To Restore Decency: tales of growing up on the right wing fringe
Writing this book is my mid-life birthday
present to myself. It’s time to wipe away the cobwebs, tell the tale, and move on.
Excerpt:
In Bridgeport, Dick (yes) Green came over numerous times at night, wearing a black jacket and a
black skull cap, and my father put on a black jacket and a black skull cap to go out with him.
My mother would ask where they were going and my father would say, “we’re going out to shoot some niggers.”
Dick Green was always saying nigger. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger. My parents called him a hero and a patriot because he was a green beret, I think.
The kids (we) were scared of him. He had a daughter my age and my parents used to bring me over there to sleep at their house.
Her mother made us hot fudge sundaes and brought them out to the playhouse. My parents said she was nuts because she kept a perfect
house and wouldn’t allow talk of politics at the dinner table. I thought she was nice and a little scary too; she ironed her clothes
so hard it looked like no one was inside them.
Dick Green checked Mrs. Green’s weight every week. My mother didn’t like that.
Mrs. Green wasn’t allowed to weigh over 129 pounds. She expressed worry about it a lot.
She had temper fits too. Once she started screaming while making pancakes. Dick Green had to slap her in the face.
BestFriendAngel
A mytho-poetic collaboration with poet Sarah Gambito that emerges from the void left by religious oppression. Eventually, this dialogue between psyches will be available as a blog.
Excerpt:
CM:
I drank the song of suffering. I do it still, I think.
What does it mean to be alive?
Jesus spoke to me last night. He said, “of course I’m not the son of God. Wouldn’t that be silly?”
Hitler killed a lot of people. Who’d want that on their plate?
Drawing by Paul Klee
God is so dead it’s not even funny.
SG:
i'm tired of sawing away on my tender guitar. full of elk hooves, ugly receipts, highway flowers, shantung dealings, lashes of rosemary and
dimpled spices. spies. flecking pies left on the midwestern counter. who's for me baby? hard sucked candies, sewer pupils. sucking on my gums trying to figure out how
do i do what i don't want to. the dead pediatrics of it. to fall into sheaves of uncut rapunzel: my name.
i offer the nub, the jezebel licking dog, i blow my breath into a mechanism of heat around your words.
i'm your small town built from the anthracite of the godly milkman, the decent bells of beethoven, the ragged coastline.
what privilege it is to live one life. grunting in the sun. exhibiting pain. to cry for the soft ear ranunculus. the soul
reaching for the thigh-flesh.
Axis Mundi: Levittown
A collaboration with sculptor Holly Laws who is creating miniature Levitt houses based on the post-WWII affordable housing enclaves built in the late 1940s for veterans and their families. I am writing short dialogues to be looped and broadcast through small speakers embedded in the tiny houses. Some will overlap, others will be overheard (and responded to) by those in neighboring houses, and others still will be in dialogue with each other. Our intention is to create dialogues reflecting each post-war decade until today. In what ways did those houses (and attitudes within them) evolve as the 20th century unfolded, bringing the houses further and further away from their original use for veterans? I lived in one of the Levitt houses in Long Island in the 1970s and feel particularly qualified to mark that decade, call up the ghosts of the previous decades, and imagine into those that followed.
Note:
I've always thought of Holly Laws' body part sculptures as "lost" invented relics from past lives forgotten, cut short, or simply not deemed important enough to have been recorded by history. In her leg series (as in "three leg pairs" pictured here), a haunted vision of any number of things that might have happened captures the eye and mind, leaving the spectator to enter a dialogue with these mini, all-too-real body parts crying out to be told. It's as if the sculptor wants to insist that no one "made" them, while confronting us with the people they once were whose lives we must imagine. Likewise in "house geodes," but this time more akin to archeology than anthropology. An empty house, up-ended, encrusted in crystal, in some ways brings us even closer to mortality, the inevitable death of shelter implying once again the fragility of human life. With the idea for "Axis Mundi," Laws decides to bring the dead back to life, this time adding the human voice, thus reclaiming a part of the human body that does not decay.
Three Leg Pairs from the Limn Series: |
House Geodes: cast plaster, alum crystals |