot of gibberish. Some of the nonsensical word-play is humorous or at least clever, but the overwhelming emotion when reading Naked Lunch is boredom. The sexual and violent imagery, so shocking in the 1960's, seems tame today and even a little bit juvenile.
Now largely deprived of its shock value by the changing of social mores, Naked Lunch appears too often to want to shock for the sake of shocking, or to be pretentiously rude. The view of drug use is also relentlessly negative, nothing in the book suggests any good reason why one would want to get high in the first place.
If the State of Massachusetts had not been stupid enough to try to ban Naked Lunch as obscene, I doubt it would ever have achieved so much fame. The first section of the version of the book I read consists of excerpts from that trial, especially testimony from Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg. Mailer comes across as a pompous ass as he lectures the courtroom on literature, and Ginsberg is too obviously anxious to help his friend.
Frankly, without a show trial Naked Lunch would have sank into the obscurity it deserves and will probably one day attain. Fortunately, there are other things by Burroughs that are much better, especially short routines such as the following great piece about a subject I like to explore in my own writing - municipal corruption.
The Sultan of Sewers
by WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
This piece was written to Harper's Magazine in response to the question, "When did you stop wanting to be President?"
When did I stop wanting to be President? At birth, certainly, and perhaps before. In this life or any previous incarnations I have been able to check out, I NEVER wanted to be President. This innate decision was confirmed when I became literate and saw the President pawing babies and spouting bullshit.
I attended Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the atom bomb. And bombs bursting in air over Hiroshima gave proof through the night that our flag was already there. There was the Teapot Dome Scandal under President Harding, and I remember the unspeakable Gaston Means. Scion of an aristocratic Southern family, infamous private eye and go-between in this miasma of graft, I remember him walking into a hotel room full of bourbon-drinking, cigar-smoking lobbyists and fixers with a suitcase he puts in the middle of the table. "Fill it up, boys, then we can talk business."
I do not mean to imply that my youthful idealism was repelled by this spectacle. I had by then learned to take a broad, general view of things. My political ambitions were simply of a humbler and less conspicuous caliber: I hoped at one time to become Commissioner of Sewers for St. Louis County. Three hundred dollars a month with every possibility of getting one's slimey little paws deep into a slush fund. And to this end I attended a softball game, where such sinecures were assigned to the deserving and the fortunate. And everybody I met said "Now, I'm old so-and-so runnin' for such-and-such, and anything you do for me I'll appreciate."
My boyish dreams fanned by this heady atmosphere and three mint juleps, I saw myself already in possession of the coveted post which called for a token appearance twice a week to sign a few letters at the old courthouse. While I'm there, might as well put it on the Sheriff for some of the marijuana he has confiscated, and he'd better play ball or I will route a sewer through his front yard. And then across the street to the courthouse cafe for a coffee with other lazy worthless bastards in the same line of business as we wallow in corruption like contented crocodiles.
I never wanted to be a frontman like Harding or Nixon, taking the rap, shaking hands, and making speeches all day. Who in his right mind would want a job like that? As Commissioner of Sewers, I would not be called upon to pet babies, make speeches, shake hands, or have lunch with the Queen. In fact, the fewer voters who knew of my existence, the better. Let Kings and Presidents keep the limelight; I prefer a whiff of coal gas as the sewers rupture for miles around. I have made a deal on the piping which has bought me a 300 thousand dollar home. Although there is talk in the press of sex cults and drug orgies, carried out in the stink of what made them possible, fluttering from the roof of my ranch-style house, over my mint and marijuana, Old Glory floats lazily in the tainted breeze.
But there were sullen mutters of revolt from the peasantry: "My teenage daughters are threatened by this immorality! Is this the American way of life?"
I thought so, and I didn't want it changed.
Sitting in my garden, smoking the sheriff's reefer, coal gas on the wind sweet in my nostrils as the smell of oil to an oilman, or the smell of bullshit to a cattle baron. I sure did a sweet thing on those pipes, and I'm covered too. What I got on the governor wouldn't look good on the front page, would it now? And I have my special police to deal with vandalism and sabotage. All handsome youths, languid and vicious as reptiles. Described in the press as no more than minions, lackeys, and bodyguards to his majesty the Sultan of Sewers.
The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. Then I met the gubernatorial candidate, and he looked at me as if trying to focus my image through a telescope, and said in effect, "Anything I do for you I'll depreciate."
And I felt the dream slipping away from me, receding into the past. Dim, jerky, far away, the discreet gold letters on a glass door:
William S. Burroughs, Commissioner of Sanitation
Somehow, I had not intersected. I was not one of them. Perhaps I was simply the wrong shape. Some of my classmates, plump, cynical, unathletic boys with narrow shoulders and broad hips made the grade and went on to banner headlines concerning two million dollars of the taxpayers' money, and a nonexistent bridge or highway, I forget which. It was a long time ago, and I have never aspired to political office since. The Sultan of Sewers lies buried in a distant, 1930s softball game.
My Morning
Here I am this morning on my front porch waiting for my friends to come over.
We went to the Evolution Cafe in downtown Florence.
It is a real hardcore vegan place that doesn't even have dairy products on the premises, except for one dietarily corrupt container of Half n' Half for people like me, sitting there in their fridge like a blasphemy among all the pure organic items.
There is a nice set of psychedelic paintings on the wall.
After my friends left, I went to UMass where the Queerfest was underway.
They finally changed the date so that it came in May, thereby sidestepping the previous name of the occasion - "The Gaypril Queerfest" which some thought was more corny than cute.
Here some newly made tie-dye Queerfest t-shirts lie drying in the sun.
