Due to technical difficulties, my satellite-based Internet was out of commission for about 10 days. The ordeal was perfectly timed to coincide with the joyous arrival of spring, which, here on the mountain, means the annual fisticuffs with nature have commenced.
John Hicks
95 Articles
Engineered and produced by Chris Nicholas at Popaholic Studios, Jackson, MS. Remastered by Bob Hate in Albuquerque, NM. All rights reserved.
One of my local libraries has a great used-book store. I stop by about once a month…
I’ve been working on a short story this week (and doing lots of spring farm chores, like garden prep and cutting grass), so the following will be brief. I’m hoping Esquire will not sue me for ripping off their format. I steal with love, guys.
JOHN HICKS
PILGRIM AND WAYFARER, 49, TUSCUMBIA, ALABAMA
One of my good friends is the international marketing director for a California winery. He met his wife during one his frequent visits to Japan.
“If you know sentences, you know everything,” Stanley Fish writes in his latest book, How to Write a Sentence (and How to Read One).
“Good sentences promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organization of the world,” Fish continues.
I admit to making a rude noise when I read that last one. It sounds a little too much like something out of the Boy Scout Handbook. (The world doesn’t care one whit about our organizational plans. People who try to organize the world go insane. I see it happen all the time, especially during the holiday season.)
I meant to include a promise in my last post that this, my next one, would mark a return to my earlier, funnier efforts (cf. Allen v. Fan From Hell 1980).
At least, I hope some of them were funny. I once told a fellow contributor that my only real goal here was to write three decent laugh lines per post. (Jokes, if you will. If you won’t, go spoon a goose. I have no idea what “go spoon a goose” means, and neither does Google. But it sounds transgressive enough.)
If you happen to watch HBO (you can send that check any time now, fellas) then chances are you’ve seen the new film adaptation of The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy.
I could fill a lot of space here by going over plot and characters, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to encourage anyone who’s not familiar with the work to bop over to The Sunset Limited’s Wikipedia entry and, yes, spend even more of your precious time on the Internet.
A few hours after I fired off my last post (“True Grit”) to B2L2, I cracked the February 14 & 21, 2011, issue of The New Yorker and discovered, to my great delight, a piece by staff writer Adam Gopnik titled “The Information.”
I was delighted because “The Information” addresses the curious state of being I’d touched on in my previous post – the calm and, well, happiness I’d begun to feel after several days of life without the Internet.
It was freezing in Vicksburg. The sky was bright blue, banded with cirrus clouds. Up on the bluffs, in the military park, I saw the raised ironclad hulk of the USS Cairo for the first time. They picked it up from the bottom of the Yazoo River a few decades ago and built a museum around it.
There’s something that never gets old about seeing a big ship that’s been dragged up on land. In its day, the Cairo slithered down the river like a gigantic smoking robot alligator, blowing things to pieces. I imagine people ran the other way when they saw it.
A glimpse inside the studios of Wood Central in Jackson, MS, where six artisans pursue their craft.
And we’re back.
I’d like to thank all my B2L2 friends who, after rolling their eyes to heaven,
nevertheless said kind things about my poetry and fiction experiments.
I had this exchange with B2L2 contributor and unlicensed bail bondsman Bob
Hudson:
I will tell you stories. I will try to make you laugh. There was a time when people laughed and told jokes and made very loud noises. I am from that time, the so-called Silver Times.