The Beiderbecke Affair

Who's Afraid of Brendan Wolfe?

“Brendan Wolfe,” or so I read this morning, “is an ambivalent lover, reluctant conspirator, counterfeit question, and, most of all, an unemployed daydreamer obsessed with a dead man.”

Leaving aside my confusion over what it means to be a “counterfeit question,” this is an unsettling thing to read about oneself. Luckily, that final e was a typo, and the conspirator in question is actually Brendan Wolf, the title character of a new novel by Brian Malloy. This other, literary Brendan is beloved in certain corners of the blogosphere, here inspiring a list that begins, “I Liked Brendan Wolf Because . . .”

Not all Brendan Wolfes are beloved, of course. In fact, one of my high school teachers, upon our introduction, declared, “What a perfect villain’s name! I think I’ll use it in my next novel.”

I don’t know if she ever did.

If you were to google “Brendan Wolfe,” you would find mostly me. “About Me” would even be your first hit. It contains a list (more akin to “I Don’t Like Brendan Wolfe Because . . .”) that recently caused my dad some concern.

“I can’t find your blog,” he told me. “All I can find is a list of people making fun of you.”

He took no comfort in the fact that it was me making fun of me. The name has too much power; it doesn’t matter if I am the one wielding it.

Anyway, Brendan Wolfe shows up elsewhere on the web, too. For instance, he was “intensely virile” in the role of Petruchio in Shrew You!, shocking audiences with “a salacious and bitter homosexual encounter.” He is also a rock singer who, it turns out, is caught in something of “a time warp”:

. . . from a distance his shoulder-length blond hair and sharp features are a striking image of a young Robert Plant. Coupled with the fact that he actually sings as opposed to shouting out lyrics as is the order of the day, it’s Wolfe’s authenticity that augments the band’s core characteristic: a grassroots honesty with an artistic garnish.

Finally, Brendan Wolfe is a Canadian right-winger who upsets his readers by warning that “misguided fifth-columnists are at work within the West, such as those organizing massive demonstrations against the U.S. liberation of Iraq.”

We Brendan Wolfes run the spectrum, apparently. I used to tell people I was named for a saint and a terrorist playwright who drank himself to death. My parents hoped I might split the difference.

Perhaps I split the difference when it comes to my full name, too. Either way, I’m grateful for the company.

ADDITIONALLY: This Brendan Wolfe ought to be in pictures.

IMAGE: This site is not even remotely safe for work.

Into Hot Air

A. O. Scott recently noted that the Sean Penn-directed feature Into the Wild “is infused with an expansive, almost giddy sense of possibility, and it communicates a pure, unaffected delight in open spaces, fresh air and bright sunshine.” I haven’t seen the movie yet, only read the book, but I can say with some confidence that author Jon Krakauer’s relationship with the outdoors bears little resemblance to “pure, unaffected delight.”

Neither does mine (although for very different reasons), a fact that started me to thinking about an essay I wrote back in 2001 about one of my own rare and reluctant forays into the fresh air and bright sunshine. The essay actually got me fired from the publication for which I wrote it—the publisher hated it that much. He actually fired my boss and me both; this essay about climbing Katahdin in Maine, it turns out, was not his only issue of concern. But he did mention it specifically before eventually changing his mind and rehiring us both. This all happened within the span of an hour spent sitting around a giant oak conference table in a room overlooking lovely Penobscot Bay. It was one time I would have preferred to be outdoors . . .

I.  The exercised semicolon

My buddy W— and I found each other in a place called The Writing Lab, which is located in Room 110 of a lightning-struck place called The English-Philosophy Building. The belly of the latter is cavernous. It is unspoiled by the sun, always the wrong temperature and haunted by ideas most closely associated with dead Frenchmen whose names I can’t pronounce. Two or three times I’ve been tempted to see EPB as an external manifestation of the inside of my head, patrolled as it is by self-loathing doctoral students and uppity, long-haired writers, groups that for years now have waged a running battle armed mostly with semicolons.

In fact, I was, and to some extent still am, shaped like a semicolon. I found solace—if not physical health—under the hazy, sucking hum of The Writing Lab’s fluorescent lights, where I tutored freshmen rhetoric students in the employment of what Nicholson Baker once described as that most “pipe-smokingly Indo-European” of all punctuation marks. I delighted in the babble of foreign students. For hours on end I might sit with a biomedical engineer from Szechwan, struggling with how to articulate, in smooth English prose, equations for the leg-movements of a sweaty man in a rowboat. Then, tired and satisfied, I might slurp up a drink of water from the fountain across the hall and wipe my brow.

W—, on the other hand, would invariably arrive at The Writing Lab flush from 90 minutes on a treadmill. He wore not clothes but “gear,” which involved a whole lot of something called Gore-Tex and imprints of mountains on the labels. Almost 20 years my senior, he also wore a graying beard, the sort of bodily feature that, when accompanied by a woolen hat, rendered him the spitting image of Admiral Peary—who, it should be acknowledged, I’ve never actually seen, but who must have looked exactly like W—.

We were, and still are, simpatico in a number of departments, including our insistence on fiddles and banjos in the music we listen to, and it is true that W—, with a mind more wary and rigorous than my own, excelled in his teaching. But his heart was clearly searching for higher ground. At odd moments, he might blurt out, “I think I’ll drive out West next week. Do some kayaking.” Or, “I’m going to apply for a teaching job at a school on Vinalhaven.” Which would be followed by a generous pause, and then: “That’s an island in Maine, Brendan.” Although he hailed from claustrophobic Chicago and I hailed from a state whose landscape opens up like a sudden and mysterious question, W— was the one of us drawn to a life lived out of doors. I have always been more likely to agree with essayist Joseph Epstein in the assertion that nature is overrated, more likely to take comfort, as Epstein does, in W. H. Auden’s observation that “beautiful scenery seems to attract the second rate.”

So when I took a job in Bangor, Maine—a place that didn’t exist for me even on the level of a Roger Miller song—we laughed uncomfortably at the irony. Someone might have observed that it was like giving a C. F. Martin guitar to a monkey. What on earth would he do with it? Neither of us imagined that a short eight months later I would be the one inviting W— to climb Katahdin with my friends and me, inviting him to explore the deepest well of mythological Maine.

“Don’t worry. I have plenty of gear,” he assured me over the phone. “By the way, did you know that Admiral Peary was from Maine?”

I had no idea.

Now We Live in a Two Story House

M’s parents made the comment that our new house—well, their new house, our new home—looked like it could have been from a catalog. Something from Sears & Roebuck, maybe. At first I didn’t know what they meant. Sears & Roebuck? Really?

Yes, it turns out. Catalog homes were quite popular in the early to mid-twentieth century. Companies like Sears drew up the plans and sold all the precut and fitted materials. True, these homes were hardly innovative.

Sears was instead a very able follower of popular home designs but with the added advantage of modifying houses and hardware according to buyer tastes. Individuals could even design their own homes and submit the blueprints to Sears, which would then ship off the appropriate precut and fitted materials, putting the home owner in full creative control. Modern Home customers had the freedom to build their own dream houses, and Sears helped realize these dreams through quality custom design and favorable financing.

Apparently, the tastes on our block were pretty similar. Ours is the middle of three houses that are exactly the same: a simple, three-columned front porch, three rooms upstairs, three downstairs, a fireplace, two baths. Some have add-ons—a back room, for instance, outfitted with two French doors and painted a calming light green, where one might hang an embarrassingly large flat-screen and lounge on a futon, wine in hand, watching The Third Man.

This, I tell you, is the life. Now let’s hope it all turns out better than the George & Tammy song.

• Two Story House – George Jones & Tammy Wynette [Mp3]

IN ADDITION: Check these cool images at the Sears website. We do not live in The Newbury. In fact, ours is not Sears at all, but something post-World War II vintage. Still, it’s in the ballpark.

A Post About Posts About Posts

This is just to say that I won’t be around much the rest of the week. I’ve got a lot of unpacking, setting-up, putting-together, sweeping, dusting, washing, folding, arranging, rearranging, breaking-down, trashing, recycling, and porch-painting-type stuff to do. But I figured that as long as I was doing one of these meta posts, I’d also check off a few other items that appear to be necessary if you want to retain your license to operate in the blogosphere: post a kitten picture (give it up for Gus & Ida!), whine that bloggers are always getting picked on and don’t get nearly enough credit (waaaaaaaa!), and declare, once and for all, that the book review sections of all major newspapers suck. They hate literature. Oh, and they’re probably racist, too.

Whew. I feel a lot better.

‘I always look him square in the eyes’

Joe Morgan, the Hall of Fame second baseman who spent the best years of his career with the Cincinnati Reds, is not beloved. In some parts of the blogosphere, he is downright hated, while in others he is only mocked. As a television announcer and, perhaps, as a human being, he seems to be stubborn, arrogant, and not always, shall we say, fluent. When I was a kid, however, he was my hero.

I collected his baseball cards. I dressed head to toe in Reds gear (a sin in my Cubs-loving family), and I swung my wiffle ball bat in the back yard, pretending I was No. 8 under the lights at Riverfront Stadium. “Brendan, you’re ob-sessed,” my mom would snort.

Where does this kind of hero worship come from? When my dad was growing up in the Forties and Fifties, his hero was Jackie Robinson—which always struck me as remarkable. Dad was so far away from Brooklyn, so far away from a world where it might seem natural for a white kid on a tiny farm in Iowa to root for a black man. To worship a black man.

By the late Seventies and early Eighties, it wasn’t so odd for me to cheer on a black player. But one of the Cincinnati Reds? That was odd. But I know exactly where it came from: Sports Hero: Joe Morgan by Marshall Burchard. I found this book, copyright 1978, in the McKinley Elementary School library. And I read it and then I read it again and then I probably read it a few more times after that. One passage always stuck out for me. It told about how, during the 1975 World Series against the Red Sox, Joe stole second even after yelling across to the pitcher he was planning to go. I’ve told that story a hundred times over the years until I began to wonder whether I’d ever read it in the first place. Maybe I’d just dreamed it.

So the other day I found a used copy of the book online—a school library copy, even—and ordered it. It’s weird seeing that book again, after all these years. Weird to come fact to face with a memory like that, even a good one. Sure enough, though, there was the passage, just like I’d remembered it:

It all came down to the seventh and final game. A crowd of 35,205 filled Boston’s Fenway Park. Across the nation 75 million people watched on TV.

The starting pitcher for the Red Sox was left-hander Bill Lee, the American League leader in picking runners off base. Before the game, Lee joked with reporters about his method for stopping Morgan from stealing.

“I always look him square in the eyes,” Lee said, “and he freezes for a split second, just like a possum.”

When Joe heard about Lee’s remarks he decided to make him eat his words. While Lee was warming up for the game, Joe studied his rhythm and motion carefully. As soon as Joe reached base during the game he took a long lead off first and yelled across the infield to Lee.

“Are you watching my eyes?” Joe hollered. “I’m going to steal!”

When Lee raised his leg to pitch, Joe took off for second. He got such a good jump on Lee that he stole the base without even having to slide.

I was a pretty shy kid in those days, but I loved to play ball. Then, as now, I played too hard, took it a bit too seriously. I let all my emotions out on the field. I wanted to be like Joe. That was the kind of arrogance I wanted to emulate. For better or for worse, he was my hero.

IMAGE: Perry first pitch, Joe Morgan at bat, Crawford –umpire, Dietz– catcher, by Art Frisch (1970), The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

'Running Cubward like a flood tide'

M & I watched last night’s game in a chain sports bar that had no sound on the TVs and terrible service. And with the scored tied at 1 with a man on in the bottom of the seventh, we got booted by a drunk bartender who needed to clean up. There were a few other Cubs fans there as well—two, actually—and M made the point that if we had been Yankees fans or Red Sox fans, there might have been violence. There certainly would have been some memorable language. But we are not Yankees fans or Red Sox fans. We are Cubs fans. We are Midwesterners. Which means we politely left and called him an asshole under our breath.

In the Washington Post this morning, David Broder writes, despairingly, of what it means to root for Chicago. In particular, he conjures the unpleasant memories of 1984. I was in seventh grade then, and I remember walking home from Sudlow Junior High wearing my Sony Walkman headphones listening to Harry Caray call the afternoon game from Wrigley. Broder was actually at the game.

On a perfect October day, I was one of 36,282 watching as the Cubs tried to get to the World Series for the first time since 1945. Amazingly, they won 13–0, with Rick Sutcliffe dominating the Padres, yielding only two hits and even hitting a home run into the right field bleachers himself—one of five the Cubs unloaded.

I remember Sutcliffe. He was slow & deliberate—you could mow the lawn between his pitches. But he dominated a game that way, making the other team’s batters restless, messing up their concentration. Carlos Zambrano, who pitched for the Cubs last night, is just the opposite. He’s the restless one, always twitching, circling the mound, pitching quickly, celebrating like a twelve-year-old kid when he gets a strikeout. Anyway, 1984. That Game 1 victory was sweet . . .

The next day, I watched as the Cubs won again, 4–2, and Thomas Boswell, The Post’s magisterial sportswriter, wrote that “baseball’s equivalent of divinity—the sacred breaks—are now running Cubward like a flood tide.” Boswell pointed out that no National League team had ever come back after losing the first two games of the five-game championship series. The Cubs flew off to San Diego needing just one win to be in the World Series.

They were swept, of course.

The next best chance the Cubs had was in 2003. And we all know about 2003. I lived in Korea then. The night games wrapped up around lunchtime the next day, Daejeon time, and with no TV, I was forced to follow along on the Internet by repeatedly refreshing the play-by-play screen on Yahoo Sports. Only a few minutes after Dusty & Crew blew Game 7 against the Marlins, I was thrust in front of a gathering of local businessmen who were bestowing upon me a bogus teaching award. I hadn’t been told about the award ahead of time. The certificate was in Korean and no one translated it. And I was introduced to the group only in Korean, after which my boss, the corpulent and dictatorial Mr. H, turned to me and said, smiling, “Okay. Make a speech.”

It was one of the saddest moments of my life. All I could do was cry.

IMAGE: Chicago Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers. December 16, 1910

Inventory

In the last seven years, I’ve lived in Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, South Korea, Iowa again, almost Chicago, and now Virginia. I’ve camped out on a deserted island, where I fell asleep to the smell of juniper. I’ve been whale watching. I’ve climbed a mountain. (At the end of the hike, in a nearby pub, I ordered a tall glass of ice water—anything to ease my exhaustion. The waitress brought me a Guinness instead.) I’ve participated in a five-and-a-half-hour native sweat lodge ceremony. I’ve eaten dog. (Twice.) I’ve written two love poems. I’ve floated in hot springs. I’ve lost forty-five pounds. I’ve been lost in Boston. I’ve been cheated in New York. I’ve been to Fenway. I’ve been to Wrigley and Monticello. I’ve almost been richer than my wildest dreams. I’ve almost declared bankruptcy. (My financial counselor suggested I buy fewer books. She suggested I investigate something called a library.) I’ve performed a marriage ceremony. I’ve gotten married myself—by a rabbi—and I’ve gotten divorced. (By a lawyer. From a lawyer.) I’ve taught kindergarten. I’ve taken guitar lessons. I’ve sold my guitar. I’ve started this blog, then quit it. I’ve started this blog again. I’ve shaved my head. I’ve grown my hair back. I’ve grown a beard, then, while drunk one night, shaved it off. I’ve grown a beard again. I’ve worked at three newspapers, two of which have gone out of business. I’ve been fired and rehired in the same meeting. I’ve been to Canada for the first time. And for the second time. (I’ve slept in my car every night I’ve spent in Canada.) I’ve lived for more than a year without a bed. (Twice.) I’ve lived for two months in a house without any furniture. I’ve hosted three Seders. I’ve been to four funerals—two Catholic, two Jewish. I’ve been a godfather. I’ve ridden in a helicopter. I’ve had emergency surgery. I’ve taken hula lessons in Hawaii. I’ve slid into third base wearing shorts. I’ve called a crisis hotline. I’ve been threatened with a lawsuit. I’ve learned how to swim. I’ve been snorkeling. I’ve had a family member in Iraq. (She’s back now.) I’ve seen a person die. I’ve put a kitten to sleep. (It was 4:30 in the morning and he was attached to an IV cart.) I’ve written more than half of a book. I’ve been published in a book. (You can buy it for a penny on Amazon.) I’ve made the highest salary of my life. And I’m now unemployed.

IMAGE: Isola del Giglio + young woman + ugly seaside development. From Giornale Nuovo.

'We can't just stop leading our lives'

Six years ago, I was living in Maine and working at a paper. This is how I remembered 9/11 a few weeks after the event:

When the call comes in Tuesday morning, just after 9, I answer with my silly voice. C, however, is frantic. She is yelling about something she has seen on the “Today” show on her way out the door. “I never watch the ‘Today’ show,” she says, gasping for a breath. Then she recounts the eerie shadow of a jumbo jet tracing across the New York skyline and into the World Trade Center’s south tower.

I had been one sentence into a CD review. Now the Internet is clogged. Within an hour several of us are across the street at the Whig & Courier pub, where the owner is grim-faced and preparing to open for the day, and Dan Rather’s bewildered narration hums in the background. The anchor is judiciously refusing to confirm an Associated Press report that the north tower has already collapsed—it’s hard to tell from the camera angle—when the south tower disappears.

Silence swallows up our end of the bar the way thunder and ash have swallowed up lower Manhattan. Even Dan Rather just stares.

Summoned back to the office, I am all hellfire. “Bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age,” I authorize, to no one in particular. (Gen. Curtis LeMay had famously wished the same fate on the North Vietnamese in 1964, a fact I will remember only later.)

I e-mail M, who works uptown at Sotheby’s. She assures me she is safe. I confess that it is turning out to be a bad week to quit smoking and a bad week to have planned to surprise C in Iowa City. M replies:

i feel sick. don’t smoke by the way. for the first time in my life i’m glad we have a republican in the white house and i hope he bombs the shit out of those countries.

The remainder of the week is spent adjusting myself to the noise and the silence: the noise of the headlines (“Terror hits home,” scream both the Bangor Daily News and the Portland Press Herald), the noise of my own anger, the noise of the TVs, the radios tuned to NPR, the streaming video and strains of “God Bless America,” the noise of tears — and the silence that grips the office for days. Hardly anyone speaks.

Hardly anyone breathes.

From Iowa City, my friend S e-mails:

Life here has gotten weird after the terrorist attacks. International students were told by the International Student Advisors at Kirkwood College not to attend classes until the heat dies down. (Todd says he has a Middle-Eastern student in his class and things were very weird on Tuesday.) Sand nigger has become part of the popular vocabulary again. People are grumbling over the loss of the Iowa/Iowa State football game. “Welcome to Jerusalem” I heard a New Yorker say after the attacks. Maybe that’s true in the Gotham City, but here it’s more like welcome to Selma, Alabama. The local newspapers, like many other newspapers across the nation, have come out with special extra editions and regular editions with inflammatory headlines. Everyone seems to have turned into a news junkie overnight. Several people at work took off Wednesday just to watch the news over and over again.

Meanwhile, the president calls for calm. He says the United States will not be “cowed.” “Our responsibility to history is already clear,” he declares. “To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

For the first time, the headlines scream war. I phone M, and she tells me that she is on Valium and unable to hold food down.

“It’s not necessarily an easy course [for newspaper columnists] to say let’s go to war,” National Review editor Rich Lowry tells the Washington Post. “It takes some righteous anger and conviction to say that . . . America roused to righteous anger has always been a force for good.”

British Prime Minister Tony Blair appears on television fighting back tears, though not all Europe is of a mind. Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for the Irish Times, observes: “For there is in American culture a fundamentalism no less strong than that of those who may have plotted yesterday’s carnage. The tendency to divide the world between the forces of God and the forces of Satan, the elect and the damned, is, ironically, one of the things that America shares with its most ferocious enemies.”

I decide to tell C about my plans to surprise her at the end of the week, a secret that until now I had guarded against very long odds. “Brendan, don’t come,” she says, sounding concerned and level-headed.

“I’m coming,” I reply, sounding anxious and pig-headed. “Things will be fine by the end of the week. And besides, isn’t there some kind of principle at stake here? We should be able to move about our own country, shouldn’t we?”

C scoffs. She’s not familiar with that particular principle, she says, but I know it’s less the principle than it is the need to move, to keep moving.

The president is back on TV. Referring to the terrorists still at large, he says we will “smoke them out.” He says, “We will rid the world of the evil-doers.” The network cuts to an interview with a man weeping uncontrollably over the loss of hundreds of his colleagues.

M is back at work and e-mails:

like everyone else i feel strange and sad and disconnected from what is happening even though it is so close by and evidence of what happened is everywhere. it bothers me how quickly there is nothing new to say, how trite we all begin to sound despite the fact that our world has been violently and irrevocably changed.

I copy her message and forward it to several of my friends, with a small addition: “My one thought is that we may be deceiving ourselves to say that our world has irrevocably changed. Other people understood that this was the world we all lived in. Just not us. Not until now.”

Replies my buddy W, a university rhetoric instructor:

right so. as in the commentary early on stating that this was the “worst act of terrorism in the history of the world.” a sentiment that “totally makes sense” to classrooms of 18 y.o. middle-class american kids. but one which might be argued by those who witnessed 250,000 dead in the Dresden firebombing, or Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, or Rwanda, or Stalinist Russia, or the Pogroms of Poland, or the Holocaust, or any indigenous population anywhere on the planet.

the shortcut of instant mythos cheapens our language, and such language devalues our humanity.

i do not lend my support to any act which kills innocent people, i do not need nor want innocents to be killed, maimed, molested in my name, in the name of my country, in the name of my dead countrymen and women. and certainly not in the name of a flag.

Along the bottom of the television screen stretch the words, in red, white and blue, “America United.”

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. In Salon magazine, he writes that “to win over peace-minded Muslims to our side in this struggle, we will, of course, have to show greater sympathy for their concerns. This includes, for example, the plight of ordinary Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and the suffering of the Iraqi civilians who are denied basic goods and medicine due to the U.S.-backed economic sanctions. This need not entail a sudden about-face in U.S. policy, but would require greater public recognition of others’ pain and suffering. After all, we are now victims too—and this gives us a common basis upon which to ask for their assistance in a common struggle against violence and terrorism.

“I know that the calls for military action will grow in volume. And I share a sense of outrage against those who killed so many of our countrymen and women. But I want the campaign against bin Laden to succeed—both in a practical and a moral sense. Battle cries like that of Sen. Zell Miller, who called on the U.S. Thursday to ‘bomb the hell out of Afghanistan’ for harboring bin Laden, may make us feel momentarily elated. But in the long run, it is only the pursuit of justice that can secure a peaceful world.”

I never tell my mom that I had, for a time, planned to fly to Iowa. When she calls on Saturday, she lets me know that Dad, who had been delayed for days in D.C. on his way back from a vacation in Ireland, has finally flown out of Dulles.

“The airport was deserted,” she reports. “The plane was half-empty, so he got bumped up to first class, which he enjoyed.”

Was he nervous about flying? I want to know.

“That man,” she scoffs. “He’s crazy. He said we can’t just stop leading our lives. I said, ‘Tom, yes we can. We have to.’”

IMAGE: From The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by writer Sid Jacobson and illustrator Ernie Colón

On Being Nowhere

Here’s a photograph of my great-grandfather Maurice Wolfe and his wife, Sarah McAndrew. (My grandfather Ray is the one directly behind his mother.) Maurice was the first in his family of Irishmen to have been born in Iowa, and he claimed to have left the state for awhile to ride with the Texas Rangers. Was Maurice full of shit? If Sarah were still alive, I’d ask her. I doubt he could have gotten much past her.

It has never struck me as particularly important, though, whether his story is true. It is told. It is part of the family, and so part of an essay I wrote a few years ago:

This is what I’m thinking about: that day of leaving, over a hundred years ago, when my great-grandfather saddled up and left behind the open and fertile fields of his Iowa farm and traveled south for the even more vast and barren expanses of Texas. I imagine there must have been butterflies in his stomach, like I’ve felt now and again. The sort that come with nervousness, dissatisfaction, the sudden need to escape. They might have been the same butterflies his father had felt when he left Kerry for another life, in many respects a harder life, in Iowa.

And I admit that sometimes I’m forced to remind myself it’s all just a story: one of Uncle Dan’s stories, one of my own stories—and Maurice Wolfe probably never rode with the Texas Rangers or even so much as roped a cow. It’s a grudging admission on my part because there’s something that feels perfectly natural about hoping for a cowboy in my past. Cowboys are a way of double-checking my credentials, my manhood, my red, white, and blue. Claiming cowboy in my pedigree is like being descended from one of the Pilgrims. It means that more than you, I’m from here. My papers are in order. I can ride tall and spit with pride, wear my blue jeans, listen to Hank Williams, and watch football on TV. What’s ironic, though, is that the myth of the cowboy is really about being nowhere. About being from nowhere.

The cowboy started out herding steer along the Western trails shortly after the end of the Civil War. His job description was as simple as this: move the animals from here to there. “For me, a cowboy is a man who tends cows,” driver R. J. Poteet tells his pokes in James Michener’s Centennial. “All day, every day. Those cows yonder are the reason you’re here. And gettin’ up north in one piece is your only responsibility.” Somewhere in the choke-dust of the trail, though, the cowboy seemed to get lost and enter the open plain of myth. He became the nameless drifter in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian: the “slim young giant more beautiful than pictures” who, in his soft hat and dull-scarlet handkerchief, had traveled “many miles from somewhere across the vast horizon.” He lost not just his name, his purpose, his individuality, but his destination, what before had defined his very existence. He had come from the horizon and that’s where he was headed.

Joseph Campbell wrote that the narrative of the classic hero myth adheres to the cycle of departure, fulfillment, and return. This is the basic story outline followed by Prometheus, Odysseus, and Don Quixote, Western culture’s blue-ribbon exemplars of spiritual transformation. In each of their tales, they quest for a new place; but the place to find, the reader understands, is not in the world, but within yourself. This is the American cowboy: like John Wayne in the final frames of The Searchers, he is a solitary figure walking away from the camera into the desert. He is always roaming, always dreaming, always looking for the borderline. Fulfillment, according to this story, only comes with departure, and yet never really comes with arrival. It is somehow gained in the searching.

PREVIOUSLY: Lost Among the Wolfes

On Not Moving to Chicago

I’ve been away. In the interim, I’ve decided not to move to Chicago, and so far the Cubs have responded with strong hitting from their outfield. A former work colleague, because of this blog, has accused me of being a spanking fetishist. Despite that, people from all over the world continue to Google and enjoy, many times daily, my post “Bix Porn (V): Flaming Cheeks Edition”; do they think I’m a spanking fetishist? Do they think Bix was a spanking fetishist? I quit my job. I visited a place called Warm Springs, Virginia, where I spent an hour pickling myself in ninety-eight-degree pools once frequented by an elderly Thomas Jefferson. He didn’t much like them and complained to his granddaughter that they gave him boils on his butt. I had a nice conversation with the author of The Cuckoo’s Child about Carolyn Chute. The occasion prompted me to remember my interview with the Maine author many years ago:

I arrive self-conscious about my fuel-efficient little Honda (beep beep!) having read of her distaste for yuppies in their “self-righteously small cars.” [. . .] If it hadn’t have been for the map, I never would have guessed that the slight patch of dirt off the side of the blacktop was her road—not so much a road as an indentation into the woods, where her house hides from view. A clothesline with several black-markered notes hangs across the way, encouraging friends and acquaintances, even Bruce Springsteen, to scram. She’s working. However, a dangling business-sized envelope has my name on it. Inside is a virtual pre-approval voucher for $27,600 from Toyota to be used toward the purchase of a new or pre-owned car. On the other side, it reads “Proceed,” with a smiley face.

I was hired to write about Bix Beiderbecke—a happy first. I ate goat—another first—at a Puerto Rican restaurant and saw A Mighty Heart in a cool little indie theater. I cried at the beginning and at the end. I cried recently while watching Braveheart on TV, but for entirely different reasons. I hired a lawyer and began reading The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, a novel for which I’ve been saving myself for four years now. It reads like a parody of the hyper-literary:

They told him that they had read the entire work, on the ship from England, and were now going over favourite passages. They were also reading Carlyle, which he might overhear—“For that’s a loud book, in its way.”

“An excited book, rather.”

Helen said, “But the excitement is magisterial.”

Leith said, “I think—”

“What?”

“That about large subjects there can be many kinds of books, playing on our sympathies or alienating them. Truth can be a synthesis, or an impression.”

Which is true. I’ve hurt someone badly in the past month. That’s something I take seriously. I miss Oscar & Ida. I miss many of the things I thought were real. Who knew? The Cubs are only four-and-a-half back and, from my new perch in Charlottesville, I’ve looked the future straight in the eye. It reads “Proceed,” with a smiley face.

PREVIOUSLY: On Leaving Iowa