FLYMF alum J.D. Smith has an excellent poem, “Two Capitals,” in American Arts Quarterly!
J.D.’s stories for FLYMF included The Great Tuvalu Liquidation Sale, My Fetishist Things and As a Matter of Fact, I Am the Person You Have to Blow to Get a Table Around Here. You can follow all of J.D.’s updates on his blog, Smitroverse.
But, if you happen to be passing by the Mount Transfiguration Baptist Church Cemetery in Aiken County down in South Carolina, you might stop by the grave of Frank Wills and say a little prayer for his soul. This weekend is his 40-year anniversary. It belongs to him, and to the three cops — public employees, as they are reckoned in the politics of the moment — who answered his call. Forty years ago this Sunday, they all did their jobs very well. In the 40 years since, as citizens of a self-governing republic, we’ve all done ours very badly.
Charles Pierce has a gutpunch of a post on the legacy of Watergate.
Certainly. And if people want to ride motorcycles without helmets or smoke cigarettes that’s their prerogative, too. But it’s the nanny-state’s prerogative to protect the rest of us from their idiotic behavior. Sugar-sweetened beverages account for a full 7 percent of our calorie intake, and those calories are not just “empty,” as is often said, but harmful: obesity-related health care costs are at $147 billion and climbing.
New York Times Food Magazine columnist Mark Bittman has a compelling column supporting Mayor Bloomberg’s move to limit portion sizes of sweetened drinks. I’d be more swayed by arguments about the nanny state if it weren’t so obvious that most of us need to be thoroughly nannied, especially when society foots the bill.
Yet it was possible to see Morgan, with his brooding blue eyes and cigarette perpetually clamped between his teeth, as heralding a new social type: a beatnik, a rolling stone. A friend of Morgan’s once told a reporter, “Jack Kerouac was still imagining life on the road while Morgan was out there living it.”
The May 28 New Yorker has an amazing story by David Grann about an American who traveled to Cuba to fight in the Cuban revolution, only to be chewed up by the aftermath. The subject, William Alexander Morgan, is a petty criminal and drifting soul, who turned a revolution into the culmination of his search for meaning.
Grann illuminates the man and the nation he chose to identify with, proving equally adept with Morgan’s abandoned children and the brutality of one dictator that slides into the murderous repression of another.
I typically enjoy Louise Erdrich’s short stories in the New Yorker, but her last one was a real delight. “Nero” blends a half-feral watchdog with courtship by combat in a half-civilized frontier town. (The time period isn’t clear, but the citizens seem to have just figured out how to get themselves into trouble with the electricity that’s been wired to their homes.)
In the midst of the story is a bravura scene where a tarantula and python turn on their showman during a visit to an elementary school. My only complaint is the ending feels a little preordained; any other direction would have been more satisfying. But that’s a small part of the story, which is well worth a read.
Update: Just saw this quote from Erdrich in the interview, which is fitting:
You probably read more short stories than anyone else on earth, so you know the rules. If a person gets romantic justice in the story, the dog must suffer, or vice versa. Also, I have never liked cocker spaniels.