Theresa Joan Nason 1928 - 2010

My mom died on this day four years ago.  She was never famous, except to me and everyone who loved her, and many people did.  She was that kind of person.  Mom always had time to listen to people, truly listen, and with exceptional empathy and concern for whatever problems they were wrestling with.  Even in her last year, when she was valiantly struggling to cope with the physical difficulties of being on dialysis thrice a week for a quarter-century, she still tried to listen and offer her invariably wise counsel.  She never told people what to do unless they sought her advice; she was acutely aware of her many gifts.

She could easily have become famous in the more mundane sense if she'd wanted to -- she was beautiful enough in her youth to cause more than one person to suggest she take up modeling.  But that world wasn't the world she wanted to be part of.  Still, she came close:  She was a top-notch executive secretary at Macy's and had the responsibility of coordinating the department store's tie-ins with movies that would advertise at the store in those days.  On one noteworthy occasion she was on the set when Macy's was filming scenes for the 1947 classic film Miracle on 34th Street on location in the store.  She babysat Natalie Wood between takes.  She watched the crew spend a whole afternoon filming one shot of some actors walking out of an elevator, take after take after take.  Natalie was a little girl at the time, and probably kept my mom pretty busy.  

She had that unmistakable 1940s glamour, but she was too down-to-earth to seek a modeling or acting career.  Macy's wanted to train her for a full-scale executive position, unusual for women in those days, but my mom wanted to marry my dad and have children instead.  That's what women were "supposed to do" in those days, she later told me.  But my sister and I were the beneficiaries of her talents, which instead of going to a corporation went into raising us.  She was a voracious reader, of both serious books and fun books; she loved theater, and saw all the great plays and musicals on Broadway; she was an avid film-goer -- her favorite star was Gregory Peck -- and she continued to love movies long after the Golden Age of Hollywood was over.  She knew better than some of her film critics that wonderful films are always being made if you just look for them.

Mom was always deeply interested in both politics and sports, and followed both avidly throughout her life.  She was unfailingly shrewd about both.  She considered Harry Truman a great president back when conventional wisdom dismissed him as a bungler, and the wags said "To err is Truman."  She knew better.  When the first news about the Watergate break-in was reported, she immediately sensed it was an operation that came right from the White House; she called in during Bob Grant's long-running New York radio show and said as much, and Grant said, "Have you been out of the country lady?  Do you think Haldeman and Ehrlichman plotted it in a back room in the White House?"  "Yes," my mom said.  History vindicated her on that.  As a Cub Scout den mother, she taught little boys how to swing a bat -- I'm told she had a pretty good swing.  Our house was filled with books about history -- both hers and my dad's -- which I only came to appreciate when I was much older; but her stories about the great historic events that occurred before I was born lit a spark in my imagination and helped turned me into a reader of history myself.  But perhaps most important of all, she stressed the importance of values, of being a decent person, and being kind to others.  I can't say I've been as kind a person as she was, but she gave me a standard to try to live up to.  I'm still trying, and when I remember my mom, whom I loved with all my heart, I make a note to myself to try harder.  I'm sure that everyone who knew her and loved her feels pretty much the same way.

Naked Dinner: Meeting William S. Burroughs

January 2015 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the famed Massachusetts obscenity trial in which the once-scandalous novel "Naked Lunch" by Beat writer William S. Burroughs was ultimately deemed safe enough for the good people of Boston to read.  The anniversary makes me recall the occasion I had dinner with once-notorious author when he was 63 and I was 20.  It was one of those simple encounters that probably meant little him but wound up meeting a lot to me.  And it was entirely legal. 

Photograph by Richard Avedon.

It happened in 1977, during the spring of my third year at the State University of New York at Purchase.  A classmate of mine from the English Department slipped into the seat next to me in the cafeteria during lunch and said in her best conspiratorial film noir voice, "Hey, William Burroughs is going to be giving a reading from "Naked Lunch" on campus tonight -- my friend Katie's having him over to her apartment for dinner beforehand. Want to come?" 

I instantly said yes, though to be honest I had never read any of Burroughs's work, though I was famiar with his notorious reputation, and in fact that very week had read an interview in the "Village Voice" between him and Tennessee Williams, which piqued my interest even more.  So right after lunch I took the bus into nearby White Plains and scoured the two or three bookshops there for any Burroughs books. I found a used Grove Press paperback of "Naked Lunch" and headed back to campus, but there was no time to read it -- I had to be at Katy’s campus apartment for that early dinner. When I arrived at the apartment there were a handful of other students already there. Katie was in the tiny kitchen preparing dinner. There was a smell of quiche in the air.

I’ve never been fond of quiche, but I was willing to take one for the team in order to meet Burroughs. He hadn't shown up yet and a couple of the guys were watching a baseball game on the TV in the living room. "Turn that thing off, he's coming up the steps!" someone hissed. The TV was duly flicked off and I heard the doorbell ring, followed by a voice that was low and gruff, but with a certain elegance of diction, saying, "Got anything to drink?"

Before he'd even entered the room, our hostess brightly said, "We have a really excellent bottle of wine..." 

"No, I mean the hard stuff. Scotch, whisky."

Katie turned from the door and rushed into the living room, panic-stricken. She grabbed one of the guys and frantically told him, "He wants real the hard stuff, go out and find someone on the block who's got Scotch or something like that.”

The designated booze-hunter scooted out the door as Burroughs walked in. He wore a gray three-piece suit and carried a briefcase and looked for all the world like at cross between the vice-president of a small Midwestern bank and a rather large lizard languidly sunning himself on a rock. He was followed by a much younger male companion who was wearing a beige jumpsuit and resembled a young David Bowie Burroughs sat on the cheap student sofa across from me and Bowie sat on the floor in the corner in a kind of yoga position. 

Nobody knew what to say -- what can you say to a legend? -- but fortunately the bottle of Scotch arrived with admirable speed. Someone fetched a tall glass from the kitchen and brought it to Burroughs; he filled the glass to the top and he polished it off neat in one long swig. I was astonished.

Nobody else but Burroughs drank the Scotch -- that was his bottle. The quiche was handed out on paper plates which we balanced on our knees as we attempted some small talk. Our thoughtful hostess tried to bring Bowie into the conversation by asking, 

"So, um, what do you do?"

He suddenly looked up and said, "Oh! I write," then went back into sleep mode.

Someone asked Burroughs what he was working on. "Oh, this movie script, but I can't seem to get it right,” he said.  

Since I was then studying in the school's Film Department, I saw a conversational opportunity.

"But why be so Hollywooden old-fashioned and start with a script?"  I said.  "Why not be just as experimental with film as you are in your books" -- none of which I'd actually read --" and improvise as you go along, letting the images tell the story....or do without a story entirely?" 

Burroughs looked at me as if he was that Midwestern banker whom I'd just asked for a large loan with zero collateral. "No, no, no" he growled, "you gotta have a script, you gotta have a story, the producers won't give you any money without a script, don't you know anything!" At that time I was unaware that years earlier Burroughs had indeed made some very avant-garde films of the kind I was talking about; perhaps he now wanted to play with the big boys.  

More desultory small talk ensued, and finally someone had the temerity to ask Burroughs "how" he wrote "Naked Lunch." The Scotch must have loosened him up, because he launched into an absorbing account of how he'd written mountains of material over many years -- stories, sketches, anecdotes, hallucinations he'd had while stoned -- but never knew what to do with them. Then, sometime in the late Fifties, Allen Ginsberg told Burroughs he could get him a book deal if he had a manuscript ready in about a week or so. 

"A week!" Burroughs said. "I've got thousands of pages in no particular order and you want me to assemble them into a book in a week!"

Ginsberg had said, "Yes, Bill -- I know you can do it."

So Burroughs set about stitching all those disparate prose and out of it emerged "Naked Lunch."  The very book Burroughs was now going to read from in a few minutes before a packed crowd in the Neuberger Museum (also built of brown bricks).  I couldn’t help but wonder if the book would be as dour as the man himself.

Dinner completed, we headed out the door where it was just starting to get dark. As we walked along the path to the museum, I gamely peppered Burroughs with questions: "Mr. Burroughs, I read that interview Tennessee Williams did with you in the "Voice" this week. It was all talk about drugs. Don't writers of the stature of you and Williams have anything else to talk about?"  Yes, I was that jejune then.

Burroughs glowered at me as we walked. "Of course we did! We talked for nearly six hours about everything you can imagine! The editors chose to print just the drug stuff.  Don't you know how newspapers work?"

I gulped and acknowledged my increasingly apparent ignorance. But I tried again. 'Mr. Burroughs, I read you live down on the Bowery. Isn't that kind of...uh, dangerous?"

He shook his head. "Nah, it's just a lot of bums and winos. They're harmless.”

My education complete, we entered the building. Every seat was taken, standing room only. I suddenly remembered the copy of "Naked Lunch" I had in my bag. I asked Burroughs to sign it and he wrote on the title page above the title, "For Robert," and underneath the title, in his scraggly signature, "William S. Burroughs."  

I couldn't find a seat, but what the hell -- I'd had the best seat in the house just twenty minutes ago. I crouched in an aisle as Burroughs read some of the wildest, funniest passages from "Naked Lunch," doing all the voices -- Dr. Benway, AJ, Clem, O’Brien -- emerging from his Midwestern banker demeanor as an actor of considerable gifts and acute comic timing:

“Get me a new scalpel; this one's got no edge to it!”

He thrusts a red fist at her. The doctor reels back and flattens against the wall, a bloody scalpel clutched in one hand. The patient slides off the operating table spilling intestines across the floor.

Dr. Benway sweeps instruments, cocaine and morphine into his satchel.

“Sew her up, I can't be expected to work under such conditions!”

Afterwards, Burroughs took some questions from the audience. I only recall one (and I wasn‘t the person who asked it):  "Mr. Burroughs, a friend of mine is seriously thinking of getting into heroin. What would you advise them?"

I was sure Burroughs would give a withering reply, but he just calmly said, "I can't tell anyone whether to use or not use junk. It's his life, he has to make his own decisions."

That seemed to wrap up the evening. The crowd dispersed.  I headed to my oppressively silent dorm room,, sat at the desk, and began to read the first pages of "Naked Lunch."  The tone of the book immediately cut through me like an icy cold knife, the blade dipped in an arctic nihilism that was no pose but the real thing.  This guy really means it.  Yet as I read on, that knife turned out to be not the lethal scalpel of Dr. Benway, but one that cut away the polite conventions and banalities of everyday life to release an oddly healing balm of unbridled, utterly anarchic laughter.  Suddenly my room,, empty except for me, was filled with the raucous voices of Burroughs’ uniquely carnivalesque paranoid imagination.  For the first time I became conscious of the enormous gulf between a person’s outward appearance and the astonishing stuff that might go on in their mind.

The next day I heard that some of the guys from the dinner had gotten into a car with Burroughs and smoked some pot on the way to the Hilltop Bar, where they drank and told stories into the night.

And I'd missed it.  I'd never used any kind of drugs during my three years at the college...but I think I might have smoked a joint so I'd be able to say years later, "I got high with William S. Burroughs."  It would have made a hell of a story.

Barry N. Malzberg at 75

On July 24th, one of America's most brilliant unknown writers turned 75.  Well, not quite unknown -- he's published scores of books since 1968.  But he's a neglected giant of post-60s speculative fiction, a contributor to Harlan Ellison's famed anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, a dystopian stylist whose unique visions of the future will alternately depress and enthrall you if they have not done so already, author of the novel that won the very first John W. Campbell Award, Beyond Apollo, savage critic and vital part of the sf world (as expressed in his trenchant essays collected in Engines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins), wizard of alternate histories and recursive SF.  In our grim era, his admittedly bleak view of man and the cosmos might well strike an even more resonant chord than it did when he first appeared on the scene nearly half a century ago.  Malzberg was a one-man American New Wave when he was turning out a new book virtually every month in the 1970s. An indefatigable gadfly and something of a genius to boot. Seek out his works or go to your graves forever deprived.

What's Wrong with American Architecture?

James Kunstler gives a trenchant and very funny presentation explaining how the American space -- not outer or inner space, but the lamentably sterile space so prevalent around us in our towns and cities and buildings -- has brought us to a dead end.  But he suggests that hope is on the way.

But this TED talk makes me wonder:  Was H. L. Mencken right when he declared that "Americans have an absolute libido for the ugly"?  Is our landscape the predictable result of business and individuals put up buildings in an entirely haphazard way, with no regard for civic beauty?  Or is it the arrogance of modern architects and city planners that creates award-winning buildings that are dismal to actually live and work in?  Or is Kunstler himself arguing for just another, albeit wiser form of planning?  His emphasis on "living locally" and insisting that citizens, not consumers, collectively determine their surroundings suggests an intriguing mixture of both liberalism and small "c" conservatism.

An Introduction, an Apologia, and a Hearty Welcome

No, that isn't a typo.  It really says "Robert Nason's Culture Bog."  And considering all the times I (and probably you) have valiantly attempted to type the highly-common word "blog" in an email to a friend, only to have that pesky spell check "correct" it to "bog," why not simply give in to technology (or to serendipity, which may just be a cheery mask for the same thing) and accept "bog" for "blog," though this is indeed a blog (or, How I Learned to Stop Recorrecting and Love the Bog.)  

But where, exactly, does the "Culture Bog" come in?  Well, you've come to just the right place to find out.  The culture bog -- a concept I've adapted from R. Emmett Tyrrell's, earlier, more narrowly political and somewhat Germanic formulation, "kultursmog" -- is the bog we all live in -- an all-encompassing swamp of texts, images, memes, sound bites (or bytes, if you will), classics and commercials (thank you, Edmund Wilson), and conflicting contexts that permeate the air we breathe and the space we inhabit for now and the near future; a cacophony of warring websites and unsocial media that fill our brains from the moment we take our first breath, accompanied by understandable wailing and gnashing of baby teeth, to our last, medically-induced, addled spurts of consciousness of the nursing home TV's current offering of disaster and catastrophe, either fictional, news-informational, or "reality" based -- and who can tell which of the three at that point, or even long before then?  Pixels and propaganda now fill our waking hours while our dreams are increasingly dominated by whiz-kids from Industrial Light & Magic.  We're stuck in the bog, and there's no escape.

But as the late Marshall McLuhan -- one of the unsung heroes of this blog -- famously said, the way out of the whirlpool was discovered by Edgar Allan Poe, a well-sung hero, in his story "A Descent into the Maelstrom": The hero must give in and stop resisting; by riding the whirlpool out to the very end, he can be sucked into the center and find an escape of sorts. But you'll have to read (or reread) that tale for yourself.

To put that into practical terms, it means that I, along with you, derive a great deal of pleasure from savoring the detritus and desire swirling about in our shared bog -- films old and new, novels cheap and novels classic, beloved TV shows from vanished youth, comics (now reborn as Graphic Novels), science fiction, mysteries, comedy, painters and sculptors, poster art and architecture, and the political machinations of scoundrels and statesmen, who surprisingly switch from one to the other given the crisis at hand.  And culture more broadly includes the whole farrago of customs, fads, forgotten trends, romance, disillusion, hope springing eternal, then ending again.  It's all part of the mix. And with luck, perseverance, and Poe's hero in mind, we might rise up from the swirling muck like the fabled Swamp Thing and find ourselves composed of the same stuff we were mired in, the same stuff that stars are made of, ready for action.  In other words, there's fun to be had and adventures to be embraced.  We'll walk that contemporary tightrope between academic naysayers who insist that all culture is mediated by power and privilege and the unwashed masses who simply love the show in all its myriad forms.  The former will grouse that it's just Bread and Circuses; those of us who are not entirely unwashed since we do believe in bathing now and then, will cheer that the human imagination has been so fertile in so many astounding ways.  We'll shoot zingers at both sides and pray they don't let go of the rope.

(A friend has advised me that there is indeed a distinct difference between a bog and a swamp; and in fact, there are many kinds of bogs, from the Valley bog to the Raised bog, the Blanket bog, the Quaking bog, and even, God help us, the Cataract bog.  There is even a sport known as "bog snorkeling" -- don't ask.  But the promising aspect of bogs in general is their "accumulated peat, "a deposit of dead plant material," plus assemblages of plants and animals, leading to a biodiversity from which the living can be reborn from the detritus of the dead -- or, for our purposes, the decayed but still valuable peat of old films, paperbacks, TV shows, comics, and ideas.  And since Stanley Kubrick is one of the resident gods of this blog, it's worth remarking that in the Anthony Burgess novel from which A Clockwork Orange was made, "blog" is the slang word for God.)

Bog is to the early 21st century what Beat was to the mid-20th.  They were beat, we're bogged down.  But to be beat was also to move to the beat, to beat the system, to achieve beatitude.  Our bog god beckons us to move beyond stagnation and overproliferation.  (Call it stagliferation -- not unlike the "stagflation" of America during the Carter years, that lethal combination of stagnation and inflation of the late 1970s).  This blog will, with luck, help encourage the nutrients in the bog to flourish, and provide hints for all of us to develop a more discerning culture-diversity.

In am interview some year ago, culture critic Susan Sontag was asked by Christopher Lydon, "What writers influence you, which ones do you light candles to?"  Sontag protested, "I don't light candles.  I read the writers I admire, and reread them," and went on to say she was interested in many things, and that listing all of them "would be pretentious."  I'm hoping the following list won't be pretentious.  At least I don't light candles to them (though in the case of Grace Kelly I've been tempted to).

Some of the people and subjects that might pop up here (and ultimately I'm the one who does the popping) are:  

Cinema masters Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Preston Sturges, Woody Allen, Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francois Truffaut; screen icons Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Groucho Marx, Gene Tierney, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Natalie Wood; TV legends  Rod Serling,  Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Mary Tyler Moore, 1950s' Superman's George Reeves, Honey West's Ann Francis, Dick Cavett and Tom Snyder; magisterial film critics Pauline Kael and David Thomson, British giants and eccentrics George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, W. Somerset Maugham, Philip Larkin, Malcolm Muggeridge, Colin Wilson, Winston Churchill, The Beatles, and honorary Brit Arthur Koestler; Irish geniuses Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett; French writers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Boris Vian; American literary virtuosos F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Henry Miller, Raymond Chandler, James Thurber, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, P. J. O'Rourke, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth; literary critics H. L. Mencken, Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Joseph Epstein, Clive James, and Louis Menand;  playwrights Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Tom Stoppard; speculative fiction wizards Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein; historians Paul Johnson and John Luckacs; artists Salvador Dali, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Edward Hopper, Fairfield Porter, and Charles Addams; plus The New York World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964, Aurora monster model kits from the 1960s, Commentary, MAD, EC comics, Film Comment, Charles Krauthammer, Ben Hecht, jazz, Gustav Mahler, women, Paris, Vienna, kibbutzim, coffee, and the joys of Elmer's Disappearing Glue Stick.  (It sounds like it should be called Elmer's Disappearing Glue Trick, but we'll leave the magic for another time.)  

I should warn you that some of the above eminentoes are people with whom I have strong disagreements, but they nevertheless occupy significant places in my own mental culture bog.  (The links above will take you to some surprising and delightful places.)  I should further warn the faint-hearted among you that some of my views could be categorized as moderately conservative -- a good friend of mine has suggested I'm to the right of Carnegie Hall.  I'd revise that to read I'm slightly to the right of the Carnegie Deli.  That should provide the appropriate flavor to the proceedings to follow.

To conclude:  This is the place to come for the real lowdown on both the High and Low and every hybrid imaginable.  Put your cards on the table, face up -- and remember that the odds always favor the house, but here every man's a king and every woman's a queen, and there are two chickens in every garage and a car in every pot.  But please, no pot in here -- we welcome sober (but not solemn), thoughtful, clear-minded readers eager for a probing analysis of all the news that's not yet fit to print -- though as Ezra Pound noted, literature is news that stays news.  Personally I'll be shocked if any scoops are broken here, but I welcome any you might have to offer.  This blog will sometimes be playful, even silly, but despite Cary Grant's admission to Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, "At my age the last word a man wants to hear is 'serious,'" it won't hesitate to be serious when the seriousness warrants it.  And remember -- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  So jump right in, the water's brine.  Or at least mine.