Category: Arts & letters

Orange crush

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day to Tommy Orange.

Since Tommy Orange scored himself a MacArthur Foundation award I’ve been rereading his 2024 novel “Wandering Stars,” the followup to his 2018 breakout hit “There There.”

The MacArthur people call it both “a sequel and a prequel” to the previous work, and it’s not a lazy bedtime read. The first pass through I found myself speedreading it, a vile habit I can’t seem to shake. It’s like driving the interstate instead of William Least Heat-Moon’s blue highways. You get where you’re going, but you miss a lot of scenery.

Now I’m taking my time and enjoying it more. Orange, a native of Oakland, Calif., and an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, covers a lot of territory as he takes us back and forth in time, from the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to the echoes of the climactic gunfire in “There There.”

With one eye on another orange tale-teller I found one passage particularly apt for Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Opal Viola Bear Shield, who is on the lam for a number of reasons — no spoilers here, read the book — is giving her unborn child a Cheyenne perspective on dogs, white people, and bloodlines (the child’s father is half white, and a white family’s dog, Cholly, is on the lam with them).

He’s one of these mutts you don’t know what kinds of breeds are in him and you don’t much care because he seems all his own in the eyes. Well he’s only got the one eye, but it’s got more life in it than I’ve seen in some men with two. And I’ve seen worse men than those with no life in their eyes. It’s worse when they know what they want and they’re hungry for it, white men in this country, they come to take everything, even themselves, they have taken so much they have lost themselves in the taking, and what will be left of such a nation once they are done?

Humbugs and gasbags

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
The Wizard of Ooze. (Behind the curtain: Stephen Miller, Generalfeldmarschall, Twatwaffen SS.)

You will recall that Professor Marvel, a.k.a. the Wizard of Oz, traveled by gasbag.

His very distant cousin in humbuggery, the Wizard of Ooze, likewise gets around on hot air, with an assist from other people’s money.

But I don’t expect we’ll see him at the 2025 Albuquerque International Balloon Festival, which begins today. Oh, sure, there’s a golf center at Balloon Fiesta Park, with a driving range and a six-hole pitch-and-putt course. But there is a distinct lack of screening foliage and even the most myopic of Repuglicunts could see him improving his lie.

The Great and Powerful Ooze might send the ICEholes in his stead (darn those bone spurs!). What a fine addition to the spectacle that would be — fats with tats in masks and battle-rattle snatching up brown people and stuffing them into locked baskets beneath unmarked black balloons, to be spirited away to Kansas or someplace even worse, flanked by escorts of flying monkeys.

But I expect those boyos are busy too, lumbering after nekkid bike riders in Stumptown or the more easily caught deep-dish pizza in Chicago.

Eat up, fellas! And don’t worry about the legs on the black olives. Ramón says they’re free-range. Organic.

Fear and Loathing in Woody Creek

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ Leave a comment
“Now it’s the same old song / but with a different meaning since you’ve been gone. …”

From our You Have Got to be Fucking Shitting Me Department:

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation is conducting a case review into Hunter S. Thompson’s death, more than 20 years after the fabled Gonzo journalist died in 2005 in his Woody Creek home.

The review was launched following a request from Thompson’s widow, Anita, and is being conducted to “provide an independent perspective” on the 2005 investigation, a CBI spokesperson said Tuesday. 

An “independent perspective,” hey? The Good Doktor had that and then some, for sure. Maybe some other poor fool in Pitkin County finally saw those goddamn bats.

Sex and violence

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Rough trade.

Two thoughts this morning. The first, from P.J. O’Rourke in his book, “Parliament of Whores.”

Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.

The second, from Tom Nichols at The Atlantic, in his essay, “The Commander in Chief Is Not Okay.”

In 1973, an Air Force nuclear-missile officer named Harold Hering asked a simple question during a training session: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?” The question cost him his career. Military members are trained to execute orders, not question them. But today, both the man who can order the use of nuclear arms and the man who would likely verify such an order gave disgraceful and unnerving performances in Quantico. How many officers left the room asking themselves Major Hering’s question?

Discuss.

Round up the (un)usual suspects

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
“No, not the trans antifa, you fool! The irony-poisoned, terminally online, neonazi groyper types!”

Some days I feel the weight of every nanosecond of the 71.5 years I have spent on this planet.

I’m so old that when some fresh young bit of news rears its pimply head, references from books — yes, books! — leap to what remains of my mind.

For instance, there’s P.R. Deltoid, the “post-corrective adviser” to the ultraviolent 15-year-old Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess:

“What gets into you all? We study the problem and we’ve been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but we get no further with our studies. You’ve got a good home here, good loving parents, you’ve got not too bad of a brain. Is it some devil that crawls inside you?”

Or the bruiser in the cowboy hat in Thomas McGuane’s “Something to be Desired,” who, upon seeing a used tampon land on his windshield at a drive-in movie theater, steps out to make a few inquiries among the usual suspects, which include the hapless Lucien, who had been preparing to continue a mutual infidelity with a casual acquaintance until a rare burst of discretion — “spraying ancient drive-in gravel” in headlong flight — came to seem the better part of valor.

“I got my fiancée here!” shouts the cowboy. “She don’t want to know about your little world!”

Alas, it seems that to gain some insight regarding the suspect in the Charlie Kirk killing I must leave the library and take a deep dive into the wonderful world of … Helldivers2?

In addition to everything else, I’m supposed to worry about whether the asshole on my six with two wheels in the bike lane is “a Nick Fuentes groyper and gamergate 4chan douchebro?” 

No thank you, please. I just finished an oldster’s breakfast of oatmeal, fresh fruit, and tea. It looks like rain. And I’m feeling the cowboy’s confusion here, with a geezerly side of These Kids Today.

I remember when games meant Monopoly, Scrabble, or just tossing the ol’ pigskin around. I don’t want to know about their little world.