Southern Writer

Descent of the Species

2012-01-09T14:00:00.000-08:00

"Out there it’s the 1990s, but in this house, it’s 1954.” Mentioned, sarcastically, by the mentally ill Maureen Dowd of the new York Times,

That same 1954 when America was on top of the world, when a man could support his family on one salary alone, when our demographic was 90% white and mostly civilized, when drug use was the habit of a few jazz musicians in NYC and almost no one else, when women wanted to be women and weren't trying to play badmitten on a tennis court, when black people had not yet been thrown into an unwinable economic competition with white people and their crime rate was only two or three times as lofty as that of Caucasians? When a fair number of their children had an identifiable father and immigration was restricted to people who could have a reasonable expectation of adopting western values, when we had Faulkner and Hemingway instead of the banality of chick lit and preening lady authors who know how to toe the p.c. party line, when we were the most admired people on earth instead of the most detested, when our schools actually conveyed knowledge instead of approved platitudes, when our most emminent newspaper hadn't yet overdosed on anti-white agitprop, when someone like our extraordinarily sophisticated Ms. Dowd would have been seen for what she is - a person who had rather have a kidney replacement than to miss a Woody Allen film?
Better to have one day of life in 1954 than immortality in the world of The New York Times.

The Node reviewed by Alex Kurtagic

2011-12-01T06:48:00.000-08:00

OCCIDENTAL OBSERVER

Thursday, 1 December 2011 - 9:03
Tito Perdue’s “The Node”
November 30, 2011—3 Comments
Alex Kurtagic

Tito Perdue is best known for Lee, a 1991 novel about a misanthropic septuagenarian at war with the modern world. The novel introduced Lee Pefley, Perdue’s presumed alter ego, who has since appeared in other novels, at different ages and even after death (as in Fields of Asphodel).

The Node, his most recently published novel, now out on Nine-Banded Books, is a blend of literary and dystopian science fiction, and features what might be Lee’s grandson.

The action unfolds in a ridiculous mid-twenty-first-century America that is the outcome of generations of caucophobia, political correctness, degeneration, and dysgenics. It is an America where Caucasians (‘Cauks’) have been reduced to a dispossessed and legally disenfranchised minority, where pederasty is considered normal, where New York has been renamed Martin Luther King, where Whites suspected of ethnocentricity are imprisoned, and which is in every other respect profoundly dysfunctional, afflicted by crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime, ubiquitous pornography, environmental degradation, mass ignorance, ball-busting feminism, sartorial chaos, infantilisation, terminal multiculturalism, obsessive consumerism, and normalised self-mutilation.

The main character is a man of 44, who remains nameless and whom the author refers to as ‘the boy’, ‘the novice’, ‘the pilgrim’, and eventually as ‘our man’. Other than his absurdly eclectic CV, the pilgrim is, in fact, fairly ordinary. He does, however, possess a somewhat independent, self-sufficient spirit. The action begins when he is forced to abandon his homestead in Tennessee, on foot, in search of propane. His journey takes him through a devastated landscape and into a dirty, overpopulated, diverse, predatory, and crime-infested city, where he visits a group of vestigial Whites in what is termed a ‘node’. Their leader, Larry Schneider, has organised a clandestine movement based on the creation of a growing network of nodes—fortified ethnic enclaves—around the country, in an effort to regrow the White race, stage a cultural revival, and rebuild the world. After some time with this group, the pilgrim is charged with establishing his own node, in rural Alabama. The rest of the novel follows the boys’ adventures as he joins the group, assembles his colonists, or nodists, and fulfills his assignment.

The Node has a linear plot, peppered with amusing incidents as one follows the protagonist. The attraction is in Perdue’s deadpan humour, literary style, and reactionary critique.

After exchanging novels over the Summer, both Perdue and this author discovered surprising parallels in their work, even though their style and voices differ. The Node’s social critique is comparable to Mister in that both authors mock the consequences of the liberal project through grotesque exaggeration, ironically contrasting refined prose against the repulsive dystopia of their setting. And both novels also make use of postmodern self-referential devices (see below). Mister, however, is oppressive and supercilious, whereas The Node is wry and ostensibly lighthearted. The targets also differ: in Mister the primary target is the ‘respectable’ conservative, finally caught up with by the world his silence made possible; in The Node it is liberalism and its human product. Also, in Mister, the protagonist is sadistically subjected to torments and indignities, where as in The Node the protagonist is treated sympathetically.

Some of Perdue’s themes of critique recurr in The Node, to wit: the soul-destroying irrationalities of 9-5 employment; the hero’s aversion to it; comically ignorant, clownish, and aggressive degenerates; the unpleasant and degrading nature of urban life; the author’s romantic nostalgia for the Old America; the author’s love for vintage objects, which he sprinkles throughout the novel; contempt for materialism, standardisation, and what Guenon termed ‘the reign of quantity’.

Thus, when the pilgrim is required to work at a 9-5 job, filling in temporarily for a nodist, since the group needs money, he resents it and resists it. What is more, in order to blend in, he is required to attire himself as per the sartorial etiquette of the business district, which in Perdue’s degenerate world means shorts and mismatched running shoes, each worn on the wrong foot. On his way to work he is forced to navigate the muggers’ booby traps—one of the muggers’ favourite baits being a lone infant left in an upturned vehicle. And at work he is forced to submit to STRONG women—‘liberated’, ‘empowered’, misandristic, agro, chip-in-the-shoulder females so loud a telephone conversation with any of them can rupture a man’s eardrum. These women are typically skeletal, yet they, in accordance to fashion, walk around with an exposed breast.

In terms of style, Perdue favours an educated prose, occasionally with syntactically complex sentences, archaic inversions, and unusual vocabulary. His pace is glacial. The sporadic, brusque dialogue acts as counterpoint to the leisurely, extended narration. And, as in previous novels, there is a deliberate use of leitmotif, with recurring phrases and references to objects. Also, Perdue’s non-existent volcanoes of Alabama make another appearance here, except they now seem apt in this frigid world of lethal sunlight, oddly coloured skies, and brown snow.

Another recurring theme are the links and references to the author’s own life and works: when the boy’s gorge rises, the trait is described as inherited from his grandfather (conceivably, Lee). The reference brings The Node into a network of other fiction by the author that partly / loosely fictionalises his life, his family, and his ancestors. Such fiction includes the forthcoming Morning Crafts, an unpublished manuscript of which is found in the novel. Perdue even engages in postmodern self-referencing, when he writes

Further down a comely woman dressed in blue was teaching her child the rudiments of what sounded liked the old-fashioned English of a hundred years before. Was this indeed the tongue that held sway in North America once, the dialect of Wolfe, Faulkner and Perdue?

The secondary characters in The Node also follow Perduesque patterns. None are truly normal. And neither are they wholly virtuous. Even the nodists, selected by the boy, are a mixed bag, individually and as a group. One speaks several languages, but is also part moth, having been victim of an embryologist’s prank. Another is a churlish, boneheaded nuisance, who is fond of beer. Yet another is persistently described as an ‘uninteresting woman’—although most seem so anyway, while the only one to attract the pilgrim’s attention in time proves a complete disappointment. And once established, moreover, the node emerges not as a paragon of Aryan supermanhood—old habits die hard. The boy’s mission may be to help rebuild the world, but for now he has to work with what he has, with exiguous promise:

Having programmed the vehicle toward a series of nearby restaurants listed in inverse correlation of cost, the girl almost immediately fell off into a slumber in which our boy could scrutinize her face in much better detail than at any time therebefore. He would have said she derived from North European ancestry, the most endangered of all ethnoses, save only for outright Norwegians. Could he, or not, get from her a renewal of that species, the West made new, a numerous people inhabiting everything between the Rockies and Appalachian mountain chains? He knew that he could not. The resumption of fine literature, star travel, Wagnerian opera houses? Not a chance of that.

Though The Node is largely comical, the atmosphere remains dark, much in line with other dystopian fiction. It is ultimately a profoundly pessimistic work. Perdue’s future America is analogous with the former Roman provinces after the fall of the empire—these were effectively abandoned to their fate, Rome having exhausted its coffers and depleted its manpower and therefore having become unable to maintain a meaningful presence beyond its core, or even in its core. In The Node, large sections of the landscape have been abandoned, and the roads have become dangerous for travellers, peppered with unsavoury characters or crumbling outposts. Abandoned also are the formerly wealthy suburbs. The liberal upper middle class Whites that championed the liberal project have disappeared. The dollar is jocundly rejected everywhere. Perdue expects not a Spencerian collapse but a long, gradual decline—death with a whimper—for the United States, and economic preeminence for China.

Moreover, he envisions any attempts at an American revival as a precarious, inglorious affair, riddled with uncertainty and frustrations, the outcome being an austere and archaic society, rather than a vibrant and futuristic utopia. Anything built upon that foundation will be leaner and harder—there is no utopia at the end of the road, but a return to old certainties, which ironically, and paradoxically, include old uncertainties too. This includes, in Perdue’s world, a return to the methods of the Old West, complete with authority founded on force and the gun:
Democracy was no good any longer, neither here nor in the country at large.

“Doesn’t work,” said he, orating to the crowd. “And can’t work when the people have fallen below a certain measure. That’s why you have me.”

The cheering stopped. One man was watching television on his wrist receiver while another had stretched out on the cold hard ground and seemed likely to fall off to sleep. The farmwives meantime had gathered in two separate knots and were gossiping happily about their trivia. Our boy could feel his gorge rising, an inherited characteristic of his.

“I’m not saying it’ll be easy.”

The tallest man in the crowd, the one in whom our man had vested his most exaggerated hopes, had turned away already and was trudging slowly homeward. Our boy counted just twenty-four subjects, all of them unproven and stupid except for himself and perhaps one or two others.

“You will notice,” he went on, “that I have begun to carry this whip around.”

“Yes, sir. We was just talking about that, sure was.” (The voice was frail and came from the back of the crowd.)

“You people. I have been here three months already and …”

His tongue fell out. He tried to sweep it up hurriedly and put it back where it belonged. Meantime the people were drifting back to their cozy, if dilapidated homes and three-hundred-inch television sets. The whole world rested in the balance, the quality of the culture, the fate of the West. Suddenly, extracting his silver-plated revolver, he fired twice into the air, bringing their indifference to a stop.

“OK, that finishes it. The time has come to build our wall. You there, you with the boils, go and fetch your wheelbarrow. Now! And you over yonder, you’re even worse. Come on back here right now and get to work!”

And yet they continued to disperse. Hingis turned and spat at them, casting an unlovely glob of expectorant to the ground. Put off balance by that, our novice said nothing at first. Until now, he had always thought an expectorant to be someone with an optimistic cast of mind. He decided to change his tact:

“What would Larry say? OK, I’ll tell you. He would say that all he had ever wanted was to bring the people back to mediocrity again. And that’s what I plan to do, too, even if I have to…” He raised his whip in one hand and ventilator in the other. It consoled him somewhat that the varlet had come to stand by his side, his primary support at this particular time.

“Let me have that gun.”

Slowly he brought them back again. He was good, the scapegrace, with threats and guns and our man began now to see just how indispensable he might eventually turn out to be.

In short, it is back to basics: making babies, raising cattle, and (hopefully, in time) developing a natural aristocracy, combining brute force with intellectual genius. Success is not to be measured by prosperity, ‘but by the quality of men’.

The limited hardback edition of The Node is currently available from the publishers (get it while you can). A paperback edition will follow in January.

The NODE

2011-11-26T11:27:00.001-08:00

From The Hoover Hog

2011-11-26T08:32:00.002-08:00

Tito Perdue has been described as "America's lost literary genius" (New York Press) and as "a reactionary snob" (Publisher's Weekly). Originally released in 1991 under the estimable Four Walls Eight Windows imprint, Perdue's first published novel, Lee, has since become a cult classic. Notably, it introduced Perdue's enduring anti-hero (and presumed alter-ego), Leland Pefley, a dyspeptic, cane-wielding misanthrope at war with the modern world. "Lee's language is vitriolic and hallucinatory," wrote a critic for The New York Times Book Review, who further praised the book as "a portrait both exceedingly strange and troubling."

In describing Perdue's work as "troubling," this early critic displayed unwitting prescience. For as Perdue's literary career has come to bloom in the years since Lee was published, so has his reputation as a problematic political reactionary whose avowed worldview is none-too-easily reconciled with the prevailing sensibilities of contemporary cultural gatekeepers. While Lee's abiding nostalgia for antebellum folkways and inherited Western tradition may be taken in stride so long as the the veneer of comically situated satire is preserved, some critics seem disarmed -- or troubled -- to discover beneath Perdue's most trenchent and inegalitarian prose the form of an all-too sincere lament. As the line between author and subject has blurred, the fictional landscape that once seemed so wonderfully peculiar and human and alive has thus been colored by suspicion, leaving status-conscious critics with few options. One option, obviously, is to call the author a snob. Another tack is to softcoat one's appreciation in sufficiently disclamatory verbaige, perhaps with a few contextual references to other problematic writers of import. Knut Hamsun might be close enough for roadwork, and Houellebecq is fashionably on call for precisely these occasions. Easiest, I fear, is to ignore the work altogether.

But let's hope Tito Perdue has yet to be consigned to the margins, because I am very proud to announce that his sixth novel, a brilliant dystopian satire called The Node, will be released by Nine-Banded Books later this month.

Here's the squib:

Welcome to the future. The 21st century has come of age and it seems that everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Propelled beyond the brink by environmental catastrophe, by social degeneration and the foretold collapse of the monetary system, the American landscape has given way to a postmodern picaresque. In such a world, where crime has been normalized, sex has been mechanized, and where ethnic enclaves – equipped with inscrutable bioengineered surveillance gadgetry – vie for the last remnants of power, one hapless pilgrim stands athwart the apocalyptic tide. Emboldened by dim nostalgia and quixotic resolve, this man – our hero, as we may insist – is entrusted to mobilize a fractious retinue of co-ethnic subversives (the maligned “Cauks”) to establish a stronghold, a redoubt, a community, a last ditch … a Node. It remains only to be seen whether the seeds of renewal may yet find purchase, or be left to ash.

The speculative form may represent a superficial departure for Perdue, who is best known for his mystically suffused explorations of decaying southern heritage, but longtime fans will the relish the idiosyncrasies and strange humor that have long distinguished Perdue's writing. The Node is engrossing, sly, subversive, and wickedly funny. Read it now or catch up later.

_______________

The first printing of The Node will be released on November 20, 2011. This hardcover edition will be strictly limited to 125 numbered and autographed copies and will be available exclusively from Nine-Banded Books (the pre-order form should be active later today) for $25, which includes shipping. A $12 trade paperback edition will be released in late December and may be pre-ordered through Amazon.

Some thoughtful commentaries on Tito Perdue's work are gathered here. Derek Turner interviews Perdue here. And Alex Kurtagic (who created the cover illustration for The Node) offers a fresh perspective on Tito's early novel, The Sweet-Scented Manuscript, here.

The Node

2011-11-24T12:46:00.001-08:00

Strange doings

2011-04-19T14:20:00.000-07:00

Part 2

“No, dear, I’ll be the one to cope with the shoes, yes? And you, why this will give you the time to go and prepare our own meal, yours and mine!”
No. She stood unsmilingly until at last Lee turned and tiptoed back to where the creature lay snoring among books and paraphernalia and, withal, the best accommodations this side of River Cahawba. Quickly he cut loose the moccasin on the boy’s left-hand side and tossed it as far from himself as he could, where it bounced against the wall. No socks. Nor did the boy seem to require them. Suddenly Lee uttered out loud, dismayed to find that the remaining foot, the one in leather, was fitted with a prosthetic device of strange nature, crude beyond imagination, the work most likely of some fellow tribesman, an iron monger possibly, or good-intentioned smith who had wanted by such means to make the legs more or less equal in length by comparison to each other. Lee dropped it at once, but then immediately gathered it up again and fastened it into place.
Of the boy’s upper parts, his face for example and head in general, they belonged to a person of whom it was difficult to make to make final judgment. Next, working tenderly, Lee lifted the lid on the right-hand side, uncovering an eye that was large, hazel, and highly clarified. It was not uncommon to come across features of this kind, hazel ones, in certain upriver counties toward the north. Thinking on this (and taking out his pipe and filling it), he was slow to drop the lid and slow, too, in running around to the other side where the eye proved so much like the first one that right away Lee began to confuse them in his mind.
Outside, his wife was where he had placed her. “I’m thinking we should have the ham tonight,” he said, “and black-eyed peas. You’re very hungry and…”
“Is he all right?”
“Fine, fine. Knows how to sleep certainly! Yes, indeed.” He hummed. “There is that little… how to say? Anomaly.”
She stopped.
“No, no, no, I didn’t do it. It’s one leg, you see - shorter than the other. And that will explain his limp. For my part, I think we should have gravy with the ham and gravy with the grits.”
She said nothing. Lee knew what she was thinking however.
“He doesn’t belong to us, dear. Why, he’s nearly a full-grown man!”
“What’s his name?”
“Never asked. And I will not have you plucking some adorable little name out of mid-air and foisting it off onto him like you did for…” (He mentioned here the dog, who also had come to them from out of the hills.) “Anyway, he’ll be gone by tomorrow.”
“Oh don’t be ridiculous. Who would feed him?”

It nearly always gave Lee pleasure when at the end of a tumultuous day he would throw himself inside the house and, shivering with the most delicious sense of security, pull Judy in after him.
He looked upon it as his own special place, and never mind that the structure was too tall by far and excessively narrow for its height. As to the ceilings (and the house was full of them), they were so high that only with great difficulty could he actually perceive them, and even then he had to use his better glasses. But primarily it was the wallpaper he adored, hundred-year-old stuff so faded by now and so grainy that it turned one’s thoughts to classic nineteenth-century postage stamps. Many were the times he used to stand facing the wall with his lantern, endeavoring to read those old newspaper accounts wherewith the surface had been mended and patched. But mostly he was drawn to the damp places where some of his earliest ancestors had been immured.
There were a number of things that committed him to this place and marked him out, not so much as “the captain of his own destination” as rather the captive, so to speak, of self-fascination. But all this was as nothing when held up next to the objects (books) and items (musical recordings) that he had abstracted from New York City, hundreds of good things that filled the shelves that ran back and forth and extended even unto the ceiling itself where a ladder was needed to get them down. They covered the moist places, the books did, and offered tens of thousands of pages amongst which a person could hide his bills of money.
He was aware of everything - the furniture, the mice, the smell of mildew, calomel and soot. Aware, too, that the closet was full of canned foods. Climbing to the third floor, he also became aware of Judy who, often as not, would be seated on the floor among her belongings.
These were the good years. No one whom he had ever known had any desire to find him. In Africa, meantime, and points further east, sixteen wars were being carried out with sticks, rifles, and razor blades. One could do worse than pilot even such an unwieldy house as this one over the dark, deep, and unsettled sea that comprised a typical black night in the land called Alabama.
And: “Did I not say, dear,” (he said), “that our love would persist for ten thousand years?”
She couldn’t hear him, not so long as he remained in his vestibule, a narrow space beneath the stairs where he had room but for a chair, lamp, and old-fashioned radio that had gone bad except for certain highly irregular wave lengths in the extreme right-hand region of the dial. Approaching the thing with circumspect - it was as big, almost, as the refrigerator - he now switched on the motor and prepared himself for a very long wait. Thus several minutes went by, which is to say until some of the more conspicuous tubes (the machine had long ago lost its housing and was kept together with rubber bands and cellophane) until the essential tubes, as he was saying, began to blush and, finally, throw off sparks.
Somehow he had tapped into a comedy show, an uproarious affair that had originated from somewhere in Chicago shortly before the War. Coming nearer, he did his best to understand the jokes, but soon was overwhelmed by blasts of trash music breaking in from two neighboring channels. It was quite useless - each time he thought that he was at last keening in on the old songs, that was when evilness took possession of the wires.
Turning to the news, he heard two stories each about racism and price movements. Quickly he turned off the power, waited, counted and then, bending over the machine, tried to ascertain if the tubes had cooled sufficiently and whether he could find Chicago amid the static.

They ate in silence, the woman and Lee. Good years were these, now that the tedium of youth was behind them; they liked to sit for hours in the dim, gloating conjointly over what they had accomplished in the past and what they hoped to avoid in the future. And in short he foresaw for them nothing but music and dogs, nights and long walks in the increasingly depopulated countryside. Suddenly, that moment, the radio spoke out loud and clear, Lee having forgotten to turn it off. And because it was a weather report (their favorite kind of listening), and since it referred to a nearby locality and to current time, Lee chose to give heed to it and, if possible, memorize it before too much static got between the meteorologist and he.
Thunder and rain, coming from opposite directions, were anticipated on two different fronts. And someday, he knew, great balls of fire would come rolling down the valley, evaporating the Cahawba. Bending nearer, he learned that December would be upon them much sooner than he had provided for. It promised high winds, the premier danger in these parts to his all-too-narrow-and-excessively-tall home that already listed to one side.
“December,” he said, looking meaningfully at his wife.
She paled. This was the weather that each year sent her running for her mittens and ear pads and never mind that there were still 60 degrees of mercury both inside and out.
“But if you think this is chilly, just you wait till…”
“No, Lee, don’t. Please.”
“… till snow has filled the attic and little hills of frost sit athwart your nipples, then what will you do, hm?”
She shivered violently and put on an anguished expression. Lee watched calmly as she tore loose the shawl that adorned the sofa and wrapped herself in it. The radio was continuing, a lugubrious voice telling of:
“… high water in Tennessee.”
“Tennessee!” said Lee. “Oh my, now that is getting close, isn’t it?”
“How close is it, Lee?”
Not immediately answering, he began to do the mental geography in his head. These were the good years and he foresaw no true danger for them, or anyway not for so long as they remained in a county that itself lay in the shade of a thousand defunct volcanoes, a peerless defense against all sorts of weather, northern invasions, interest rates, and television beams.
He had wanted to do the dishes; instead, at the last moment, a crime show came on, emanating from the only station he could trust. Of the story itself and its outcome, he was able to recall only very little of it later on. His preoccupation was with the way the world was when first the radio waves had set out on their long journey over the fields and furrows of Illinois. Meantime in the kitchen his wife was up to her elbows in dishes and, although he could decipher no word of it, singing non-stop.

2011-04-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

Forward

The story begins in moments from now, as soon as the aftermath arrives of something that happened one time:
Remember? How in those times we used to keep watch till night, you and I, and then come outside and climb the hill? One would have thought there was
nothing to look forward to except further dimness by day and additional darkness at night and keeping steadfast vigil, you and I, from places in the house and field. (Followed then several moments in silence.)
And how we used to trudge on down to where in old times a certain one we both remember well would wait all night with his legs dangling over the Edge as he cradled in his lap that well-remembered lizard of which the county still sometimes tells? Vehement indeed was the weather in those days, and so dense (he said) with unorganized matter hurtling past that many times (and I believe him) he could have leapt across the distance and built his home upon an unclaimed star. But the rest you know - how he did one thing and another, ending up as a minor constellation in the December sky. (Again Lee fell silent. A chill was up, bringing with it the smell of unharvested apples deteriorating on the stem. He attributed it to the people who had run off in such haste toward the ever-expanding cities that now touched each other across broad distances. Working quietly, he folded the blanket more closely about the woman, uncertain whether she were sleeping or not.)
They never went about in daylight, Lee and his wife, nor set foot on land that was not their own. And because she was prone to falling unconscious and remaining that way for certain hours, he had to prod her to the hill and haul her to the summit and, gathering her head in both hands and aiming it in the right direction, describe for her ears alone the things that had come to pass in nearby counties.
“See that?”
She nodded.
“And there, did you see that? It never ends, and it never does!”
“Never. Can we go in now? The cold.”
“And there!” (It seemed to him that he was seeing more than usual, and that his powers of observation were even more acute tonight than by comparison with his accustomed standard. He saw a lot, and what he saw told him all that he immediately needed to know about a great number of things.)
“This is why we never leave the house,” he said, “except at night. And over there, that’s the reason why…”
She agreed.
Those airplanes leaping off the tarmac? Trying to effectuate an escape. For this he blamed the boy next door, who had chosen this time for trying out his kite, a tattered item as black as the birds who served as consorts for the thing.

Remember? How we left the hill, you and I and, traveling far, came to where the surf broke like glass on what till then had been our sovereign shore? And when as on the first day of the world we stood gazing for hours at the inordinate sun? “Because life,” you said, “must someday end.” Came then the light.
And I recall the boy reeling in the stars and kite, and you upon the shore, asleep when all was bright.

One

At the time of The Second Council, when 37 cities had agreed to unify and a man could grow old and die without having ever smelt “the wet smell of a wet mule in wet rain,” and women wanted to be like men, that was when large numbers began to be seen loitering on street corners wishing for life to come to an end. In such a situation as that was, one could hardly blame the better sort of people for wanting to draw apart and live where census takers and others of that kind declined to follow. Some might choose to keep a cow, to give one example or, to give several, several. Or, failing in that, might prefer to toddle on down hand-in-hand to the Edge, as if the time for changing over to other planets had not all long ago passed away. They could not know, of course, neither Lee nor his wife, that at that very moment History itself in ungainly form was broaching nigh unto their home.
Such then was the disposition of Lee and his two-person family when on the fifth day a tall and hollow-looking youth blundered in upon them from out of the hills. Groaning, Lee rose and went forward to meet him, much embarrassed to be covered up in the flour-like material with which for the past half-hour he had been powdering the dog.
“Pefley,” he said, extending his hand but then immediately drawing it back again when he realized that the boy was even more uncouth and unacceptably dressed than he had at first supposed. “Of the Alabama Pefleys, don’t you know,” he went on, noting then that the fellow carried a staff that would have sufficed alike for holding dragons at bay or vaulting over valleys. Keeping his eye on that staff, Lee called for his cane, knowing full well that the woman couldn’t hear him. Thus far the churl had said nothing and meantime Lee was growing more and more appalled at his “shoes,” a makeshift arrangement in which one foot was fitted out in leather and the other a sort of canvas with holes in it. Came now the boy’s voice, a guttural sound asking for water. Far away Lee could see his wife running toward the house where the cane was stored.
“'Water,' he says! And yet I don’t hear him offering to work for it, I just don’t.”

The older man led the way, a sixty-yard stroll to where some two or three cords of unsplit firewood lay in an asymmetrical heap. Smiling, Lee now took the cane in one hand and the ax in the other and through a series of understandable errors proceeded to offer the wrong instrument to the boy.
“And there’s another pile behind the barn.”
Dragging the ax after him, the vagrant waded into the stack and began at once to work. Encouraged by his attitude, Lee came chasing after, highly resolved that on this one occasion at least he’d get a decent payment in return for what had been asked of him.
“Lift high the ax,” he called through cupped hands, “but when bringing it down, do it with your strength.” Suddenly he jumped back, dodging a length of hickory so admirably split that it looked like surgeon’s work. It was while he was inspecting it (turning it with his cane), that another of them - he squawked out loud - came flying out of the pile and smote him on the shank. Immediately Lee raised his cane and took two steps forward before then coming to a complete halt when he remembered how much more formidable were the ax and boy as compared to himself and the cane. And then, too, he was benefiting from the boy’s energy, the sections of wood “falling apart of themselves,” as it seemed, each time he touched them with the blade that itself was so blunt and bent over that the older man no longer consented to use it.
He reckoned the boy to be approximately six feet tall in height and exactly six inches, including the expanse that had opened up during the maturation process between his pantaloons and vest. But when it came time to weigh the child, Lee could only guess at the number which kept changing back and forth in his estimation from around 260 pounds to as little as 240. It made Lee mad, remembering his own size, which had never been like this. And meantime the sticks were flying, the churl hewing, and the blade singing in mid air. Lee let several moments go by before moving to a position whence he might better view the creature's face.
It was a face of a certain kind and belonged to a person, Lee would have said, who ought never have left his upland home among inert volcanoes in the state's northeastern section - such were his thoughts when, that moment, he chanced to see Judy coming toward them with a platter of what were probably beans, bread, and the usual honey.
He thought that he might faint. The vagrant had not finished one part of the work that Lee had in store for him, and here now was Judy again throwing away their beans by hundreds upon any passing stranger with wit enough to use a spoon.
“A meal like that? Judy, Judy. Why do you want to put our guest under a moral obligation like that?”
The churl seemed not to hear. He had finished the solids at once, had drunk the honey, and now was probing with one finger into a corner of the plate where nothing remained.
“Would you like some more?” Lee’s wife asked before Lee could catch hold of her.
“More! Can’t you see he simply wants to be left alone? So he can work?”

The scoundrel was supplied with further beans, additional honey, and two full cups of high cost coffee. It was while Lee was counting up his losses that the youth tried to rise and almost came crashing down on top of them.
“He’s tired!” said Judy. “Very tired. And he wants to lie down, too!”
Lee looked at her, she in her lipstick and the red sloppy ribbon in her hair. Soon they’d have no rations left at all, with policies such as hers. Nevertheless, Lee came forward and began nudging the boy (three-fourths asleep already) toward the barn.
Later on, thinking back upon it, he was to remember the fear that came down over the child when he set eyes for the first time on those book-lined precincts with its tables and desk, its two microscopes, and the some twenty-odd framed engravings affixed to plywood walls where but until recently only mules had dwelled, living in unfurnished cells. Standing back, Lee, who had prepared this place many years ago in hopes of guests - no guests had come - examined the area with his all-too-critical eye.
“Yes,” he said, addressing the boy from about twenty feet away, “no doubt it does seem like a great many books, for someone of your sort. And yet, compared to the house” - he nodded toward the house - “this is absolutely nothing, a mere residuum as it were, or ‘reserves,’ we call it, Judy and me, when compared, I say, with what you see yonder through that middle window with the…”
The knave wasn’t listening. He had chosen the old-fashioned bedstead in the adjoining compartment, an inviting piece of equipment covered with a faded quilt showing scenes from the battles of John Bell Hood. Many times Lee had resorted to this bed when on winter nights he had craved to hear the language of the rain on a paper-thin roof. But instead of rain, and in lieu of Lee, the churl now lay sprawled at full length, overhanging the furniture in several places.
“Ah, me,” said Lee, “if only he’d been there, there at Franklin with the others.” (He pointed to the quilt, a bloody piece of work showing what had happened on a certain bad day in Tennessee.) “I believe we could have won.”
“Ssssh! He’s sleeping.”
“But oh my goodness, the ignorance. And look at that face!”
“Really, we ought to take off his shoes.”
“’We?’”
“All right, I’ll do it myself then!”
Lee caught her. There was not the slightest chance that he would permit her into the shoes of such a one as that, an outlander and hillsperson, unclean and predominantly ignorant and so full of honey that Lee could not endure to think of what it had done to their supplies. He had little trouble, as short as she had lately become, in lifting her from the floor and, while she stood kicking and fuming, transporting her outdoors.

Disparate Impact

2010-05-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

By 2014 it had become all too obvious that America's homicide laws were having a disparate impact on our African American minority. In response to that, the pre-Regulator Congress had established the reformed "point system," properly so-called, according to which AAs were given one demerit each for first- and second-degree murders performed under social stress. (For parallel crimes, white people, by contrast, were to be assigned 12-64 demerits on a scale in which nine such "points" qualified for the death penalty.) Applied with rigor, this system did finally succeed in equalizing punishments granted to those found culpable of capital crimes.
Also it was the first federal statute overturned by the Regulator, who ruled that the law was henceforth to be applied solely to the authors of the law.

STACY MCCAIN

2010-05-22T12:27:00.000-07:00

You thought the Executor would set up a defense (attack) force comprised as usual of nineteen-year-olds with an expectable seventy years of additional life in the larder. I knew that's what you thought. WRONG. Instead he began at once to recruit heterosexual men who had successfully achieved the age of seventy or more, who had lost their wives, all of them, whose children had grown up and gone away, and who accordingly had little to lose and looked upon death as a sort of vacation during which they could sit around a table and reminisce about the brave days.
Amazing it was, when the recruits, some as ancient as ninety, began to flood into Richmond, scarred veterans of office work, public relations, consultancy and other parallel vocations. "Take me!" they recited. "No, take me! Me! Don't take that fellow behind the tree, take me!"
And so he did, welcoming them into the corps with open arms. With nineteen doctors standing by, they were initiated at once into officially-approved standards of rheumatism therapy, the proper usages of Bengay, Gator Aide, penile extenders, hip and brain replacement, and other kindred soldierly enhancements. He likewise accepted those clamoring for suicide missions, forming as they did an especially useful regiment in the forthcoming Canadian Campaign. Came next the need to select a commander of this fairly heterogeneous force, a post requiring a peculiar amalgam of talents and vices. Twas on a Saturday that the solution took place in his head, that soft spot just below the left brow - Stacy McCain! (http://theothermccain.com/) - a man who had risen from Private to Corporal in record time (nine year four months, a record) and could pass for ninety even if his authentic age remained forever undisclosed.
NEXT WEEK: THE SUBJUGATION OF MANITOBI

TOADS

2010-05-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

But before getting down to the tedious business of governing, the Regulator wasted four full months - this explains our quondam silence - in a fruitless effort to negotiate with those liberal recidivists still in occupation of the northeastern fringe. All such efforts failed when those toads refused absolutely to reconsider their recently-passed bill prohibiting marriage between members of the same race. His determination reinvigorated, the Regulator, in disguise, made his way in safety back to Richmond where at once he enunciated a new policy granting illegal immigrants a two-week period in which to report back to the homelands they had so disloyally abandoned. He then withdrew all constitutional rights from those who had declined his offer, thus making it permissible to physically discontinue the above-mentioned squatters, a measure that added some seven million residences to the housing market and empowered the nation's schools to get into the education business.

Population and its Problems

2009-11-17T07:56:00.000-08:00

But first, before concerning himself with economic affairs, the Regulator opted to address the most pressing of national issues, a population catastrophe in which the average American acre was expected to provide habitation for 29.32 citizens, as opposed to the 1.09 of more healthy times. The earth groaned under the weight. “Never,” said he, (said the Regulator) “has so much ignorance and so many vile appetites been compressed into such tight quarters, save only perhaps in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.” He went on: “Every man his hundred acres! And let no domiciles come within three hundred yards of each other, certainly not. Every man his library, incunabula mostly and all of them leather bound!” (Wild cheering.)

“And how, Sir, may we bring the population down?” (This was actually asked by one of the bystanders.)

“Why, by giving them six months to get out of town!”

“’Them?’”

“Bet your sweet ass ‘them!’”

(Wild cheering.)

“And then we cancel all constitutional rights for those as lag behind. Want to take their houses and rape their wives? Have at it!”

“Actually it’s their daughters, Sir. Not their wives.”

And so thus Lee, who gave the order that same day. Not content with that, he next wheedled some 17 million youths off to Key West with promises of beer, video games and sex. It needed just two score of patriotic Americans to sever the single highway to that island and push it out to sea. Amazing, how quickly the quality of life on the mainland began to return to the “gold standard” of 1940-58. Next, he fobbed off almost 72 million liberals to a certain well-known large city in the Northeast which the Executor (as he was sometimes called) immediately quarantined with a laser-defended wall varying from thirty to thirty-five feet in height.

Had he died that moment, The Regulator would surely have gone down as perhaps the greatest benefactor in the whole history of the West. But still his work was not done, not even after he had purged the nation of those some seventeen million afflicted with the “cathode ray tube sickness,” a mortal condition characterized by atrophy of the brain.

[Next week: Europe]

Bookmark Interview

2009-11-14T09:53:00.000-08:00

My interview on Don Noble's Bookmark program will be rebroadcast on November 22 at 11am on Alabama Public Television.

Inauguration of the Regulator

2009-11-13T07:21:00.000-08:00

Blustery day, that when Lee “Leland” Pefley, age 77, composed and committed himself before a crowd of more than thirty souls to the “Great Oath,” properly so-called, that marked his assumption of total power in the political, economic, military, and cultural realms. His right hand on a copy of the first edition of the novel named after himself, he pledged all sorts of things. (Thirty souls! A select group, to be sure, chosen by lot from unpublished writers and long-term prisoners furloughed for the purpose.)
“I do pledge,” it is said he said, “do pledge to do what is most aesthetically pleasing, and to hell with practical results. Anyway, I’m sick of results and people of that sort. What is the quality of American poetry, yes? And how many of us, really, can speak both Aeolic and Attic Greek? These are the questions my cabinet shall address next Monday at our annual fry.
(Some of those prisoners are still at large, the neighbors claim.)
“And what will be my policy you ask?” (He pointed to the one who had asked it, a roseate and gimlet-eyed rubicund man with a beetling brow handcuffed most cruelly in barbed wire.) “We don’t need no stinking policy! All we need is…” But here his voice was overwhelmed by the National Orchestra’s rendition of the second movement of Mahler’s eighth, a performance commanded by him at 3:15 that same afternoon upon awakening for the brand new day.

The Coming of the Regulator

2009-11-10T09:31:00.000-08:00

How strange, that the young people of today have no apparent collective familiarity with the seminal events of 2017-22, that “social earthquake,” so-denominated, that established the foundations of our current happiness. Indeed, a recent poll carried out by the J. W. Booth Institute suggests that as much as 14% of the youthful population could not immediately identify the official oil painting of Regulator Leland (“Lee”) Pefley on display in our nation’s capitol in Richmond. It might seem therefore that the time has come to review the signal achievements of this epoch-making individual who, if it is not too much to claim, restored our republic to the condition that in the normal course of events it could (and should) have assumed some seventy or eighty years earlier.
But first, recollect how this person ascended to the newly formed emergency position of Regulator, a last ditch measure to shore up our national boundaries and restore some, at least, of the features of the by-then forgotten American Constitution, (to employ the nomenclature of the nostalgists of that day). Prior to having dissolved itself in the autumn of 2015, you will remember how the Senate in its final action had set up this new position, granting wide executive powers agreed to endure for five years. Remember, too, that the quality of our higher officers had already begun to improve somewhat, owing to the new method of selection by lottery. Even so, (you must also recall) our society remained in the most parlous condition, the “War Without Pity” still raging in full flood between The Junta, The Bloods, and The Caucasoid Rump.

A Hole in the Hole

2009-11-06T06:17:00.000-08:00

To elude the modern world, it’s not always enough to have a secret place, a “sanctuary,” so to speak, or even a deep round hole in the cold hard ground. Nor is it always enough to have access to an abandoned well or disused missile silo in order to ward away the sounds of rock and rap, of chainsaws and midday blonde newscasters.

No, very often a person will want even greater secrecy, a “hole in the hole,” as we should call it, a carpeted area about eight feet square where a fellow can squirrel away a package of non-filtered cigarettes along with candles and a literary novel or two. Here, lost in ecstasy, that fellow might dredge up a few old ethnic jokes, indulge in negative thoughts, and allow his facial expression to do as it wants.

(We mention this here as just one of the possible compensations of the examined life.)

A Hole in the Wall

2009-11-05T12:59:00.000-08:00

But first, before taking up residence in the countryside, it is absolutely crucial to avoid those things that could abort, or even reverse, any effort to live a more essential and more spiritual life, namely the good likelihood that a person of our sort will end up offending one or more of our guardians and/or law officers. Crucial, too, to remember that it is impossible to go on breathing in times of late decadence without at the same time being in violation of at least two or three laws or fashion imperatives.

Where really, can a person go if he wishes to have a cigarette? Or tell and ethnic joke? What if he finds himself having negative thoughts about some specific race or gender or handicapped person, some man/boy pederast or cocaine merchant? How if he prefers old movies to new, yea, and romantic ballads as well? How about it if he habitually averts his face when Madonna comes on stage? And how about that Brad person and his wives!

You remember how during the religious troubles in Britain, certain unreformed Catholic aristocrats used to create secret cubicles in their homes where outlawed priests could hide from the authorities? Well there’s our answer I do believe – have a hidden place, about eight feet square, where one could smoke or speak out loud, consume high caloric foods and fail to exercise. There, in perfect darkness, a man might curse the modern age, the obsolescence of mules and the coming of baggy pants. An then, after an hour or so, fall into the best-quality sleep still available to those charged with supporting with blood and treasure the world’s last (as of today) superpower.

In times of decadence...

2009-11-04T18:36:00.000-08:00

Moving right along, we need now to consider the ways in which a decent person might be able to weather the next few impending years. Already we’ve agreed that anyone living in a city needs immediately to abandon the place, taking as many of his or her private possessions as can be fitted into the trunk of an automobile. (We’ve not yet come to the point where racial profiling has made travel impossible for white people, nor have CCTV cameras as yet been programmed to narrow in on people understood to be historically guilty. Accordingly, a scrupulous driver ought to be able to put a fair number of jurisdictions between himself and the city he is fleeing before his local IRS agent and other creditors have been twittered as to the fact.) And this, that although city dwellers aren’t permitted to expose actual rifles in the rear window of their vehicles, yet decals are easily available, and cheap.
Having (we assume) escaped the downtown city and (a much less difficult operation), having bribed the toll taker and gatekeepers, our delinquent instinctively points his and her nose to the South, last place on earth where a person can still be left alone. Here, settled amongst poor people who still understand how to grow food, our person can sleep till noon, tend hogs, listen to good music and read four or five books a week.
(Our next installment will undertake to cite which books and hogs are most availing for an individual of our kind.)

And more on decadence...

2009-10-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

What was the behavior of good people, the few that remained, in late Roman Empire days? Or, more urgently, how should decent people behave in 2009 when we have fifty-year-olds still attending rock concerts, nostalgicizing Star Trek, lamenting John Lennon, reading Stephen King – a generation that cannot and never will become authentic adults? Shall we also mention those with three divorces who end up in a blended family comprising three husbands, two wives, the gardener, pets, neighbors, and clones? May we talk about high school graduates who don’t know how to wear a baseball cap, who weigh twice too much, about new style women chasing capital gains, 12-year-olds dreaming of rectal intercourse, tax-sponsored therapy for those as can’t wipe themselves, popular “music” as the most perfect distillate of mass ignorance ever yet devised, of new and ingenious forms of Anglo-demotionism designed to punish the inventors of the West, may we, pray, talk about these matters. No? Of immigration policies calculated to recruit civilization’s most active enemies and bring them here? Can we talk?
Or is it more useful to think about those two or three hundred souls (like mine obviously), who have wasted so much time trying to hold decadence at bay? How, really, should we respond to a dwindling culture that once held the world in envy and imitation? Ought we secede from current affairs, turn off our television sets, retreat into rural areas or tiny towns with small populations, cultivate our own talents and dedicate our last decade(s) - (it is taken for granted here that no one under the age of 50 can possibly know what it is to have lived in a normal society) – and dedicate our final years, as I was saying, to our spouses, our books, good music and dogs?
Yes we should.
(How to go about this project will be detailed in future messages, assuming the extraordinary number of responses hasn’t become too many for me to handle.)

More on Decadence

2009-10-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

We cannot of course predict how long, under conditions of deep decadence, the once-great culture of the West can persist. Some say a full century still remains to us, citing as examples the seemingly interminable cultural stasis of Egypt persisting down to Alexander and beyond, or Byzantium’s thousand-year collapse. Others believe we have less time than that, perhaps only a single generation before the last performance of an opera will have been given, the last piece of literary fiction published, and the last good school sacrificed to diversity and a perverted egalitarianism. For those whose tastes run in that direction, we may by then boast ten thousand rock stars, a million celebrities, and marriage will be understood as any legally valid agreement uniting a list of husbands, wives, pets, and clones.
How then should serious people behave in the short time left to us? I have acquaintances who have chosen to stand up against the current debasement, and who seem in some cases actually to believe that a restoration of social health is still possible. That is not the opinion of this person. Decadence is easy, lots of fun, and is especially attractive to prosperous people who have become averse to struggle and concentration. That is why the facile virtues, the ones that can be practiced while sitting on a couch in a darkened room – compassion, empathy, tolerance – have crowded out the hard ones, which is to say integrity, strength, and achievement.
(We’ll definitely return to this theme in our next contribution where we [just me actually] will try to reply to the question cited in the first sentence of the second paragraph inscribed about four and a half inches above.)

Decadence

2009-10-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

The jury may still be out on Iraq and Iran, on Brittany’s hairstyle and global warming, but by now we have a clear-cut verdict on the issue of western decline. No longer sufficient to admit that the West has lost relative position with regard to the rest of the world in material terms, it’s past time to confess that we are deep into the historically well-attested syndrome sobriqueted [my word] as decadence, a mortal condition, probably irreversible, that is reflected, indeed proved, by the waning quality of the civic and aesthetic arts in evidence today.

Has ever there been a time when merit and success were so inversely related? And really, could anything be more painful than forced to scan the roll call of America’s most famous people? Than the best-seller lists? Than our educational system? Than the conduct of billionaires? Than television?

Imagine the historians of the future trying to understand this, how the cultural contributions of the earth’s richest and most powerful nation can be summed up in terms of basketball, rock and rap, consumerism, new forms of pornography, art galleries full of high priced junk, “vibrant” neighborhoods, pulp journalism, etiolated children glued to computer screens, women soldiers, pullulating cities, special effects cinema, etc., etc., the whole bloody list.

Truth is, in its senescence our civilization has become a cultural failure, a denouement foreseen by Toynbee and others, fostered by comfort and security and a prosperity that has been too far prolonged – the worst of conditions for writers of serious intent.

(Future blogs will offer suggestions as to how writers can continue to operate under such conditions while still preserving some measure of human integrity.)

Distracted by Samuel Johnson

2009-10-20T06:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, well perhaps I did promise to read, or anyway to start, David Foster Wallace’s elephantine Infinite Jest and report back my findings. And I sincerely intended to do that too, which is to say until I was tempted, sore tempted, to look into Peter Martin’s mediocre biography of one of Britain’s least mediocre of men - Samuel Johnson, specifically speaking. Already I have passed through this man’s penurious childhood, his rather incongruous marriage, his sojourns in London, and have now begun to read how and why he compiled, with the aid of five sometimes assistants, his famous English language dictionary. Impossible not to sympathize with this man, who endured so many mental and sublunary obstacles, and yet who at the end of the day had produced so much. Learning of his bodily peculiarities I, too, have recently begun to exhibit certain convulsive tics and involuntary movements of all sorts, a real hindrance to getting into my usual reading posture, which entails a 40-watt lamp, a leather covered couch, and about two inches of spirituous liqueur, all which are to be enjoyed between the hours of one and four o’clock a.m.
More shortly.

Infinite Jest by David Wallace

2009-10-07T09:44:00.001-07:00

Having lately invested in a paperback edition of David Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a 1,037-page text in small print (a length, I’ve repeatedly been told, is not publishable), I seek suggestions on how to approach the thing. Dave Eggers has said it required him a month to read it, but at my age I expect it will need much longer. My fear, of course, is that it will turn out to be a pretentious production, a display of cuteness designed to prove how informed the author was, how reckless and sophisticated, and how the possession of genius empowered him to ignore the value of being understandable.
My great hope, on the other hand, is that the book is as wonderful as so many critics have claimed, and that this author’s genius is not merely putative, but real. In any event I will be giving the novel my best attention for as long as I find it useful to bear with it, and will report back at intervals.
I should also say that I am dismayed by the lack of attention that has been given to this writer’s suicide, far less notice indeed than what has been given to Paris Hilton’s hairdo. The decay of the West – I’ll be reporting on that, too.

Writing Fiction

2009-10-03T06:17:00.000-07:00

In at least one way, fiction writing differs pronouncedly from non-fiction, as also from other forms of creation. The best surgeons, for example, are generally the best paid, the best basketball players earn far more than mediocre ones, the best architects, best engineers, etc. etc. In non-fiction, too, the better writers are the most likely to succeed. Not so in fiction, where the best are far less likely than the mediocre ones to be published and acknowledged. Fortunate are those who aim at the sweet spot in the Bell Curve - not too hot and not too cold - and who sell in the millions while lingering for a long time at the top of bestseller lists. Numbers are everything, and the number of not-too-smart readers outnumber discriminating ones by a ratio of about a hundred to one. “Cultural democracy,” it might be called, a foolproof way of ensuring that America will never rank culturally in the same place as its political and economic power might lead one to hope.

Health Care Proposal

2009-09-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

Oh, good. We read that the president’s proposed health care bill will require every American subject to buy health insurance, and never mind whether he or she wants it or needs it, or approves of it, or whether he or she is on death row, or expects to expire within 24 hours, or whether she or he owns a hospital, or whether she or he is the sort of character who deserves such care. This proposal would bring advanced medicine to bear upon behalf of pedophiles, serial murderers, liberals, cocaine dealers, terrorists, and other like-minded sociopaths. I, who prefer to choose those whom I help, don’t want these people to get well, and certainly not at my expense. I want them to die.
But if the gov’mint can now require us to buy certain things, why not require us to buy a General Motors car (they need the money), or buy one of Obama’s books, or buy more broccoli, which is said to be so very good for us. How wonderful that Jefferson and Madison and Washington have not lived to see this day and be made to feel that their life’s work had failed.

Chattahoochee Valley Writers' Conference

2009-09-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

One naturally expects the best American fiction to emanate from The South, but it remains an only partially understood truth that the best of the best is very often to be found in the region immediately adjacent to that Chattahoochee River Valley that so arbitrarily subtracts Georgia from Alabama’s realm. Such talent, fortunately, is displayed annually at the Chattahoochee Valley Writers’ Conference convoked each September in the city of Carson McCullers – Columbus, Georgia.
This year’s celebration, held September 24-26, attracted writers and readers and agents from far and near, including keynoter Jill McCorkle who spoke affectingly of the role of memory and family, (surely the two most defining themes in southern writing) in the creation of her own novels and stories. Also present was Stephany Evans representing her New York agency FinePrint Lite rary Management. Always on the lookout for new talent, Stephany has become a regular visitor to this vicinity, famous equally for fine writers and those able to appreciate them.

Chattahoochee Valley Writers' Conference

2009-08-17T12:56:00.000-07:00

Tito Perdue will be The Visiting Author at the 2009 Chattahoochee Valley Writers' Conference in Columbus Georgia. He will present at two sessions on September 26: first at 9:30-10:15 and again at 11:10-11:55 in the Auditorum of the Columbus Public Library.
http://www.chattwriters.org
http://www.writersforum.org/

Tito Perdue on TV!!!

2009-06-29T18:51:00.000-07:00

Mark your calendar. On July 19th at 11am CST, Tito will be interviewed by Don Noble on the renowned Bookmark program on APTV, Channel 10.

WORDMASTER

2009-05-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

Alright, so it’s not as bad as I had thought - suburban realism is not the only sort of writing that our critics and publishers are willing to take seriously. Nor, apparently, is it still necessary to write in a “spare” and “understated” mode, previously the highest flattery an author could wish for. Nor is it required to have a meager vocabulary, or to offer sex scenes every fifteen pages of the kind to make a gynecologist wince. Nor must one have been published in The New Yorker, thank god.
In other words, I’m just now finishing up Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, the best and most unafraid novel I’ve seen in a very long time. The man writes as he pleases, and doesn’t greatly care whether anyone likes it or not, in my opinion the first pre-requisite of a genuine artist. His tropes are original and often startling, and his dialogue, not to put too fine a point on it, is about as perfect as it gets for the sort of characters he enlists. He must be read slowly and with delectation, and oftentimes it will be advisable for the reader to close his eyes and allow the fumes, as it were, to waft to the aesthetic centers of the mind. And then, too, the man’s vocabulary is larger than Shakespeare’s, comprising vast numbers of six-, seven-, and eight-letter words

soffit
swarf
wapsy
halms
thook
lunule

but almost none that are longer than that. I began to jot down these words as I read and have now accumulated a list of 176 of them that I hope the readers of this blog will, first, look up and, secondly, send the definitions to me.

macled
sleech
sussurous
hob
spall
carinated

He also has a very interesting story to tell.

ARE WE DYING OUT????

2009-05-04T13:10:00.000-07:00

Save in cases of self-sacrifice for a larger cause, suicide is generally frowned upon as a life (no pun intended) choice. How much the worse therefore for an entire culture to knowingly destroy itself, and especially so when that culture happens to be the most creative and affirmative in world history. I ask you to make a list of all the best things that civilization offers – political liberty, classical music, space travel, biotechnology, romantic love, film, medicine, religious tolerance, the writing of history, individualism, etc., etc., and you will quickly admit that at least 85% of these enjoyments have originated in the culture that you presently inhabit. Or would you prefer to live in Saudi Arabia?

I had expected western civilization to chose a quicker and more spectacular mode of suicide than the one that has actually been selected, namely the annual admission of millions of sub-standard folk fleeing the gehennas they have created in the lands they are abandoning. Soon, very soon, we will be witnessing televised animal sacrifice carried out by Rastafarians in our historic venues, the use of English will be outlawed, and our national cuisine will offer naught but tacos and frijole beans. But if you don’t believe me, watch this video.

Alabama Writers Symposium 2009

2009-05-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

We had a great time at this year's Alabama Writers Symposium. It's one of the very best events I've attended. I hope to be able to return in the future. One of my fans (Ashlea Singleton) took this photo of myself with the wife.

Are we being socially engineered?

2009-04-26T21:10:00.000-07:00

By now you will have noticed, dear reader, the enthusiasm with which TV advertisements these days have joined the Afro-promotionist project. Orders have come down from on high, and it is now barely legal to sponsor an advertisement, whether for toothpaste or penile extenders, without including at least 30% very well-dressed and confident-looking Negros in the mix. But if advertisers truly want to play it safe, it is highly advisable also to expose a strong women in a position of high authority, preferably if she can be shown barking out orders to a toadying white male.
A stranger to this land would assume from television that our society is under the absolute control of 30-something impatient-looking females in cahoots with no-nonsense black people with IQs in the 140-170 range. Social engineering via cathode ray tube? Bet your sweet ass it is.

Our Country is SICK!

2009-04-23T12:14:00.000-07:00

"It’s happened again. Sixteen illegals, represented by the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, sued rancher Roger Barnett in federal court for $32 million. In 2004, he collared the border jumpers and held them at gunpoint on his Cross Rail Ranch near Douglas, Arizona, until the Border Patrol arrived. One of them was a previously deported dope dealer. Since 1998, he has detained 12,000 for the Border Patrol. Illegals have trashed his property, killed livestock, stolen trucks, and even broken into his home. Because they kept wrecking an 8,000-gallon water tank, he installed a faucet so they could get something to drink.Still, in February, the jury in the case awarded four of the plaintiffs a total of $78,000: $7,500 apiece for two of them because Barnett inflicted “emotional distress,” $1,400 each for two more because of his “assault,” and $60,000 in punitive damages…” (R. Cort Kirkwood)

So this is what it comes to, a once-great nation caught in the act of suicide. Were we still a healthy society, these interlopers, instead of being granted court damages, would be rendered into rather tiny pieces by high-power ordnance the moment they stepped across the line. Healthy society? In fact our country is sick unto death and will not last the night.

The New York Times Circles the Drain!

2009-04-22T05:50:00.000-07:00

The New York Times! Has ever there existed in this hemisphere an institution more trusting of government than this one? Government is good – that’s just the way it is – but beware the people, many of whom have consented voluntarily to live outside the American Northeast.

I once undertook the task of adding up the projected cost of all the multifarious federal projects this newspaper demanded, but left off with it when the total surpassed the capacity of my admittedly inexpensive calculator. We’re talking real money here, most of which was to be directed to the 97% of the population deemed by the Times to be disadvantaged.

I do so hope The New York Times collapses economically, a denouement that balances and more than balances any sort of recession you care to postulate. New York Times! Failure is not just an option for that paper, but a civilizational requirement.

Benefits of Recession???

2009-04-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

I do agree with those people, both of them, who believe the current recession offers renewed hope for the future of our society. Imagine, if you will, that twenty million illegal immigrants will have been inspired to return to the pullulating cesspools they have established in the lands of their origin, all to the benefit of our domestic morality and degree of civilization. More exciting still, imagine that another twenty million LEGAL immigrants might also opt to deliver us from their presence!

While imagining, imagine that the recession might somehow eventuate in a better form of capitalism more approximate to authentic meritocracy. Imagine if cancer researchers earned more than Madonna, opera singers more than basketball players, brave soldiers more than pornographers. And while we are dreaming, imagine that good people were better rewarded in this country than the current crowd of multi-culturalists and other sub humans who mis- and diseducate our people from their positions at The New York Times, television, and Hollywood.

Real poverty, as Stacy McCain rightly notes, is never to be recommended. Impossible to live a thoughtful and productive life if one is locked into a cycle of unremitting drudgery which would entail the end of literature and music, romance and adventure, and everything good. It isn't poverty I wish, but rather the end of the sort of sumptuousness that dissolves self-discipline and grants giant fortunes to the worst people in our country - lowest common denominator capitalism that aims at the middle of the Bell Curve, and enriches pornographers and rap singers and basketball players but is indifferent to scholars and scientists and brave soldiers.

Is the Recession a Positive Thing?

2009-04-20T11:13:00.001-07:00

I am delighted with the collapse of the western banking system, a deserved denouement that offers us the chance to rid our society of some of the putrefaction - celebrities, billionaires, television - that has so depreciated American culture over the past sixty years. And then, too, we must not ignore the very good possibility that some part of the twelve million illegal trespassers now disfiguring our landscape will see fit to return to the living hells they have created and abandoned.

Tito Perdue & The Other McCain

2009-04-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

Tito Perdue, literary genius -
(posted by R. Stacy McCain - The Other McCain http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/)

Woke up this morning at 8:30 a.m. after staying up until 3 a.m. talking to my old friend Tito Perdue. The morning sun is streaming down on the lakefront here about 10 miles north of Wetumpka, Alabama. It's beautiful, although I thought the midnight stars were more beautiful.We watched opera last night, and Tito reminded me how we met. I'd written a column for the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune which (humorously, I thought) explained why I couldn't stand the caterwauling of an operatic soprano. Tito, who was then living in Cave Spring, Ga., wrote a letter to the editor denouncing me as a philistine. This was the start of a long and eventful friendship. More after this operatic interlude featuring the Russian soprano Netrebko:

Among other things, I'm semi-responsible for Tito's "outing" as something other than a liberal. (Don't ever call him a "conservative"; he'll reply, "No, I'm a reactionary!") Tito's first two novels were published to critical acclaim and he looked to be well on his way to being the next Winston Groom (who is, in fact, a cousin of his). Critics thought his Faulkneresque style was "postmodern," and he was favorably reviewed in the New York Times, etc.Then, after we met, I wrote a feature profile about Tito, describing his library full of classics, his enjoyment of Wagner, his admiration of Nietzsche, his general loathing of all things new or even recent. Among other things, he mentioned in the interview that, if there were ever to be a film made of his books, the only director he'd want would be Elia Kazan -- who, you may recall, "named names" for the House Committee on Un-American Activities.Tito thought the article was splendid, and copies of the article were distributed by his agent. At which point, the game was up. His book contract was cancelled and it was a couple of years before he published his next novel, which the New York Times didn't review. Difficult as is the life of a literary novelist in the Age of Illiteracy, imagine what it's like for Tito being marked as an antagonist of the liberal culture -- really, an antagonist of the entirety of contemporary society. And, doggone it, Elia Kazan is dead!Tito is a fine storyteller and his first novel, Lee, is great, even if the critics agree. The book introduces the protagonist Lee Pefley, who is featured in his other novels. His second book, The New Austerities, was actually better, I thought. More recently, he's published a wonderful tale of Lee Pefley's romantic youth, The Sweet Scented Manuscript. This is a roman a clef of Tito's own wild experience at Ohio's Antioch College, where he met, wooed and married his wife Judy.Their love affair was scandalous enough to get them both kicked out of school in 1957. They've now been married 51 years, and I think young readers -- who have zero idea of what the 1950s were really like, much less the kind of love that causes two kids to get married at 18 -- would get a thrill out of The Sweet Scented Manuscript. Of course, this postulates the hypothetical existence of young people who read literary novels for any reason other than being assigned to do so by their teachers. Sigh.

At any rate, I'm sitting barefoot in Tito's living room, which has a magnificent view of the lake. Last night, as we stood out on the deck underneath a star-filled sky, I said I wished my friends up in D.C. had any inkling of how wonderful Alabama is. This horrified Judy, who expressed the fear that such a revelation might result in an influx that would ruin the place.So whatever you do, don't tell anyone that the nearest place to heaven on earth is 10 miles north of Wetumpka on Alabama Highway 111, just off County Road 23. Take a right turn at Martin's Bait & Tackle and keep going until you find the end of Muscadine Lane.Of course, you'll never find the place. You probably won't even bother to try. And isn't that sad?

Why Shouldn't Iran Have Nuclear Weapons?

2009-04-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

Yes, well we see a great concern nowadays over the possibility that Iran might soon produce enough fissible material for the construction of nuclear weapons. With my poor memory, I remember no such parallel concern with Israel’s nuclearization, nor that of India, nor Pakistan, nor even China’s, nor all those other countries currently doing the same thing secretly. Iran, however, unlike Israel, is a unique sort of country with a propensity for committing aggression upon its neighbors. So very poor is that memory of mine, I cannot recall precisely which countries Iran has aggressed against. I do remember Iraq aggressing against Iran, but since that was done with American help, it has no place in this discussion.

Alabama Writers Symposium, 2009

2009-04-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

Tito Perdue will be speaking at the Opening Convocation of the Alabama Writers Symposium in Monroeville, AL on May 1, 2009 at 8:30AM. Don Noble will appear with him as scholar and moderator.

The Node, by Tito Perdue - first two chapters

2009-01-12T12:25:00.000-08:00

CHAPTER ONE

It remains only to be told how our hero grew up and died. Let it also be told about his physical person, how he drifted from one career to another and this account can quickly be brought to a close. Of his ancestors and other things, little need be said.

To begin, he was a tall man and except for one particular feature, was reasonably average in a great many ways. His legs hung down on both sides, acuminating in two feet of no particular distinction. His arms were perhaps thinner than he would have wanted, as also his neck, ankles, and his reengineered dog, a honey-colored creature purchased at great expense from a nearby biological laboratory (now shut down). But primarily it was our hero’s face (because it was pale and broad and box-shaped), that drew the little bit of attention that sometimes came his way.

In fact, it was even worse than that, resembling, as it did, that of a squid, or the fly-wheel of an old-time escrubilator, those with the several holes that had been designed almost as of set purpose to simulate a nose and shrunken mouth. Seen in full sun, it looked, that face, like a slate that had been wiped clean and then redrawn in a faint blue chalk that had mostly peeled away by now. Worse still was his profile, which had a saurian aspect centered upon a bright red tongue that was forever darting in and out. And then, too, his nostrils were so small, minuscule orifices that established a whistling noise when he breathed in and viperous aspirations when he breathed out. Not part of his face properly speaking, his hair appeared to be a bituminous product capable of independent movement and employed primarily for testing the quality of the air. Never again was he to see a face like his own, not till that day he broke open a loaf of cheese and found there imprinted the original prototype.

Of careers, he had had about twenty of them before he achieved the age of 28. Remember that in those days, when the average life endured for 120 years or more, a person could dally for a great while before settling upon his authentic vocation. Accordingly he wasted a good four of those years in putting up dry wall for the neighbors and painting over it in acrylic. He was good at this and oftentimes could be seen grinning as he worked. Which is to say until there came the day when suddenly he grew bored with the whole process and turned around and left it, returning several hours later to clean up the mess.

He was too old for college but went there anyway. Torn between Sanskrit and Real Estate, he used to come to class and, his face veiled, used to observe the modern youths who sometimes seemed more interested in each other than in what was inscribed upon the school’s armorial crest. Himself, he had hated old people when he was young, just as now he hated the people moving in and out of view and, very often, trying to get a look behind his veil. The lesson was unmistakable – that the new generation was altogether as loathsome as the old one used to be.

He studied mining technology, choosing for his specialty the then-burgeoning kaolin industry. Linguistics was next, though he soon came to doubt the theory of the Indo-European tongue as the prime source of western grammar. No, he had seen better and more elegant formulations among certain contemporary rural individuals with whom he enjoyed a personal familiarity. It was mainly for that reason that he had veered over into the study of Moabite Antiquities and then followed that up with a three-month tutorial in The Schleswig-Holstein Problem.

Exhausted before he was granted a degree, he embraced a long stay in the fog-bound purlieu of Lago Todos Los Santos in South American Chile. Here, rising late, he reveled in the good sleeping the place afforded. And yet, here too, his money soon ran out. Angered by his imperative needs, he hitch-hiked back to the residual United States and accepted a profitable assignment enforcing the European Union’s universal hate crime laws.

His second stay at the University! Chile notwithstanding, he was tempted by seismology, by Pictish numismatics and other fields of study including most pleasurably (it was to prove his favorite subject) forensic nematology. Studied meta-chemistry and graphology, hotel management and resumé construction. Briefly he worked as an oculist, an occultist, a honey producer, trapeze artist, and wrote magazine articles for a journal laudatory of a certain breed of poultry. Briefer still, he tried to be a tin monger and then, finally, set up a rocks and minerals booth in Bryson City.

It was true that he had developed a small library, though nothing certainly like what his grandfather had built. Proudest among his volumes was the variorum edition on calf skin of Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft, a capacious volume that had served him more than once in dealing with his own diseases.

(Diseases: He suffered from glanders and shingles, from nose bleed and accelerated hair growth. Other inadequacies of his were focused mostly below the waist, including the two or three of them [not mentioned here] that he had inherited from his people.)

He possessed a copy of the Newe Metamorphosis of Marston together with a boxed set of the annotated A. A. Milne. The History of the World Conqueror by Juvaini was his, as also a medical dictionary, two novels by Jerome Wisdom, Mother Shipton’s Dream Book, and volume IV (only) of The Cambridge Medieval History. He had a dictionary.

By this time he had taken a certificate in Teaching English to English Speakers, thus providing himself with a rich source of money. Between this and dry wall and the few hundred-weight of strawberries he was able to produce on his 20 acres, he thrived very happily for about two years, which is to say until he ran into a girl with the sort of figure that spoke to him, never realizing until too late that she had been modernized.

“Why so uppity?” he asked. “And why so loud?”

“Oh? And how would you like it, to be a women in this testosterone hell?”

“’Hell?’”

“All I ever wanted was to be a CEO!” She wept.

He had two tomes on scientific matters and in the wake of their divorce used some of his alimony to harvest volumes V and VI of the above-mentioned Cambridge set.

He had other possessions, including most especially a .357 magnum revolver that held eight shells. He used to take this out sometimes at night and play with it, yearning for someone to launch an attack on him. He knew the effect of those cartridges, if not on flesh, on watermelons and cantaloupes at any rate. He had two suits, one of them mildewed and the other obsolete. He had a third that fit real well. Had a frying pan, a pocket knife and an outboard motor. But all these fell away into entire inconsequentiality when compared to his most prominent, most expensive, and proudest article of all.

One final book he had, a thing in golden covers that he had bought for its aesthetic appeal. And although he could read no word of it, and although it were far from his “proudest possession,” (being illiterate in Persian), he used to carry this around as well. He had no further books.

His investments, to bring this to an end, were negligent but diversified. Every share of stock was hedged by a put option, and every option by some stock. He had invested equally in futures and the past. But mostly he had put his money into the so-called “moral dereliction” coupons, granting certain rights. The wisest thing he had ever done, these had quickly been folded into some of the country’s best performing mutual funds.

Funds, alimony, coupons and strawberries, he was able by age of 37 to retire to his remaining acres, six of them. Here, shut off from the business (and busyness) of the outer world, he shortly lost account of what was happening. Did they still wear trousers, new style girls, and the nineteen petroleum producing nations, had they been subdued by now? He really didn’t know.

Followed then six years in silence.

CHAPTER TWO

He said it was because he no longer had access to propane that he chose to come to town. The weather had been so bad, and he could not stay warm throughout the winter without indenturing himself to hearth and dwindling hoards of hardwood. He had read his books, yes, but hadn’t laid eyes upon a woman in all those years. Having eschewed television and periodicals of every sort, he still believed the country to be what once it was. And then, too, owing to those nightly bands of stragglers and southern capitulationists migrating across his and his neighbor’s land… It was too much, as finally he admitted.

Originally it had been his intention to seek out a cylinder of propane and have it delivered to his place, a scheme that might have sufficed him until June; instead, after trekking the four miles to town and finding nothing of that kind, neither propane nor occupied cottages nor even anything else, he stepped from the edge of the forest and, treading as noiselessly as he could, began to penetrate the ruined suburbs that had washed up along the southern perimeter of Nelson County, as it was denominated in those days. Anyone watching from a moderate distance or less could have seen that he carried a knapsack on his back and was dressed in a hat of some kind that came to a point and bent over and pointed to the ground. That person could also have seen that he wore moccasins on one foot and boots on the other, and that he had accustomed himself to last year’s fashion of doing without socks.

But no one could have guessed what he carried in his knapsack, save that whatever it was, it was too heavy for an individual man. One waited in disappointed expectation of seeing him finally disburden himself of the thing and open it up to view. One also noticed that he was being trailed by a dog, an animal of commensurate size with a metal collar that made somewhat of a chiming noise as the little links happened to brush against each other in time with the pace adopted by the… It chimed. The animal, yes, was old, a burnt-out case really, but endowed still with good dentition.

He said he saw bats (one of them transporting a frog on its back), circling ever so slowly about the smoke stack of one of the downtown factories. It was a period of long nights and short days, a symbiotic combination that still worked out to the usual 24 hours, more or less. Next, he crossed over into a Salvadoran neighborhood where he must tread with utmost care lest he be discovered and chased down and stomped to death or inserted into one of the glowing ovens where even now at three o’clock in the morning the local bakery was readying the next day’s wares. Pressing at the glass, he spied into upon a numerous family of a burly wife in a peasant’s skirt and some four or five children suffering, apparently, from want of vitamin D. No question about it, the odor that came from that place was praiseworthy in the extreme and included new-made pastries that could be smelt if not, however, seen. Here he lingered, aware at the same time that a lamp had come on in one of the overhead apartments. Far away he heard a radio full of static and bits and pieces of Spanish spoken at exaggerated speed. And that, of course, was when the hound, impatient to be moving, began to whine in his way, a nasal sound as annoying as a child’s.

They moved past the twice life size statue of a bearded man who had been the western hemisphere’s most admired mass murderer. Never pausing, they crossed over into a Korean district where their safety was fractionally improved, as our narrator believed. But if they were awake and active, these neighborhood people, and going about their business, one could not have detected it by obvious signs. Was he being watched by Asian eyes? Probably. And might they leap out upon him as he wandered by? He thought not, no, or not at least with any effect, not so long as he carried in his vest the .357 caliber heirloom revolver handed down to him by his fathers. And this was not even to mention the some 500 rounds of ammunition that formed so integral a part of the freight that he carried on his back.

He was old and getting older, and his footwear was old, too. In younger days he had tried to avoid the cracks in the sidewalk while at the same time keeping a conscientious score of his failings. But not now, not when such matters seemed somewhat less important than more pressing projects bearing upon his prospects and very survival indeed.

By 3:57 he had come to the heart of the downtown city, an underwater garden, as it seemed, owing to so many stalk-like buildings wavering in the breeze. Here he halted long enough to twine his scarf more snugly about his neck and then take out a cigarette and ignite it hurriedly for the warmth it might give. The stars, they were migrating back and forth – until he understood that it was but a deception caused by the motion cited above of so many tall structures weaving back and forth. He saw then a light burning yellowly in one of the upper stories, and silhouetted against it what either was a human being or item of furniture of some sort. There was no question but that the wind put on higher rates of speed as it wended among the buildings and ran off down the streets lined on both sides with commercial buildings. It was 4:07 in the morning and they still had several blocks to go.

“About four more blocks,” he said. “But what if they don’t let us in?”

He groaned, the dog, and then began searching up and down the avenue for other possible places in which a person and his dog could escape the wind. A capsized car lay in the intersection, its doors all missing and offering no sort of protection. Except for that neither man nor dog could see any sanctuary soever from the wind.

“Too late to go back now.”

“Well hell yeah it’s too late!” (He was speaking to himself in two voices.) “Should of thought of that before you started out!”

“I did. I thought about it.”

“The devil you did! I don’t know, sometimes you just...”

He stopped, distracted by an airplane toiling overhead. Many months had gone by since last he had witnessed any such thing as that, a jet-powered vehicle with, apparently, fuel enough to get where it was going. The man marveled and watched, shielding his eyes unnecessarily against the weak light of the moon. But what a poor pilot it was to steer like that, an unconfident person who changed his mind at the last moment and opted to keep on going instead of setting down.

“He’s not stopping.”

“Pretty obvious isn’t it? Jeez.”

A delicatessen came up, a narrow building squeezed in between two much larger ones. Pressing against the window, our traveler detected an illuminated glassed-in counter holding a selection of meats and cheeses together with a gallon jug of knurled pickles floating in brine. He perceived a sausage in there, too, a coiled and pudgy thing half again as long as the longer of his own two arms. They were eating well, were these people!

It was not that he intended to possess himself of any of these products, not at this time and not so long as the place held at least two CCTV cameras looking down from a corner of the room. The time was late and there was an iron grating over the window that could be folded up and pushed off to one side during operating times, an accordion-like apparatus that could by no means have been broken open save but by aid of much heavier tools than any possessed by him. Even so he marked down the location, using for that purpose the gel-point pen that he carried in his vest. Already he had circled a good number of landmarks on his street map, including the police station, the water works, and several other designations. Suddenly he ducked back under the awning, surprised that the airplane had come back and was patrolling almost exactly overhead. In the next block an individual of some kind had stepped from his doorway and was scanning up and down the road, oblivious, as it seemed, to our hero and his dog. He estimated it, the man who gave this narration, as the last day in April, 4:38 in the morning, birds circling overhead.

He arrived at his destination and bent down close to the numerals that provided the address, a four-digit combination (1647) that approximated so closely to a well-known historical date that he knew he’d be able to remember it always. He knocked once, politely, and then took off his glove and rapped a second time with greater vigor and simulated confidence. The building itself was of four stories with a frontage of perhaps a hundred feet. Each storey meanwhile had a row of windows, all of them occluded with grime or some other accumulation that effectively formed “mirrors,” as it were, that reflected what was left of the washed-out moon. Listing to one side, our man was able to perceive a very long and very narrow pennant furling atop the building, a black or possibly deep scarlet streamer that reached out over the street below and possibly a little further. He could not of course decipher the insignia all at one time, though it seemed to bear the portrait of a reptile or sea creature, or something along those lines. That was when the door came open and he found himself squinting from a distance of about six inches into the face of a wizened man, tall and thin, who wore a pained expression. His face was narrower than it should have been and in the moonlight his glasses looked as if they had been covered over in yellow paint. In those lenses our traveler could see himself, the building opposite, and an automobile working down the street.

“Peebles, is it?”

“No, I’m ----------------,” our boy said, giving his real name.

“--------------?”

“Yes.”

The usher checked his notebook, an inexpensive little affair with a spiral spine.

“I don’t see you on the list.”

“No, no. I was recommended.”

“Yes? And by whom if I may ask?”

He provided the name, our boy, and waited to see if it would register on the person’s face.

“Ah. Are we talking about a long-term stay? Or just for the night?”

“Long.”

“And the dog?”

“Please.”

“You weren’t followed?”

“No, no. I’m sure I wasn’t.”

The man stood back, giving entrance both to animal and man. The door, made of metal, was a good four inches thick and had a peephole in it that our hero had been loath to use while he was still in the outside world. He knew he was going to take off his heavy coat – (he had not been invited to do this) - and hang it on one of the hooks in the vestibule where right away he observed some six or seven pairs of shoes and boots and galoshes arranged in tidy fashion next to the interior door. The man stood back now and looked him over with a non-committal expression.

“Let me see if Larry is still awake.”

“Right.” He began to move into the building proper, which is to say until he was forestalled by the man. The fellow’s arm was long and thin and extruded incongruously from a sleeve that had girth enough for half a dozen men.

“If you’ll wait here.”

It gave our man time enough to seat himself, take off his own shoes and console his soles, as he liked to say. There were a number of etchings on the wall, most conspicuously of the letter “L” (for Larry?) in the Danse Macabre of Holbein. Our man moved closer, examining in detail the full horror of that scene. Perhaps it represented his own impending fate, should these people reject him and send him on his way.

He was a troubled-looking human being, this “Larry,” as could be seen in his face. Our man rose immediately and after wasting a few seconds by offering to shake with him, said:

“I ask for sanctuary.” And: “I have money.”

“So. Are you speaking of a long-term stay? Or just for the night?”

“Long.”

“And the animal?”

“Yes.”

There were two facing benches in the vestibule, allowing them to sit across from each other. His interlocutor was an austere sort of person with gray hair rotting from the top and pointing off in all directions. His face meantime looked like the underside of the fibulation plate of a disassembled 2013 Husquevarna snow blower. His mouth was wide and had a better number of teeth in it than might have been expected at the start. His eyes appeared to have been made, respectively, of porcelain, agate, and jasper. And in sum he was a representative wall-eyed man, rubicund, pixilated, and portly. His handshake, which he consented at last to grant, was firm in the beginning although he very soon began struggling to get free. Behaving with conspicuous dignity, the man now plucked out his handkerchief, used it, and then began very calmly to inspect the needlework. “You come to us from…?”

“Yes. Been living out there in the countryside since 2019.”

“I should think you’d want to stay.”

“I would, yes, like to stay,” our man said. “But it’s not possible, not any longer. Can’t get propane. And too many strangers moving back and forth.”

“Strangers?”

“Flagellants, people like that. Rosicrucians. All sorts.”

“I see. Yes, we get them, too. Gilians, most of them,” he said, referring to one of the new religions. “Well, not as bad as it used to be of course.”

He acknowledged the statement, our man did, and then waited for the dialogue to pick up where it had just now broken off.

“Countryside, you say.”

“Yes.”

“Wife? Children?”

“No children.”

“You left out the part about wives.”

“Divorce.”

“Now it comes out. How many?”

“How many wives? Or how many divorces?”

“Those two numbers ought to be about the same, no?”

“Not necessarily. For example I might still be hanging on to one of those wives, yes?”

The man put on an annoyed expression, and then drew out a pad and pencil and made a notation.

“Brought money, you say?”

He delved deeply, our pilgrim, into his knapsack, but then had to go back and release the combination lock that held together this rather protean piece of luggage that contained some forty-four pounds of highly miscellaneous contents. He had two hundred Yen and a little more, together with another sixty stowed away in a certain pocket accessible only to someone already knowledgeable about it. The man named Larry took up the bills and, wetting his thumb, proceeded to count the stuff, a slow procedure that seemed to give him a detectable pleasure that made both men blush.

“Two hundred and four Yen, all in specie.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Plus whatever’s in that little” – he pointed toward it – “that compartment there.”

“I brought some food, too.”

“The devil you say.”

“No, I really did! See?” He withdrew one after another some dozen little cans of sardines and processed meat, a wedge of cheese and box of powdered milk.

“No spirits, I assume.”

Our boy was pleased to be able to draw out a pint of rum and another, not quite full, of a coffee liqueur from the former Brazil.

“Gracious. And you’re prepared to donate all of this to us? What else did you bring?”

“Books.”

“Books! How many? Or rather, how good?”

He lay them on the table, eight separate volumes, each scarcer than the next. The man applauded his selection.

“Anything further? But no, your little green knapsack is almost empty.”

“I still have something else in there,” the narrator said. (He took out his .357 caliber revolver and 500 pieces of ordnance, well-organized objects standing, each, in a perfectly-fitting little cubicle of its own.)

“Oh gosh! We can certainly use this certainly! I think I’m going to let you into the great room, where we can talk ”

The room was great indeed, a high-ceilinged area which might almost have been a cathedral or shopping mall emporium at some period. But mostly his attention was for the fire, a robust affair in one of the largest hearths he had ever seen. They gravitated toward it naturally, man and dog, and stood at attention before the warmth. Suddenly he jumped back, surprised to find there an old man in a leather chair peering pessimistically into the flames. Outside it had begun to sleet, a commonplace occurrence these days. It formed a sound like that of grit being thrown unavailingly against the tall and very narrow windows that reached almost to the ceiling.

He was in an unusual place, an atrium really, notable for the lack of any sort of ornamentation or drapery, or art works on the wall. He was however able to make out through the gloom a heavy-laden cabinet holding as much as a hundred volumes lying sideways on the shelves instead of up and down.

“Shall we talk?”

He followed the man to the table and sat across from him. A coal-fired coffee maker took up the middle of the table, although the traveler waited until invited to do so before siphoning off a cup of the stuff for himself. The chinaware was frail and interesting-looking, and bore a pattern on it of scarabs and the sun. The coffee, too, was of almost the perfect temperature and there were good supplies of sugar and cream as well. The supervisor watched closely as our boy lifted the cup and quaffed down the contents in three or four hasty actions. And continued to watch as the boy poured out a second cup without pausing to be asked.

“You’ve come far?”

“Yes, sir. Peluria County.”

“Peluria! I thought that would be the last place. You knew that they’ve cleared Ringo County already?”

“I heard about it.”

“A few stubborn people still clinging on. They’re doomed of course.”

“I reckon.”

“Nativists!”

“Yes, sir.”

They looked at each other. A woman and child had come into the room and then, seeing the two men talking, turned and went out again.

“How do you feel about that?” asked the man called Larry.

“I think some of my people were in Ringo.”

“Belike.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Odd business, no? We spent a thousand years putting together some advantages for ourselves, and now we’re supposed to give them all away.”

“Yeah. Everybody’s good, except us. We’re bad.”

“Precisely. Entirely appropriate that black people, yea and Asians too, should look to their interests. But don’t you try it!”

“Yeah. ‘Less you want to get ‘wedged.’”

“Just so. Is that why you’ve come?”

“I guess so.”

“To stand against this malign titration?”

“I been wanting to for a long time.”

“You’re an educated man?”

“Little bit. But I can still do things.”

“Automobile repair? We can always use that.”

“Shoot pretty good, too.”

“That’s even better. I’m already leaning toward letting you stay. Ever killed anyone?”

The boy looked down. “No, sir.” And then: My granddaddy killed a fellow.”

“Yes, but we aren’t talking about him. Our grandfathers were different kind of men.”

“Yes, sir, I agree,” our pilgrim said, after raising his hand and waiting to be called upon.

“And so we have to start all over again, no? And learn to be more like them?”

The pilgrim frowned painfully, his mind slowly coming into play. “Look out for our own interests? Instead of other people’s?”

“Precisely. Can you do that?”

The conversation proceeded smoothly, right up until the boy began to notice that the sun was coming up behind the stain glass panes in the lower sectors of the elongated windows. It illuminated the picture of a reaper sowing in a field, a blue tableau highlighted in pink. He had been wrong, quite wrong, to imagine that the place was devoid of art.

“Yes,” said the superintendent, “one of our people made that.”

Together they watched as one by one the dawn uncovered a succession of scenes showing an ancient ship floundering at sea, unicorns and insects and a layout of the daytime sky that might or might not replicate the reality that illuminated it from behind.

“We could not have created the Chinese civilization, we ‘Cauks*,’” the man said. “But nor could they ours.”

Came next the portrait of the seated Charlemagne, an aged but yet

* Caucasians

handsome individual with a staff laying across his lap and a terrestrial
globe supported in one hand.

“Those were the days.”

The visitor, knowing little of such matters, nodded obligingly. His attention had meantime been called by the sight of some seven or eight
men, middle-aged types who had mustered in the vestibule and were preparing to depart the place, as it seemed. One wore goggles, one carried a canteen, and one had a bowie knife strapped at his side. Embarrassed by it, the chieftain tried to explain.

“We have to have some kind of income after all.”

“Oh.”

“Try to use volunteers of course, but if that isn’t enough… Well! There’s always the lottery.”

Our boy put on a worried face. He had not come to this place in order to take up a position in the outside world. On the other hand, the seven men seemed to form an experienced group that no doubt was accustomed to coping with things. He even thought he detected a certain repressed excitement as they assisted one another with their paraphernalia. The dog, too, wanted to go, though his owner held him back. Meantime he was giving alf his attention to the stain glass portrait of a medieval cavalryman clothed in armor made of scales.

“No one works for more than 8 hours,” Larry was saying. “And if they do, why we’ll go after ‘em and bring ‘em back.”

“Where do they work actually?” the visitor asked, his mind still largely on the cavalryman etched in glass.

“Oh, the usual thing. Rolo there is in sales. The others are mostly public relations, consultancy, facilitation, etc., etc. That tall fellow there? Grief counselor. But never mind, we don’t expect people to participate in our little enterprises during their first few days.”

“I could teach.”

“Not hardly, not unless your Serbo-Croatian is a good deal better than mine.”

“I can’t speak it at all.”

“Ah. No wonder you’re here.”

The boy reached for the coffee but then changed his mind when he saw how bright the day was threatening to become. Oblivious to the law, he took instead a cigarette and ignited it with one of the outsized matches he carried always.

“You’re tired,” the man observed. “You’ve come far and you’re tired.”

He admitted it, whereupon the old man abandoned his leathern chair and, carrying his candle with him, conducted our boy down a long narrow hallway that grew yet narrower as it disappeared among the dark. Indeed it tapered so radically, that corridor, it caused the people to turn edgewise as they went on. Here were any number of little cells, mere cubicles really, that abutted upon the hall, some of them shut tight, some open to view, and some with individuals in them occupied with books or escrubilators or, in one case, a hunched man bent over a computer monitor that glowed a virid green. Here they paused, supervisor, visitor and dog, and introduced themselves.

“Herb? I want you to meet… By God, I haven’t even asked your name!”

“-----------,” our narrator said, choosing something from his recent readings.

They shook all around, Herb, the dog, and our man. He was a gloomy specimen, was this Herb, and because the computers gave so little warmth, had wrapped himself in a florescent shawl. The office itself was full of clutter, much of it on the floor, and one’s first impression was of a chaos so complicated that it had come to infatuate the rather unhealthy-looking man at the center of it all. Just now his monitor, clouded over by a fog of some kind, revealed a herd of whales roaming at high speed along the bottom of the sea. One’s attention turned then to some of the other screens that filled the wall and in two cases were suspended from the ceiling by what looked like nylon fishing cords. Among other sights, a person could see an unsteady black-and-white image of the very doorway by means of which he had entered the place.

“No one can sneak up upon us now by God,” the proctor said. “Not since Hollis here joined our ranks!”

“’Herb,’ actually.”

Our boy meantime needed very urgently to piss, and if he was not soon given access to a mattress, might have to put himself on the unclean carpet and fall off to sleep in plain open view.

“Fellow needs to piss, I believe. See how he’s dancing around like that?”

“Yes, sir. And sleep, need some of that, too.”

“I see! Well you can have one of those, but not both. This is not a charity you understand.”

“Yes, sir; I understood that as soon as I handed my money over.”

In the event, his chamber, unclean also, did have bedding in it. He disrobed hurriedly and then arranged himself on a pallet barely thicker than the law required. He didn’t care. He had been traveling for fifty hours and more and was tired of reiterating in his mind all that he had done and seen during that time.

And slept well, too, which is to say until about noon when he stirred and stood up and then, assuming he was allowed to use it from time to time, began searching about for the facility. He passed an old man sitting in a cell, a bald sort of person bending over a book bound in membrane. The fellow looked up and smiled.

“You’re the new fellow.”

“Yes, sir. I guess so.”

“And your homestead? Your cozy little farm? What will happen to that?”

“I don’t know.” (Gloom came down over him.) “The government’s talking about giving it to the Cambodians.”

“So! An underrepresented group.”

“Yes, sir.” Deferring the need to piss, the boy now stepped into the constricted room and began to marvel at the array of books that covered three walls entirely and a good part of the fourth. A globe of the world, too, although it reflected a very obsolete notion of countries and continents, including the picture of a bosomy mermaid sitting on the shelf of Argentina.

“O, I see,” the man said. “You think I’m trying to escape the present by retreating into the past.”

“I would,” the boy said, “if I could.”

“Larry doesn’t like that. He thinks we still have a chance to bring back the country we used to have. Before you were born.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve heard about it.”

“You’ve heard about it, but I was there. Bathroom is down the hall and to the right.”

He slept again, this time until twilight came and pressed against the window panes. Leaving his compartment, the “boy” (he was 44 by now), stood for a time trying to understand the arrangement of the stalls and the half-dozen entryways that let in and out of the corridor. He saw a woman and child moving from one room to another and then another person of about his own general type and size carrying an ancient-looking leathern satchel with a hammer and drill sticking out. Outside he could hear cars and buses and the other expectable traffic of the city, even if the noise was muffled somewhat by the apparent density of the building. It was as if he had come to a fortress set up by bad judgment in one of the most dangerous of places, 160 miles outside Nashville, Tennessee. Suddenly just then a tightly focused ray of light broke through the window nearest the boy and loitered for a few seconds on the opposite wall.

“We need to do something about that,” said the man called Larry who had come up behind and had placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“I had my way,” he continued, “and we’d brick up these windows.”

“I could do it.”

“No, all I need from you just now is that ammunition you’ve alluded to. And street map.”

Agreeing to it, the boy returned to his cell and took out both the ammunition and the hand-drawn map, all of which he passed over to the man who stood waiting for it impatiently. His ears, the newcomer observed, were appreciably bigger than they should have been and resembled a set of little wings designed to fly his mind to higher realms. However he said nothing about it, the boy. Instead he said:

“And I have these antibiotic tablets.”

The man took them hastily and spilled them out into his paw, also larger than it ought to be. Having settled into the crux of that cup-like paw, they looked like miniature eggs in a nest of fingers.

“They’ve expired, these.”

“Yes, sir. But if you take a lot of ‘em at the same time...”

“All right, that’ll be all right. Anything else?”

“No, sir. Just personal possessions.”

“’Personal?’”

“Clothes and so forth. Toothbrush.”

“Yes, but don’t I see another book” – he pointed to it – “another book in that green and formless pouch of yours?”

The boy drew it out reluctantly and then stood by as the superintendent opened ever so gingerly the faded yellow cover and scrutinized the author’s name, the title and imprint information. Continuing with it, he then turned to the text and began to read silently, his two lips fluttering in resonance with the high-grade prose. The boy waited. There was a famous scene in chapter three, if the man desired to read that far.

“Now that’s the king’s true English!” he said finally, after shutting the book and looking to heaven and then opening it again and going on with it. “And such adjectives! He must have searched the world to find those!”

They were getting along very well, it seemed to the newcomer who then tried but failed to take the book back into his own possession.

“Glad it was written when it was. Today, of course, it could never be published, not with the English-language quota down to seven per-cent.”

“Sir?”

“Oh yes! And that applies to library collections, too.”

Outside a heavy truck had come and parked just next to the building, an armored personnel carrier as the boy at first believed. It was requisite for both men to edge away from the window, lest someone detect them in the dim. Huddled there, the man now gave back the revolver and most of the ammunition, saying:

“Ah, well; you’re just as likely to need this as any of us.”

The boy took it gratefully and waited for the book as well.

“Nowadays there’re just two sorts of Americans, my man. Those who know they’re sick, and those who don’t. Have you breakfasted?”

“No, sir. It just got dark a minute ago.”

“My wife, she keeps us in bacon and eggs, everything. Watermelon rind pickles. Fine coffee, really good; you’ll be coming back for more all night long.”

“Sounds good. I think I’ll just put that book back where it was and…”

They fought for it and then entered the main room, dodging swatches of moonlight that had leaked through the tattered drapes. He counted, the novice, some two dozen adults up and down the length of that enormous table, not including women and pets. It disturbed him somewhat that his own dog had acclimated so quickly to things, diluting the allegiance he owed to one person only. But meantime the coffee was good and brown and the boy permitted himself to splash about in it for the first several minutes, ignoring the questions coming in his direction.

“Yes?” he said finally.

“And left it of your own free will?”

“I didn’t have any choice! All these people hanging about. Couldn’t get any propane.”

“Your ancestors, they had propane?”

“No, no,” said the third man, a heavy sort of individual with an incised face whose blue lips at first glance appeared to have been positioned above, as opposed to below, his gingham nose. Known as Charles Roach, he had come to this place from a failed motel business named after himself.

“No, he had every right to leave. Who are we after all?”

“You don’t know?”

“We who have come together here to avoid those self-same interlopers who…” The man hushed, aware that he had employed one of the illegal words. Two minutes went by in a general embarrassment in which one could hear almost nothing save for the noise of diners breaking open their colored eggs and/or tossing down bits and pieces of the excessively good bacon. Far away the boy saw a bearded man raise his hand and start to speak before realizing at the final moment that he was about to rub up against the grain of the prevailing silence. He had started out to say something about “rights,” and the sort, something like:

“No, he has every right in the world!”

“OK, Clay, that’ll do it for now.” And: “Could I ask you to pass the bacon please? Good stuff, by God.”

Never before had the boy had access to as much hot coffee as he had now. Lifting the kettle in both hands, he poured out nearly a full quart of the stuff, resolved to drink all of it before the decision went against him and he was made to quit the place.

“Play chess?” asked the man in the quartzite glasses. His hair was a mess, this man’s, and offered the perfect habitat for spiderlings and things like that. Some years ago the boy had read an essay about these creatures, their great variety and sexual habits.

“I play a little bit,” said the boy. “But I’m not very good at it.”

“Glad you warned me. Nothing more tedious than…” His voice trailed off.

“But if they let me stay, maybe I could become a better player. Well! I couldn’t be much worse could I?” He laughed merrily.

“’They?’”

“Sir?”

“No, you said ‘they.’ If ‘they’ let me stay, you said. That’s what you said.”

He drank hurriedly, our hero, from his fourth cup of coffee.

“It’s Larry makes these decisions, Larry alone. And of course Milt.”

The man named Milt now raised his hand. He was, and no doubt is so still, an atrabilious-looking quantity with some sort of decoration pinned just next to the mandated badge that revealed his genome.

“I used to own this building,” he said in a reedy voice somewhere between an oboe and a clarinet’s. He was shy and his hair was as much of a problem as anyone’s there. “But hey, what do I need with a building, right? And then, too, Larry is a very persuasive man.”

They all looked to Larry, save only Larry himself who went on eating in the meditative style that seemed to suggest he was disquieted both by the quality of the discourse and of the people alike.

“He’s the one with the plan after all,” added Milt. “That’s what we’re counting on anyway.”

“That’s right Milt, tell this stranger here all our secrets why don’t you? Christ.”

“Don’t worry about it – the way he’s going now he’ll be completely caffeinated in another few minutes anyhow.”

It was at this juncture that the boy elected to take no further coffee at the present time. He was still young enough to have observed that the woman across from him was, 1., in a bathrobe, and 2., the robe was slightly open. How he despised these perceptual interruptions that tied his attention to the female body and its things, he who had set out to seek for intellectual guidance and a more valuable form of life. Draining the very last of the coffee, he stood along with the others and returned their little bows of courtesy, a nice action that told him the place was as civilized as could be wanted, and no one could want it more so.

“You’re the new boy,” the rector said, drawing him aside and handing off his own unfinished plate. “And so you get to slop the pigs.”

He laughed merrily, our boy, until the others also began to donate their leavings, hash brown potatoes that had not been entirely consumed and shards of bacon fat. No question, about it, the chess player was enjoying this.

“See what happens? When you don’t take the game seriously?”

It was a primitive sort of arrangement, that which had been set up for the pigs. Open to the sky, the palings enclosed perhaps some thousand square feet of space squeezed in between the barracks, the adjacent suntan salon and second-hand escrubilator lot. Entering with trepidation, our boy threaded his way among and between the hogs and the dozen or so chickens who cohabited with them in a state of peace as it seemed. At first he offered the ladle to each animal individually, meeting with refusals everywhere. The chickens especially wanted no part of him and stayed as far back as the enclosure allowed, eyeing him unsmilingly. That was when he perceived the wooden trough, a rude structure built of planks that ran around the interior of the den. “It’s here they are wont to feed,” the newcomer said, taking care not to let the chess player (watching from the window) see what he was thinking. Truth was, he was impressed by these animals, their general dignity, their stance and pertinacity. They knew what they were and had come to accept it with grace. Coming nearer and bending low, he testified that the leader of them, a robust creature with a sawed-off nose with two holes in it, possessed intelligence of a kind, one that reckoned with the outside world in ways that he himself could only guess about. The moon above, how, really, did it seem in the eye of a hog? Moving over to the adjoining animal, he saw that its face resembled the surface of a grapefruit cut in half. Here, too, he witnessed that most adroitly positioned of all the world’s noses, a dispensation that allowed the thing to pick up crucial scents a good long time before the rest of him arrived at the scene.

The third pig was more porcine than the others, his head and face a tetrahedral that came to sharp points fore and aft – the boy paid no further attention to him. It reminded him of a flounder or an ape, or a certain protozoan whose features are solely to be seen beneath a microscope, and then only from specific angles.

It was impossible for the hens to reach the trough wherefore our novice began to search about for the assumed bag of grain that could be scattered about on the cold hard ground. The third hog, as he attested now, had ears as thin as palimpsest that had been erased so many times and to such effect that actual perforations had developed in the plasma. However, he preferred not to think about it. Instead, looking skyward, he sheltered his eyes against the moon and waited for the next meteorite, confident that he would see one before very long.

“You’d do better looking more to the east.”

The boy jumped back two steps, but then managed to regain his footing before stepping into a cache of hog manure.

“I didn’t know anyone was out here,” he explained.

“No? And yet here I am.”

The two people looked at each other. If any meteorites were falling down just now, they would not be perceived by either man.

“Quite a… contraption you have there,” said the boy. “What is that, a telescope? And chair to sit in?”

“Yes indeed. Except that this is the chair. The scope’s over there.”

The boy came nearer and laid a finger on the long length of the instrument, a galvanized tube of about four feet that pointed to the eastern sky. He did not actually ask to make use of it and was not invited to do so at this time.

“You can see pretty far, I guess, with a thing like that.”

The man smiled. He was fuddling with a stack of cards and his face in the moonlight looked like a sheet on paper on which someone had etched one eye only and part of an ear.

“Yes indeed. I would have thought you might ask to see for yourself.” And then, speaking to himself in a barely audible voice: “But he didn’t!”

“I’ve been feeding these hogs.”

“Nothing wrong with that. Besides, it offers something to occupy the mind. And in that connection, how do you come to be here actually?” Suddenly he held up his hand. “No, no, nothing about propane please.”

“Migrants,” our boy said. “They were beginning to take my things.”

“Ah. Sikhs?”

“No, these were one of the underrepresented groups I believe.”

“Tattoos on their elbows and cheeks?”

“Why yes. Yes, sir, that’s them all right.”

“We see them here, too. Sometimes. They’ll take a hog, if you aren’t careful. You sure you don’t want to peep through this scope of mine?”

The boy came to him from long distance, moving at first toward the chair which looked as if it belonged in a dentist’s office, so many attachments did it have. The scope itself had honed in upon a dark place in the sky, which is to say until the child had given himself time to adjust to the distance. And even then he had to wait a while.

“Looks like a… constellation. A real small one.”

“Yes, Procrustus actually. He’s in the ambit of Genevieve tonight.”

“Astrology?”

“Yes indeed. They used to laugh at us, remember?”

“I do, I do remember.”

“And there, there in the lower left quadrant, do you make out a little pinpoint of light that seems to be pulsing every few moments or so?”

The boy adjusted himself slightly and then twisted the eyepiece by a fraction in hopes of compensating for his myopia.

“I do. I see it.”

“That will be a heliotropic dwarf, as they used to call them. Never achieved fusion don’t you see, the poor thing. Now look just to the left of that – you see that very small object that looks like a hole in the sky with light pouring through?”

“No, sir.”

“Keep looking.”

“I see a green thing that…”

“No, no, that’s just intervening trash of some kind. Ignore all that and keep on looking.”

The novice kept at it until his eyeball began to throb. Turning away at last, he noticed, first, how the hogs were jointly gazing at the sky. The other thing he noticed was that the astrologist had taken out a little flask from somewhere and was drawing on it. Reverting to the scope and applying his fresh eye to the opening, the novice worked to recapture the asteroid he had discovered earlier, a newly discovered body called MLK that had taken up in the orbit between Neptune and a far-away planet that hadn’t even been christened as yet. He realized that his one eye was better than the other and that the scope allowed him to make the needed adjustments for that.

“I see it.”

“Splendid! You’ll go far. That’s the innermost planet – Silenus we call it - that circulates around the dwarf.”

“Gosh. I didn’t know planets could give off light.”

“Never mind about that. Now, focus on that extremely tiny little business that sits just off the coast of Silenus. See it? That little sucker’s not much bigger than a grapefruit.”

“O, I’ll never be able…”

“Keep looking.”

This was tedious and his eye, previously fresh, was beginning to burn. Turning to the man and away from the scope, he interrupted the project.

“Getting chilly out here. A little bit.”

“Keep looking.”

He went on with it. He might as well be looking for lightning bugs in the night while knowing that all such flies as that had been extinct by 2009.

“I see it now.”

“No, I want the truth.”

The boy went back to it. It was almost noon (midnight) and the skies were full of an insensate activity that obtruded on the view. Turning his instrument to the moon, he detected a bad place along the rim where a fragment had fallen out, causing the planet to be “out of round,” as the expression had it. The hogs meantime had gone back into their tiny cubicle and, safe from meteorites, were lying in a pile.

End Chapter Two

THE NODE - first draft completed - what it's about...

2008-10-20T08:55:00.000-07:00

THE NODE, by Tito Perdue
a synopsis

Imagine that everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Imagine that society has segmented itself into ethnic enclaves. Imagine further that the economy has collapsed altogether (this book was written many months before the current mess) and it has become necessary to revert to an agrarian way of life based upon barter and manual labor. Continuing on, imagine that the relation between the sexes has become mechanized, the environment has become irremediable and criminal activity has become necessary for survival. Imagine finally that our protagonist and a few companions have set out upon an endeavor to found an alternative society - the "node" - devoted to the perpetuation of ideals and high cultural standards. Still continuing on, imagine that these "nodists," properly so-called, comprise a problematic group whose mission has been made almost impossible owing to the extreme individualism of the participants.

(I will be posting exerpts in the near future - stay tuned)

WELCOME TO TITO’S NEW WEBSITE

2008-06-21T18:37:00.000-07:00

Please browse through the pages on this site and you will find some interesting information about Tito Perdue and his work. All this newly available information has been gathered here for your enlightenment and enjoyment. You will find excerpts from all of Tito’s published books, and synopses of his unpublished (yet to be published) works. You can find articles about Tito, reviews of his work and interviews. In the near future we will be presenting announcements of Tito’s news and appearances. Stay tuned …