Quin Withey's Radio Weblog

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 20:48:26 GMT

Experimental post . . .

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 20:24:44 GMT

Here is the link to the story by Mr. Prince. http://www.fwweekly.com/issues/2003-12-31/metropolis.html Each and everyone of you should read this story. Mr. Prince writes in a fascinating, Texan weave and if that isn't enough to lure you to this story, there is the story itself. If someone doesn't do it first, the Luna Azul Foundation will try to get down to Texas to interview Ms. Webb with our new little tax write off, the digital minicam. However, we fear that Borinanada fine ecclectic knits and wollens will have to sell a few items first so that we can pay for the trip. We'll summarize Ms. Joann Webb's trials and tribulations here, but do read the story. It features a fine picture of Ms. Webb and her legs, which are responsible for her excommunitation from the Baptist Church which she and her husband had been attending, as well as a Webb-based dress code at the local Chamber of Commerce on which she volunteered. Gosh folks, aren't Christianity and small town life wonderful? Isn't this the life to which all Americans truly aspire? Freedom of speech and religion and all that? We're so excited here, that we can't resist trying to copy the picture of Ms. Webb's legs and post it here right now. But we're resisting. As little as this blog offering is thus far, it has taken us a bit of time to type it up, and we don't want to lose it in our enthusiasm. So why don't you just go click on that link up there and take a look at Ms. Webb. See? Doesn't she look like a nice lady? We are just hoping against hope that this goes to the supreme court and that Ms. Webb wins the day. The Texas Penal code is just embarrassing. DILDOS IN AMERICA. The porn industry is larger than the hollywood movie industry. Did you know that? What does that say about us . . . objectively, I mean. Largely a question of technology, really. Thomas Jefferson had a nice collection of pornographic books from his time in France don't you know. Porn is not new. We could even trace it, if we wanted to, for all those out there simply flagelating themselves with gasping delight over this book, The Da Vinci Code--don't buy this one folks if you are interested in reading anything that reads any better than your worst 10th grade history text in 1972; for any who have followed even the least little bit of Biblical history, or the Wiccan thingamabob, or any little tiny bit of feminist literature or even the King Arthur Cartoon Series, there is absolutely nothing new here. The show that the Captain of Deep Space Nine hosted on the History Channel about the Gnostic Gospels was far more interesting . . . but . . . for our readers for which this is a salient luscious lacivious literary delight . . . or for those on the other side who no doubt belive that this author Dan Brown is demon possessed (not true, the book would be far more interesting) the celebration of the sex act could be seen as a form of the ancient fertility rite, the Beltane Fires, that Star Trek Episode wherein everybody walked around with no emotion dressed like extras in Angel and the Badman, until, at the strike of the appoionted hour, they burst into a frenzy of orgiastic behaviour. For some reason Kirk and Spock thought they should stop this . . . much like the folks dealing with Ms. Webb. Our point is this: Porn is not new. For our non-Christian types out there, nature must have created us with a need for visual stimuli so that we could perpetuate our pink and furless little species. For those Christian types, God doesn't make mistakes I believe. No doubt he created porn as a test or some such nonsense. Porn is one of our primary type sources for Dildo research. When we were compiling our four hour blog on December 28th, for example, we found one of the few interesting sites out there on the history of dildos. It had many lovely reproductions of images--looked like 18th Century--of a genre called candlelight--in which candles were used as the item of insertion. Sadly, we did not bookmark this page and, as fun as it might seem to recreate this search of sex toy sites porn sites, it gets just too tedius after the first hour--a marker through which we have just passed. Your basic timeline out there for the history of the Dildo goes something like this: Ancient times--Greece, leather, wood, stone Renaissance Italy--the diletto Asia--Ben wa balls and so on Victorian--pre-Freudian-histeria. Doctors grow fatigued massaging women's wombs all the time so to alleviate their general anxiety disorder, so they create mechanized versions. Some, steam powered. Wouldn't it have been easier to just write up a little manual to send home to husbands, butlers, or grooms so that this could be taken care of at home? Ah, but the medical profession then as now was always in search of a buck. Probably they could charge a pretty penny for a steam powered anxiety relieving session. Modern times--the plethora is there for the asking, unless you're in Joann Webb's home town. None of the sites below are very interesting, and just cause us to long for our original blog, filled with wit and better references to dildo history. But is is not to be, and one shouldn't, after all, cry too much over spilled milk. So we present this sampling. Most of the dildo history out there is from sex toy sales sites, and we're not advertising any of these sites here, just presenting a bit of the dreck that's out there. In general, the uk toy sites have better history pages than the American. http://www.sexyshoppers.com/content/medieval-power-women.html--powerful women in Medieval History--nothing really about dildos here, but you do meet a few gals you'd forgotten about from that History of Western Civilization Class you slept through in your sophomore year. Come to think of it, most of these women weren't even mentioned in that class. It didn't focus much on women after all. http://www.appleofeden.com/Merchant/historyofsex.htm--pretty dull, tries to present a history of sex in one page http://www.hotadultstuff.com/dildohistory.html--some interesting old pictures http://www.hotadultstuff.com/dildohistory.html--your basic history--Greece, Italy, 1800's steam powered and so on Apparently there is a German rock group called Armageddon Dildos. This was a great disappointment to us. When we saw the title, we had high homes for some end of times Bushleague dildo information. http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dildo--defines the dildo for you. Also links you to their summary of the merkin--a false vagina, which according to Wicipedia, men don't really enjoy all that much. http://www.libidomag.com/nakedbrunch/archive/europorn02.html We have to admit that we have learned some things about dildos that we didn't know, and we have recently subscribed to an online library from which we hope to glean more academic ideas on the subject. But as far as we can tell, the online listing is fairly bleak. To try to liven this up somewhat, we will soon, possibly this afternoon, upload a painting of Quin's, or perhaps a few, which we are hoping to include in illustrations to this text. For the moment, we will post so that you can get started on the article by Mr. Jeff Prince.

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 21:44:25 GMT

We find that several of our posts have mysteriously disappeared. Could we have so offended the Radio Userland God? We find our attempts at sex toy analysis rather harmless in the extreme. At any rate, we attempt to repost. DILDOS IN AMERICA DILDOS IN AMERICAten. Far be it from us to forget Indeed, on December 28, 2003, in a year already long past, we created a summary for readers who will not want to buy the expensive coffee table tome upon its inevitable publication, of our extensive research thusfar. Really we did. And, true to the tricky nature of this blog technology, when we tripped happily out onto the web in search of further links for our gasping readers, pages and pages and hours and hours of research and blogging were lost sending us into a hiatus of despair and knitting almost equal to that of which Quin is capable, but not quite. No one can match that. We have now, after cups and cups of coffee, yards and yards of knitting, questioning the meaning of life and all that, returned enough to the land of the living to almost be able to try to recreate some of that research. Unfortunately now, we are sure that our readers are no longer gasping and have probably forgotten all about us. As always we will soldier on, hoping that our loyal readership of approximately five or so, along with our new found friends who go searching (STILL, it is truly amazing) for gang bang children . . . everyday we have a new referer from that search. . . . someone out there must be truly desperate to find some prepubescent lethario for this purpose . . .will forgive us for our long abscence. We never forget to carry on, but sometimes frustration and despair temporarily stop us dead in our tracks. Speaking of knitting . . . please stand by for this brief word from our sponsor. The Luna Azul Foudation will soon be partnering with Boringanaeda Fine Ecclectic Knits and Woolens in the opening of a little shoppe on ebay. The shoppee is not up as of yet, we'll let you know when it makes its maiden voyage, perhaps with a press release. Boringanaeda's hand knitted wares are beautiful, eccentric, functional, sexy, one-of-a kind (as we say in the marketing biz) and really quite nice. The line's signature item is the Boringaneada signature hat. This item is truly amazing. We'll try to post a picture to this blog so that you can have a gander before the shoppeeee is actually up. The signature hat can be made to order, complete with whatever spells the potentential wearer would like woven into it . . . no negative spells please. It features a Heathcliff-like mixture of rebellious wools, stitches and colors, can be make in the long version (approximately 24 inches) or the normal size. Boringanaeda works in mohair from happy goats only, and mixes in a plethora of fine wools and upon special request, persian cat wool, and does some of its' own spinning. The long version of the hat will run about $200.00, but there will be other items in the shoppe that will be there for those ebayers who are always searching for bargains. For straight men, there is a muff for your lady which will be sure to win her affections, warm and cozy, just like your bachelor pad, and laced with velvet and ribbons, this is sure to keep her hands and her heart warm on those chilly winter nights--lined for up north, soft and unlined for Texas---where many of our readers reside . . . also, for you married men, come spring time, Boringanada will offer the perfect lingere for the ladies. Knitted from ribbons and silk. These nighties in babydoll short . . . remember those halcion days of raiding slumber parties when all the girls were in babydoll nighties . . .or Jean Harlow long . . . this makes the perfect anniversary gift. But wait! There's more! Manly scarves in greens and browns, sweaters for your pups, blankies for your bairns, guitar straps for the love of your life . . . the witches and fairy folk at Boringanaeda will weave to your hearts' desires. So be on the lookout. Of course, some of the more pricey items were knitted in June of 1933 during the dull daytime hours by the girls in Mrs. Montoya's House of Cards while Koo Cowlick played a few guitar tunes to the poetry of John Donne he had put together the night before in the Dos Passos jail, Beagle Zilchard leaned rolling a cigarette on the porch post outside, and Elizabeth Montoya herself read that hot new poem by T.S. Elliot, Quin's idiot cousin. And now, back to our programme. DILDOS IN AMERICA. We first refer you to an article by Mr. Jeff Prince, journalist of the Fort Worth Weekly dot com and elsewhere. We will post this before linking in fear of losing this portion of today's rendering while we dip into another search engine to the bookmarked page wherein the link resides. Here is the link.

Sun, 28 Dec 2003 01:32:10 GMT

Before Quin left on his hiatus this afternoon, he asked us to announce our forthcoming book, Dildos in America: a Short history of the American Pornucopia. In this book, we will have lovely watercolor paintings of dildos with historical narrative, notes and so on. We have already done approximately four hours of research . . . we just started after all. And have found that this promises to be quite a valuable topic indeed. Although there is a plethora of information online which would, and does, allow us to access plenty of pictures of girls and guys with dildos, it takes quite a while to dig deep enough to get to dildos and any kind of historic reference. One does get there after a while, but this takes about ten searches, at least, with many many keywords, including such things as dildo history, historic dildos, Netsuki, Erotic Art--good stuff, not surprisingly, in the Netherlands, oh, and of course we searched under John Donne dildo. Now, I hear some of you chuckling good humoredly, thinking we were just making a little funny just then, but (remember all things are connected, and all things issue forth from The Empire of Dr. Bienke, our interest in John Donne and the CD which has come spewing forth from that interest actually originated from the girls reading the poetry and sermons of John Donne in Mrs. Montoya's whore house during the daytime hours that frequently lay heavy on their hearts. Thence came our interest in Donne, and thence, in part our interest in dildos. There are two Donne quotations which I will include just as soon as I can find our book, it frequently disappears, but in at least one of these Donne mentions the dildo in, really, quite the strongest terms. The other is equally sexually fun. Since I can't, at the moment, find our volume of John Donne so that I can provide you with these quotations, I will refer you to a sweet little academic paper we found this afternoon, on Donne and cunnilingus. You can find this at http://online.sfsu.edu/~draker/sex.html. Our book will be much more interesting than this, but this will begin to place it within other existing academic literature for you, and let you see that, once again, we're not making this stuff up. While we're at it, we might as well go ahead and refer you tohttp://www.ameanet.com/memberz/candles/index.htm, which will give you a nice historical/visual beginning. In addition to Quin's existing interest in the topic, he is now spending between 8 and 16 hours a day in the neighborhood of Perry and West 4th Street in the West Village. We remember when it was actually difficult to find a sex shop in Manhattan. Now, we're not including the peep shows around Times Square. What we mean is the kind of cuddly cozy sex shop which is now positively ubiquitous. There was a time when, as far as we knew, and we tried to always know a great deal about this sort of thing, there were only two. Now, of course, there were probalby hidden corners in Bodegas . . . or other places which have hidden corners for this type of thing, but we knew of only two actual official sex toy shops in the early 90's. One was in an upstairs floor on 57th Street . . . will try to recall the name at some point in the near future, and the other was, perhaps, Toys in Babeland, where Tristan Tarrimeno got her start (sorry, probably misspelling her last name. Her website is puckerup.com) Now, down around Perry and West 4th Street, there are, per Quin, at least fourteen. If you haven't seen one of these, they are lovely little spots, filled with toys in boxes, and examples of such festooned about the store. They are frequented by upwardly mobile young adults, both men and women . . . and women with women, men with men, and all of the various combinations. As far as we can tell, there is no ethnic proclivity one way or the other in these spots, only that of class . . .money. In other words, these toys are not cheap and so you don't see any poor folks in there. There are all sorts of devices, candles, books, pretty pictures, Kama Sutras and the like. And these places smell nice, being filled with the aromas of oils, incense, lube and so forth. So, probabably as a result of the amount of time that Quin is spending down around there while on hiatus, his interest in the topic, Dildos in America, has been rekindled. Not to worry, we're not going to flood you with our research just now. Tomorrow will be soon enough to begin. However, we will say, just so as not to lose our title, the the title: DILDOS IN AMERICA: THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PORNUCOPIA-- is copyright Quin and Elizabeth Withey, 2003. We're not sure if you can copyright a title or not, but if so, we have just done so.

Sat, 27 Dec 2003 17:58:03 GMT

Here is a passage from a book, old now, first published in 1976, by Annabelle Melzer. The book is called DADA AND SURREALIST PERFORMANCE. It is now available from Johns Hopkins University Press. Interestingly, Ms. Melzer is now teaching in Isreal. We wonder how she finds all of the current war situations going on from the perspective of her research on dada. At any rate, here is a lengthy passage which we will type out from her book. As a preface, we will just let you know that the dadaists in Paris, about which this book is primarily concerned, met and performed out of what they called the "Cabaret Voltaire", which was a kind of bar which they had talked the owner into letting them use. We long for such a bar scene in New York, or anywhere for that matter. Quin would move to whatever city it was in if we could just find one where he could spend his time being Quin among other intelligent types who were interested in collaborating in some way which might bring in income of some sort. Academics put out a "call for papers" whenever they are putting together a book or conference on some subject. Here, we put out a "call for smart people interested in collaborating in some way to make money in some artisticish manner." You wouldn't think that would be so hard to find, but it is. And so on to the lengthy passage from Ms. Melzer's book. We just want to mention that there will be quotes from this one and that one in here, and from this manifesto and that manifesto, which if our other browser, the one created by that zillionaire boy genius, now a man genius whom none of us like overmuch, were not infected by a horrible spyware called Netpal, we could indent and italisize and translate into many nice colors for you. This little detail tends to keep us going here at the Luna Azul Foundation, but since that particular browser is infected, we are working in Netscape, which we feel much better about politically, but which doesn't let us do all of those pretty things to our text. We can't even change the font for you to one which is smaller so you will know where we end and the quotation begins, and so we will just soldier on with quotation marks and double spaces and such like. Here is the passage. It is from Chapter IV, entitled, "Dada Becomes a Movement." "Dada is a tomato. Dada is a spook. Dada is a chameleonof rapid, interested change. Dada is never right. Dada is soft boiled happiness. Dada is idiotic. Dada is life. Dada is that which changes. Dada means nothing. Everything is dada. Dada manifestos, passim." [The above is a quotation from a dada manifesto; the next is Ms. Meltzer.} After the first few months of experimentation, the group at the Cabaret Voltaire chose the word "dada" to describe their work. Despite the great controversy over the origin of the name and its meaning, Hans Arp [one of the major players in dada] wrote: "I am convinced that this word is of no importance and thata only imbeciles and Spanish professors can take an interest in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit, and we are all Dada before Dada came into existence." [back to Ms. Melzer] Dada's raging manifestos do not help clarify the movement; rather the reinforce its many ambiguities. Dada comes out against Art ("Art is useless and impossible to justify"--Francis Picabia), and yet makes art. its spokesmen cry: Dada wants nothing Dada means nothing All real Dadas are against Dada--and yet its adherents continue to create. Destruction becomes synonymous with creation: "order-disorder; ego-nonego; affirmation-negation." How is one to define a movement which cannot be identified with any one personality or place, viewpoint or subject, which affected all of the arts, which had continually shifting focus and which was moreover intentionally negative, ephemeral and illogical. Waht does emerge from the manifestos, journals and recorded diatribes of the "movement" is the oppositio to anything that smacks of traditioalism in literature and the arts: . . ." (Meltzer, page 57). We pause in our citation of Ms. Melzer's work to insert a personal note. The note is this: the above description of dada is one of the best descriptions of QUIN that we have ever seen. And as such, we know our dear readers will understand, in part, why it has been so difficult for us to get a handle on him all these many years (eighteen on January 2nd, for those of you who want to send gifts or at least make a friendly comment to the blog). You see, those of us at the Luna Azul Foundation are worker bees. We analyze, translate, cite, design CD covers and booklets and websites and portfolios and the like. We do our level best, really we do, in our previously noted Pauline fashion, to promote and promulgate the words and works of QUIN. But you just never know what his reaction will be. We know that since he personifies dada, he doesn't mean to be all of those things listed above, (we note especially the words, "intentionally negative, ephemeral and illogical") but he just can't help it. Here is an example. First you should know that Quin has stopped off at the Luna Azul Foundation in order to not celebrate the culmination of the feasts of consumption with us. We expect that he will go back off into the ether and his hiatus at any moment now, probably this afternoon. He has been dada-ing us a great deal lately, more than usual, even purchasing the above cited book as our non-feast gift. And so it was with our usual happy enthusiasm, thinking that we finally might understand something, that we approached him yesterday morning and said something to the effect of, "While you're still on hiatus and making money (he has given the tentative date of January 1 as the date of his ceasing again to officially work and therefore bring in, really quite a sizeable chunk of cash to the Foundation, but even cash is not worth it if this causes Quin to do away with himself, or worse, have a recurrence of the pinched nerve in his neck that causes him great pain, but to continue) we said the above and went on, "what we should do is we should rent a space and have a Dada performance." We were smiling of course, as is our happy little bent, until Quin fixed us with a look of depressed anquish. Knowing that we had again managed to say the wrong thing, we went on " I know I know, this is what you've been talking about for months,"(we watch the anguish deepen and know that he is thinking of the exact year, probably 1999 when he first started talking about this . . . Now truthfully and to our credit, he has NOT been talking about putting on a Dada performance for months or years. He has been talking about doing some kind of performance, in the nude, in hopes of creating some sort of sales, and hopefully we might even get a semi-clad brazillian girl dancer or two to participate; I fear that this will end up being just the members of the Luna Azul Foundation belly-dancing away, with perhaps the Beagle singing along. . . .but it was never clarified as dada--we expect it will be still something about Quentin Crisp--but seeing the look of anguish at our once again evidenced naivte, which always makes us feel just as stupid as we can be, we soldiered bravely on and said " . . . since we're followers of dada . . ." now, just so you know, we aren't really totally stupid here at the Luna Azul Foundation, but we do sometimes say things of that sort hoping to get a laugh out of the Quin when he is in despair. There is, after all, no despair so hard for us to take as Quin despair. At this point, however, Quin's face became, if anything, even more tortured and he said, "We are not followers of dada." and rolled over in the bed, putting his arms and hands over his face as he often does when he wishes to block out the horror of the world. So, you see how the above description of dada is in truth a description of Quin. We are in the buisiness of selling ideas here, and we think this will require a new wardrobe purchased at our local thrift stores of various velvets and pins and finding the right parties to go to. Losing twenty pounds would also help greatly, but that takes more time, unless we contract this flu that's going around, and we can't afford that without donations to the Foundation designated specifically for flu care. Be careful out there in radio land, this flu frequently turns into Peeeenumonia. A close friend and colleague of ours landed in the hospital with it for several days. Here at the Foundation where health insurance is scarce, we can't afford to be sick . . . we and 45 million other Americans. Does that brief description of Dada and Quin help any? What is hard for most people to understand about artists is that they are really terribly terribly absolutely positively serious about all of this. The English language does not have sufficient adjectives and adverbs to describe their seriosity. And so, when loved ones--don't get me wrong here, NO ONE at the Luna Azul Foundation has ever or will ever suggest this, but it has been suggested from time to time sending Quin deeper and deeper under the covers--when loved ones suggest that Quin en famille might move back to Texas where he could work at, oh, say, The Home Depot, or some such place where he could probably have health insurance, these well-meaning suggestions just function to send him to the outer darkness . . . the black hole of the sole (sic) or wherever that well known saint went when he was in prison and being tortured and so on. (Our Star Trek sensibilities will not allow us, at the moment, to recall the actual phrase . . .there it is, the "dark night of the soul") Quin spends a lot of time there, in the black hole of the sole (flounders are depressed creatures after all, flat and spending all of that time on the bottom of the sea). In point of fact, there is just no dragging him out most of the time. Now we know that we say this from time to time, and that quite frankly, it pisses some folks right off, that we talk about Quin's despair and so on. And we say to you, Tough. What is interesting is that the people that it annoys the most that we dare mention this, which is, after all, unfortunately, something that many artists seem to deal with constantly or at least off and on . . . remember POLLOCK? Remember Kirk Douglas in that movie about Van Gough? Even Charleton Heston in that movie about Michealangelo suffered with this kind of thing. But to continue, what is interesting about these pissed off folks is that they are the same ones who believe that there should be no secrets, that secrets cause disfunction. They believe in airing problems and sufferings and talking about other people's alcoholism and fears and deeper inner sufferings and all of that. But here is the key. They think that once these things are spoken aloud, they happily and miraculously just go away. Poof, as our dear Uncle Leo Castelli has said. And so then, after all this has been aired, they don't have to hear about it anymore and everything is rosey. We tell you all that this is not how it works. Those of you who believe this are not serious. Krishnamurti . . . do you know him? He is one of the more amusing, or was, he has passed into the ether now, of the Eastern Guru types of the late 20th Century. Krishnamurti in his writings and quite funny television appearances with his wide 1970's collars and swirling Quetin Crisp hairdos has told us that most of our religious practices are just another form of entertainment. We do this to engage our minds, which are always craving activity so that they don't actually have to be serious--or at least quiet. Those of you who think anything goes away, poof, so that you don't have to hear it anymore and can go get your religious fix, whatever it is, are just not serious. You're biding your time, waiting until you can pass into the ether or be reincarnated or whichever thing it is you are longing to do. Quin is serious, and so nothing ever goes away. We always get to this point in our diatribes here, don't we. The proclamation that Quin is serious, that you should listen, if not to him, to the sounds in your apartment (that is a John Cage quote, not, unfortunately, our own). Perhaps we project out onto our supposed readership what Quin projects on to us, and so, seemingly unable to convince him that we are listening, or at least trying to, we try to convince you to. We tell you this however. One of these years, Quin will have a big retrospective of his art and writing. It may be at the Whitney, or it may be at the Walker in Minneapolis. Hoard your pictures for the lenders dinners folks. We'll be calling on you. We just hope that this happens before he permanently passes into the ether. Sometimes retrospectives do happen when the artist is still around. Tottering manfully in his tuxedo pumps. Usually not. Enough for now, as Osho says. We'll post this and try to move on.

Fri, 26 Dec 2003 00:14:01 GMT

We pause in our narrative to discuss a once and future topic. Once and future because it supplies background information to all the works of Quin, and because it will be the next great thingamagig in the series of performance art which is and has been his life. This next great thingamagig is and will be: The dada hootenanny. Readers are probably all already aha-ing on this holy of holy days--the culmination to the great holidays of consumption--when all have completed the required religious rituals of feasting, purchasing gizmos and gadgets in profusion, holding tight to old resentments in their hearts while watching loved ones' disappointed faces as they fight bitterly with the plastic packaging to get at the gizmos, and finally, with relief, anticipating the homeward journey inside some hugely large and heavy gadget, gizmo, or thingamagug, so that they may behold the faces of loved ones no more. The dada hottenanny has something to do with gizmos and thingamagigs, and here is why. First, you might want to try this: Enter the word "hootenanny" in your search engine and see how hard it is to find a description. It is rather hard. Try entering the words 'dada hootenanny', no doubt thinking that you will find pages complete with images of performances et. al. And you find nothing of very much interest. There is very little out there about the hootenanny, let alone a dada hootenanny. So we examine these two confluent words in an attempt to glimpse what Quin's next performance art piece may look and/or sound like. When we check out the word, hootenanny, expecting to find much referencing to, at the very least, Pete Seegar, here is the kind of thing we found. A lot of links to a Magazine called Hootenanny. Something which tantalizingly mentions the words hootenanny and counter culture but turns to be about playing guitars in the Catholic Church. A site for Golden Voice recording? with an interesting comic book style cover. and so on. When we looked up "hootenanny definition," we are taken first to a thing called hyperdictionary, which gave us this: : affair, article, artifact, choral service, dingus, dofunny, dohickey, dojigger, dojiggy, domajig, domajigger, doodad, dowhacky, eisteddfod, eppes, etwas, farewell performance, flumadiddle, folk-music festival, folk-sing, gadget, gigamaree, gimmick, gizmo, hickey, hootmalalie, jam session, jigger, material thing, music festival, musicale, object, opera festival, quelque chose, rock festival, service of song, sing, singfest, sing-in, singing, something, swan song, thing, thingum, thingumabob, thingumadad, thingumadoodle, thingumajig, thingumajigger, thingumaree, thingummy, whatchy, widget. This was not what we expected at all. Apparently, more dictionaries know the term hootenanny in terms of its "thingummy, widgetty, doodad, flumadiddle connotations" than it's" music festival" connotations. So far, we have found nothing referencing our concept of hootenanny, which, although visions of Pete Seegar dance in our heads repeating "one more time . . . . one more time . . . ." into the ether, we have always treasured images conveyed by the word, of bearded Bull fiddle playing Warner Brothers cartoon figures, Arkansas Hillbillies, stamping and fiddling away and reminding us that out there in cartoon land, there were those who dwelled in jug playing anarchy . . . maybe. Finally, we went to Britannica.com where we found the following definition with a nice illustration of Pete Seegar in the Student Encyclopedia, which is always the more interesting of the two reference texts. If Britannica will let us cut and paste onto this blog, we will reproduce it here for you. Seeger, Pete Britannica Student Encyclopedia E-mail this article Print this article Cite this article Pete Seeger, 1971. David Gahr [unfortunately, the photo of Seegar from Britannica is uncopyable] (born 1919), U.S. folksinger. One of the foremost figures of American folk music, Pete Seeger spent decades popularizing his own brand of pop-folk both as a member of various groups and as a solo performer. His most famous songs—‘If I Had a Hammer' and ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?'—became well-known pop-folk classics, and ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!' was a number-one hit for The Byrds. Pete Seeger was born on May 3, 1919, in New York, N.Y. Both his father, a musicologist, and his mother, a violin teacher, were on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music. By the time he was a teenager, Seeger was adept at playing the ukulele, banjo, and guitar. His interest in folk music began when he visited a folk festival in the southern United States. After attending private schools in Manhattan, Seeger enrolled at Harvard University, where he studied sociology for two years. In the late 1930s, Seeger worked at the Archive of Folk Song in the Library of Congress and appeared on radio programs. He formed the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell in 1940 and released his debut album, Talking Union and Other Union Songs (1941), just as the United States was entering World War II. After serving in the Army, Seeger became the national director of People's Songs, Inc., where he used the term hootenanny to describe the group's pro-labor, antifascist songs. In the late 1940s, Seeger formed The Weavers, a quartet known for popularizing such folksongs as ‘On Top of Old Smokey' and ‘Goodnight Irene'. A performer with a strong social consciousness, Seeger was blacklisted for his alleged Communist sympathies during the 1950s and was unable to get work on network television for 17 years. Throughout this period, Seeger continued to sing and record though his public appearances were limited. By the early 1960s, Seeger had found a new audience among young Americans who increasingly embraced his commitment to political and social change, especially his opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Seeger's albums during that period, such as We Shall Overcome (1963) and Songs of Struggle and Protest 1930–1950 (1964), reflected his antiwar stance. The Byrds recording of his song ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!', which became a number-one hit in 1965, was a fusion of folk and pop with lyrics adapted from a Biblical passage in Ecclesiastes. An accomplished storyteller, music historian, author, and instructor, Seeger educated and influenced many other performers. He played a pivotal role in popularizing the five-string banjo and introduced a variety of instruments into folk music. In the 1990s he continued to perform before audiences young and old in concerts that typically included active audience participation. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. From Britannica, we also gleaned this sugarplum about leadbelly and the hootenanny. 1885?–1949), U.S. folksinger and composer. Leadbelly was born Huddie William Ledbetter near Shreveport, La., probably on Jan. 21, 1885. An African American folk legend whose style influenced the hootenanny movement as well as folk music in general, he became a wandering musician who sang the blues. Although he had frequent run-ins with the law, he used his music to win a pardon and avoid work details while in jail. On a Louisiana prison farm, he was discovered in 1930 by John and Alan Lomax, who were collecting folk songs for the Library of Congress. His best-know songs, ‘On Top of Old Smokey' and his theme song, ‘Good Night, Irene', became hits after his death in New York City on Dec. 6, 1949. (See also Folk Music.) Interesting. The Leadbelly citation mentions the "hootenanny movement . . ." We think we'll just take a moment now to look up "People's Songs Inc." and see what we find. We will let you know in a moment. Oh . . . well, now. You find at least some fairly interesting things when you look this up. First is a lovely long page of text by Woodie Guthrie who with Pete Seegar and others published the bulletin "People's Songs Inc." We'll summarize, and, when we are able again to access this blog in another browser, we'll put in some colors and indentions and things so that you can tell more easily where we stop, and Guthrie starts. You may just want to skip straight to the Guthrie parts. We know that. At any rate, in the excerpt that follows, Woodie is discussing the first ten months of the bulletin's life, and he castigates, or at least it seems so to us, his fellow readers and editors for not including more songs from real people. Read this over and see if you concur. from: http://aztec.lib.utk.edu/~pelton/psi.htm Jingles, jangles, and rangles by Woody Guthrie Vol. I, No. 10; November 1946 You ask me to tell you what I think of our song bulletin at this tenth month of its birth and life. I will talk with my eyes on a world of bloody fights, town rapings, bloodhound lynchings, fiery cross burnings, and with my ears and my feelings set to catch the pogroms, racial wars, the word "verboten", and the words "gentile only", and "no blacks", as well as words painted on boards that say, "no men wanted", "no vacancies", and see what I can say. The nine issues of People's Songs bulletin so far has not been a full blooded, nor a full grown book of People's Songs. It has had soome very good partisan songs, anti-fascist war songs, we will all admit, but it has not had enough, even of these. I think it has had too many jingles, rangles, and tangles right and left, so many that the more deeper and longer ballads and songs have been crowded out. The best loved columns in any magazine or papre are the spaces set aside for the true stories of real living human beings. we have heated our hearth and warmed our bed for outstanding ballad singers and best song writers, and a few of our close kin, but we have pushed the deathless songs and ballads of Sara Ogan, Aunt Molly Jackson, and their classic protest songs about bloody Harlan County, out to stand by the door and wait. Our song file here is running over with a few hundred or so of the sadder, madder, and gladder stories from out of our chain gangs and our work gangs. But the jingle of the day elbows many of our more human tales plumb out of the picture. We have been the talkers when we ought to be the listeners. Our main aim is to cause folks to write their own songs and to sing them. We need more songs that sing about actual fights, battles, on the level of "Montcalme and the Wolfe", "I am a Girl of Constant Sorrow", "The Worried Man Blues", Goin' Down This Road Feelin' Bad", "Columbus Stockade Blues", "John Henry", "East Texas Red", "The 1913 Massacre", "Dream of the Miner's Child", "The Bourgeoisie Blues", "Tom Joad", "The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done", "Joe Hill", "East Virginia Blues", "The Death of Floyd Collins", and thousands more. I can see the parts of my own life reflected here, I believe, stronger and plainer than I can in all of these jingles and jangles. I know a few of us have worked our heads off to keep our bulletin going and growing. It will grow more yet. I see it already bubbling and jumping up faster, as more folks see it, sing it and feel it. I feel sad only because more people haven't run and jumped in with us. I just hope, maybe, to get you to feeling like I feel, and then to set down and write your own feelings in to us. I always was a lot better listener than I am a talker. Your Oklahoma Pal, Woody Guthrie. What gives us the most solace from the above passage is that, it seems even Woodie Guthrie had trouble getting folks to come play in his sand box. Searching for things about People's Songs Inc., we also ran across an FBI report on Judy Holliday--the actress? We encourage all of our readers to look over this link. Since this seems to be where we're heading again, or already are, we'd better get some songs ready, like Woodie says so we can be ready. If you want to read the FBI file on Judy Holliday, here is the link:http://www.wtv-zone.com/lumina/FBI/newyork.html. If you keep going through google pages, you will indeed find some more interesting things there about People's Song's Inc. But for all of this, it's pretty hard to find a nice succinct bit of verbiage about, say, the histori-sociological significance of hootenanny in the mid to latish 20th Century. Now, Let's consider dada for a moment. Here we find reams and reams. http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/Bai/shipe.htm--This one gives you a pretty good summary. Now, we'll discuss dada in our own editorial layperson's terms for a while, knowing all the while that Quin may one day see this and just poo poo the heck out of it. Many times he thinks our work is ok, many other times he tells us that it is bad work, fucked up, crap, or so forth. And so when we type, doodle some little design on the computer, knit, or whatever, we must always mentally prepare ourselves for if certainly not the inevitable, at least the possible. And so, for those of us for whom dada or dadaism may not ring the biggest of bells, we offer . . . this. Many people, since we are now in the absolute heyday of Gulf War: The Sequel, have forgotten all about some of the other wars for money or oil or whatever that the moneyed classes have propegated or promulgated in . . . well, in the previous century, we must now say, meaning, the 20th since we are now in the 21st. Dada, which for simplicity's sake, we can, for the next five minutes think of as perhaps an artistic movement. And to properly begin to discuss it, we need to remember a bit about The War to End All Wars . . . remember that one, no? yes? That one was World War I, or the First World War, circa 1914 - 1918. The one before Hitler. A great many men, especially European men (we include the English in this) died in this war. Zillions in fact. And it all happened soon after and around the continuing time of all of the arguments over the rights of the workers and the proletariet and so on. What we saw was that we can talk and talk and talk about the rights of the working poor, and then as soon as the rich folks and higher ups decide that we need a war, the workers all go marching off to die in one. You may just like to note that this is happening even now. Let yourself do a quick search about military salaries and find out just how much all those children being all that they can be are dying to make for the wives and children they are leaving behind. And those are the quote, professional, unquote, soldiers. The reservists are a different story entirely. We're not going to do that search for you, but let's just do a quick search and see if we can find out approxmately how many men died in WWI . . . According to Britannica, around 8,500,000--eight-million-five-hundred-thousand, soldiers died in WWI. Ponder that a moment. This is carnage. Do you remember how they fought in WWI? It was a style of fighting carried over from the American Civil War, or War Between the States, and made even more manifest as soldiers dug their way across Europe. Both sides dug trenches, say, six to eight feet deep, or deeper perhaps, which were immediately filled with water and mud and dung and rats, and so forth . . . the rats came in handy because they could be eaten, and then when the commanding officers in the lovely homes they had comandeered to run the proceedings said so, they ran out of the trenches while men from the trenches on the other side of things fired on them, or blew them up with land mines they had planted, or bigger guns which fired shells, or if they still had legs to run on, stabbed them until they died with big swords called bayonets which were attached to rifles for that purpose. Did your teachers make you read "Johnny Got his Gun" in school? Among those left, those who were not among the millions who had died, there was bitterness against the upper classes and bourgeois who were responsible for bringing this on, and who also managed to make quite a lot of money, as usual, on the whole enterprise. Dada is a sort of serious minded hysteria which developed among artists/thinkers as they thought about this and what manner of thought processes might be needed in order to prevent another war of this sort. Remember, there weren't many of these people left . . . most of them were men, after all. The Dadaists went after the various systems of thought, ways of life, political organization, and so on, that seemed at the root of this carnage. They went after language for instance. To do this, they used poetry, theater. They went after the traditional ideas about Art--with a capital "a". Most of the men continued in their day to day lives to wear attractive black suits in small sizes. We will continue in our lay discussion of Dada, however, we want now to jump straight to Quin and his Dadahootenanny to be. It's working process may be perhaps best described by a quote from Jean Cocteau regarding a theatrical work, in his preface to Les maries de la Tour Eiffel . . . Cocteau writes: "A theatrical piece ought to be written, presented, costumed, furnished with musical accompaniment, played and danced, by a single individual. This universal athlete does not exist. It is therefore important to replace the individual by what resembles an individual most: a friendly group." In our experience it is much easier for Quin as individual to write, present, furnish musical accompaniment, play and dance everything in a performance, than to find a "friendly group" to perform these functions. And so we expect that Cocteau's description will form the basis of his performance. Their theater pieces were what we would call performance art today, only along more specific guidelines. The dadists, like almost anyone who thought much, could write, and could afford to publish in some way, published many manifestos. This was the fashion of the times--the manifesto. The Communist Manifesto did not get written in a vaccum. People were manifestoing constantly in those days.

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 23:21:41 GMT

It was a handbill inviting all sharecroppers, day laborers and tenant farmers to a meeting with Mr. H.L. Mitchell, at Labor Hall in Jonesboro about a month back. Mitchell, it said was Secretary of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and would speak on the topic of fare living conditions and wages for all.

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 19:09:53 GMT

The sun had shifted over to the east side of the house so that the front room was nice and cool. Dishes were washed, Purity was out back shelling peas for supper. There was plenty of ham left, and potatoes. The greens wouldn't take long to boil up and they could have corn on the cob and hot rolls and that pecan pie in there. They had been lucky to get this piece of land with the tree on it.

Time enough to sit a while before supper with the men out and taking Clem with them. Oscar'd said after lunch that he didn't know but what Clem wouldn't be helped by some hard work that afternoon. The truth was, this was the only morning of the week the boy hadn't been out in the fields with the men, and that was just because she'd needed him to mend the cow's stall in the barn. It was a wonder young ones managed to learn anything during the school year as hard as the men worked them when they needed them. Clio went to check on Nellie out on the sleeping porch. Saw she was sleeping with Cassie and Jem curled up beside her on the bed. Clem and Jem. Clio shook her head. Well that had been Oscar's doing having to go and name the child Jeremiah after his father like he did. Wasn't like the old man had done anything but eat them out of house and home for four years before he died. And she'd had to look after him like a slave in those days with three little ones to take care of. She wrinkled her nose, remembering the old man scent of smoke and urine and bad teeth. Her father had always been clean and neat and he'd smoked sweet strong tobacco in a pipe.

Nellie's two girls were down on the floor playing with their rag dolls on the old quilt Momma had made when she and Oscar got married. It was the quilt for everyday, stitched with scraps of old soft cotton from Clio's dresses and things. She could still recognize almost every dress in the pieces of that quilt. The green one she'd worn to Jersey Dale's fifteenth birthday party, the brown had been a fall dress for church with lace at the collar Momma had tatted, and the white. Clio let herself smile when she remembered the thick soft white cotton nightgown, heavy in the bodice where her mother had smocked it with dark blue silk embroidery thread. Mamma had cut the pattern so that the bodice was heart shaped and threaded a blue satin ribbon through the neckline. Clio spent a year of magical nights the year before she married, sunk deep in her feather bed reading the Arthurian Legends and imagining herself as Gwenevere. Oscar when he started coming around was her Arthur, with his red gold hair and strong hard build. He had been teaching school in Tuckerman then, but was saving for his own place. A man couldn't marry and raise a family on a school teacher's salary.

Clio hardened her mind against the memories and forced herself to focus on Nellie's girls. They favored Mamma's side, like Nellie, though not as pretty, too much O.T. mixed in. But still, they'd be pretty enough girls if they weren't so plump and useless. Well no doubt some farmer would marry them. She'd probably end up having to train them up herself with Nellie always so tired she could hardly turn her hand to her own work. Clio made a note in her mind to start working them this fall. No need for Nellie to try to do everything with those two big girls around the house. Always treated them like they were play dolls, dressing them up so they weren't fit for anything. Well she could see to that well enough. They'd have school during the day, but there was plenty of time to learn some chores after they got home.

The dog followed her out onto the front porch and sat at her feet; his tail curved around the heels of her shoes. The sun had started to go down in back of the house, and Clio could see the orange streaks of it across the fields. Clouds had come up like she'd expected, and there'd be more rain tonight. Oscar had said the crop was almost in, so it shouldn't hurt too much. Way far out were the men. Tiny blue shapes bending and standing, bending and standing. Oscar could pull over a hundred pounds on a good day, and O.T. not much less. Clio found herself thinking about Oscar's feet. Too small for a man his size, not good for a farmer. They always hurt him but he didn't say much about it. Maybe she'd put some of those Epsom salts in a bucket for him tonight so he could give them a good soak. His feet would give him a lot less trouble if he'd use that rub she made for him with he willow bark in it. And then her lip curled a little. Oscar never would listen to her about anything he was afraid she might know more about than he did. The man shot himself in the foot that way. Clio reached around and rubbed that spot in her lower back. Like an old woman she thought, what with all these new aches and pains. I don't remember my momma ever talking about hurting like this, but then she'd never had to work hard either. Never a day in her life.

The Bible sat where it always did on the round table beside the rocking chair up at the front window. Clio let herself sit down heavily and felt the cushion on the seat of the chair slide under her. One of those ties was probably loose. She considered standing up and retying that tie, but didn't move, and after a moment the chair creaked rhythmically as she rocked forward and back. For just a second she shut her eyes and felt the world change around her. There was thunder off in the distance, just starting in the big white clouds, making the room close, even though the temperature had dropped a degree or two and a breeze blew in the scent of the mimosa tree out front. Somewhere a mockingbird started to sing it's strange song. The Arkansas lark, Daddy'd always said. This one seemed to have a song of its own, musical and sweet, interspersed between bob white calls and the ugly blue jay sounds it made. Two years ago there'd been one that clucked like the chickens and crowed like the rooster. Given that old tom cat a run for his money too, diving at him when he got too close to the mimosa where she'd had her nest. No one was in the room to see that Clio smiled with the memory. If they had been they might have been surprised at how young she still looked when she smiled. But Clio didn't smile often, and so like most of the women on Floodline Farm, she always seemed older than she was.

For that second, she let sounds drift over her. The dog's snuffling snores at her feet. Girls playing quietly in the room beyond. Dragon flies' big black papery wings buzzing near the ground where she dug up her flower bed every spring and kept the earth wet. A pot clanged from the direction of the kitchen where Purity was shelling the peas. Probably she'd finished and was fixing to start washing those greens soon. Soon enough, Clio thought. Let the child rest for a piece, and Clio hoped she would, though she would never have gotten up from her chair to go tell her to. The girl wouldn't know what to do with herself if she wasn't working at something.

Opening her eyes, she reached for the heavy black Bible. Flipped without thinking past the smooth family pages where her father had recorded names going back to the Revolution in sculpted handwriting. There were bright colorful images too of Jesus' ascension into the clouds with the deciples standing by, and the three Marys at the cross. Her thumb stopped when she got to the page where the dark frayed ribbon lay.

Revelation 3:20. Behold I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and I will sup with him, and he with me.

There was an illustration across from that page as well. Jesus, his long blondish hair waving down his shoulders to the bright blue and white robes he wore, stood in front of a round door of deep knotted wood. His hand was raised as if he was just about to knock on the door, and there was a golden light around his head, though it looked like it was dark outside except for that. Jesus, always knocking and knocking, and no one ever seeming to let him in. Clio turned a couple of pages to the spot where she had left off reading to the family the night before. She lifted the heavy book with both hands and read aloud.

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power and his seat.

Well that would probably give Jem nightmares again. Maybe she should try to get him to bed before the reading tonight. Problem was the boy seemed to love the Bible reading and prayer time. While the others were yawning, he'd be just praying and praying, including every chicken and pig on the place. Couldn't understand half of what he said either, but maybe that didn't matter to God.

She turned a few more pages and found what she was looking for. A piece of paper folded in quarters and shoved in the back of the book when Oscar had come home a few days ago. At first, Clio thought she should put it somewhere else, but then figured that the way Oscar was, the Bible would be the last place he'd find it.

She unfolded the paper at its creases and read it again.

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 18:40:22 GMT

Jim Allen cleared his throat. He should have known better than to set foot in this house. Oscar never had gotten over him knowing Clio for so long.

"Anyways, I don't know but we may have some trouble in Arkansas before this thing is over. Sometimes it seems to me Mr. Roosevelt is trying to kill cotton farming in the South."

"Teacher said Arkansas has the largest cotton production in the world," Clem quoted coming out of his bib a little.

"Surprised the boy can remember that so long after school's out." said Clio. She took a hot yeast roll from the pan but ate it plain, without any butter.

"Well did he now, Clem, did he indeed," said Jim Allen, "Well it's third largest if I remember it right. Whatever it is, it's a hell of a lot of cotton, that's for sure."

Across the table, Nellie's two girls giggled. The man had said hell, and at dinner too.

Jim Allen heard them and looked over at Clio, "Excuse me Ma'm," he said.

"Roosevelt's got his hands far and away too much into other people's business as far as I'm concerned." Oscar said. "It's not government's place to be telling people how to live their lives and then taxing em for the privilege. I don't know but what he's done anything to fix this depression either. New Deal, New Steal I say."

"That Mrs. Roosevelt's sure not much of a looker, is she." O.T. helped himself to the first piece of pie. Chess, one of his favorites. Just cooled from sitting in the pie safe for the morning. Clio must have made it that day, or maybe Purity. Too bad his girls were so little help to Nellie.

"Mrs. Roosevelt is a good woman and wants to help the poor." Clio said in her voice with the edge. "It's a far sight more than most rich people do." Jim Allen shifted in his chair and Clio went on. "She's building new houses and towns so that folks with little or nothing can have a place to live and good work to do. She's as good as the President himself as far as that's concerned."

"Building towns for coal miners not farmers. I don't see any help coming from Washington for any around here." The chess pie sat in front of Oscar but he didn't take a slice.

"Maybe that'll come in good time." Clio said, "Pie Jim Allen?"

Jim Allen said he didn't mind if he did, and the pie passed Oscar by the first go round.

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 17:46:23 GMT

Cassie sat on the floor of the sleeping porch on an old patchwork quilt. Colors and shapes without names looked up at her. That the quilt was one of three that her grandmother had worked for Clio for her wedding, she did not know. Nor that it had been a place keeper for four other small damp packages of flesh like hers. She knew soft, and somewhere in her mind a word was forming for the smell of the quilt. Her own smell mixed with the smell of Clio's lye scrubbed pine floors, the beloved aroma of the dog and the general odor of food and sweat and work that was the family. Her mother's smell was not on the quilt. Perhaps just a trace. That smell of lilac water and soap from the store. Woman damp and pie crusts.

"What you doing honey?"

A voice from above. Cassie focused her eyes on Nellie's round face and blonde hair and her own face opened up.

"Oh look at her smile." said Nellie. "You sure are a pretty little thing. Look like your momma don't you with them eyes. Daddy always said that's the Indian blood." Nellie's smooth forhead creased. Their momma had never held with such talk. Said Clio's hair was dark like that queen of Egypt back in Bible times, or sometimes she'd say it was from the Irish on her side of the family. Daddy'd always laughed at that and said that if it was, it was black irish blood for sure. Nellie'd never known what they meant by all that. And anyway, lots of families in the county had Indian blood. She rubbed at her forhead with one hand for a second, then remembered Cassie. "Maybe her's going to get herself another little girl cousin to play with before too long, and then before you know it all you girls'l be making them quilts yourself."

Nellie went on with her baby talk and Cassie's eyes dropped back down to the quilt. It was an extension of the fields with greens and whites and blues and browns all stitched into the circular wedding ring pattern. Here and there where the fabric had worn thin, a little of the cotton batting showed and Cassie worked one of these spots tenaciously until she got a wisp of the white stuff out. Then she screamed with delight. This was something she knew.

From the other room came voices. Her mother, "Nellie keep that child quiet," and the men, low and speaking in their mysterious worried tongue. Always the worry sound. Always to Cassie like her sound of crying, but low pitched and without tears.

All around the sleeping porch were Clio's books and old magazines arranged on low shelves along two sides of the rectangular space below the screening. They were arranged precisely, in alphabetical order, another code of the world Cassie didn't know. Some were old with worn brown leather covers with faded gold lettering and fat with hundreds of thin pages. On others the cover had been lost and only the woven thread of the back binding showed. So many variations of squares. Tall and short, fat and thin. The magazines filled half of a whole shelf. Covers slick and shiny with bent corners and frayed paper spines. People on the covers were faded from the sun that filled the porch in the mornings. They wore strange clothes that made no sense and looked hot. Some had a tail like the dog's around their necks. Magazines didn't smell like books which smelled fresh and old at the same time. Magazines smelled like they looked. Like some other world entirely.

From the other room came a word Cassie understood. Her father's voice, raised and rumbling. Cassie heard him say thatdog, and Clio's reply which came clear to Cassie's ears. "I don't know why you'd want him out of here today when he sits by me for every other meal this family has."

In a moment the dog appeared on the porch with Nellie and Cassie. He settled his muzzle on the bed and gave Nellie's belly a diagnostic sniff. Satisfied, he ambled over to Cassie, licked her ear and flopped down beside her, between her and the door to the bedroom. The black eyes between his paws kept watch, but his ears pricked to the conversation going on two doors beyond. Understanding more of the language than Cassie.

"Now I wouldn't say that, Oscar, " O.T.'s voice whined a little. "I don't think I'd say that at all. What would you say to that, Jim Allen?"

"Well now, I don't know for sure about that. You men would feel differently about it I guess being renters."

"Thirds and fourths." The words seemed to come out of Oscar automatically.

"Yeah now, the men who are straight sharecropping would have a different idea about it all I reckon."

"Pass the potatoes to Mr. Alden, Clemenceau." Clio broke in. I swear I don't know why I bother trying to teach you children manners at all. For all the good it's done, and get your elbows off the table."

"If your name was Clemenso, you wouldn't have no manners either."

"Any manners," Clio said.

"No manners or any manners either," Clem's voice raised as far as he could get away with. "Nobody can even spell Clemenso. Not even teacher spells it like you do Momma."

"Don't sass your momma or you'll feel the back of my hand boy." Oscar said.

"Sunday School teacher says not to swear, Momma," said Purity quietly. It wasn't fair for Mamma to talk bad about her manners like that, like she was as bad as Clem. Somewhere in her a small knife turned and she pushed her plate away.

"What are you talking about child, no one was swearing at this table," said Clio, " And besides that, little Miss Sunday School doesn't know everything about everything I imagine. I knew it was a mistake to let you go over to that Baptist church in Jeru this summer. That dog out there's got more sense than the Baptists, dunking little children in the Cash river like they do. It's a wonder we haven't had the typhoid on this farm because of you getting Baptised with the rest. If I'd known about it, I wouldn't have let you do it." And seeing Purity's chin quiver: "Oh stop that now," she went on a little easier, she was a good girl after all, and a hard worker. "I don't know what on earth has gotten into you children. You all showing out because Mr. Alden is here? I tell you this is not the way to endear yourself to an important man."

"Well now, Clio, I guess those children have spirit and that's a good thing." Jim Allen smiled sidewise. "And Clem, that Mr. Clemenceau wasn't as bad as all that. Especially early on. Went off there at the end as far as I'm concerned."

"You had the great misfortune to be born before my mother died, Clemenseau." Clio pronounced the name extraordinarly clearly and passed a platter with the second to last ham to the nearest set of hands. "And she had the privilege of naming you. She always said that Clemenseau was a refined sounding name and begged me on her death bed never to call you anything common--like Clem."

Clem's chin sunk down onto the bib of his overhauls, but he kept quiet.

Oscar looked up sharply at Clio and she met his eyes. He wasn't happy. Oscar never liked it when she talked like that, called it her "book talk." Well what of it. She had a right to speak her mind now and then didn't she? If he didn't like it he shouldn't have married her. Seemed to like it well enough ten years ago when he'd courted her. Had his own place then too she recalled.

"Talk about showing out." he said under his breath. Loud enough for everyone at the table to hear, it seemed to Clio.

Wed, 17 Dec 2003 17:10:00 GMT

The Editor takes a moment to interrupt the narrative and remind our dear readers of Quin's promised offering on ebay.

The iconic portrait of Leo Castelli.

We believe that Quin wrote the biography that appears there himself and so we know our readers will want to peruse it.

To view Quin's offering and biography, simply go to ebay.com, search by Quin Withey, and there you will be. We might just also note that any funds received from a sale will go to help support The Luna Azul Foundation, a photograph of the future home of the Foundation will appear in this blog, and on the website RagtimeTexas.com, shortly.

Wed, 17 Dec 2003 16:33:13 GMT

"Oscar, O.T," Jim Allen pulled off his hat. Well the wind would have had it off in a minute.

O.T. nodded. Oscar just stood and waited.

"Sorry to come round bothering you right at lunchtime."

"Figure it was the only time you could find us all at home," Oscar said, then waited again then: "Must have something on your mind, I reckon." When Jim Allen still didn't say anything, O.T. tried. "Must be something pretty important. to get you away from Miss Eulane's cooking."

O.T. shot a look at Jim Allen to see how he'd take that. He took a lot of guff on account of Miss Eulane taking care of him like she did. But Jim Allen was smiling it looked like. Something like a smile anyway, his face all pulled to one side like a scar.

But Jim Allen just said, "Mamma's gone into Newport to do some shopping." Then he looked at his boot. Scuffed it around in Clio's hard swept yard. He was staring at it hard it seemed. Or maybe he was just listening to the wind. Feeling the humidity go up. Thinking that it would probably rain again later that day and slow down the crop.

Still scuffing his boot, Jim Allen cleared his thoat, glanced up at the house, then spat off to one side. He looked up over their heads again toward the house and said, "You men been hearing any talk around the place lately?"

It seemed like Oscar was thinking about that.

"What kind of talk?" O.T. said. "Seems like all we hear day and night is from the women. Wish Mr.Alden'd have these houses painted, Jim Allen. Maybe you could talk to him about it. Our women are at us day and night about the houses and the outhouses the water table's got up so high."

Jim Allen looked at O.T. and his face crumpled up on one side again. "I'll get him to do it, O.T. Likely those outhouses need to be dug out. And the houses need a new coat before the winter sets in anyway. Can't guarantee the color though."

"What's on your mind?" Ocar said. Almost butting in, but not quite.

Jim Allen looked at him then, "Well I'll just tell you," he said and looked from one to the other. "There's been some men up this way. Not from around here either. You men ever heard anything about the STFU?"

"Heard about the SCU," Oscar said. "Niggers in Alabama. Don't think any of them would come around this farm." .

"Yeah. No, this is not SCU. It's a new one. Got Blacks and whites," said Jim Allen. "I heard they've been over to Cassel's farm."

"Cassels a long way from here."

"Not that far if you've got a car."

"Nobody's been coming round here, if that's what you're asking," Oscar's voice hadn't changed, but his face looked hard. "None of the men on this farm would want to join up with the Niggers I expect. Not as long as your pappa keeps to his word. Our kids are in school and most of our women don't have to work. Nobody wants to risk losing his home in these times."

"Yeah, I guess you're right about that. Just thought I'd check." He was looking at the house again when Clio came out onto the front porch. She had come out in mid-sentence, yelling something at Purity or the boys and looking for the men. Bad as children, they were. How long did it take to wash up. On the porch she stopped. She still had her apron crumpled in one hand and she knew she had wet spots under her arms on her dress. Well she had to work didn't she? At least the yard looked good. Swept clean by Purity every morning to get off all the droppings. She frowned at the truck up on her yard. Those tires of his had left ruts. The ground had dried up since that last big rain, but it was still soft enough for that. Well Purity would fix that right enough. Looked like rain again anyway. The big dog nosed his way out the screened door and stood beside her. His tail folded in the skirt of her dress so that when he wagged it, her dress wagged with it. Looking down at him, Clio said, "Hello Slim."

"Mz. Forrest." Jim Allen said.

Clio straightend her back and came down the steps with the dog at her heels. Her skirts dragged the ground and the hem of her dress, already stained, got dirtier.

"Jim Allen," she said. Well she was entitled. She'd been raised in that church over in Newport for all the good it did her now.

"I see you're here again keeping these men away from their dinner. Or is it just that Miss Eulie's off shopping again and you're hungry yourself."

Jim Allen smiled then, and this one almost got to both sides of his face. Well now, Momma did say something about going into town this morning.

"I thought so, Clio said. "I guess you'll want to eat with us then."

"The man's got work to do Clio." Oscar said. "He doesn't need to spend an hour sitting in that house sampling your cooking."

"Oh, I don't mind if I do." Jim Allen broke in, "All this talking's hungry work.

"All right then," Clio said and brushed at a stray piece of hair that had fallen out of it's pins. "I'll go tell Purity to set an extra plate. I can see that you'll want to wash up like these two. Only try to be quicker about it. That food's already been waiting a quarter of an hour."

All three men watched as she walked away. The dog did for a minute too, then took his leave from the men and followed her into the houe.

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 17:45:35 GMT

Quin as Avatar.

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 17:36:21 GMT

"You sayin' a good woman like me shouldn't be reading her Bible?" Clio was at the door. Apron off and twisted in one hand. The rest of her was rail straight. Skinny, O.T. thought, despite five kids, and still with all her teeth. Maybe that was because she knew what to do when she was expecting better than most women. Grew all those plants in the summer and drank her teas all winter long. A little shiver went down his spine looking at her. Clio was the only woman in the community who still wore her skirts to her ankles. Looked like a pioneer woman.

"Oh you know sister," Nellie said, "I was just talking. But I wish you'd let me do something around here. I feel fine."

"And have you nearly bleed to death like last time?" O.T. looked over at Nellie and saw her wince. "No ma'm. You're doing just like I say this go around. Now you lay back down there and keep your feet elevated. O.T., she's had enough of you for now. You go on outside, that pump's waiting."

At the door, O.T. looked back and saw Clio messing around Nellie. All at once a wind came up so that Clio's long skirt blew with it and he could hear the big oak tree rustling outside. A shadow lifted and the sun slanted into the porch for a second. Clio bent straight from the waist and put her ear to Nellie's stomach and to O.T., they seemed frozen there in the wind and the light. Clio's dark head on Nellie's pink dress. She did something sharp and swift with her hands that O.T. couldn't see then she was standing straight again, one hand on Nellie's stomach and the other on her hip.

"I might be able to hear something if you weren't so fat." Clio said. Her voice was hard but Nellie laughed and looked past her to O.T.

"O.T. likes me plump, don't you honey. O.T. says that a man doesn't want to sleep with an old step ladder, don't you O.T."

O.T. gave his low chuckle and Clio turned on him. "Now I'd say that's just about what the problem is here, wouldn't you O.T.?"
O.T. was about to duck his head, but he saw Clio's eyes weren't hard like her voice. The woman had a pari of fine dark eyes if she ever stopped nagging at you long enough so you could see them.

"All right, now you've seen your wife, so get out of here and get cleaned up. Even Oscar looks better than you right now, and that's not saying much. Go on."

Outside the wind had definitely picked up. Oscar was standing by the pump. His hair was wet and he was wiping down his arms with a towel, slow, like he wasn't paying much attention. Then O.T. saw he was looking off down the road. There was just a brown swirl of dust way off in the distance, but they both knew what it was.

O.T. started working the handle. When the cold water rushed out he stuck his head under it fast before the pump handle stopped swinging.

"Wonder what he's coming up here for." he said when he stood up. Oscar handed him the towel and O.T. rubbed it through his hair.

"Don't you just, now." Both men stood still and watched the dust ball get bigger.

"One thing you can say for him," Oscar said in a minute, "He don't put on airs like the old man. Lives right over in Jeru, not in the county seat like his Daddy."

"I reckon the old man made him," O.T. said. "So he can keep an eye on us better."

"Could be." Oscar said, "Could be at that."

As the dust came closer, it turned into a red truck. Not a new truck either. Dirt clung to its doors and bumpers and wheels and the back end was loaded with oily equipment and rubber tires. It pulled up onto the dirt of the yard sending the old rooster running and squawking. The engine roared for a full minute, like someone was pressing on the gas pedal. Then the door opened and slammed, bounced back open again. Soft swearing, then slammed and stayed.

Oscar and O.T. stood still at the pump and watched the man walk over. Jim Allen always looked like his legs were too long for his body. Moved well enough, but kind of disorganized in the way he walked. The way he looked, you'd almost think he'd been out picking cotton himself, if you didn't know better.

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 23:53:29 GMT

At the road O.T. stayed with Oscar. Usually he'd take the fork and turn toward his own house and Nellie's cooking, but Nellie was pregnant again and looked peaked to him this morning. And earlier that day Oscar's boy Clem had run out to the fields to tell him to eat lunch at their house.

"Wish the old man would paint these houses." Oscar said pulling off his hat and scuffing the dirt off his boots on the front porch step. "Purity!" he called in the house. Almost instantly a girl of about seven appeared through the screen door and shifted Cassie down from Oscar's hip to her own. Her dress was of the same pattern and material as Cassie's, only cut bigger to fit. Already she had a curve at her waist shaped to fit Cassie's bottom.

"The old man saves a penny where he can find one, " said O.T. behind him. He looked down the gravel road toward his house a half mile or so away. "Think I'll just go check on Nellie before lunch."

"She's in here." A voice from the house. A woman's or maybe one of Oscar's kids.

Inside, the house was dark. Clio kept all the curtains pulled to when the sun got high to hold off the heat. Oscar knocked his toe on a chair and swore under his breath. Clio didn't take to swearing, even more than most women.

"What do you think, I'd leave her down there to herself all day?" Clio's voice this time, clear and a little hard edged, coming to Oscar with the sounds of plates being set on the big table. "Purity, go out to the kitchen and get that pie from the safe." The girl, Cassie still slung across her hip, did as she was told. "Jem, get out back and call your brothers in here. I've worked too hard on this meal for it to ruin waiting on them." With the table set and waiting for the pie, Clio turned her attention on the men.

Well now, look at you two. You could have stopped by the pump before you came in, I guess. You come in here looking like that, the kids will all think they can too. Get on back out there and wash up."

"Clio," O.T. held his had in his hands, "Can I just see Nellie first. You got her in the bedroom or--"

Clio looked him up and down and her mouth twisted. "I don't know why she'd want to see you like that, O.T, but she's out on the sleeping porch. Too hot to be bundled up in the bed. She's fine, but you may as well go. She's already had a little lunch and I don't want her bothering about coming in here with us, so just take a minute and then leave her be."

O.T. went through the dark bedroom where Oscar and Clio slept and on out to the sleeping porch on the other side. Oscar had added it on summer before last when Cassie came. Now in summer the boys could sleep out there, or Oscar and Clio could if they wanted to. Oscar said he liked it, but Clio said it wasn't proper. Even she gave in when it got hot enough though and chased the boys into the living room.

Nellie was there on one of the beds. A white sheet was tucked into the bed in tight hospital corners and Clio had propped Nellie's feet up on a pillow. She'd also made sure Nellie had a cool glass of tea. A church fan sat on the table beside her, and now and then a breeze came through the screens. O.T. saw the glass had a green mint leaf in it from Clio's kitchen garden. Mint was good for the stomach.

"How you doin' hon." O.T. asked coming out to the porch. Nellie opened her eyes and smiled at him, then reached out with the hand that didn't have the tea in it. He took her hand and bent down to kiss her on the cheek. "I'm just as dirty as I can be," he said, "Clio got on to me about it."

"You work hard," Nellie said, "Clio should leave you alone." O.T. raised up and looked down at her. She was so sweet, and even now, looked so pretty--all pink and white and gold. Her face was swollen though and so were her ankles, and her eyes had a look he didn't like.

"Clio been taking good care of you?"

"You know she has. Too good. I haven't been off this bed since she dragged me and the girls over here this morning. She wouldn't even let me help her set the table. You know how I hate just lying around."

"You could have read one of her books I guess, hon. She's sure got plenty of them.

Nellie struggled up on her elbows. "You know reading makes my head hurt, O.T. I don't know why she has all them books anyway. All she reads these days is her Bible. And anyway, I feel fine. I don't know why Clio thinks she has to make all this fuss."

"She's just worried." O.T said.

"I know she is, but if I'm not I don't see why she should be." She paused and took his hand again, "Oh O.T., I know everything's going to be fine this time."

O.T. smiled but it didn't reach his eyes. He sat down on the bed beside her and put a hand on her stomach. It was so big. Bigger than last summer. She'd been happy then too, and sure like this. A cheerful little soul. But then there had been all that blood and the baby born dead at eight months. Clio said it must have been dead inside her a long time before that. Said it was too soon for Nellie to have another baby too. But there it is, O.T. thought, and what's done is done.

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 17:44:47 GMT

We have been set a task, please see below.

Cryptic message from Quin, written in red marker on the back of a menu.

movie--the empire of dr. bienke--a lifestyle design celebration of RUBOS--rural bohemians. "we must cultivate a class of bolsevic hillbilly." --ivan the terrible redsky.

. . . the beaty boys in: RED HILLBILLY--a shocking expose of sex 'n' sedition in de sere sensuous sodden southland up yr. red dirt 'n' other green puff marijuana road. hoo doo tales . . .

We begin.

Cotton. Miles of it scorching the earth.

At eye level the boles white and blazing. Stalks making soft crackling sounds in the damp breeze. Tough outer petals spotted dry and specked with black. Inside dark spots. Seeds.

Knees under a crumpled skirt. All stained with black dirt. Soft. Toes digging. Cool. Nails hallowed by black rings. Dirt dust clinging to skin and fabric. A small wind lifts damp hair. Sky and big white clouds. Then wet and hot. Tending and guarding.

Bells ringing out. Voices. A laugh. And blue legs, hard arms. Heat and smells and the shade of the broad brimmed hat.

       "Well I'll just tell you," Oscar swiped a sweating hand over his sweating forehead, His other arm bounced Cassie on his hip as he walked.
     "I don't know but what if this weather holds, we might get this forty in by the end of the week."
     "I don't know but you might be right about that. And don't I know that my Nellie wouldn't be glad about it if we did. She's been after me all summer mend that kitchen shed and what with all the rain, I just haven't got to it. Course that makes her hotter than ever." O.T. Barnnell chuckled low. O.T. always chuckled low like that. Never laughed right out loud. Always just chuckled, like he had a secret.

High on Oscar's hip Cassie looked out at the world. It shimmered with sun and heat and white and moved in a mist of wet light. All across the field tall blue forms moved in the direction of the houses and the road, toward loaded tables and aproned women and home. Soft, something touched her toes rhythmically as she bouced along. Down below Oscar's arm, dark eyes met hers. Cassies hand went down toward them and the dog jumped up on Oscar's leg to lick it.

"Hey, there, hey. Get down you old cuss." Oscar gave the big dog a shove. "I swear, I think that dog is more of a mother to this child than Clio is. Watches her better anyway. We'll be lucky if this girl here doesn't have the mange or something worse by the time this crop is in."

"Clio's got a lot on her mind I guess." O.T. spat casually between the rows.

"No more than your Nellie, I guess, "Oscar frowned, "and I don't see her leaving your girls to the dogs and the men all day."

O.T. gave his low chuckle but squinted and looked up toward the sun. Nellie told him too much sometimes he thought. There were some things a man didn't want to know about his friends' wives.

"Oh, Nellie and Clio's so different. Clio acts more like her mother than her sister, for all she's not so much older. And after Nellie's time last summer--" O.T. stopped. Well, who knows anything about women anyway."

"I'm not him, that's for sure, Oscar said.

Oscar walked on for a while and didn't say anything. Lately Clio had seemed even stranger to him than usual. Under his hat, he glanced down at Cassie's dark brown curls. And the way she was about this one. Well she'd always been hard on the kids, but she'd never just seemed to forget about the others like she had this one. He'd have to try to talk to her about it again, a man was supposed to be the king of his castle after all wasn't he? Well maybe she figured if he had more of a castle, she'd let him have more say. Oscar's legs were swinging faster now. He didn't know he'd stepped up the pace until Cassie gave a little whimper. She'd stuck her big toe in the buttenhole at the pocket of Oscars overhauls, and his faster walking was twisting the hole tight around it.

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 15:55:48 GMT

This is a placeholder for the photo of Quin as Avatar.

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 17:15:22 GMT

Here is a fun and interesting thing to do.

Enter a combination of worlds with which you believe that you could search for almost any sex site and you will get Quin Withey's Radio Weblog. For instance, we checked our referrers for this morning as we sometimes do, and someone had entered the words Gangbang Child. Sure enough, about five from the top, there was Quin Withey's Radio Weblog. Below, we post the entry from that day, June 2, 2003 in it's entirety as an example for our readers of how this spider technology works. We also note that searching for sex sites in this manner is a very good way to find long lost entries to the blog which are no longer posted. It is the I Ching of the web. Here is Quin's entry for June 2, 2003. It is a very good one, long before the darkness of the hiatus came upon him.

June 2, 2003

Anarchism begins at Home, the Means are the Home, the End is the Home; anarchism is a stay at home child because all the Fruits of Society are so twisted up with Hierarchies and what I remember Mr. Veblen calling 'Invidious Distinctions' that picking them is nerve wracking and troublesome. Sometimes anarchism goes to galleries or the library or niteclubs. Anarchism likes to get home early.

2. I was being a steppenfetchit out towards Montauk and I was in a kitchen and some Brothers come to me and say: "Mr. Quin, Mr. Quin, we wanna hold a physical manifestation of the Empire of Dr. Bienke. We want to feel the Book." And one particularly lovable Brother says:"Quin, I know I won't be able to understand it, but it would be nice to hold it." From which I drew the hurtful notion that he thought I might try to write a book some Skank Suit should understand better than him. Oh no my Brother, I am not interested in a Fiction for RichBoys and RichGirls - I'm gonna sell them hoaxes - try to make them better - but as far as Fiction goes you gonna understand this as well as anybody, especially after I get some scratch together and send you a Magic Decoder Ring.

3. SuitCulture an amalgam of Academic Accomplishment, PopStar Idolization, and Seemly Religion. The PopStar Idolization is a curious aspect, at least when it spills into Sounds (most PopStars are SportsActionFigures). I have never really been able to deal with the fact that the Rolling Stones are SuitCulture's favorite band. Whoa, I always say. But I have to conclude that if the Rolling Stones had really good juju then SuitCulture wouldn't be so smurfy, so, Keef, yr. mojo ain't mojo enough. PopStar Idolization performs some displacement/vicarious/voyeuristic fuction I don't understand because I Hate PopStars.

6. One time I was working my Ambrose Shrine with this Scottish Child and this PopStar Guitar Picker come in and the Scottish Child say: "Wouldn't it be nice to lead the PopStar life, Quin? Have people be nice to you all the time?" I said: "Scottish Child, if I had tp pick guitar as lame and rotten as that motherfucker I wouldn't be living. I let that motherfucker come in here because his dark skin and tattoos make Old RichGirls a combination of horny and pissed off and it amuses me to watch them twist. Otherwise I'd run his cheap ass out of here." Another time Scottish Child says: "Quin, I want to write a Novel about restaurants in which people can see themselves and recognize how badly they behave." I said: "Scottish Child, you ever read any Cheever? See, the weird thing about Cheever is that the people who read Cheever are mostly the people in Cheever. They read to see themselves and wave like babies."

17. I'm guessing that 1984 was required reading somewhere for all these Skank Suit LeadershipMen we got running things today. That guy who wrote the Bonfire of the Vanities made such a bad movie used to come in to my Ambrose Shrine on hot Saturday August Nights when he could be anywhere and only vermin like me hanging in town. He could be anywhere but he eating by himself with me. That guy a little PopStarrish but he walk around the neighborhood quiet, not being noisy and messy like PopStars can be, so I sorta like him. A long time ago that guy wrote a book about a TexasBoy who wrote a book about a CrazyPerson that Kirk Douglas was gonna play in the movie but didn't. That KoolAid book has a scene I ain't looked at in thirty years maybe but it stuck in my head - it's the GangBang scene. I read that book when I was young - maybe they shouldn't let young people read books like that - but I gotta hold of it young and I swear to this day MotorCycles all tied up in my mind with that GangBang scene and whenever I hear 'Harley-Davidson' I get a little horny. But I don't ride MotorCycles - damn things are noisy and hot (you wanna ride? go child go) and scary fall downy (be careful). They come out with that HarleyDavidson Perfume and I'm like: 'what would that smell like?' sweat and semen, burning steel and burning oil, a whiff of roadkill - RoadKill - 'SuitChildren the wanna smell like that?' Apparently. Whoa.

17. When Ieuan told Justine that they would be staying for a time in LunaAzul Ieuan said: "It's that place on the Radio." Justine did not like Radio. "Is it a real place too?" she asked. "Maybe," Ieuan said. "I've not yet looked at a map."

1:36:09 PM comment [ 3]

© Copyright 2003 Quin Withey.

Now, of course what the editorial staff is dying to do is go into a lengthy and complete analysis of this entry complete with maroon numbered notes. But we fear that such analysis is making our readership fall off. Although what we lose in our regular readership, we may get back from sex site searchers. We much prefer this to our other apparent fan club, the young white kkkklan types who go searching weblogs for those that contain the word "jew" and then refer readers to their nasty sites filled with red white and blue banners. It brings down the class of the blog neighborhood. Lowers the Property Values. So, we will resist for a time the intense desire to overanalyze and let readers ponder for a time this pure entry from Quin. We believe that we will go back and highlight it in bright red, referencing the New American Standard Version of the bible, and see if that makes our readers comfortable or uncomfortable. Then later this evening, or perhaps this afternoon, we will post a recent photograph of Quin which was sent to us by someone who thinks she has seen him in his hiatus, somewhere in Amsterdam, finally studying to be an Avatar. It's about time. We only hope that it will make him easier to sell. Our funding runs low here at the Luna Azul Foundation. Like true deciples always do, we give most of our Quin away for free to try to help the hungry masses yearning to breathe free. But it makes it difficult to keep up the good work, and other such cliches.

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Thu, 11 Dec 2003 18:10:45 GMT

d.'s promo company would seemingly exist to feed schnaybels n englishmen.

from: new mafia in town.

2). already correcktness is a bother.

from: happiness in the tower of babble.

Thu, 11 Dec 2003 17:15:42 GMT

We suppose we see ourselves as Paul.

We have an overpowering need, having had a blinding light fall on our faces but not fully understanding, to get the word of Quin to the masses. And we have a giant thorn in our flesh, which is Quin himself.

The problem is this: We never liked Paul very much with all his talk of it is better to marry than burn and all that. What he preferred was that men have no sex at all. He presumed that women had no need of if except to make children. Perhaps since we have no churches yet which write us endless letters filled with tedious detail about how to do this or that--which clothes to wear, how to wear our hair. Whether women should speak, and all of that--when it is our turn to write letters to our Thesalonians, we will do better.

Jesus was supported by rich women, did you know that? Did you ever wonder how he managed to wander about Judea speaking and being charasmatic and getting the word out? He still had to eat after all, and pee and wear clothes and sandals. Well, he had a lot of rich and middle class women on his side. He stayed in their homes, accepted their gifts, ate their food, let them sit at his feet. Remember Lydia? She was a buyer of purple as we recall [we beg Quin's mother to correct us in the comments section as to whether she bought sold or wore, but we remember that Lydia and purple are inextricably linked in the holy writ]. Purple was a very expensive commodity in those days. Hard to come by. Lydia was a wealthy woman. She supported Jesus. And the Magdalen, she seemed to be doing all right in her business. She did well enough that she could give it up and follow him. Some of the gospels not officially condoned by the Church with a capital C when the Church decided which gospels would go in and out of the bible list her as one of the deciples, right along with John, and John the one Jesus loved [we've never fully clarified that issue either have we?] and Peter and Peter's brother, and all the rest. The Magdalen must have saved up a tidy sum over the years to be able to afford to just drop everything and follow like that. She was played by Anne Bancroft in one of the Jesus films we saw part of over the blessed holiday of consumption.

What Quin needs is some rich women.

Perhaps he hasn't found them in all these years because of this 'Beth' character that he insists is real. Women do not like rivals. And if you're carting one around in your head all the time, it is likely to make the rich women uncomfortable. Much preferable to have a nice tasty set of male deciples to mix and mingle with. Big fishermen and all that. But what's done is done. Marx had his 'Beth' as did John Donne, and Shelley and Hammett and many other geniuses. However look at the records of their prosperities. Marx always lived in horrible poverty, living mainly off his womanizing friend, Engels, John Donne, imprisoned for a time for marrying his, then living in poverty creating hordes of children, twelve or thirteen altogether, seven of which lived, quite a record for the Elizabethans. The Donne familiy also lived entirely off of their friends until he finally gave in and took church orders when she promptly died. Her death caused him to write some of his most wonderful holy sonnets. He was really broken up about it. Obviously he liked her quite a lot to run off with her as he did, and then make her bear twelve children. Shelley was quite a womanizer himself, but in Mary he found an equal. He ran off with her as well when she was about 17. He had married another 17 year old previously, and couldn't marry Mary until that woman finally committed suicide. Shelley's writing never really was very good. But he was intelligent and handsome and an adventurer. Even in school he was blowing up buildings with his experiments. Hammett finally made some money, but by that time he was pretty much bedridden from alcohalisma and unloveable, living in Lilian Hellman's house and viciously critiquing her plays, The Little Foxes and so on.

At any rate. We summarize that men with living muses don't seem to do as well financially as those without. Because all the rich women stay away.

Some will complain that we are so quick to compare Quin to Jesus, but we don't have much problem in that. We think that Quin has a lot of avatar potential if he would just give in and let there be a god that he could personify. But he won't give in. He's very thorny like that. Quin's god is the future. And even though he sees it, he can't get to it. Interesting isn't it. He really does actually see it, but seeing it doesn't take him to it. Quin's vision for all of us here below or wherever we are is not all that much different from Jesus after all. He wants all these stupid wars over money to stop. He wants us to all have enough so that we can live our lives in modest comfort, doing what it would be best for us to do. [Marx said much the same thing, but the Marxists don't like Marx's words about everyman an artist . . . we think they prefer art to be elitiest, which it isn't anymore now that paint is so cheap]. Quin's vision of a peaceful world is very modest indeed. But without some big pie in the sky god to back him up, or at least a few rich women to support him, he doesn't get to get out much to talk about it.

Another way Quin's message is like Jesus' has to do with class structures. Quin acknowledges that they exist [Give unto Cesar and all that] but says that they are bogus. The American class system is just like all the others. It is about money. Little pieces of folding paper that we pass around and exchange for this and that. Except that some people don't exchange it very much. Either they have so much of it that they can just sock it away somewhere or pay people to build tanks and things with it so that they get more folding pieces of paper, or they have so little that they have none to exchange for things, dead chickens to cook and can's of tomato soup, things like that, and so they can't exchange it very often. In America, and indeed on much of this small green planet, those with more bits of folding paper make up a higher class, and even as in the olden days of the bible [old and new testaments both--remember the Pharasees and Sadgasees, sorry for this spelling, but you get the drift] those with more of this stuff get to have all the knowledge and they get to argue the fine points of economics, politics, god, how to overthrow the Roman Empire and so on.

Enough to chew over for those who will.

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 02:04:33 GMT

We know not why the beast below appeared. We had begun a sentence about the sudden bleakness of the winter and the accompanying desolation of Quin's hiatus, when suddenly, there appeared this beast--pig, man, or van . . . today's cenotaur . . . or whichever is the beast of the Greeks which was half man half horse.

Yesterday was the full moon . . . or so almost full that it seemed so. Last night after walking in the city snows, we were bitten by a small sad dog. He would not have bitten had he not been so small and so sad. We know him well. We know we will not be hydrophobic. But now the finger seems to be infected. We haven't seen Quin and so we don't know how he is doing in the full moon and snow, if he is in the snow. We see that he writes in his blog from time to time but that is all we know of him. We hope he is well and not too unhappy. He has set us a task. We are contextualizing. If you look at RagtimeTexas.com, you will see that it has changed. It will continue to change. We are contextualizing. And we are updating. Quin would say that this is too little too late, or at least too late, and probably he is right. But we do feel a mission to get Quin's work to others--we don't think we know best how to do this, but as should be obvious by now, we keep trying.

We'll ramble on here a while, then get to another task we have been set by Quin, which is to write about this: "emma goldman RAGTIME doctorow--reading/Rockland County." As he was leaving he handed us a piece of plain white paper with these words written in turquoise crayon. But before that, we allow ourselves this ramble.

When we read different Buddhist things, we read about desirelessness. We sometimes reach a point of what we think must be desirelessness. It is very difficult. It is difficult because it is so boring. And because it rankles with the truth of our existentialiality. Rankles may not be the right word. What we mean is that it rings with the truth of our existentiality and this is not very pleasant to think about. In other words . . . this is it. That's what desirelessness is. Realizing that this is it. There is no desire to buy or eat or have. This doesn't mean that you don't do these things, only that they don't bring a buzz. Somewhere, after hanging around in desirelessness for awhile, we begin to see differently. Or maybe it is the reverse, maybe as we begin to see differently, we begin to have glimpses of this desirelessness. Chicken or egg, egg or chicken. Read Satre. Read Pale Fire. Think about the difference.

It is said that when Quin first met 'Beth', they sat in dark bars a great deal, and the conversation would go something like this:

Q: Love, have you read X, Y, or Z?

B: (beginning to bristle, because the her answer was always the same) No.

Q: Well you should because in X, Y, or Z, (this work would be something like Veblen's Theory of the Liesure class, for example) we learn that . . .

And so it is said went their courtship. He can't help it that he is so smart. His brain has a zip drive for storing extra data. Sometimes one has a moment of epiphany when one suddenly understands every word he says and what he means by it. Then one feels oneself a god. But those moments are seldom.

Quin and 'Beth' are scientists of memory and sound artists. "Scientists of Memory" is a phrase they picked up from that Nospheratu movie with John Malcovich. How it applies in our discussion of contextualization is this: Quin says, and this is the truth, that our history has been stolen from us. It doesn't belong to us anymore. He wants to take it back. All you have to do to see the truth of this is to think about the American Indians or Native Americans and then think about westerns. Quin and 'Beth' like westerns very much. But that doesn't mean that they believe in them. Some people do you know. It is very strange. You can also think about the Buffalo.

Quin talks about the Buffalo a great deal. He is very serious about them. No one seems to pay attention. Here is why: People seem to think that if Quin were serious about the buffalo, he would be out fighting for their rights. Raising them, fostering them, teaching them to fetch. Have we not told you that Quin speaks in metaphor and parable. Here is what he says about the Buffalo, over and over. In a herd of Buffalo, there is one who is the watcher. That is his job: to watch. And that is what he does. Who is he watching for? The Cowboy. The Railroad. Let's bow our heads for a moment and think about the Cowboy and the Railroad and the Buffalo. Now why do we think that the Buffalo would be watching for cowboys and railroads?

Quin and 'Beth' were both raised to endless pictures of the holocaust. We hesitate even to type the word for fear that some spider will post a comment to a link of some kind. Those of you who read the comments section will understand what we mean. Quin and 'Beth' were both raised to endless pictures of the holocaust. This was so that they would learn that this should never happen again. This lesson was effective for they did learn this.

The pictures were in black and white and were of many different scenes. Usually these were moving pictures and were shown in history class. One of 'Beth's' favorite high school teachers, her 10th grade history teacher, coach macmichael showed her most of the films. Others were in the class as well. The army had taken the films when they opened the death camps. One of the climactic images in the films was of piles of bodies--very thin bodies, bony bodies. It is amazing that these bodies had so recently been alive. How could they have possibly been alive and so starved. There were many other images. Quin and 'Beth' also learned the ineffable from these. The ineffable is a thing that cannot be described in words. Some people, for instance, say that the notion of god is ineffable, and some people say that the notion of infinity is ineffable. The images of the holocaust are ineffable. They cannot be described, they are so horrific--you see, that word doesn't work at all, it does not describe the impact of the images at all, it is too weak--and so the sentence must remain unfinished.

In the case of these images, ineffable applies because there is no possible method which can be used to comprehend them. They simply cannot be understood. They make no sense. They are bewildering. This is why they are so terrible. We cannot comprehend why any person would have done this thing. All of the rational explanations, hatred, greed, fear, do not explain it. They are too weak.

Quin says that some Buffalo are watchers. They watch for the Cowboy. They watch for the railroad. They watch for the ineffable. They watch for the things that bring piles of bodies. Have you seen the pictures of the buffalo hunters standing on top of piles of dead buffalo? The piles are fifteen feet high and more. Then, later, there were piles of bones, not quite so high. There are other pictures of Indian hunters with many Indian scalps hung on their belts. For those who think people are more important that Buffalo, you can look at these. The Indian hunters were paid by the U.S. government for every scalp--so much money for each. This is the rational explanation for these ineffable images. The same old one. Hatred, greed, fear. But these words don't explain these images.

In The Empire of Dr. Bienke, Quin has a character he calls Clyde the Tortured Buffalo. Clyde is a god now. But he used to be a watcher. Things didn't work out well. We can't remember exactly what happened, but, despite all of Clyde's watching, The Cowboy and the Railroad got in and the piles of bodies came. In The Empire of Dr. Bienke, Clyde suffers so, that he becomes a god, and when Koo Cowlick, goes into the desert with his mojo bag, Clyde appears to him and tells him to kill no man or he will surely die, and Koo vows that he will not. But when Koo sees that Mrs. Montoya will kill the gangster who has killed Big Nigger, he kills him, himself so that she won't have to. For this, Koo has to pay, and on Christmas Eve, 1933 in Dos Passos, while playing the electric slide guitar, Koo dies and ascends into the ether. So ends the first reading from The Empire of Dr. Bienke. Some people think that Quin is joking. I tell you, he is not.

Quin is a watcher. He predicts things that happen. The things that he predicts that happen are generally things that could be thought of as coming from the Zeitgeist. You can think of the Zeitgeist, if you want to, as the collective unconscious. A lot of people resist what he says. Here is why: it is because what he says is ineffable. And you see, when Quin knows the Cowboy and the Railroad are coming, he tends to yell about it, then if that doesn't work, he may try to be very creative in his way of expressing it--this could manifest itself in writing a song, or a novel or a blog or by painting a picture. And when that doesn't work, he gets angry and demanding, and then finally when that doesn't work he goes into despair. Someday he will probably be a god, but that doesn't seem like an improvement on his situation when you think about what happens to gods.

Even we on the editorial staff who know these things, don't help very much. Why should it be so hard just to run when the watcher says run? We think it may be that same old thing, what was it . . . but I know him, he's the Carpenter's son . . . oh, we can hear readers hissing at that. But think about it? Isn't that exactly that same old thing?

'Beth' once was asked by an English teacher to write an essay about love. Her essay went on and on. Most of what she writes tends to go on and on. She wrote many words and sentences that basically said this: Love is just an excuse for greed and fear.
Love, she held, was not mainly about wanting to do good, but about wanting not to lose. We think that most buffalo do not run because they don't want to lose something--grass, pasture--that kind of thing--in other words, whatever is had at the time. The easiest way to justify not running when the watcher says run is to say something like . . . "I know him, isn't he just . . ."

Right now, in this full moon second which some say unfolds continually, right now, in this Zeitgeist, there is only one way for a watcher to get anyone to listen to him. He must possess. When he possesses, then the buffalo follow. This is the reason Quin wants money. He wants you to start running.

Enough for now.

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 23:06:31 GMT

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 20:40:33 GMT

bob dylan wrote 'positively fourth street' in 1965. i was seven. that's the copyright date. on album it was not released until 'bob dylan's greatest hits' in 1967, but i think it was a single or a b side in england prior to that and maybe in america too.

'positively fourth street' was notable as sort of an anti-pop offering and non-love song. it is a protest song but you are not sure against whom dylan is protesting. baez maybe? i read the lyrics today and i think it might be that he's protesting against me... but i was seven in 1965 so i didn't grin when he was down and out and it seems to me that bobby is the one that stays on the side that's winning.

i suppose it would be the conventional thing to feel grateful for bobby for the profound impact he has had on my life.

i can remember my music teacher in coventry in 1972 telling me that 'no one will know who bob dylan is in ten years'. i was skeptical, but then i was 14 so i wasn't sure he didn't have a better grasp of history than me.

over thanksgiving we go to the cedar tavern and they play bob dylan's greatest hits. damn. i didn't look to live with the motherfucker my whole life.

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 19:42:11 GMT

somehow duchamp's green box became s.r.a. i would read all the s.r.a.s but then i hated doing the written work at the end and so nominally remained in low colors. purply colors.

we could download pieces of blog and laminate them and fill up old lunch boxes painted green. there'd be a plastic fold out 'board' like twister on which you might lay your pieces of blog.

we could offer the lunch boxes in a twofer commodity package with a plastic ukelele with a wind up music box inside you could jam along with.

we could make a movie of pretty teenagers playing with their blog filled lunch boxes and their jam-along ukeleles and then they'd get eaten by monsters if they'd ever done it. actually i'm tired of that movie.

when koo dies he goes to "the radio ranch in the ether". it will be from the Radio Ranch in the Ether that we shall revisit the 1596 battle of cadiz (after the style of cy twombley) where we shall see essex and raleigh and mr. john donne.

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 19:02:55 GMT

"Posters, photos large and small, and other mementos from his music career were tacked up on the walls of every room, along with a calendar portrait of Jesus. The living room walls were painted bright red, and after a half hour or so I noticed that the wallpaper was made of old newspapers. This last detail shocked me. How was it that a famous musician was living in a place like this? I suddenly found myself sitting in Mance Lipscomb's reality, not my own, and I realized that if I was going to write about his life, I would have to do it by leaving my prejudgements back in Austin and living in his world for however long it took me to come to know it."

Glen Alyn. "I Say Me For A Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman." as told to and compiled by Glen Alyn. Da Capo Press. New York. this is a great book and da capo has been a great imprint.... so much more is available than when i was a kid and the blues and jazz literature sucked and was hard to come by.... not that the increase in the availability of knowlege seems in any way to positively help....

of the above quote however i will note that alyn is speaking of the summer of seventy three. bright red walls are sort of trendy in seventy three and what you want to bet i can put lipscomb in a room with a rauschenberg before then and likely in a room with rauschenberg himself?

scholars can be awful condescending towards old negros pretending they cannot glimmer conceptions of modernity and minimalism.