Special Report: Is Michael Jackson a Castrato?

For those unfamiliar with the term, a Castrato is a male soprano whose larynx was never transformed by puberty (i.e. lowered into Tenor or Bass range). Occasionally, this is the result of an endocrinological condition (as the Wikipedia tells me), but it was semi-common practice throughout the Catholic Middle Ages & Renaissance to castrate great boy singers to preserve their pristine upper ranges. (Countertenors are male altos with testicles who have perfected their falsetto, & were also commonly used in church music for centuries, & still sing modern & ancient music today. The last proper Italian operatic Castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, died in 1922. There are a few scratchy old recordings of him.)



I do not know that much about Michael Jackson or his music, but I watched the premier of his controversial interview with Martin Bashir, Living with Michael Jackson, while I was in England in 2003/04. I was fascinated by his behavior on that program, & I tossed off the theory that maybe he was castrated before he reached puberty, thus explaining many of his quirks at once. I was just thinking about it again recently, & I asked my friend Danny Holt to bring up an old VHS tape of Living with Michael Jackson, from his collection, when he visited last night. (It's not commercially available.) Danny's friend Shirley suggested I should write down my theory, so, if in twenty years, I'm proved correct, I can say "look when I guessed it!" I'm sure others have suggested this before, but here's my talking points, all based on Martin Bashir's interview.



-HIStory: Jackson was an inspired child singer. His father was controlling, abusive, violent, & obsessed with the success of his children's act. Michael describes repeated beatings, & also his extreme desire to fulfill his father's expectations. With the international fame, & stressful schedule, Michael more or less did not get a childhood. He also refers to his emotional turmoil at puberty, not wanting to grow up or lose his child star qualities, being embarrassed at his zitty pubescent face. If he, his father, or someone else, ever had the crazy idea that they could prolong his child fame & soprano voice by castrating young Michael, I do not want to speculate the actual events. Or maybe he developed an endocrinological condition possibly related to his phoney skin disease.

-His Voice: His singing range is very high, with some seriously difficult-to-reach upper notes which he hits with no strain. Stranger, tho, is the apparent lack of any low tones. I'm not that familiar with his complete cannon, but if anyone is aware of a moment when he throws in a masculine phrase or Elvis impersonation, where is it, & are we sure that he sang it? More interestingly, his speaking voice is pretty high without sounding affected - it doesn't sound like, say, a stereotypical movie transvestite speaking in falsetto with the occasional break away from head voice.

-Eternal Youth: It is obvious that Jackson has deep psychological issues with age. I'm sure these can't be chalked up to any specific thing, his abnormal childhood or his celebrity isolation - and if you castrated a normal small-town boy, he could conceivably have a normal adult life or musical career without building a fantasy Neverland with a private zoo. Jackson claims to have the soul of a child, & some of his regular 12-year-old friends that are interviewed say that he acts & plays like just one of the kids. But as sociopathic behavior isn't evidence of anything physical, I'll leave this issue to the forensic psychologists.

-Virginity: Jackson tells several anecdotes to Bashir about how he was scandalized by sex as a boy. Once when his brother was having sex with girls in the same hotel room. The second story is far stranger, when he is older, at a time when normal teen stars couldn't be happier that girls follow them everywhere, he describes a groupie trying to seduce him & he wasn't "tempted." I should discuss that castrati historically are not asexual, with famous examples like Farinelli, the 18th Century playboy opera-singer. Eunuchs of Antiquity were castrated men employed to accompany & protect the many wives of a patriarch, but their roles also were not asexual - they were often needed to pleasure neglected women of a harem without the threat of impregnation. Michael Jackson is almost certainly not a virgin; but in my subjective opinion, there is something very non-sexual about his relationship with women, & there is something very pure about his obsession with toys & desire to hang out with kids his mental age. I'll return to this thought below.

-His Children Are White: The unalterable nature of genetics & recessive genes were not subjects that his private tutors (most likely Jehovah's Witnesses) ever taught in much detail, because he has a Bush-ian ignorance that he can just tell the world whatever fantasy he believes, like that he is the father of his children. Prince Michael I, Paris, & Prince Michael II ("Blanket") are Caucasian, visibly not half nor fully African-American - (Jackson claims the secret mother of Blanket is black). Whether he has convinced himself that his phoney degenerative skin disease has affected what color his children's skin will be, or if he has been lied to, or simply doesn't get that the rest of the world understands genetics better than he does, is a mystery. But on the interview he unblinkingly describes the conception of his children with their contractual mothers, & rhapsodizes lovingly about their family resemblance to other Jacksons. I feel I can say without much controversy that Joe Jackson is not their genetic grandfather. Whether this is because Michael Jackson does not possess the biological capabilities to create sperm may never be known. But at some point in his late thirties, he expressed the obsession to become a father (he says he would carry around baby dolls), & rather than going about the fairly conventional process of impregnating his wife with his own DNA (& celebrities with large egos are even more prone to want to sire replicas - like baseball player Manny Ramirez, who also named both his first two sons Manny, Jr.), Jackson somehow brought into this world three white children.

-Michael Jackson His Sexuality: Again, we may never know for sure if he is actually a sexual predator who has a history of ogling adolescents. He has been determined, thru several decades, to have sleepovers with kids, & it is even his naive & earnest desire is to admit it openly. This doesn't seem like the behavior of a pervert, who usually has some self-awareness of indiscretion. When I think of Humbert Humbert's caution & paranoia, Jackson comes off as much more of a foot-in-the-mouth putz. He is just so oblivious that, in his mind, kids aren't allowed to sleep in the same bed as other "kids". A better historical parallel may be Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the Oxford mathematics professor & Anglican clergyman, who wrote Alice in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Although Dodgson had many consecutive relationships with young girls, & even photographed some of them semi-nude, Carrollians are in general agreement that his relationships were "platonic". As an adult, Dodgson was a shy, nervous stuttering man, & he only ever felt comfortable around his child friends. It's more complicated than that of course, & one interesting aspect is that the age of Dodgson's girlfriends increased as he did, so that by the time he was an old man, he had several female friends who were in their twenties. As for any Victorian appreciation for the beauty of children, without the creepy sexual overtones always inflicted by our modern minds, we may never be able to see his photography-hobby as not suspect. I'll tell you what I think is creepy: the oil painting in Michael Jackson's house, shown behind him in the interviews, of a mostly-naked Michael in Renaissance style, surrounded by a dozen floating naked cherubs. The point is, even if he naively doesn't see the harm in this aestetic, can't he realize how twisted that seems to the rest of us! Dodgson's photographs have long since been salvaged from suspicion by art critics & biographers - (Go ahead! you can enjoy the beauty of Alice Liddell without feeling non-Catholic guilt or receiving a subpoena) - but there's something fundamentally disturbing about Jackson's tacky taste. I'm on the fence about what's actually going on in his psyche, why or how he is the way he is, what he actually did, & whether history will vindicate him.



If it ever comes out that Michael Jackson is a castrato, that would certainly add an interesting dimension to the discussions about his sexuality & psychology. I recall that in one of the court cases, there was some talk about the victim identifying something unusual about the defendant's genitalia, & there was going to be a photograph of the King of Pop's privates exhibited as corroborative evidence. Any revelation of that magnitude would have been explosive, impossible to keep away from the press. But could it have been....?

Read more from our fantastic weblog: www.itwaslost.org
UPDATE: I've posted some of the comments from this post in two new separate posts: here & here.
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Report from Corinth

The Earth, & shall it ever be,
I am not ashamed of it,
I don't cover up its embarrassing bits with pavement.
Like vines, extending from every orifice,
Ashamed of it, that scientists & houris praise?
I hope its glories are allowed to self-perpetuate thru endless days.

Ashamed of the Earth?
Just as soon let the mermaid be ashamed of the midnight lagoon.
Just as soon let cheese-making nuns be ashamed of the moon.
Just as soon let my barbiturate-induced glossolalia fail to be perceived as sacred.

Ashamed of the natural Earth & his conceits?
No, I am not ashamed..
Sooner far let the Ghosts of Anchorage raid the bazaar,
Sooner far let them shun their bodies & the cheats' receipts,
Sooner far let evening disown its strangest star.

Ashamed of our ways, our hearth & our glorious days?
Am I ashamed of the resources with which I create my continuing heaven?
No, when I blush, be this my shame,
That I have forgotten to honor the ground from where I came.

Music: S. Sandrigon, Gold Diamonds, Night Creature, & Drew Piston at the Sacred Grounds Last Night!

Last night I played a set of songs on my guitar, for a small but attentive crowd in the coffee shop in San Francisco. I was opening for Gold Diamonds & Night Creature, the elusive duo who rarely perform in public, followed by Drew Piston, all of which was lovely. Here's my set list:

You're Welcome, Willie Stewart (Robert Burns)
Gorgeous Borges (Robert Burns's Rantin' Rovin' Robin with modified lyrics)
My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose (Robert Burns)
Song of Favors
Anacreontic Song
Love Minus Zero / No Limit (Bob Dylan)
Father Drank Himself to Death
Staff in the Hand
Father Drank Himself to Death (Snake Handler Version)
I'm Goin' To See My Lord

Gold Diamonds & Night Creature did all covers: a fifties dance song, a Sun Ra song, a James Brown sing-along ("For goodness sakes! take a look at those cakes!"), & ended with some Mariachi. (They once planned on starting a Mariachi band called Los Sphinctores.) They played a tiny keyboard (hooked to some pedals) & sitar, then switched to guitar & fiddle for the final Mariachi. The singing was beautiful, inspiring - Miss Jenny Ruth Crawford described it as "like A Mighty Wind to the future." Drew Piston sang songs of whiskey, guns, & complicated love. I like his lyrics. In one song, he changed one word (after his brother misheard it), from "ward" to "whore", making the chorus:

I am waiting to see what you’ll say,
And the furniture’s been rearranged,
And there’s blood on the floor,
I am waltzing with the geriatric whore.

As for my set - I have never performed that Bob Dylan song in public before, even tho I first learned it many months ago. My guitar part is meant to sound kind of Merry-Go-Roundy, with the capo on the seventh fret. I sing it with the three songs before it to complete the "my love is like a" theme. Perhaps I'll tire of that theme some day. I wrote "Song of Favors" & "Anacreontic Song" four years ago - (around the time of the bombing of Baghdad, & I can still relevantly sing both. Both songs are based on the Burns love song, melodically & lyrically) - & have never published the lyrics, so here goes:

Song of Favors (2003)

Met a wench on Basra Street,
La a-la a-lala, bop shu-wop.
Saffron soldiers drowned in heat,
La a-la a-lala, bop shu-wop.
Was she crushed neath fallen idols on the concrete?
Where the shadows of the mirrors & the lizard mosques meet?
Which favor of the tan gazelle will both of you deny?
Which favor of the tan gazelle will both of you deny?

From the West does my love rise,
La a-la a-lala, bop shu-wop.
With her eyes see I her eyes,
La a-la a-lala, bop shu-wop.
New Jerusalem's an eccho of the old one.
Time & space have died the victim of a tasteless pun.
Which favor of the tan gazelle will both of you deny?
Which favor of the tan gazelle will both of you deny?





Anacreontic Song (2003)

My love is like a cold, cold beer.
No really - she's more smooth than that.
Although she's more white wine, I fear
She hath no wine cork for a hat.
Anchor steam rose.

I see my love upon a mountain,
The one true bride, so bright & clear.
Although there's sadness in the fountain,
Her tears are eighty proof, I swear.
Anchor steam rose.

My love's the question in the vineyard:
Can the pin unpierce the rod?
My love's the song the seraphin heard
When they burnt their space twixt God
And all his ecchoes in this glass.
My love doth every lovely booze surpass.
Anchor steam rose.

"Pleasant evening last night? Did you do any fornicating?"

-Richard Nixon, in Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon, now on Broadway.

"We cower as you point your fingers telling us to support our troops. You and the smarmy pundits in your pocket -- those who bathe in the moisture of your soiled and blood-soaked underwear -- can take that noise and shove it."

-Sean Penn

"I told Mr. Penn what I thought of his second rate wordsmithery right on this show. Well, Sean Penn has accepted my challenge. I drew a line in the sand and he picked up the gauntlet. Soon we will see who has the stones to bring home the bacon. This metaphor battle is at the starting gate and I am ready for liftoff."

-Stephen Colbert

Bookstore Conversations #1,300 & #1,301, & #1,302

Bookstore Conversation #1,300

Customer: Yeah, do you have those pens with the...
Your Hero: You know, Amsterdam Art went out of business. This is just a bookstore now.
Customer: Oh, no! When did that happen?
Your Hero: About eighteen months ago.
Customer: Oh! I guess I haven't been here for a while! But it was an institution! Do you know why it went?
Your Hero: A complicated mix of reasons.
Customer: What is this now?
Your Hero: A book store. We sell remaindered books, like leftover books that didn't sell in other stores.
Customer: Do you know where the closest art store is?
Your Hero: Yeah, it's four blocks down at University at Sixth, it's called Blick's.
Customer: Blake's?
Your Hero: No, Blick's.
Customer: And that's four blocks down, on the right or on the left?
Your Hero: On this side of the street. You'll see it.
Customer: Okay, thank you.
Your Hero: Have a nice day.


Book Store Conversation #1,301

Your Hero: Hello - Hello - Are you looking for an arts store?
Customer: Yes! What happened to it?
Your Hero: Amsterdam went out of business.
Customer: Oh, no! How long ago?
Your Hero: Eighteen months ago. We're just using this space to sell remaindered books.
Customer: Shit, I already put money in the meter. Is there an art store near by?
Your Hero: Four blocks down at University & Sixth, called Blick.
Customer: Blake?
Your Hero: No, Blick, like Richard Blick, Dick Blick's.
Customer: You know, you still have the art store sign up.
Your Hero: I know that. I'm powerless to take it down.


Book Store Conversation #1,302

Customer: This is a bookstore. Is Amsterdam next door?
Your Hero: No, they've gone out of business.
Customer: They've completely gone out of business. You don't have picture frames?
Your Hero: No, this is a bookstore now.
Customer: Is there an art store around here?
Your Hero: I have no idea.
Customer: Okay, thank you.

Follow-up: Violence to compensate for lack of talent.

Someone named Albert posted a long essay dissecting Seung Cho's bad plays on my April 18th "literary review." I responded below, but mostly what I meant was, don't look too closely at the perceived symbolism, any "symbolism" in this case or foreshadowing of violence is inflicted by the critic, the plays have zero depth. As for reading a lot of racial tension into Cho's life & work, even in his manifesto, he states his "revenge" was more driven by class than by his insecurities about his name & heritage.

Anyway, I feel vindicated by Stephen King, who came to some similar conclusions about Cho's artistic merit. I'll reprint his short essay for Entertainment Weekly here in full:

I've thought about it, of course. Certainly in this sensitized day and age, my own college writing — including a short story called ''Cain Rose Up'' and the novel RAGE — would have raised red flags, and I'm certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them, even though I interacted in class, never took pictures of girls' legs with my cell phone [...], and never signed my work with a ?.

As a teacher, I had one student — I will call him George — who raised red flags galore in my own mind: stories about flaying women alive, dismemberment, and, the capper, ''getting back at THEM.'' George was very quiet, and verbally inarticulate. It was only in his written work that he spewed these relentless scenes of gore and torture. His job was in the University Bookstore, and when I inquired about him once, I was told he was a good worker, but ''quiet.'' I thought, ''Whoa, if some kid is ever gonna blow, it'll be this one.'' He never did. But that was in the days before a gun-totin' serial killer could get top billing on the Nightly News and possibly the covers of national magazines.

For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do (James Patterson, for instance, a nice man who has all too often worked the street that my old friend George used to work). Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ''just mean.'' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by Columbine, but only because he was too dim to think up such a scenario on his own.

On the whole, I don't think you can pick these guys out based on their work, unless you look for violence unenlivened by any real talent.

I also think it's relevant to bring back up a controversy from ten years ago. I just remember Peter Schickele lambasting on his radio show a feminist music critic who claimed Beethoven was a "suppressed rapist" who took out his violent sexual longings on his music instead of on women. Schickele said that if that's the case, we should be giving manuscript paper to inmates. Beethoven either was a rapist or he wasn't (he wasn't), he may have been a tad crazy, but violent music is uncomparable to repressed violent urges. Many artists go to some pretty dark places to illuminate the human condition - Cho had more human condition than he did illumination.

Photos: A few from the Golden Gate Sacred Harp Convention 2007

Here's some photos of me singing Shape-Note songs at the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House in San Francisco on Saturday.



It was a great sing, lasting six hours. We had expected a larger turnout after, shockingly, the New York Times gave us a surprise plug the day before!

A schedule of singings across the country is maintained by the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association on the Web site fasola.org (from the Sacred Harp learning tones fa, so and la). In San Francisco, the Golden Gate Singing Convention takes place tomorrow. A flier lures in newcomers by saying: “The harmonies achieved by these untrained early American composers were so rich and delightful as to border on the sinful.” Coming in May are conventions at the University of Chicago and in Montclair, N.J.

The hyperlink on "Golden", tho, stupidly linked you to Golden, Colorado.

A Prophecy

In today's Economist, in a report about the downfall of the Neocons, it is written "Mr Cheney is proving no more destructible than Lord Voldemort." Well, as the world well knows, the seventh & final Harry Potter book will be released July 21st, in eighty-nine days. Nothing is certain, of course, & Lord Voldemort may prevail, Harry die, or both - but I tend to be an optimist - And, really, the series, marketed primarily to adolescents, has already be surprisingly dark. Furthermore, the last few weeks have shown people closer & closer to Bush going down, (altho, characteristically, neither Wolfowitz nor Gonzales have submitted their resignations). Let's take the Economist's sentence as a prophecy, & hope to see both You-Know-Whos fall in July. You heard it here first.

Special Report: Cho Seung-Hui No Great Playwright

For those who have not been following the fallout of the Virgina Tech shooting, it has come to light that the 23-year-old South Korean gunman was an English Major. More amazingly, his class writings were so disturbing that one of his professors, Lucinda Roy, had contacted the police & sent him to counseling. His poetry professor, Nikki Giovanni (whom Oprah is a fan of), said that his poems scared away his fellow students from attending class! From the Times Lede blog:

In interview after interview in newspapers and on TV, Ms. Giovanni has described a student whose behavior caused her creative writing class to drop from about 70 to 7 students in the fall of 2005.

“Once I realized my class was scared, I knew I had to do something,” she told The Washington Post.

So she confronted him about the dark sunglasses and maroon cap he would wear in class and the darker poetry that he would write.

“You can’t do that,” she told him, referring to the “intimidating” poems.

“You can’t make me,” he replied.

“Yeah, I can.”

Her next step was to lobby the department head, Lucinda Roy, writing a letter requesting he leave the class, she told CNN. And she was ready to go all the way.

“I was willing to resign before I would continue with him,” she told CNN. “It was the meanness.”

Well, two of his short plays have been leaked to the internet. Of course, they are as sick & angry as everyone has been saying they were. But I'm happy to report that they are also really dumb & poorly written. I must admit to having a brief glimmer of wonder if this was some misunderstood writer, & if his writings may have been "disturbing" like Nabokov is disturbing or Andres Serrano is disturbing. There is no depth tho, here's a passage from "Richard McBeef":

Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick ... Richard McBeef. What kind of name is that? What an asshole name. I don't like it. And look at his face. What an asshole face. I don't like his face at all. You don't think I can kill you, Dick? You don't think I can kill you? Gotcha. Got one eye ... Got the other eye.

The play is entirely a son & mother hurling dumb insults at their loser step-father, who has no redeeming qualities. With Ahab, the boy character shares a revenging obsession to kill a large Dick, but the sexual undertones in Melville are much more interesting. Are any of the insults at least a little Shakespearean in their variety? I admit to liking "Eat this, you giant tree trunk piece of ass." But, no, they're mostly pretty boring, like this rant:

What are you, a Catholic priest! I will not be molested by an aging balding overweight pedophilc stepdad named Dick! Get your hands off me you sicko! Damn you, you Catholic priest. Just stop it, Michael Jackson. Let me guess, you have a pet named Dick in Neverland ranch and you want me to go with you to pet him, right?

The second play is "Mr Brownstone", in which three 17-year-olds sneak into a casino with apparently no other purpose than verbally abusing their "ass-raping" math teacher Mr Brownstone, whose name is cleverly compared to a kidney stone. This play turns into a musical, with two of the eleven pages devoted to the kids singing a Guns 'n Roses song. Originally, there's a bit of diversity in the teens' obscenities, but by the last two pages, they settle on simply repeating "muthafucker" over & over again.

I assume it will only be a matter of time before someone leaks the poetry which so frightened Ms Giovanni's class. It's amazing to me that both these teachers went to the administration & even the police about this student's writings, almost two years before he was to become the gunman in the most violent non-Indian massacre in American history. Six years ago, performances of the works of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen were canceled after he made a comment comparing the September 11th bombings to a "great work of art". He publicly apologized, explaining that he had simply meant that the time, effort, & finances it takes to create a large work of destruction is comparable to creating something constructive, say, like an opera or a building. Not to mention how much more media attention the ideas & images "destructive art" can receive.

Cho had serious psychotic & angry tendencies & he expressed them first thru some terrible plays & then thru a violent movie-inspired rampage - (a semiautomatic gun in each hand? come on, man, that's as cliche as your pedophilic step-father, an uninspired blend of Claudius & Humbert Humbert). Interestingly, this massacre came right after Quintin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez's double-feature Grindhouse hit the cinemas - a very gory flick lampooning old slasher B-movies. Compare how Cho & Tarantino differ in their response to their shared muse - the latter with taste & irony, the former with a tragic lack of creativity & loss of human life. And Cho received ten times the media attention; possibly more people are reading his lame plays online today than watching that movie - indeed, I'm sure this real grindhouse will bitter everyone's taste to watch a clever send-up.

T.S. Eliot said "there will be time to murder and create", we all have the potential for either creation or destruction, but most of us won't make the news.

Doggerel about Naming Babies

I've been in further correspondence with Mr & Mrs Croak about the name of their imminent third-born, but it has not yet been declassified (in three weeks!) Meanwhile, here's a sub-par doggerel about naming babies:

My last name is Smith & I'm having my six billionth baby.
I used to name my kids John or Mary, but I'm getting more creative maybe.
Twenty percent of American Men are named Jim, John, Bob, Mike, Bill, or Dave.
But if I name my son Adolph, how will he behave?
If I name my daughter Thistle, will she hate me to the grave?
If I name my son Bob, will he put up another white picket fence?
Or if I name him Ronald, will he eat burgers until he is immense?
Or if I name him Donald, after the former Secretary of Defense,
Would he rebel against his name,
And achieve neither infamy nor blame,
But eat vegetables in a hermitage & write verses of nonsense?

The great-great-grandson of General William Tecumseh Sherman
Is a famous linguist named Tecumseh Stitch,
But all my ancestors were masons named Allan or Herman,
None were named Ulysses or Ormsby or Rufus or Godfrey or Mitch.

We used to name our girls after flowers, but now women drive S.U.V.s,
If her name doesn't fit a CEO, she might get indicted.
And some of the prettiest most useful flowers are on lemon trees or fig trees,
And if I named her Rubber, she might get blighted.

If I was a yuppie, naming her after a wine would be fine,
Like Syrah or Chardonnay or Pinot or Nebbiolo or Klingelberger,
Or if she is bubbly I could name her Gewürztraminer,
But I'm not a yuppie, so I won't cross that line.

The British name their daughters Penelope & Fiona,
The Americans name their daughters Madison & Emma,
Whatever happened to Elizabeth or Bess?
But I want my daughter to be unique, to go it alone-a.
You think picking the perfect name wouldn't be this big of a dilemma,
But it is a death of a mess.

Muslims tend to think their names are godsends,
But it gets pretty confusing up at paradise's door.
A lot of Westerners name their kids after Jesus's friends,
But I myself have never been a fan of war.

If I name him Louis will he act like a king?
If I name him Buddha will he ever eat any thing?
If I name him Frodo will he have to bear a really heavy ring?
If I name him after William Chester Miner, will he cut off his dingaling?

O what o what to name the world's six billionth baby?
Maybe I'll name him Dugong or maybe I'll name her Behemotha maybe?

R.I.P.

I am very sad about Kurt Vonnegut's death, & haven't really been able to find the words to write about it. I cannot believe what's just happened today, several dozen people gunned down on the Virginia Tech campus (not to mention the cow that died to make the gunman's jacket.) This is a terribly sad event which will dwarf discussions of all artist mortalities for a while. Many hundred people have already posted responses to the Times Lede blog, many very angry, with all sorts of political beliefs. I didn't want to enter into this discussion, but I couldn't believe how many people suggested that more students & professors should be armed to prevent against this kind of thing. More professors be armed!!?? Have you all lost your minds?

As for campus security, which many people seem to all of a sudden have tons of ideas about, this is surely not opening a floodgate of campus violence. More students will still die from binge drinking than lone gunmen. As for "freakanomics", which my father keeps telling me about, I like to bounce around this statistic: There are 3,000 Americans on Death Row (many of whom will not be executed); 3,000 people died in the September 11th bombings; there have been more than 3,000 American Deaths in Iraq since April 2004; and, for your comparison, there have been almost 250,000 American deaths from automobile accidents since the Iraq War. The point is that priorities and national anxieties rarely correspond with the numbers. In the next few weeks, this terrible shooting will be dragged up by everyone to talk about gun control, the Second Amendment (which was written in 1791, long before automatic weapons), violence from the entertainment industry, & campus security. But please, let's not turn our campuses into airports!

Mid April Apologia

Ah! Iakov, April is the cutest month, & I just heard Ute Lemper sing a Tom Waits lyric: "The orchestra is blind, but I've never been the worrying kind." She was also singing something like:

But all of your letters burned up in the fire
And the time is just memory mixed with desire
That's not the road, it's only the map, I say
Gone just like matches from a closed down cabaret.

Meanwhile, today, I've been scribing some very important epistles to Alabama about my May Journeyings. I would love to publish those here, but I'll wait until I can fully chronicle my adventures (singing 19th century folk choir music in Primitive Baptist Churches in Alabama, the only state of the union I've never been to.) Do I want to log my life in a blog, but I feel that I'm instinctually obscure. Does anyone enjoy reading my e-mails? Perhaps the United States Congress? First thing this morning, I posted a note to James Eliot Quill detailing my ongoings last week:

Dear James,

I just got your mumbled phone message. Yes, yes.

Virtue says her plant store has some coca plants in the grow room. I'm waiting to hear when they're ready for purchase. Maybe we could start a tea farm.

Things I've done in the past week:

-Won fifty dollars at the horse races (Jenny's 11-year-old niece picked all my winning horses just by looking at them.) -Saw a Neil Diamond Cover Band
-Communicated with almost two hundred beefy guys thru a fake personal on Craigslist under the persona of an alcoholic ex-Mormon dumb-blond-girl construction worker.
-Rescued a starfish from being thrown like a frisbee by a jerk asshole at the tide-pools.
-Danced with Liam Joseph Olaf Worland Golden to a ten-piece brass band.
-Wrote a poem in terza rima
-Drank a martini at a hipster bar.
-Worked forty hours at a slow bookstore.

But I'm not boasting of my activities.

I recommended trying to be in Cornish, New Hampshire, for J.D. Salinger's Ninetieth Birthday, January 1st 2009, before we hit Scotland for Burns Day; but Elle Czaog (LJOWG) said it's too cliche & Salinger doesn't want to be bothered. I suggested we don't bother him or try to find him, but just go to a pub there & toast him. Opinions?

Peace,
James

A few comments about some of that:

The fake Craigslist Posting, that ended up being one of my meanest tricks ever, & I'll report about it in detail, hopefully posting some of my letters written in character, once a bit of the guilt subsides.

As for the Coca Plant, I have not researched if these are legal, or if making a tea from the leaves is legal in this country. For the record, I do not enjoy cocaine, nor is the creation of this weblog enhanced by any controlled stimulants. Since this is a public space, viewable by all my potential future employers or professors, I must mention also that I do not regularly bet on the horses nor facilitate underage gambling. I abhor such behavior. It is sad that the historic Bay Meadows race track will be closing for good this fall. I encourage you to go one last time!

Celebrity Canto

Let’s take a walk thru history with an American icon.

Sure! He collects rare shards of colored glass from Turkey & Italy,

And he’s written a lot of books, but who has found time to read his last one?

Now he pauses on the Piazza, but there he goes, he runs like a century.

He ascends a mountain of fine light, it’s all been done before in particles.

Historians will disagree about whether he was depressed at this time or pretty happy.

Meanwhile, he’s already thinking about a poem he’ll write about this walk of dangling participles.

He has a brief adventure involving batrachian nepotism & a gutterful of shit.

Compared to the trials of Hercules he admits that he is no Hercules.

The mainstream media licks its lips thinking about every step of it.

He considers this when he considers every step he takes.

Then, losing himself, he does a gay little dance & slips into a gooey pit.

The media quickly sidetracks & reports that his mother died in those earthquakes.

There is an eruption of sympathy & he finds time to masturbate to an old John Ford movie.

Hark! thumps, claps, deafening huzzas! The gospel trombone & his mother awakes.

Scholars think that his imminent divorce was preoccupying his psyche,

But I know & you know that he was always focused on his public characterization.

He knows he looks good in that suede suit, but it’s out of style by the time he gets to the Louvre.

His wife actually was just raising a big stink about House-Elf Emancipation.

He was trying to bide his time by walking around the block again,

But the mainstream media realized they could sell more papers by popular music democratization.

The Chancellor of Germany sent her condolences, but sent it at the wrong time on the wrong train,

A small press illegally publishes his letters to his mistress, & he sues them into bankruptcy:

They were just being opportunistic, but no need to explain.

His wife leaves him like a free radio blitzkrieg, but her breasts have gotten flopsy.

Now his mistress is in every magazine, but he loses her & finds ten more corseted supermodels.

He converts to Mormonism! He jumps up & down in J. Edgar Hoover’s stilettos for all the world to see.

The Celebrity His Aria: I’ll condemn you all to the Ninth Circle, every last one of you pundit assholes!

My memoirs will be impenetrable, I’ll admit to raping half of the penitentiary!

How many volumes can even my most devoted enthusiast stomach? Remember the earlier puddles?

But it’s all given me some space to breathe. My ex-wife’s face was the crime of the century.

Your televisions are all pointed North. The penguins are finally safe from your scrutiny.

The British National Dish may be curry, but mine has gone home in a flurry.

House Arrest! There have been worse fates for Saloth Sar & the late Sheriff’s Deputy.

I can finally database my shard collection, & the historians can rot in my impunity.

A Theory of Gayness

I was just reading today's article about the genes of romance, in the New York Times ("Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes" by Nicolas Wade), & I had a few thoughts to add to it inspired by some of the BBC nature documentaries I've watched in the past months. (Alastair Fothergill's Planet Earth, sadly lacking David Attenborough, is playing for the next two sundays on the Discovery Channel. It's beautiful - watch it!) Neurologists now believe that the wires attracting a male brain to females or to other males have probably been connected before birth. (This is not true in women, who seem to always be attracted to both sexes, & any specific sexualities come from an innate pickiness for mates & for reproduction.) Now comes the big clue, that two Canadian researchers, Ray Blanchard and Anthony F. Bogaert, "have shown that having older brothers substantially increases the chances that a man will be gay. Older sisters don’t count, nor does it matter whether the brothers are in the house when the boy is reared." This is because of a "a maternal immune response to succeeding male pregnancies."

Obviously this is a mother's genetic response to the type of family she is creating, &, in a larger sense, the type of society she is living in. Having more males in your tribe means more fighting for females when the next generation comes to want to start families.

How males in different mammal species fight for mates varies greatly in levels of violence. A common trend in all animals, however, is what Richard Dawkins calls the "gloved fist", meaning that, no matter how dangerous the tusks or horns, there are civil rules of conduct, the duelers never fight to the kill, and the loser retreats as soon as he knows he's inferior. In the most violent of mammals, like Elephant Seals, whose males are huge & keep humongous harems of females numbering in the hundreds, the loser males band together in gangs & roam the waters, biding time until one can challenge a reigning king. This male bonding occurs in large mammals the world wide, from elephants to deer.

Now humans have many examples of the "gloved fist" romantic warfare, despite what Western movies make us believe. We also have many examples of gangs of males who haven't chosen a mate & settled down in a family to breed yet. But we are the most violent species that has ever lived on this planet. We regularly use our most advanced technologies to murder large numbers of other humans for ambiguous genetic benefits, sacrificing thousands of young males in the process. I could be easily led to believe that that "maternal immune response" that makes some sons homosexual only crops up in a species when that species evolves to be sufficiently violent enough to warrant any benefits from gayness. Some scientists have written that homosexuality increases fertility in other family members, & studies have shown that gay people on average have more relatives than straight people. Also, obviously, gay males are less prone to fighting. Historically, some societies with infamous rampant homosexuality are: Athens during the Greek Empire, Berlin after WWI, & America today: three exceptionally bellicose empires. (The arts and philosophy have also flourished in those places, with many gay men among their most prominent thinkers.) Is creating gay children a biological response to war?

E-mail: Male Baby Names Part I

I'm not allowed to publish my "opinions" about the four girls' names Mr & Mrs Croak are contemplating, but my list of fabulous boy names is safe for the gossipy public. Their first two children were named Imogene Croak & Arlen Croak.

Date:	Mon, 9 Apr 2007 13:25:05 -0700 (PDT)
From:	"James Welsch" <_@itwaslost.org>
Subject:	Male Names Part I
To:	"Mike & Esther Croak" <________@hotmail.com>
CC:	"Jenny Ruth Crawford" <__________@yahoo.com>

A few ideas (I'm sitting at work doing nothing, but using my brain, my strongest muscle since that tongue injury) for boys. You'll notice I have a penchant for the strong, old-fashion name.

Henry - My father's & my middle name, also my grandfather's & great-grandfather's name. A classy name which has fallen out of favor, a king's name, most oftenly associated with Henry VIII, who was, among other things, a sharp intellectual & religious innovator.

Serafino - I just noticed it as one of the many middle names of the gay 19th Century writer, Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe the Lord Corvo. Fiery angel. I've always liked "Sera" as a boy's name too, & it's never too late to give your son seven names plus a title.

Resolved - My ancestor who was the only pregnancy on the Mayflower, Resolved White. I guess that's pretty eccentric, but "Rezi" is cool.

Melville - author of the best book. "Mel" has now skipped a generation, & can probably be safely brought back without its Borscht-Belt associations (i.e. Mel Brooks, another of my heroes.)

Ignatius - the 2nd Century Christian whose awesome epistles got cut from the bible--; also, St. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuits. Definitely a classy name, perhaps more associated these days with the hero of "A Confederacy of Dunces". Maybe Iggy?

Augustus - Octavio Caesar gave himself this name, meaning "totally cool", when he inherited the empire. Then he messed up the calendar, stole some days from February, & created the month August. In 1869, Adolphus Busch, an innovative beer brewer with great ambition, married Eberhard Anheuser's daughter. His great-great-grandson August Anheuser Busch IV is now the Chairman of the Board.

Sirius - Canine/stars - Sirius Black from Harry Potter.

Dugong - One of Jenny's & my favorite sea mammals, one of the oceans only herbivores. Dugong Croak!

Busby - like Busby Berkeley, who was (according to Wikipedia) "famous for his elaborate musical production numbers that often involved complex geometric patterns".

Roy - another old cowboy name like Arlen. My uncle who teachers statistics at M.I.T. is named Roy Elmer Welsch.

Spenser - It's funny this name has a weak connotation. Edmund Spenser wrote the longest poem in the English language, hardly girly work.

Jonah - As far as biblical names go, how can you beat the prophet who rode inside a whale?

James - the most common male baby name from the 40s thru 60s, it has now fallen tragically to 17! We need all the help we can get, especially to beat out upstarts like Tyler (16) or Ethan (5!).

Luckily, just about any name sounds great with Croak. Maybe not Sirius, but certainly all of the strong Latin-y names like Ignatius or Adolphus sound great.

I'll e-mail you when I think of more. Don't forget the baby names graph: http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

Peace,
James

Doonesbury's Bush-at-Warisms 2007: More settable texts for ambitious composers

Short Spring Short Reading List

It's spring & finals are approaching for the busier human beings. I'm daydreaming about a singing trip to Alabama in May. Who has time to read a novel? Did you know that less then 50% of Americans will read a novel this year? I blame it on Sanjaya Malakar. While Sam Amidon was working on his list of top ten movies for 2007, I was compiling a short list of short excerpts in American Literature, manageable-sized chunks to read on the grass when you're pretending to be studying but actually looking at dancing hippies (see picture). Most of this list is lesser-read stuff by great dead-white-male American tragicomedians.

A) Herman Melville - Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, Chapters 8 thru 12.
Accidental covert American agent Israel Potter is sent on a secret mission to give Dr. Ben Franklin a message in Paris during the Revolutionary War. Melville portrays Franklin as a nearsighted know-it-all & the adventurer Paul Jones as a bastard.

B) Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon, Chapters 27 & 28.
Read this after Melville's portrait of Franklin. Charles Mason & Jeremiah Dixon go womanizing with Franklin in Philadelphia, & come away with an impression that the famous inventor is "unfocused." I've annotated these chapters for Liam Joseph Olaf Worland Golden, & I'll publish my notes here soon. In Chapter 28, Mason & Dixon go to Col. George Washington's plantation, & meet his despondent Jewish slave Gershom.

C) Mark Twain - Roughing It, Chapters 12 thru 17.
Nothing is funnier than Twain's send-up of Salt Lake City, reflections of when he pass'd thru it in the early days of Western Expansion. An entire chapter is devoted to slamming the Mormon Bible.

D) J.D. Salinger - "Teddy" from Nine Stories.
A beautiful classic. Salinger turns ninety on January 1st, 2009, nineteen days before Bush leaves office & twenty-four days before Robert Burns's 250th. (The title for Jerome David's only published novel is from a Burns song.) I was trying to figure out how to send him a telegram in Cornish, New Hampshire, but apparently the wires are down. "Teddy", about a ten-year-old genius, is good to read next to:

E) Jonathan Safran Foer - Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
I love this book, & it's a pretty fast read. Nine-year-old Oskar Schell decides to track down everyone in the New York Phone book with the last name Black, determined it should prove that his dead father loved him. (It's shorter if you skip the letters from his Grandparents, but go back & read them this summer.)

F) Dashiell Hammett - The Thin Man.
Another fast read, Hammett's classic post-noir mystery written at the beginning of the noir craze. The wit of the husband-&-wife detectives has not dulled over the years (as opposed to anything Chandler wrote). The old movie is also amazing. "You look like I need a a drink!"