Cosmos | Warm | Pet Merlot | Comptche Excitement | Golden Torch | Soma Reset | Dragon Head | AV Events | Garage Sale | Yesterday's Catch | Hinckle Memoir | Democratic Socialism | Bibi's Wingman | Getting Stoned | Get Back | Cow Stripes | Marco Radio | Giants Win | Eldorado Biarritz | By Marriage | Fireworks Explosion | Dead Day | Rightward Drift | CBD Wigs | Software Development | Night Cafe | Mississippi Died | Painted Hills | Africatown, AL | Frank Zappa | Lead Stories | Texas Flooding | Confederate Cheerleaders | Embracing Contradictions | Russiagate Deception | Winesburg, Ohio | Mailer Interview | Tahiti Street | The Mowers | Kathe Kollwitz
TEMPERATURES continue to increase through Monday in the interior. There is a slight chance for interior thunderstorms Monday and Wednesday along with slightly cooler temperatures. Hot weather with temperatures over 100 degrees possible by Thursday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A foggy 51F this Sunday morning on the coast. It looks like the show went on nicely last night? Our fog/sun daily mix will continue into the new week, no big changes in sight.
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
We’re putting out a cuteness alert for this lovely young girl! Merlot is a friendly, playful 5-6 month old, loaded with puppy antics and love. Still a youngin' Merlot is brimming with energy, loves playing with toys, enjoys a good game of tug-of-war, and still has that adorable and goofy puppy clumsiness. This girl is smart and oh-so-beautiful, with a gorgeous coat and soulful eyes. She’s guaranteed joy in canine form.
Currently 36-ish pounds, Merlot is a great age to start puppy training classes, where she is sure to be an attentive student.
For information about all of our adoptable dogs and cats, and our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com.
Join us the first Saturday of every month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event.
For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453. Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!
SHERIFF MATT KENDALL:
We had a lot of moving parts during the 4th of July weekend throughout Mendocino County. This week it started with a little track meet at the Comptche Store where we had to chase down a wanted subject who had pulled a crime in Boonville. Luckily my commanders from central sector and the coast responded quickly and we took gold. This was largely due to the locals being good communicators. My hat is off to them.
Belinda at the Comptche store had quite the crowd gathering to see why all the patrol cars were in town. She should’ve sold tickets to the event. Following this arrest she was kind enough to set up a small station with water and a bottle of tecnu for those deputies who don’t respond well to poison oak.
With the celebrations in Willits, Fort Bragg, Mendocino and Point Arena we were stretched a little thin. But so far so good. I’m knocking on wood that we can keep the pot from boiling over.
One thing for certain: everywhere I have been so far, our residents have treated each other and my deputies well. I can’t thank folks enough for that. It gives me hope that the noise from our warring political parties hasn’t infected all of us.
God bless America and God bless all the folks in Mendocino County for continuing to look out for each other. And I almost forgot, God bless Jim Shields and all of the commenters and those good old fellows at the AVA. If they weren’t stirring the pot we might all forget how bad some of these things stink!
RETURN PORTALS!
You Don’t Need More Stimulation. You Need Soma.
If you’ve been feeling tired, scattered, over-stimulated — or just longing for deeper clarity and presence — I want to invite you into something special.
SOMA: Nectar of Insight, Ritual & Radiance
Sunday, July 13 | 10am-3pm | In-Person at The Shala + Online
This is not another breathwork class.
It’s a mid-summer rite of passage — a reset for your nervous system and a remembering of your inner nectar.
We’ll gather in ritual to explore:
Soma — the ancient elixir of bliss in Vedic and Tantrik teachings Breathwork — to clear stagnation & awaken inner fire KAP (Kundalini Awakening Process) — a 40-minute subtle transmission that’s gentle, non-verbal, and deeply effective
No substances will be served — but we’ll explore microdosing wisdom, Ayurvedic soma herbs, and the kind of somatic magic that doesn’t wear off.
Whether you're called by the Moon, breathwork, or inner alchemy — this is your portal back to yourself.
Enroll here: https://justinelemos.com/events-39a3V/soma
Register by July 10 to receive a Jyotish Full Moon report + breathwork integration audio
Come as you are. Leave re-attuned.
With love from the lunar current,
Justine Lemos, PhD
Ayurveda, Tantra, Vedic Astrology
theshala.love | @justinelemosphd
CAT SPYDELL: Our Dragonwood dragonhead stump was covered up by plants so I retrieved it, relocated it, cleaned it up, & gave it a blown-glass eye, created years ago by my glass artist daughter Cassidy!
ANDERSON VALLEY EVENTS
Yorkville Community Garage Sale
Sun 07 / 06 / 2025 at 11:00 AM
Where: Yorkville Community Center/PO/Fire Station, 25400 Hwy 128,
Yorkville, CA 95494 More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4704)
The Anderson Valley Museum Open
Sun 07 / 06 / 2025 at 1:00 PM
Where: The Anderson Valley Museum , 12340 Highway 128, Boonville , CA
95415 More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4784)
CV Starr Rec. Center Trips on Mondays
Mon 07 / 07 / 2025 at 9:30 AM
Where: CV Starr Rec. Center, 300 S. Lincoln St., Ft. Bragg, CA 95437 More
Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4772)
AV Village Walking Group - all welcome
Tue 07 / 08 / 2025 at 9:00 AM
Where: Meet at the Community Park (near the AV Health Center) More
Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4800)
AV Village Chair Yoga
Tue 07 / 08 / 2025 at 11:15 AM
Where: Anderson Valley Senior Center , 14470 Highway 128, Boonville, CA
95415 More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4761)
Senior Center Lunch
Tue 07 / 08 / 2025 at 12:00 PM
Where: Anderson Valley Senior Center , 14470 Highway 128, Boonville, CA
95415 More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4764)
Moving to the Groove
Tue 07 / 08 / 2025 at 1:00 PM
Where: Anderson Valley Senior Center , 14470 Highway 128, Boonville, More
Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4697)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, July 5, 2025
ALFREDO BOLANOS, 32, Sonoma/Ukiah. DUI.
MICHAEL DEJONG, 42, Ukiah. Vandalism.
MERINO GOMEZ, 29, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. DUI, suspended license for DUI.
ANDREW KASPERKIEWICZ, 40, Ukiah. Public nuisance, criminal threats.
BRYAN LOCKWOOD, 34, Ukiah. Parole violation.
SHADIN PETERSON, 24, Willits. Domestic abuse, false imprisonment.
STEPHEN SERR, 30, Ukiah. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent, paraphernalia.
ISIDRO TEJEDA, 32, Laytonville. Controlled substance.
RIODRAN WILHELMI, 41, Mendocino. Failure to appear.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Democratic socialism, which is not communism, is a good thing, as a visit to one of the European countries quickly reveals. We should be so lucky to have a country with universal health care, affordable day care, and the ability to live without the fear of financial ruin if you contract a serious illness. Perhaps one day we'll join the rest of the civilized world.
HAWKS OF A FEATHER
Editor:
Engaging American military force in parallel with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bombing of Iran continued the abandonment of President Donald Trump’s campaign assertions that he would immediately end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, while maintaining disengagement in any other disputes. Waging an aerial assault in conjunction with Netanyahu, who is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, is inviting a guilty by association world view of our president and the United States. This will not make America look great, flying wing to wing with Netanyahu.
Rob Liroff
Petaluma
WHAT GOD WANTS
Hello everybody,
God Almighty Wants This.
Just chillin’ at the air conditioned main public library in Washington, D.C. Have sent out emails asking for help to 1. Return to California 2. Get my EBT card to work again 3. Get my SSI benefits back, and 4. Get my federal housing voucher back… to the political offices of California Gov. Newsom and District 2 representative Jared Huffman. I’ll skip contacting the Mendocino County pol who, as you may recall, informed me that the government does not owe me anything (after I voted for her). Aside from the fact that America’s consumerism-on-steroids attempt at a society does not value me, I still am here with a spiritual purpose. Next up, automatic writing? I could make use of the money in my checking account and fly to the Santa Rosa airport, whereupon I would be homeless and outside. Ultimately what you call “God” will take care of everything, because it would be impossible to act in accord with the highest will if one were not in the body-mind complex. If you understand this, please assist me in returning to California and getting stabilized. Thank you.
Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]
STRIPES
Scientists believe that a function of a zebra’s stripes is to deter insects, so a team of researchers painted black and white stripes on several cows and discovered that it reduced the number of biting flies landing on the cows by more than 50%
MEMO OF THE AIR: The gnurrs come from the voodvork out.
Hanson raced up with sirens screaming. He left his escort of MPs and ran across the platform. Pale and panting, he reached the President and, though he tried to whisper, his voice was loud enough to catch the General's ear. The-- the gnurrs!" he choked, "They're in Los Angeles!"
Marco here. Here's the recording of last night's (9pm PDT, 2025-07-04) 8-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part: https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0651
Coming shows can feature your own story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.
Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:
Born Free America. https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/07/an-overdose-of-american-style-patriotism.html
Strictly speaking, you're not supposed to do this, make clothes out of flags. One time when I was in fifth grade, um, 1969, when we lived in Carmichael, my step-brother Craig and I rode our bikes to the Metropolitan Army Nayy surplus store to browse around in its vast dim labyrinthine interior of fun stuff. Gas masks, bayonets, walkie-talkies the size of a shoebox, weird tools, nuts, bolts and wheel bearings, khaki coats, skis and ski boots (!), just everything. I found a folded-up giant canvas U.S. flag for 50 cents, lugged it home on the handlebars, and got out the Simplicity patterns to think about making an overalls suit out of it to wear to school. My mother said no. I said, It was just fifty cents; it was my fifty cents. She gave me fifty cents and took the flag away. Aw, man. No fair. Also, that kind of impulse project was how I learned to type on a typewriter, and make go-karts, and do everything else. I would have learned to use a sewing machine, and just think what entirely different fabulous road I might be on now. https://www.vintag.es/2025/07/flag-inspired-fashion.html
We're all Americans! (Scroll down to videos.) https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/07/04/repost-american-institutions/
Thank you for your cooperation. https://boingboing.net/2025/07/01/tom-the-dancing-bug-know-your-ice-agent.html
And here's one of the many super stories in Ted Chiang's collection The Story of Your Life and Other Stories. It's /Hell Is The Absence of God/. It's about a world just like ours, but where mythical biblical religious creatures are real and there's an afterlife. I think you'll like it. It's sad, steady and thoughtful. https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/hell-is-the-absence-of-god
Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
A RARE NIGHT OF GOOD NEWS and results for Giants as they beat A’s
by Susan Slusser
WEST SACRAMENTO — Everywhere you looked Saturday, fun things were going on at Sutter Health Park. Mostly for the San Francisco Giants, but the A’s had a few good vibes, too.
Matt Chapman returned to San Francisco’s lineup after missing a month with a right hand sprain and reached base four times; Logan Webb, pitching near his hometown, tamped down an A’s offense that scored 11 the night before; and Heliot Ramos, drilled by a pitch in the first inning, responded with a homer in the fifth in the Giants’ 7-2 win over Sacramento.
Webb, who is from Rocklin, had pitched at then-Raley Field as a minor-leaguer, but this was his first big-league start in Sacramento, and he had much of the crowd on his side.
“I heard it the minute I walked out there, people yelling at me,” Webb said, adding that pitching coach J.P, Martinez, like Andrew Bailey before him, loves to invoke his hometown when motivating him. “I always get, like, ‘Go Thunder!’ or ‘Go Rocklin!’ I got a lot of that today, J.P. was giving me a hard time but it was a blast. I love, love being here and I’m happy I was able to get the win.
“Every time I got an out or a strikeout, I felt like the whole crowd was cheering me on.”
Webb didn’t need to boost his chances at getting named to the National League All-Star team on Sunday, because he’s pretty much a lock, with fellow starter Robbie Ray also a strong candidate. The A’s made him work, especially in the sixth, when with one out, the bases loaded and a run already in, Webb got Tyler Soderstrom, the team’s top RBI man, to bounce into a double play, his second of the night.
Manager Bob Melvin believes Webb is a shoo-in to be named to the NL squad. “It’s a no-brainer for me,” he said. “I don’t know how he’s not.”
Webb went 6 ⅔ innings and allowed two runs, seven hits and three walks while striking out six. His 2.62 ERA is fifth best among NL starters; at 2.68, Ray’s is eighth best. Webb’s 133 strikeouts are second most behind Zach Wheeler’s 136 and Ray is fifth at 117. And when it comes to All-Star candidates, the bullpen has two: Randy Rodriguez, who came on in the seventh and got Jacob Wilson to pop up to end the inning and strand two, and Tyler Rogers, who worked a perfect eighth.
“I think Randy has been the best reliever in baseball,” Webb said. “I really hope he gets it. And Ty Rog should have been an All-Star for the past five years.”
“I don’t know that there’s a better setup man or a guy that’s come in and been a fireman and done what he’s done this year,” Melvin said of Rodriguez, pointing to Rodriguez’s 0.71 ERA, then adding, “Tyler too. Robbie too. Well, I mean, we’re not going to get all those guys, but I know I’m probably biased.”
Chapman had an infield single, a walk and scored two runs in his return, and, like Ramos, he was hit by a pitch in the first inning as the Giants-fan heavy sellout crowd of 12,298 booed. Willy Adames drove in two runs with a single that inning, and he drove in two more with another in the third.
“When we score some runs early in the game, we tend to do a little bit better, and then we’ve got Logan on the mound,” Melvin said. “So it was pretty feel-good from the beginning.”
The best way to respond to teammates getting drilled is driving them in. “You want to take advantage of that situation,” Adames said.
Like Webb, Adames was tickled by the number of Giants fans at the A’s park. “You know, I thought we were playing at home,” he said. “It feels like we have more fans in the A’s — no offense.”
Luis Severino (2-10), the A’s top offseason acquisition, allowed five runs in four innings, just his latest disappointing outing, but there are reasons for optimism overall for a team with one of the better collections of young hitters in the game.
Sacramento had four first-round picks in the lineup Saturday, including Rookie of the Year candidates Jacob Wilson and Nick Kurtz, plus Soderstrom and third baseman Max Muncy. There were two more A’s first-rounders on the scene: Chapman and A’s first-base coach Bobby Crosby, and it might not have been a coincidence that the Kings’ top draft picks, Nique Clifford and Maxime Raynaud, threw out the first pitches Saturday.
For comparison’s sake, the Giants had two of their first-rounders in their order, Ramos and catcher Patrick Bailey — plus Matt Williams, coaching third base. And does it count that Soderstrom’s dad, Steve, was a Giants’ first-rounder?
(sfchronicle.com)
A HUSBAND AND WIFE drove for miles in silence after a terrible argument in which neither would budge.
The husband pointed to a mule in a pasture.
"Relative of yours?" he asked.
"Yes," she replied. "By marriage."
7 BODIES FOUND at Site of California Fireworks Warehouse Explosion
The explosion, which left seven people missing, started a wildfire and forced some cities and counties to cancel or postpone Fourth of July fireworks shows.
by Yan Zhuang
Seven bodies were recovered on Saturday at the site of a fireworks warehouse explosion in Northern California this week that set off a wildfire and forced San Jose and other cities to cancel or reschedule Fourth of July shows.
The explosion on Tuesday, in a Yolo County farming community about 30 miles northwest of Sacramento, injured two people and started a 78-acre wildfire that prompted evacuation orders. Seven other people were reported missing, officials said.
Lt. Don Harman of the Yolo County Sheriff’s Office said on Saturday that the bodies of seven people had been recovered at the site. The coroner’s office will use rapid DNA testing to identify them, he said in a phone interview.
Investigators will keep searching on Sunday to make sure there are no other victims, Lieutenant Harman said, adding that a criminal investigation was continuing.
Families of the missing have been on edge since Tuesday. Three of the seven missing people are brothers who worked at the warehouse, Angel Barajas, a Yolo County supervisor who represents the district where the explosion occurred, told The New York Times this week.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is leading the investigation into the explosion, the cause of which remains unclear. The agency has said that such accidents are very rare, and that it believes the warehouse was owned by an active pyrotechnic license holder. It has not named the company.
The warehouse was operated by a company named Devastating Pyrotechnics. The company says it “has produced displays in the San Francisco Bay Area and other California venues for over 30 years,” according to an archived version of its website. Devastating Pyrotechnics said in a statement on its website that it would cooperate with the authorities.
Douglas Horngrad, a lawyer whose contact information is listed on Devastating Pyrotechnics’ website, said on Sunday that he represented Kenny Chee, whom several media outlets have named as the chief executive of the company.
“Mr. Chee is innocent of any wrongdoing,” Mr. Horngrad said via email, and said he would have no further comment until the investigation was concluded.
San Jose, Northern California’s most populous city, was among several cities and counties that canceled or postponed Fourth of July fireworks shows after losing their pyrotechnics in the explosion. Others included Yuba County and the cities of Cloverdale and St. Helena.
(nytimes.com)
CALIFORNIA’S RIGHTWARD DRIFT
by Dan Walters
The Democratic Party’s eight months of internal debate, recriminations and soul searching that followed Donald Trump’s win and Kamala Harris’ loss in last year’s presidential duel got another jolt last month, when an otherwise obscure 33-year-old state legislator finished first in New York City’s mayoral primary.
Many Democratic leaders have concluded that Trump’s win was rooted in the image of their party reflecting priorities of college-educated coastal elitists rather than everyday issues affecting blue-collar families, such as inflation, crime and immigration.
The remedy, many concluded, lies in turning a bit to the right, downplaying such issues as climate change and paying more attention to bread-and-butter concerns.
However, the surprise primary win in New York by declared “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani, making him the favorite to become mayor of the nation’s largest city, creates a new wrinkle in the Democrats’ post-election debate.
Mamdani stressed the cost of living and other working class issues, promising that if elected he would make life easier for New Yorkers. He’s advocated for rent freezes, increases in minimum wages and having the city open its own grocery stores to drive down food costs.
Mamdani’s emergence as a new party leader with a pronounced left-of-center campaign resonates a continent away in California, a one-party state whose dominant Democrats are often divided along ideological lines, pitting Mamdani-like progressives against business-oriented moderates.
In the main, progressives have been losing ground to the mods, even in the San Francisco Bay Area, the bluest region in a deep-blue state. Daniel Lurie’s recent election as mayor of San Francisco, on pledges to balance the city’s deficit-ridden budget and crack down on street crime, is one indication of that trend. The recall or rejection of other Bay Area progressive officeholders in recent elections is another.
As the political website Politico noted recently, “Zohran Mamdani’s rise in New York enraptured progressives across the country. But for activists in San Francisco, it’s a sobering reminder of just how far they’ve fallen in this onetime bastion of progressivism.”
The conflict is also very evident in the state Capitol, with the political arc of Gov. Gavin Newsom a pithy example.
While running for governor in 2018 Newsom — the former mayor of San Francisco — paddled his political canoe to the left, embracing such leftist iconic causes as single-payer health care.
However, over the next six years Newsom slowly drifted rightward in policy terms, calling for tougher attitudes toward encampments of homeless people, dispatching Highway Patrol officers to fight street crime and, most recently, opposing transgender women competing in women’s sports.
Newsom even dropped his advocacy of single-payer health care in favor of wider coverage by the state’s Medi-Cal program, then sought to cut back on that coverage to close a state budget deficit this year.
As Newsom distanced himself from the progressive agenda — perhaps to make himself more viable as a presidential candidate in 2028 — its advocates found that the Legislature became less amenable as well. Progressive agenda bills could often gain passage in one legislative house only to die, almost always without any formal votes, in the other house.
Last year’s election also indicated that while California is a blue state, it’s nowhere close to embracing the democratic socialist program. Not only did Trump do surprisingly well against Kamala Harris in California’s presidential voting, but voters passed Proposition 36, an anti-crime measure that most Democratic leaders, including Newsom, opposed as a regression from criminal justice reforms.
This week’s passage of two Newsom-backed bills to overhaul the California Environmental Quality Act over the opposition of major environmental groups was another indication that, if anything, California’s politics are drifting slowly rightward.
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT CYCLE
1. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
2. Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
3. Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren't really bugs.
4. Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn't work and discovers 15 new bugs.
5. Repeat three times steps 3 and 4.
6. Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.
7. Users find 137 new bugs.
8. Original programmer, having cashed his bonus check, is nowhere to be found.
9. Newly-assembled programming team of 6 developers works overtime to decipher the spaghetti code and fix almost all of the 137 bugs. But they introduce 247 new ones.
10. Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.
11. Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 411 bugs.
12. New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He fires software development team and hires a new programmer to redo program from scratch.
13. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
THE DAY THE MISSISSIPPI DIED
by Gillian Welch (2024)
Way up on the Erie they like their chops so fat
I've seen the League of Women lick their fingers like a cat
While out in California they like their soya beans
I pretty much eat anything from soup to turnip greens
I try to treat my neighbors like I like them to treat me
Even when they got that dog and cut down that tree
I hate that barking dog I miss that old oak everyday
But I don't expect everyone to see the world my way
Now the truth is hard to swallow it's hard to take
But I do believe we've broken what we never knew could break
I'm just so disappointed in me and you
But we can't even argue so what else can we do
Now the other day I saw a living picture torn from Hell
Taken down in Kensington a place you all know well
I saw demons laughing, breaking people just for play
I cried at the table then I put my tears away
I dug my hands deep into the black Mother Earth
Tried to raise my spirits up for what it's worth
You laughed and said "Aw honey, now what did you expect?"
Not these tears and nightmare years where madness goes unchecked
My pony he did stumble and sent me to the sky
When the jury brought the verdict it was the blue-tail fly
I'm thinking that this melody has lasted long enough
The subject's entertaining but the rhymes are pretty rough
So fill 'em up once again boys
Fill 'em up and over the brim boys
There's whiskey but the water's done run dry
Oh we're drinking to the end
Of a long long friend
And the day the mighty Mississippi died
AFRICATOWN, ALABAMA WAS FOUNDED After A White Man Bet He Could Smuggle in a Hundred New African Slaves, Costing Thousands Their Lives
by Shannon Quinn
In 1807 to 1808, the United States outlawed the slave trade, and started prosecuting people who captured new slaves and bring them into the country. However, they would not outlaw owning slaves for several more decades. Slaves that had been purchased before 1808 were still considered to be private property, and the children of those slaves were not allowed to go free. They were considered assets of the family that owned them, and they became the next generation of servants that were bound.
In 1860 Mobile, Alabama, one businessman named Timothy Meaher made a bet that he could smuggle a hundred new African slaves into the United States, even though it was against the law. No one believed him, so he decided to prove that it could be done. This single bar bet changed the lives of thousands of people, and it lead to the establishment of Africatown, Alabama.
The Bet That Cost People Their Lives
Timothy Meaher was a wealthy businessman from Mobile, Alabama who owned a company called International Paper. He specialized in trading goods all around the world. He owned a huge amount of land and a lumber mill, which was used to make paper. Large boats would carry the paper goods to other countries. He was able to make a huge fortune off of his business. Many parts of Europe had a shortage of trees that they could cut down and make into paper, but America was full of them.
As a wealthy man living in the south, Meaher would often hear his friends grumbling about how they were angry that they were no longer allowed to purchase new African slaves, and they had to settle for the ones they already had. At this point, it was over 50 years since the laws had changed, so the number of slaves that were passed down to the new generation of slave owners was getting smaller.
The richest men living in Mobile, Alabama would spend their weekends in riverboat casinos drinking, gambling, and smoking cigars. Timothy Meaher claimed that he was so great at conducting international trade, he could bring anything into the country- even slaves.
Since these men were already used to high-stakes gambling, someone bet Meaher $100,000 that he couldn’t actually bring a hundred new African slaves into Alabama without getting caught. In today’s money, that’s more like $2.5 million. Meaher accepted the challenge. A man named Captain William Foster worked for Meaher, and he was given the task of taking $9,000 in gold to buy the slaves by any means necessary. Foster hired a crew of men to help him.
Foster learned that the west African tribes were still going to war with one another, and that there were still opportunities to buy captured slaves. They built a schooner called the Clotilda, and they arrived on the shore of a country called Benin. There were thousands of people who had been captured from various tribes and countries. It is estimated that Foster bought 110 to 125 slaves, because his boss needed 100 to win the bet. He thought that it was always possible that some of them would die on the journey back to the United States, which is why they needed to buy a few extra. Thankfully, none of them died.
Captain Foster knew that the authorities would be waiting for them in Alabama. The rumors about the bet that Meaher made on the riverboat had gone through the town, so the authorities were searching every boat that entered Mobile Harbor, looking for these smuggled slaves.
Foster anchored the ship in a smaller harbor in Mississippi near the Alabama border. He rode on horseback to meet Timothy Meaher and let them know the location of the Clotilda. They brought a river steamboat over to the Clotilda, and moved the slaves over to the new boat. River boats went up and down the Mississippi River all the time, and they were usually filled with tourists or people who were looking to have a good time. There was no reason for the police to want to inspect a river boat.
When they arrived on the shore, Meaher burned the boat to destroy the evidence. Remains of the wreck still lay on the shore of Mobile Bay. Timothy Meaher was even taken to court to answer for the crimes that he was accused of, but but there was not enough evidence to convict him. He got away with it.
The Founding of Africatown
Once he won the bet, Timothy Meaher sold the slaves on the down-low, but kept many of them to work on his land. After slavery was abolished in 1865, he couldn’t care less what happened to the people he brought over. He was not about to spend the money to take them home, either. So he let them go. Many of them didn’t know how to speak English, and white people were not allowed to purchase new slaves anymore, they couldn’t exactly find a place to live or work.
Meaher allowed them to live on his property in the north end of Mobile, in a plot of dense forest known as Hog Bayou. As the name suggests, wild boars ran through the woods, as well as deer. The water was full of fish, and lush vegetation was all around them, as well. As members of African tribes, they still knew how to hunt and survive on their own. This area became known as “Africatown”, and it was the first all-black neighborhood in the United States.
The people who came over on the Clotilda did not spend very much time living as slaves, so they still spoke their native languages and very much held on to their cultural values. These former African slaves wanted to go back to their homeland, but their former owners refused to help fund the journey. In Africatown, they were able to govern themselves under tribal law. They became the first and only African-American community to do so.
The former slaves who were born in the United States and spoke English didn’t know how to survive in the wild on their own, and they didn’t have enough money to figure out a way to travel back to their native villages. When they found Africatown, they were accepted with open arms. They were taught how to hunt and fish.
Some of these people reached out to Timothy Meaher for work. He and his brother James owned a lumber mill, so they agreed to take on some of these former slaves as paid employees. With this money, they were able to buy private property and make themselves Africatown an official part of Mobile, Alabama. Unfortunately, white business owners would eventually take away the little piece of home that these people had built for themselves.
The last remaining person who was still living in Africatown who came over on the Clotilda was a man named Cudjoe Lewis. He gave an interview about the whole story of what happened to the slaves who were smuggled into Alabama in the 1930’s, but his testimony was buried in the town archives for decades. An author named Zora Neale Hurston found his story and wrote a book called Barracoon: The Story of The Last Black Cargo.
As the years went on, more and more factories were built around the bay. At first, people living in Africatown loved this, because it created more jobs. The town grew bigger with a grocery store, Elk’s Lodge, barber shops, motel, and movie theater. The only problem was the massive chemical refinery that opened up right next to the town, billowing putrid and toxic smoke over the homes of the people. According to residents, there were days when even stepping outside and breathing the air would make people sick and vomit.
The Legacy of Africatown
By the 1970’s, the pollution from the factories was enough to make plenty of people want to leave Africatown for good. It was no longer safe to breathe the air. Cars would rust after being only a couple years old, and roofs of houses were disintegrating. Something was seriously toxic.
In the 1980’s, a huge portion of Africatown was torn down to construct a highway. While they were digging, they uncovered a huge field of bones. Residents say that it was a graveyard of unmarked graves of the slaves who died on the Clotilda. The government said they were just “dog bones”. They kept moving forward, paving the land. Many residents believe that they actually paved over top of the cemetery of forgotten souls, but it’s too late to prove anything.
In the later 80’s to late 90’s, the nearby factories released over 600,000 pounds of chloroform into the air. That’s right- chloroform. That same chemical you see in every movie that makes people pass out when they breath it in. And it just so happens to cause cancer, too.
The town started having 2 to 3 funerals of residents dying from cancer every week, and people were only living to be in their 40’s or 50’s. Multiple people in every single family were dying from cancer. By the year 2000, International Paper Company and Scott Paper Company closed their factories in that area, but b then, the damage was already done. At its peak, Africatown had 15,000 residents. Now, there are only 2,000. Hundreds of people came together to file a class action lawsuit against the companies, but they were told that there was not enough evidence proving that the chemicals directly caused the cancer. Despite this setback, the residents are continuing to push for grants that would help them clean up the pollution that is still left behind from the factories.
According to Nick Tabor from The New Yorker, Africatown is now filled with abandoned buildings, dusty roads, and mistrust of outsiders. White people took everything they had, and kept making things worse. But there are residents who are determined to make the town as great as it once was in its heyday, and encourage more people to move back there, now that the air is cleaner. The citizens still honor the memories of the lives of the people from the Clotilda every single year, and they have plans to open a new museum sometime in the future.
(historycollection.com)
Desperate Search for Missing in Texas Floods as Death Toll Passes 50
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Here’s Why the Deadly Storm Quickly Intensified
What We Know About the Flood Victims
China and Russia Keep Their Distance From Iran During Crisis
With One War Over, Netanyahu Heads to Washington Amid Calls to End Another
Khamenei Appears in Public for First Time Since Israel War Began
WHY THE DEADLY TEXAS STORM INTENSIFIED
Clusters of thunderstorms formed repeatedly over the same area of central Texas on Friday, moving slowly and delivering torrential rain that triggered deadly flash flooding. Some locations saw a month’s worth of rain in only a few hours.
“It’s the prolonged excessive rainfall over one area that makes them so dangerous,” said Emily Heller, a meteorologist with the Austin-San Antonio National Weather Service office.
(NY Times)
DONALD TRUMP, OUR FOUNDERING FATHER
by Maureen Dowd
I called my brother, Kevin, to ask if he would spend Independence Day with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and me.
Monticello has a new tour focusing on the fond and fractious relationship of Jefferson and Adams, which culminated in an exchange of 158 letters in their last 14 years of life.
The historian David McCullough deemed this attempt of the fiery Bostonian and reticent Virginian to overcome their political feuds and understand each other “one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history.”
My favorite anecdote about Adams and Jefferson, who both loved Shakespeare and used the Bard’s psychological insights as inspiration when they conjured the country, concerned their visit to Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon. As Abigail Adams recalled, Adams cut a relic from Shakespeare’s chair while Jefferson “fell upon the ground and kissed it.”
Our family trip to Monticello on Wednesday was suggested by Jane Kamensky, a very cool historian of the American Revolution and the president and C.E.O. of Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. She thought that my Trump-supporting brother and I might appreciate the new tour, “Founding Friends, Founding Foes,” as inspiration for “a thoughtful dialogue across the divide.”
Kevin laughed when I told him about the invitation.
“I’m amused,” he said, “that we are the example of modern-day comity and civility.” Americans are at one another’s throats, living in a world of insults, coarseness and cruelty, a world where Donald Trump and JD Vance excel.
At Monticello, we talked to Ken Burns, who was giving a preview of his upcoming PBS documentary on the American Revolution. He is finishing it in the nick of time, given Trump’s attempts to slash PBS’s federal funding.
“The Revolution — no pictures, no newsreels, and more violent than we could possibly imagine,” the filmmaker told us. “The Revolution was not just a quarrel between Englishmen over Indian land and taxes and representation, but a bloody struggle that would involve more than two dozen nations, Europeans as well as Native Americans, that also somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.”
A year from now is the 250th birthday party for the country. In retrospect, the odds seem impossible. When the patriot militias engaged at sunrise at Lexington Green in April 1775, Burns noted, “the chances of the success of the operation were zero.” Then somehow, eight years later, “we created something new in the world. We were the original anticolonial movement. We turned the world upside down.”
Adams and Jefferson constantly talked about virtue, and what virtues would help mold our anti-monarchical society.
Trump, who plays at being a king, is not interested in virtue; only in humiliation, conflict, enrichment and revenge. (The popular president of the University of Virginia, the school here founded by Jefferson, just announced that he would resign because of Trump’s anti-D.E.I. pressure campaign.)
As Trump rammed through his horrible bill, a humongous wealth transfer, he scoffed at those who suggested there was no virtue in hurting the most vulnerable to make the obscenely rich richer. He keeps insisting that no one will lose Medicaid benefits, but the Republicans are cutting over $1 trillion from the program, so a lot of people are going to suffer. The Declaration of Independence aspired to equality while Trump’s bill deepens our inequality.
He wanted it rushed through for a flashy July 4 ceremony, so he could sign this dreckitude on the same day that our soaring origin statement was adopted. He timed it for maximum drama at 5 p.m., with military planes flying over the White House.
I asked Burns if it was possible now to persuade anyone across the aisle of anything, or is everyone just howling into the storm?
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view,” he said. “The only thing that can do that is a good story. Good stories are a kind of benevolent Trojan horse. You let them in, and they add complication, allowing you to understand that sometimes a thing and its opposite are true at the same time.”
Reading the Adams-Jefferson letters, I felt that these founders were able to resurrect their relationship the same way I’m able to preserve mine with my siblings. We approach politics carefully, without venom or overblown expectations of changing one another’s minds. We look for slivers of common ground: None of us thought Joe Biden should cling to office when he was clearly declining, and none of us like it when Trump belittles people or cashes in with cheesy products like his new $249 perfume, “Victory 45-47.”
We talk about other things, movies and sports, just as Jefferson and Adams discussed wine, books and ancient Greek philosophers, with Jefferson sometimes throwing in Greek phrases.
“Lord! Lord!” Adams exclaimed with exasperation. “What can I do, with So much Greek?”
Burns told us that his half-century of making documentaries about America’s wars and pastimes has taught him to embrace contradictions.
“The binaries that we set up are the biggest trap, whether they come from the left or the right,” he said. “When you see somebody making a ‘them,’ you have to be careful. That’s antithetical to what the Declaration is saying. I hope that what we do on the Fourth of July is try to put the ‘us’ into the U.S.”
(NY Times)
TAIBBI & KIRN
Matt Taibbi: Russiagate was really one of the great journalistic manipulations ever. It’s one of the great examples of the media leveraging a thing into existence. But they did it with the aid of a very complicated maneuver that was significantly undressed this week in a new report by the CIA and John Ratcliffe. And just to back up, last year, along with Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag at public, we did a story about some of the same stuff. So just to set the stage for this.
Walter Kirn: Right.
Matt Taibbi: One of the problems with Russiagate is that it was a story that was very easy to get people interested in or worked up about, because the basic allegation, Trump is a spy. Trump had connections with Russian agents and Russians interfered in the election. That was very simple to explain to people, and even if they didn’t know exactly what it was that he was being accused of or how this story even started, I mean, I always thought that was one of the most amazing things about that story is that no one knew how this story started, right? But it’s very difficult to break down the mechanics of how the deception happened. That is an extremely complicated story, and that’s what happened here with the CIA report. But did you have any initial things you wanted to talk about with this before we get into the details?
Walter Kirn: Well, I guess I’ll give my final takeaway before we get into the details that lead to it. Once I was told as a kid how hail is formed, how golf ball sized hail is formed. What happens is that there’s a little speck of ice, and it gets blown up into the atmosphere higher and higher, and then it’s starting to melt as it falls, but it gets blown up into the atmosphere. And then another layer freezes on the outside of the initial speck, and then that process is repeated enough times that the initial speck after being melted and frozen and coated with more and coated with more, finally is so heavy that it falls to earth. It can’t be blown up anymore into the sky. It reaches either golf ball or plum or grapefruit size in the-
Matt Taibbi: Canned hams, that was David Letterman’s term.
Walter Kirn: Right, right. Or canned ham size. And finally, the turbulent winds can no longer hold it aloft and keep it circulating and it hits earth. To me, that’s what the Russiagate scandal was. There was some initial speck, and it was even hard to decide what that was. We finally found out that it was coated over and over with speculation and insinuation and further questioning, and it finally fell to earth as this, wow, Trump’s a spy. And in collusion, because remember, that was the key word, in collusion with Putin he won the presidency, because somehow the potent manipulations of Russia and Putin were so effective. That was the story. It wasn’t just that Putin wanted Trump to get elected and did some things. It was that Trump colluded with him to do that.
Matt Taibbi: Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Collusion was the key accusation. Of course, that’s all forgotten now. Everybody, whenever you bring it up, all they want to talk about is interference, right?
Walter Kirn: Right.
Matt Taibbi: But collusion was the big word for almost three years. And so just to back up, Russiagate was a story that really, as a public phenomenon, emerged in the summer of 2016 before Donald Trump was elected. There were some early stories behind-
Walter Kirn: The Alfa-Bank story.
Matt Taibbi: The Alfa-Bank story, that was in late October that it first came out by Franklin Foer at Slate. Michael Isikoff at Yahoo did a story saying that there was a well-placed Western intelligence source who was saying that a former Trump aide named Carter Page was a cutout to the Kremlin. And this was a very, very serious allegation, by the way. This idea that somebody who worked for the Trump campaign had a backdoor route of communication to somebody who everybody was claiming was interfering with the election.
Walter Kirn: Because the key to the notion that there was collusion would be some form of communication. Coded, underground, using cutouts or something. If people are to collude, you must prove finally that they communicated.
Matt Taibbi: Yes, exactly. So that story came out, and that’s why the Alfa-Bank story was important because it suggested a route of communication, like some mysterious-
Walter Kirn: It suggested that there were computers located, I can’t remember where, in Florida, some-
Matt Taibbi: I don’t even remember. Yeah.
Walter Kirn: Computers associated with Trump that were communicating with a Russian bank, a computer over in Russia, and it never went anywhere. Okay. It not only never went to anywhere, no one even tried to get it to go anywhere after this original 20,000 word story in Slate, which originated, I don’t know where, but I seem to suspect with… What was that group?
Matt Taibbi: No, this was the Clinton campaign was shopping the story around it. And the Fusion GPS had a role in this, and we have a reporter who goes by the name Undead Foyle. He’s done a lot of work on the case that the Alfa-Bank story was spoofed, and with the aid of some researchers at Georgia Tech who were connected to the Clinton campaign and were also sources for that story. All of that is sort of background to this, which the issue is there were multiple attempts to make Russiagate this huge, all encompassing story that would sink the Trump campaign before the election, and that failed.
Walter Kirn: And what was the story about Trump’s lawyer going to Prague? Remember?
Matt Taibbi: So that came out later as a result of the Steele dossier.
Walter Kirn: That’s right.
Matt Taibbi: So during that summer, the Clinton campaign hired the former British spy Christopher Steele to do a series of reports about Trump. And there all sorts of very concrete, very-
Walter Kirn: The pee tape.
Matt Taibbi: … serious… The pee tape, blackmail. And that story also came out before the election, David Corn did a story in Mother Jones saying, “A veteran spy claims that Russia is trying to blackmail,” or, “Has the ability to blackmail Trump.” And alluded to sexual material. None of this stuff caught on, however, and Trump was elected anyway. Hillary Clinton, on the night of the election, talked about Russia as being one of the causes. But this story was in danger of dying. It was not going to go anywhere. The FBI investigation had essentially stalled out at that point. And in December of 2016, so before Trump became president, while Barack Obama was still a lame duck president, Obama commissioned the writing of an intelligence community assessment that would be done by three agencies. The NSA, the FBI, and the CIA. And this was something south of a full-blown intelligence assessment or a national intelligence estimate. Remember, that’s how we got into the Iraq War, was by an NIE. This is a smaller version of that. He commissions it-
Walter Kirn: Right.
Matt Taibbi: Hmm?
Walter Kirn: It was a more seat of the pants, last minute, lower confidence sort of intelligence product.
Matt Taibbi: I mean, it’s incredible how quickly this came together. On December 6th, Obama commissions this thing. It comes out on January 6th, 2017. So in a month’s time, the CIA-
Walter Kirn: Which includes the Christmas holidays.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Exactly.
Walter Kirn: And the New Year’s holiday.
Matt Taibbi: They must have powered right through it. And they issue on January 6th, this intelligence community assessment that has a very powerful statement at the top. It says that they conclude that Vladimir Putin and the Russian State interfered with the election or engaged in an influence campaign, quote, “To undermine faith in the US Democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability.” And then another well also quote, “Having a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” So this is the intelligence community saying that Russia interfered to help Donald Trump. And within this intelligence community assessment, there was a classified annex that included material from the Steele dossier.
Walter Kirn: The double secret probation sub-clause.
Matt Taibbi: Exactly. So even though it wasn’t leaked to the public, the public couldn’t see it, there was a thing in this ICA that basically said, it summarized it and said, “Russia has the ability to blackmail Donald Trump because of X, Y, and Z.” And the source was the Steele dossier. Now, what happened after that was that the three intelligence chiefs, actually four, it was John Brennan of the CIA, James Comey of the FBI, Jim Clapper, who was the director of National Intelligence, and the fourth wheel here was a semi reluctant Mike Rogers of the National Security Agency, they went to Trump ostensibly to help him and warn him that the Russians had the ability to blackmail him. This is the same week they warned Trump, and they promised to keep the information as Comey put it, “Close held,” or “Close hold.”
It’s leaked instantaneously. And on January 11th… Actually, can we call up that story? CNN comes out with a story, “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.” And you can see that the famed Carl Bernstein is one of the names added to the byline of this story. And in a moment just like that, two things that were dead in the water as stories. One of them being that Russia had interfered specifically to help Donald Trump. And two, that Trump had potentially the-
Walter Kirn: Had created blackmail material for the Russians.
Matt Taibbi: Yes. And this started a series of chain events that led to the entire Steele dossier being published by BuzzFeed. And off we went to the Mueller investigation.
Walter Kirn: Then it goes to CNN.
Matt Taibbi: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And so all of this traces back to this one report, absent this one report, this intelligence community assessment being published, there is no Russia gate. It can’t happen.
Walter Kirn: It’s the first domino.
Matt Taibbi: Exactly. And so this new-
Walter Kirn: And the first domino inside the domino is the Steele dossier.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Exactly. Exactly. And even though we had, and a lot of other people, Aaron Monte, oddly enough, the current deputy director of the FBI, Dan Bongino, Ray McGovern is another one, had done some reporting about how this ICA came together. And even Brennan himself in a book that he wrote called ‘Undaunted’, admitted that he overrode his own analysts to come to that conclusion, which was very strange.
Walter Kirn: Well there was a republic to save.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Exactly.
Walter Kirn: And as Comey in his own book title said, we answer to a higher calling or whatever, what was his book called?
Matt Taibbi: ‘A Higher Ground’ or something like that?
Walter Kirn: I think it was, ‘A Higher Calling’ or something.
Matt Taibbi: We already knew that they overrode some of the objections of their own analysts to come to this conclusion. The word that they use in the report is that Putin aspired to have Trump win. How did they come to that conclusion?
Walter Kirn: I aspire to have all of Elon’s girlfriends line up for a bikini shot just for me and my personal use. But it’s another one of those aspirations that may or may not be real.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I have a whole list of things I aspire to. I want to get to them right after the show.
Walter Kirn: Winning the World Series in a seventh game home run with two outs. Yep. I aspire to that.
Matt Taibbi: Like Pudge, that’s what I’m going to do. Stay fair. But this report had a lot more detail than we had, than any of the reporters had. For instance, Shellenberger and I knew that there were dissenting opinions that said that the Russians actually considered Trump volatile and probably unreliable and thought that a Clinton presidency would be manageable and represent continuity, that was suppressed. But this report has all kinds of written stuff like emails to John Brennan. So the deputy director of analysis for the CIA, Warren Brennan in an email on December 29th, a week before the report comes out about including the Steele dossier in the report, he said that it would risk the credibility of the entire paper to include it.
Walter Kirn: Which it did, ultimately.
Matt Taibbi: It did, yes.
NORMAN MAILER, THE LAST INTERVIEW
Interviewed by Christopher Busa
NORMAN MAILER: Anytime I say something that’s not clear, please interrupt. If you think you have a better idea than I have, interrupt — although, caution there! And if you have something that’s not necessarily going to be agreeable for me to hear, that’s fine. I react better to criticism than to compliments.
CHRISTOPHER BUSA: You prefer tension, I know, so I’ve learned never to say anything nice to you.
NM: If you keep telling me how good I am, frankly, I get bored. It doesn’t do anything for me now. When I was young, it did a lot!
CB: So, let’s get a picture of you of your origins in P’town. What possessed you to come here in the first place?
NM: The first visit was in 1942. I had just finished my junior year at Harvard. It’d been a crazy summer. I’d worked in a mental hospital. Then I worked in a small theater group. I think I was here in July. I came here with the young lady who later became my first wife, Beatrice Silverman. We were contemporaries. She was going to Boston University. I was going to Harvard. We decided to go away for a weekend. She picked this place. It had no meaning for me.
CB: What was her attraction to it?
NM: She’d heard it was interesting and fun. Of course, in those days, we were always looking for something that was agreeable to the eye. You know the way kids are. We wanted to see a place that had charm, and was, ideally, perhaps European, because the war was on and there was no question of going to Europe unless you were in the Army. If I recall properly, we took a train from Boston, all the way to P’town, a four-hour trip. It used to end up parallel to Harry Kemp Way, and then came in behind the gas station on Standish Street. At one time, it ran all the way out to the pier, to pick up the fish, but by this time it stopped on Standish. The last part was very slow indeed, from Hyannis on. But then we saw the town — incredible. I’d never seen a town like that.
CB: How long did you stay?
NM: About three days.
CB: Do you remember where?
NM: Yeah, we stayed in one of the rooming houses on Standish Street. We found a room not even one block from the railroad station. There was something easy about it. Naturally, as kids, we were worried whether we would be taken for husband and wife, but it was obvious the landlady couldn’t have cared less. That was the first time I’d ever run into that, because things were pretty starchy in those days. They didn’t look lightly on young men and young women who weren’t married who passed themselves off as married.
CB: Even in Provincetown in that period?
NM: Provincetown has always been ahead of the rest of the nation. One of the things I love about this town and which I always tell people who haven’t been here, is that this is the freest town in America. People can argue. But it’s free now, with the gay population, and it was free long ago when the artists came here. One of the reasons they came was they loved the freedom of the life here. You could live with whomever you wanted and in any combination you wanted. To have sexual freedom has always been terribly important to artists.
CB: What I noticed, growing up here, is the way families and their kids are integrated into that freedom. You went to these wonderful parties and there would be young children there!
NM: I think there just wasn’t money for a babysitter. Or, the best friend, the babysitter, was going to the party also.
CB: You’re cynical, Norman.
NM: No, it’s just that I was at a lot of parties where there were no kids. Particularly, in a period we’ll get to, you wouldn’t have wanted kids there. Some of those parties got pretty wild. Not wild by draconian standards, but a lot of people were getting drunk, people were barfing, occasionally there’d be a fight. You didn’t want a kid running around scared stiff by a fight. Usually a girl with long hair and a certain kind of look in her eyes, slightly spacey, holding a kid on each hand, would come wandering into the party. She wouldn’t necessarily get a great welcome. People wouldn’t be rude to her, but she wasn’t what we were looking for. So, to return to the beginning, we had three days here. The town was incredible. Of course, there were no lights allowed at night.
CB: Because of the war.
NM: There was a blackout, and the streets had a mystery, an 18th-century quality. Occasionally you might see a candle behind a window shade. It gave you a feeling you were back a hundred years or more. Certainly the architecture didn’t destroy that impression. The town looked, surprisingly, a good deal of the way it does now — because of the sand, and because nobody in this town could ever allow any major corporation to come in and sink their roots, thank God!
CB: And that’s what you love about our local democracy — its grass roots, which grow in sand, give an organic texture to the community?
NM: Well, it keeps the community from getting too big. I don’t know that the reason we don’t have high-rises is because the sand won’t take it or because nobody here could agree long enough to allow a corporation to get together enough land to build a high-rise. Thank God we don’t have corporate shithouses that are five, six, seven stories tall, the sort of things that are beginning to deface Hyannis. We don’t have dead-ass, mall architecture all over the place. In that sense, the town is still very much the way it was then.
CB: The eaves of one roof are tucked under the wings of a neighbor’s house. There is a busy urban proximity we share because of the closeness of the houses, yet you get this freaky isolation you mentioned, walking down the street on those foggy evenings where a candle in a window is the only light. It’s like a movie set, but without the overlit intensity of Hollywood.
NM: I wouldn’t disagree — it has that. A friend of mine came up recently. What he was taken with — he’d never been here before — was the enormous sound of the wind down Commercial Street, which I had never noticed. He said, “You never noticed it! It’s as if a jet plane is going by.”
CB: It’s not true you never noticed. You talk a lot about the winter wind in Tough Guys.
NM: Yes, but not that sound, the example he gave. Since then I’ve heard it. An extraordinary sound. Like a propeller whose blades are 60 feet long is sucking the air down a huge tunnel. Anyway, to go back to my first impressions we were only here about three days. Then we left. The following winter we got married, in ’44, a year and a half later. All through the war, once I went overseas (Bea served in the Waves so she never went overseas but she was in uniform), we kept writing, back and forth, about what we would do when this war was over. We would go to Provincetown and spend the summer there.
CB: Does it say that in your letters?
NM: Yes. In June of ’46, we took the boat from Boston to here. We rented bikes. I forget what we did with our luggage. I do remember getting on bikes and looking for a place. For some odd, stupid reason (looking back on it maybe it was a lucky reason), we bicycled clear out of town to the East End and went down 6A — I don’t think Route 6 was even in existence then. We ended up at a place called the Crow’s Nest, which is still there. It’s over on the North Truro line. I always thought I was in Provincetown that summer, but in fact I was in North Truro, maybe a half mile from the line. Now the Crow’s Nest is altogether different — it’s one long building with rooms for rent, housekeeping apartments. In those days, it was separate little bungalows.
CB: Right on the beach?
NM: Right on the beach, in two rows. Some bungalows were right on the water; some were one step back. We were one step back. We spent the summer there and would bicycle to Provincetown just about every day for food, bring it back in our bike baskets, and we’d write. We’d write. Sometimes we’d write in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. I forget how long we’d write. But in the course of a couple of months there I must have written the first 200 pages of The Naked and the Dead. It was either good luck or bad luck. For one thing, we didn’t get much of a feeling for Provincetown that summer. We were out of the town. We didn’t make friends with people in town. The people we saw that summer were people we’d known already who came up to visit. Family would come — it was hard to get food that summer. When Bea’s folks would come they’d bring certain goodies, like rye bread.
CB: Or bagels?
NM: Yes. It was the first summer after the war, and it was very good for work. If we’d lived in town I might have had a totally different existence. I might have lived here and had a great time, cheated on my first wife, fucked up all over the place, never wrote a word.
CB: You were protected from failure by your will to become a writer.
NM: I’ve thought about it often. It was a summer of great fun, with absolute devotion to work.
CB: Well, you were wired because you came back from the war with the notes that would become the novel.
NM: I wanted to write, I really did. It might have worked in town — maybe we wouldn’t have met that many people. Who knows? In any event, that writing got The Naked and the Dead started. A few months later, back in New York, I got a contract based on those first 200 pages. I worked all year. I’m not even sure we came back the following summer for more than a visit or two. My cousin, Charles Rembar, a fine lawyer who has argued literary cases, such as the obscenity trial concerning the U.S. publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, had a house up here. Kurt Vonnegut was definitely living up here, but whether it was that year, 1947, or whether it was later, because I was back here in ’51. I can’t say. But after the summer of ’46, I worked on the book all year and finished it in the fall of ’47. Spent the winter and spring in Paris, came back to New York in the summer of ’48 — I don’t know if we were in Provincetown that summer. Then went to Hollywood for a lot of ’49. I think by ’50 we were back here. Bea and I broke up in ’51. I started living with Adele Morales and we came here and rented a place. One summer we rented the Hawthorne house that’s up on Miller Hill Road. At one time it was the only house on the hill. Now there are about 15 houses or so it seems. That was a wonderful house. It had a little studio as well and that was where I worked on Barbary Shore quite a bit. That book was started in Paris, continued in Vermont, where I spent a winter before I went out to Hollywood. The first draft was finished in Hollywood. Then I worked on it up in P’town in that house, then bought a house in Vermont, then finished it in late ’50. The book came out in May of ‘51.
CB: If we were to jump from the past to the very present — you’ve seen Provincetown change over 50 years. In one sense you’ve said it hasn’t changed that much. Its attitude remains open and tolerant.
NM: Architecturally it hasn’t changed that much. In terms of what the town is like, it’s changed immensely. The people here now are altogether different from the people then.
CB: The town is certainly less bohemian. Now, it is possible to say with plausible irony, most of the gays are straighter than the straights.
NM: In the early days, and this carries through to the ’60s, the town had, essentially, one ongoing tension. That was between the Portuguese and the artists. Some of the Portuguese fishermen were wilder and stronger than any artist you’d ever find. We’d get drunk together and have arm-wrestling contests, often. I remember Bottles was the one guy nobody could ever beat.
CB: Bottles?
NM: Bottles Souza. He was really good at arm-wrestling. He had a reputation for being the strongest man in town, which was saying a lot in Provincetown in those days when you’ve got all those fishermen. I remember asking him once, “Bottles, did you ever know Rocky Marciano?” They were contemporaries. He said, “Yeah, I knew Rocky. I knew Rocky when.” I was fascinated. It came over me, sure, he’s the strongest guy in Provincetown, he’s heard about this strong man in Brockton. They were both about 17 or 18. So maybe one day when they are all drunk they get in a car and drive down to Brockton to look up Rocky Marciano and arm-wrestle. So I said, “You knew him?” “Yeah,” he repeated, “I knew him when.” I said, “Bottles, what was he like?” Bottles looked at me and said, “Rocky? Rocky was crazy!” That’s all he ever said about Marciano.
CB: I never met Bottles. My local hero, a half generation after your time, was someone perhaps less strong but equally charismatic — Victor Alexander, the goated bartender at Rosy’s, who wore a gold stud in one ear before it was fashionable.
NM: The tension in the town then was between the Portuguese, who were Catholic and observant and very family-oriented, prodigiously family-oriented, and the artists, who came every summer with a different mate, sometimes a different kid. Of course, we were smoking pot. It was all right to get drunk in town — but not pot. That was the tension then. Now the artists have virtually disappeared. You’ve still got a good many over at the Fine Arts Work Center, but you don’t have that feeling that this is a painter’s town the way you used to, when you had Motherwell, Hofmann, Kline, Baziotes, Helen Frankenthaler when she was married to Motherwell, and you had a number of younger artists who were building their reputation, damn good people like Jan Müller, Wolf Kahn, and your father Peter Busa. For people who knew the art world, there must have been 20 artists here of note any given summer. Now it’s no longer a vanguard, let’s put it that way.
CB: I’m very conscious of what you say. I couldn’t live in Provincetown, especially in the winter, without a Work Center.
NM: Get it straight, I’m not objecting to the Work Center. I wish there was more of that. In those days there wasn’t a Work Center, which would have been a very good time to have one. But there were all these well-known painters, and that gave a certain tone to the town, plus an interesting tension. The Portuguese looked askance at the artists. They looked at these great painters and didn’t know what they were doing.
CB: There was a cross-cultural communication. For example, my father traded plumbing services for painting lessons. The plumber’s idea of paradise was to paint a nude figure.
NM: Also, there were women who came up here to study art and ended up marrying or living with a good many Portuguese fishermen. There was a lot of that. Those Portuguese fishermen had no small reputation as lovers. There was one grand lady I knew, who shall remain nameless. She was big, she was blonde, and she had been married to a distinguished literary intellectual in Western Massachusetts. He was a renowned critic and she was a fabulously beautiful woman, and big as a frigate. She left him that summer, came here to live, and ended up living with a young fisherman for an entire year. And if you were a young painter or a writer and you were invited out on a fishing boat, that was a big deal. The fishermen were much respected in those days, and properly so — they were real, and artists tend to have a tropism toward the real. Provincetown was not only most agreeable to the eye, but it was real, with real people. It had been a whaling town. It was real enough that when the Pilgrims came here, they decided to move on because it was a little bit too real. It wasn’t nurturing.
CB: It was harsh. Even the Indians only came to Provincetown during the warmer months, like the present-day New Yorkers. They would come down from the mainland, out to the edge, to get shellfish and have a good time. They didn’t live here in the winter. The clay base of glacial Cape Cod ends at High Head in North Truro. The sea spit up all the sand that is Provincetown. So our turf is insubstantial and the foundations of houses are fragile. We are protected by the difficulty of surviving here. It’s very hard to live here, and in fact, in the days you remember in the ’50s and ’60s, hardly anybody lived here in the winter.
NM: A friend of mine, John Elbert, spent a winter here, and I came up to visit him in ’57 or ’58. I’d known him in the Village. He was looking to save money and write. It was a grim winter, nothing was open.
CB: You are obliged to face isolation — that’s the test, a marvelous test. Can you go in a room, face a blank sheet of paper, and come up with something that’s worth the sacrifice?
NM: When one’s a young writer there’s that awful feeling that life is going by and you’re not getting enough experience for your future writing. It’s hard to be a young writer and a monk. It’s why so many young writers will let a couple of years go by before they start another book. It’s only when you get older that you go from one book to another, where you finish a book and two months later you’re on your new book. In the beginning, it’s two or three years between books because you want to fill up; you want to have new experience. The irony, of course, is that the immediate experience you get is not stuff you can write about; in fact you probably shouldn’t touch it yet.
People have always said to me, “Why don’t you do an autobiography?” The main reason is I don’t want to use up my crystals. What I mean is that certain experiences have an inner purity to them. They remind me of a crystal. I use the word advisedly. Your imagination can project through this experience in one direction, and you can have one piece of fiction. What I call a crystal experience is not a simple one, rather a most complex one, but it has this other quality that it can be studied from many angles to produce many results. So, whenever you write about something that’s a crystal experience, you are dynamiting one of your richest narrative sources. I don’t want to write an autobiography because that’ll mean I’m done as a writer.
CB: The autobiography would reveal your crystals — to yourself?
NM: No, it would use them up. The crystals are right in the middle of my life. I’d have to use them if I were to tell a reasonable narrative of my life. I’ve never written directly about any of my life. I’ve never written directly about any of my wives, for example, for just that reason. The experiences were too rich, too complex, and too enigmatic to use directly. As long as I don’t use them directly, I can write about 20, 30, 40, 50 women on the basis of the six women I’ve been married to, plus a few other women, of course.
CB: Thank God for breaks between marriages, because you get some fresh experience. I’ve only been married twice, yet I define myself as a serial monogamist. I go from one woman to the next woman, and I try not to be two-timing the woman I’m with. When you start doing that, the relationship is over. I got trained as a husband and enjoyed the idea of being married to one person, and I also felt that, sexually, we could get better rather than worse, just like Olympic skaters improve their act together. But the thing you said about protecting the crystal is vivid. I can see how you could go through the same form and come out a different side. For example, in your last novel, The Gospel According to the Son, you deal with Christ’s chasity. Your very knowledge of women now provides you with another prismatic direction.
NM: I wouldn’t say that. I had trouble with Christ’s chastity. When you write, there are certain things that you work to get, and there are other elements that come to you as gifts, almost out of the very mood of the writing or the momentum of the work. You have to count on things coming to you or your work is no good. And then there are parts that don’t come to you, and you’re not as good as you thought you’d be, so you work and sweat it out. Christ’s chastity was not a simple matter for me. A lot of people complained about the book. They will point to one novel where He had homosexual affairs, another where He had an affair with Mary Magdalene. What they don’t understand is that I never allowed it to become a temptation. I wanted to do the Christ that presented to us in the Gospels. I was trying to understand that story. I wanted to write that story in a way that I could understand it.
CB: You wanted to write the available story in a comprehensible way?
NM: Yes, I wanted to treat the Gospels as if they were absolute gospel, in other words, received information that could not be departed from. That’s difficulty was interesting. To take Christ in one or another imaginative direction would have been very easy and would have been my natural inclination.
CB: The restraint of staying faithful to the Gospels is the key to its success, I think. There’s tremendous compression. You refer to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the authors of the synoptic Gospels, as scribes who didn’t get it exactly right, perhaps because they wrote about Christ a half century after His death.
NM: Well, they’re not scribes. Let’s call them Gospel writers, because the scribes to me had a particular meaning — the people, who were in a sense the court reporters, the professional intellectuals in the temple.
CB: One of the things that interested me in your novel was how the authority of the writer was linked to the authority of Jesus. Jesus got His authority by knowing the Scriptures, by knowing the lessons of the Old Testament. He can quote what Moses said. He can quote the prophets and His authority derives from His knowledge of tradition. It is so simple that it is audacious. The opening sentence of the book — “I was the one who came down from Nazareth to be baptized by John in the River Jordan” — is direct and stirring, the voice of a human being. We’re not talking about God, we’re talking about the Son of God as a human being.
NM: That was my intent. What I wanted to do was treat the man in Jesus Christ, not the superman. I found the Gospels almost irritating. Obviously, if you read the Gospels, as in reading Shakespeare, you’re going to get certain sentences that are part of our literary culture. But generally speaking, reading the Gospels is not an altogether agreeable experience. For one thing, they are not that fabulously well written.
CB: I knew you might say something like that.
NM: For another, Jesus is not a man in the Gospels. He’s being told that God sent His Son as a human being among us, but the fact of the matter is that Jesus is a superman. He’s never challenged in a way where you can feel any fear in His heart. I thought, no, no, no. Any man, even if also a god, who goes through those extreme experiences is going to feel a great deal of fear. And that was the way I wanted to treat it.
CB: In your book one thing I find incredible is that Christ Himself never says He is the Son of God. Other people say it about Him. He questions whether He is really the Son of God, so the final authority is always beyond Him.
NM: At least in my book, there is some doubt in His mind, not whether He is the Son of God, but He doesn’t know how close God is to Him. People tend to think, well, you’re the Son of God, so it’s automatic.
The key thing, which is true for all profound religious experiences — not that I’ve necessarily had that — is that even if you’re endowed with or are the representative of what everybody in places like AA calls a “higher power,” this power is not always with you. It’s often, signally, not there. When people have faith, they often go through excruciating experiences when they feel the absence of faith.
CB: Christ’s mood comes out when His faith wavers. The variety of religious experience corresponds to the variety of human moods that are mixed in any single character. A character is not just, say, a sourpuss, but may inspire a thousand different adjectives, equally accurate. It’s like the ups and downs of being in love.
NM: Very good, it’s very much like being in love. There are times when there is no doubt in your mind that you are in love, and there are times when you assume the love has been withdrawn. Where is it, what happened to it? In that sense, I wanted to treat Christ the way I would treat, if you will, a saint. The first thing about saints is that they don’t know all the time that they are saints.
CB: Your description of Capernaum, a town in ancient Palestine on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, reminds me of Provincetown, where the mouths of men are also painted red. Simon Peter tells Jesus how Capernaum, “though only a small city, was favored by men who did not know women but other men. So I learned that such men would cover their lips with the juice of red berries, and in the taverns they would speak of how the bravest of the Greeks were Spartans, who were great warriors but lived only to sleep in each other’s arms.” Jesus’ disciples dispute this, and Peter says: “Spartans also live with the sword. Whereas these men of Capernaum live with the coloring that women chose for their lips.” I can’t help but feel there is a little bit of Provincetown in Capernaum.
NM: How can I pretend I didn’t think of Provincetown once while writing that passage? But Capernaum was known for that.
CB: I love the vivid lipstick made from “juice of red berries.” You said once that talking about religion, for you, was more embarrassing than talking about sex. Another episode I love is when the disciples come to Christ, depressed about their failures to cast out demons. They lack His skill. It is a skill that exhausts Jesus. He can’t cast out too many demons. There is a limit to His power. His disciples are sometimes effective, but more often they are not as good as He is in casting out demons, predicting the future, or curing lepers.
NM: That goes directly to my notion of a divine economy.
CB: Economy?
NM: Economy. In other words, in Tough Guys one of the happiest moments I had — I didn’t write the book here but I edited it here — was when the father, Dougy Madden, was talking to the son about pro football and handicappers. The father says, “Listen, if God handicapped the football spread, He’d be right 80 percent of the time.” The son asks how he arrived at that. The father says, “Well, the best handicappers, for a little while, can be up to 75 percent for a few weeks, not more. So I figure if they do 75 percent, God can be 80 percent, no trouble at all.” Madden’s son asks why God can’t do 99 percent or 100 percent. He just passes over the teams at night and He sees what their energy is and He says the Giants are up and the Steelers are down. I’m going to pick the Giants. And He’s right 80 percent of the time.” So Madden’s son says, “Yeah, but why can’t He do it 100 percent of the time?” And the father looks at him sternly and says, “Because footballs take funny bounces.”
CB: Oh, God that is funny!
NM: The the father says to the son, “If God had to work it out, it would take 50 times more effort on His part, and it isn’t worth it.” So, you see, my feeling has always been that the divine economy is very much with us all the time, but not totally, not totally, because the gods must focus and do not have complete powers. They have what they have, and it can be immense, but they don’t have more than that. I employ that principle all through The Gospel According to the Son, which is that God has other things to do besides taking care of His Son down here.
CB: So the ethical is limited by a need to balance sacred energy on the fulcrum of divine purpose? My belief is that God didn’t create us, we created Him, but that may sound like blasphemy to you.
NM: Well, that is beyond my purchase, and I don’t want to get into it. What I will say is that if we take the notion that God is capable of doing everything and anything at any given moment, it takes away the last of our human dignity. I much perfer the notion that God is just doing the best that He or She can do, or that it’s a marriage that They can do. I’ve never believed, for one moment, that God intervenes at every moment and takes care of everything. So my god is an existential god, a god that does the best that can be done under the circumstances. A tired general will not always prevail. I wanted to get across in the Gospel that when Jesus removed demons from people, He didn’t do it for nothing. It cost Him a great deal. He was as exhausted as a magician after a long night of performance.
CB: Speaking of performance, the 1996 cover subject of Provincetown Arts, Karen Finley, told me she decided to become a performance artist when, as a teenager, she witnessed speeches at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, when people like Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg were giving these emotional rallies before larger audiences. She saw them as an art form. The whole concept of performance art started in this political realm. In other words, there was a perception about politics as theater. In your book, Of A Fire on the Moon, about the Apollo moon shot, you have a concluding section called “A Burial by the Sea” A broken-down car is buried in a P’town backyard.
NM: Half-buried.
CB: Half-buried. It’s almost like a religious cermony. Heaten Vorse quoted from the Song of Solomon. Somebody else read from Numbers.
NM: Eddie Bonetti read from a poem he’d written about this car that had been poorly conceived: “Duarte Motors giveth, and terminal craftsmanship taketh away.” You’re right, but I wouldn’t call it a religious cermony, it was a quasi-religious ceremony. It was more moving and more sacramental, in an odd way, than anyone expected. Everything about it was bizarre. My friends, the Bankos, had this hole dug by a bulldozer, and the bulldozer pushed in the car. It sank halfway, and the half that stood up looked so much like a bug coming out of the earth that Jack Kearney welded on antennae, pieces of metal that became antennae. Really it looked like the biggest beetle you’ve ever seen.
CB: A ghastly beast — I saw it at the time. I went earlier today to look at the site.
NM: They took it away.
CB: It looked like there was a mound of earth and they put some vegetation over it.
NM: May they decided it was cheaper to cover it with dirt and grow something.
CB: One of these days I’m going to go over there with a shovel and see if it’s still there, but I worry about disturbing the bones of the dead. I did think the section in your book is interesting for the ceremony and the invocation of religious language at a time when, as you say, marriages were breaking up. Five marriages that you witnessed that summer.
NM: And one of them was mine.
CB: You connected this with the moon shot, as if our lunar assault was destroying our ability to sustain love.
NM: I was married at the time to Beverly Bentley, and I’ve never known a human being who was as sensitive to the moon as Beverly. Whenever there was a full moon, I dreaded it, because about two in the morning she couldn’t sleep and she’d go out on our deck — at that time we were living at 565 Commercial Street — and she’d bellow at the moon. She’s say, “Oh, Moon! Don’t you pretend that I am not looking at you! I am looking at you. Moon, so you can speak to me!” She’d go on and on with that, not out of her mind, just very enjoyably half out of her mind, and loving it and half believing it. She always had a prodigious imagination. If a small cloud passed in front of the full moon, that to her was a sign. Our marriage broke up that summer. And I felt; let’s not say the moon had nothing to do with it.
We had landed on the moon, after all, which I felt was a great violation because it was done without ceremony, down at NASA, where they could have apologized for landing on the moon. Primitives used to do that. If they cut down a giant tree, they were all too aware that tree had a spirit, which I suspect is true. I think all great, noble trees do have spirits. I think little trees have spirits too, but it’s the old story of divine economy — their spirits can’t get too much together. But a giant tree can mean something. So when a tribe cut down a giant tree, a religious ceremony was invoked. Of course, NASA never did that. There was never one moment when the people at NASA said, “We recognize that the moon has been a source of endless stimulation to generations of poets, and is deep in the culture of the West, not to mention other cultures, and so we are very proud of landing on the moon, but we also apologize to those powers in the universe about whom we know nothing if they have been disturbed.” Can you imagine the poor bureaucrat who wrote that speech and delivered it? He wouldn’t have been long at NASA. There was something so cold, so steely, so mechanical about NASA. That is one of the reasons it never captured the public imagination. Think about what a feat that was. Yet there was no spirit, no sense of awe about invading our symbol of madness, mystery, gestation, and recurrence.
CB: The lawyers have a term, “excited utterance,” to describe statements said under the compulsion of an emotional moment. The astronauts had no quotable excited utterances — no surprise of the heart.
NM: Nothing but “a small step for man and a mighty step for mankind.” It’s not that good a quote, nothing remarkable. It doesn’t reach. But a requirement of NASA was to be deadly dull. These astronauts, however, had a double life. They all had Corvettes in those days and they would drive at 100 miles an hour down those Texas highways, one foot away from each other. When they cut up, they cut up. I’m not talking about Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, who were on Apollo 11, because they were probably the purest of the pure, looking back on it. They took the three most dependable guys for that shot. Let’s say they took the six or nine guys out of the pool of 25, or whatever they had, and said, “Among these nine are the guys we can count on.” And when they had those three, they said, “This is a very good three. Let’s go with them.”
CB: To be conscious of the excitement would have been a distraction from working.
NM: The work was prodigious. The amount of detailed work tended to keep them from getting excited. Also, the whole idea was not to be excited. If you get excited, the awe of the experience is going to weigh on you, and we don’t want that. In order not to feel fear, you’ve got to explore every realm of the unknown technologically, which they did. They were made completely familiar about every aspect of the job, but ultimately some essence was completely unfamiliar.
CB: I want to make a connection between the moon and the spirituality in a work of art. I grew up, with an artist for a father, valuing art as a vessel for spirituality. Of the painters you’ve known in Provincetown, can you say anything about discussions you had with them? For many years, Robert Motherwell was a close neighbor. I remember seeing you at the National Arts Club in New York when Motherwell gave a speech following the award of a medal. You were in the front row listening to every difficult syllable he uttered.
NM: Motherwell was an immensely intelligent and cultured man. But we never had a serious discussion. We weren’t that close, and there was a kind of tradition among those painters never to talk about art. If some of the artists got drunk, they occasionally may have had a private argument about art between two of them. There were forums at the Art Association but I don’t remember anything remarkable being said. What mattered was the presence of the artists.
Maybe one reason I never got into a discussion about modern art with them is that I always felt such conversations never went anywhere. How far can words carry an artist? To this day, I find most writing about art to be poetic explorations that depart very quickly from the experience of looking at a painting. The writer goes off on some inner collaboration with his or her own experience. The painting becomes like a distant object from which one is receding at a great rate in one’s vehicle of metaphor. I find that terribly tiresome. On the other hand, technical writing about art — the nature of the pigments used, and the method of their application — while useful, is not going to stop anyone’s traffic. Perhaps there are more painters worth writing about then there are writers worth writing about — that’s a large remark, but it comes out of my general impression.
Maybe there are a thousand painters in America you could take seriously, but I don’t know if there are a thousand such writers here, I don’t know. But I do think that when you write about painting without involving yourself with the life of the painter, I’m not sure the criticism has the same value as it may when you are reviewing a book or doing a piece of literary criticism. If you have 10 people reading a book, and you have 10 people looking at a given painting, an important painting, Painting does not lend itself to critical language. Rather it’s a springboard to all sorts of sensations, emotions, metaphors, indulgences, new concepts — whatever — but it’s as if each of these people is exploded out from the work. That is the excitement of painting. You go to see a painting to be shifted, startled, moved into new awareness. Whereas, very often with a work of literature what you are looking for is more resonance than one’s own thought. To a degree that we learn about the life of someone else, which you get out of a good book, we understand the life we would otherwise never have come near to. So we are larger, more resonant within.
CB: When you were doing your interpretive biography of Picasso you must have thought hard about the issue you just articulated — the limits of what you can say, verbally, about a visual experience. When did it occur to you that you had the ability to do that book, especially your ability to substantiate your assertions in actual descriptions of Picasso paintings? That, to me, was the accomplishment: locating your insights in the work itself.
NM: Thirty years before I started that book I signed a contract to do a book on Picasso. It never went anywhere. I ended up writing a 200-page philosophical dialogue that was published in Cannibals and Christians. Looking at reproductions of Picasso’s work for two months at the Museum of Modern Art stimulated that writing. But I wasn’t ready to write about Picasso. I didn’t know enough about him. I really didn’t know his life. He stimulated, sent me on a long, wonderful voyage, and I honored him for it. But I wasn’t ready to write about him. Over those 30 years many good books and bad books were written about him. By now I had developed a sense of the honor and the shoddy in another writer’s style. You get a very good sense of the part of the writing that has integrity and the part that is meretricious. This is true for all writers, even the very best.
I’ll show you in Shakespeare a hell of a lot of meretricious writing. Parenthetically, what Shakespeare loved was having wonderful lines of dialogue, back and forth, and wonderful monologues. So he’d bring people together to produce this language. It had nothing to do with reality — which may be one of the reasons Tolstoy hated Shakespeare so much. Shakespeare was not interested in reality or morality, as an intimate matter. He was only interested in morality for its relation to language.
To come back to what I was saying, you can find the meretricious in a writer no matter how great they are. You cand find it in Proust where he is needlessly long at a given moment, until finally his virtues become his vice because he’s so good at it. Certainly, when you are reading an average good writer, what’s fascinating is where they are telling the truth, as you see it, and where they are not, where they are fudging it. If you’ve been a writer all your life you do have quite an authority there. You are not unlike some high ecclesiastic who decides that the evidence here is such that we will or will not call this woman a saint. There are standards, intimations, instincts you’ve developed that give you a wonderful sense of when someone is having a sincere religious experience and when they are having a false one. With writers, if you know how to read them, and it may take being a writer for 50 years, then you see through the writing to where they know a lot of where they don’t. And that inspires your own writing, illumines it.
One reason I was able to write the biography of Picasso 30 years later is because of all the books written in between that I could read and study and get a great deal out of. Not only good books, but ones where I could say I think I understand Picasso better than they do. Of course there is a tremendous amount of bad writing about Picasso by some of the most established writers about him — they love being academics about his work, and that’s not the way to go to Picasso.
CB: You make clear that for Picasso, creation itself is a violent act. When you speak about dullness in the imagination of NASA, sometimes I think your idea of a good party is to invite the enemies of your friends.
NM: No, only certain enemies.
CB: I’m teasing.
NM: Norris, my wife, thinks my idea of a good party is when I do all the talking.
CB: You’ve found a woman equal to you in terms of her centeredness. Even though you’ve been married six times, you’ve now been married to Norris longer than most people have been married at all.
NM: We’ve been married 20 years and have been together about 25 years.
CB: And when did you learn she was born on January 31st, the same day as you?
NM: First night.
CB: That must have been a shocker.
NM: It was curious. We looked so unalike and were so different that it was interesting to have something in common. But it wouldn’t have mattered what her birthday was. Over time I’ve learned that we not only have the same virtues, but the same faults.
CB: Do you remember a woman named Cinnamon Brown? Rumors say you know of her.
NM: Yeah, sure. That look of panic you just saw in my eyes was me asking myself if there were two Cinnamon Browns.
CB: You cast Norris in this role of Cinnamon Brown, at a small party in New York, dressed in a blonde wig and brazen makeup, and introduced her as a girl from the South who’d come north to enter the skin-flick business.
NM: The real art was that we did it with two extremely sophisticated people, Harold and Mara Conrad. Mara was one of the smartest, hippest women I’ve ever known. The idea was precisely to fool her. As I remember, Harold was in on it, or I don’t think we could have pulled it off.
CB: I once pulled a fast one like that, taking a woman, Mary Boyle, to an all-men’s club in Provincetown, the Beachcombers, for a Saturday night dinner. Women are not allowed; so Mary put a theatrical corset around her chest, removed her false teeth, and put her hair under a beret. I introduced Mary at the Beachcombers as a guy I’d picked up hitchhiking in Bourne. His name, I said, was Marty Anus, a French name pronounced “a-NEW” and spelled Anous, but vulgar Americans always mispronounced it. All these guys bought it.
NM: No doubt they were drunk — the real test at the Beachcombers is the ability to hold your booze.
CB: I know you could match them.
NM: Well, I got there a little too late, too old. I realized that to enjoy this I had to be able to drink on Saturday night the way I used to in the old days. I can’t do that anymore.
CB: So much of your knowledge of the body comes from an interest in sports, especially the dynamic balance of a performing athlete. Your characters, both within themselves and with others, are moving through complicated turns, where they are at once off balance and in balance, yet the center of gravity is maintained in evolving alignments.
NM: The turn for me came in the ’60s. In the first half of the ’60s I was doing my best to give up smoking, and my style changed, starting with An American Dream. I smoked two packs a day for years and was addicted for 20 years when I started to give it up at the age of 33, in 1956. It took me the next 10 years to give it up totally. It was very hard to write when I was giving up cigarettes. Smoking enables you to cerebrate at a high, almost feverish rate. Your brain is faster when you smoke cigarettes, which is why working intellectuals, particularly, do hate giving up their addiction. I discovered, yes, I had much more trouble finding the word I wanted, but the rhythms were now better. Before I had been writing more like a computer, if you will, imparting direct information, stating things. Gradually I learned a more roundabout way of discovering the meaning of a sentence, rather than knowing it before I started. Also I began to write in longhand, rather than with a typewriter. Writing became more of a physical act, with more flow to it, but with less celebration in each sentence. I attribute the development of a second style to giving up smoking.
CB: Out of necessity. It took you a full decade to get comfortable writing without smoking?
NM: I suffered greatly for years, which gave something to the new style, because when you’re suffering, to get the writing out when your behind is not entirely clear, you truly have to work on clarity.
CB: Much of the new clarity didn’t exist before. I was just reading what James Baldwin said about “The White Negro,” which you published in Advertisements for Myself. He felt he couldn’t understand what you were talking about.
NM: He may not have agreed, but I think he understood. He was saying, “How dare you write about black experience?” That irritated the hell out of me. I said, “Jimmy, how dare you write about white experience?” In Giovanni’s Room he had written about two white boys. My whole feeling was, of course, we can cross over. Is a man never to write about a woman? Is a woman never to write about a man?
CB: The right to write about another’s consciousness is what’s at stake.
NM: If we can’t do it, we may be doomed as a species. That is a large remark. But unless we are truly able to comprehend cultures that are initially alien to us, I don’t know if we are going to make it. This applies to all sorts of things. If we can’t begin to imagine the anxiety and pain and disorder that is caused in all parts of the cosmos by birds dying in the oil of the Exxon disaster, or if only a third of us can recognize that, then worse things will happen. What terrifies me about human nature is our stupidity at the highest levels. For example, all the Y2K crap going on now — what was going on in those guys’ heads that they couldn’t look 50 years ahead? And now we are going to go into cloning, fooling with the gene stream? If we can make an error like Y2K and not be able to see in advance what the mistake will do, in the very system these guys developed and invented, then I am terrified. As an extension, the idea that you can’t write about things you haven’t immediately experienced is odious to me. There is much too much journalism in our lives now. I remember when I did the biography of Marilyn Monroe; the first question everyone asked me was “Did you know her?” I’d say no. Immediately the shades would come down on interview shows. In effect, if you didn’t know her, what you wrote about her was not worth reading.
CB: There you said what I was trying to hear.
NM: I believe it. You need an awful amount of luck to be a novelist, and I have had a lot in my life. I didn’t have to spend half of my 50 years of writing earning a living at things I didn’t want to do, which is killing to talent. This ability to reinvent cultures, to make imaginative works of them that are more real than any pieces of journalism, is crucial to our continuation. For many years I felt we were just scribblers and it didn’t mean a damn thing. What I was recognizing was that what we write doesn’t change anything. Everything I detest has gotten stronger in the last 30 or 40 years; plastic, airplane interiors, modern architecture, and suburban sprawl. One of the things I like about Provincetown is that it hasn’t changed that much, it hasn’t been poisoned the way cities like Hyannis have been ruined. I’ve come around to feeling that what we do as writers is essential and important. Consciousness is enlarged gently and delicately, yet powerfully, and it takes great literature, like great music, painting, and dance, to make that happen. I’ve come to believe that the function of the novelist is more important now than ever, precisely because the serious novel is in danger of becoming extinct.
CB: If we connect these remarks to your novel about Jesus we see that the source of His wisdom resides in the parabolic language that He uses even more skillfully than the Devil.
NM: One of the reasons I don’t altogether enjoy talking about that book is that it is not altogether my book. Some of the best lines in the book come from the Gospels. When you write a book, you want to be able to take credit for it. The Gospel According to the Son — only half-credit. The Exeuctioner’s Song, which a lot of people think is my best book, I also can’t take whole credit for. I didn’t write that incredible plot. God or the forces of human history put that story together.
CB: Shakespeare took almost all of his plots from secondhand sources, such as Holinshed’s Chronicles. He absorbed history and earlier versions of his plays as cultural documents, then fully re-imagined them.
NM: You either write your own story or you don’t. The story, in novel writing, is a powerful element. There are very few great stories and I would like to think that I came up with a great story once or twice. But I don’t know I have, except when I have borrowed them, such as Gospel or Gary Gilmore’s story.
CB: Borrowed stories are embedded in the culture’s legends. Newborn babies are not original, yet each generation values them nonetheless.
NM: It’s one thing to take legends and bring them to life, to the best of your ability — it’s a high activity and I’m very happy to have done a little of it. But I go back to what I’m saying: my real excitement is when I do it myself, when I’m not dealing with a legend, when I make up the story, as I did in Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost or The Deer Park and An American Dream. Those novels give me more pleasure, when I think about them, than when I think about The Gospel According to the Son, where the difficult thing was to bring a legend to life.
CB: With Ancient Evenings you’re dealing with an Egyptian culture more than a thousand years before Christ. We had lunch at Napi’s a few weeks ago and you were telling me about the research you did for that book at the annex to the New York Public Library, leafing through a huge book depicting the Battle of Kadesh, the first battle recorded in history, recorded in drawings.
NM: That book is called the Lepsius Denkenmahler. It was published in Leipzig about 1838, soon after the first major discoveries in Egypt, and the Germans were absolutely wild on the subject. Ancient roots! It gave one a great sense of how they used to print books 150 years ago, as opposed to how they do it now. Boy, they printed books in those days. The pages were approximately 30 inches long and maybe 15 inches high, and when you opened it — heavy, stiff buckram covers — and turned a page, it was like coming about in an old catboat in a light wind. The thick canvas mainsail lopes over.
CB: Here we have a picture of you doing research and enjoying the research.
NM: Not all research is that enjoyable. In the Lepsius Denkenmahler you go through maybe 100 pages of tomb drawings on all the details of the battle of Kadesh. You’ll see donkeys screwing each other, men fighting, a horse nosing out a soldier’s food he shouldn’t be eating in an encampment.
CB: To count the dead, the hands of the fallen are cut off and massed in a big pile, and a lion eats these hands, crunching the bones, and gets so sick he dies. Is that depicted in the drawings?
NM: I forget where that detail came from. I don’t think I made it up, but I might have. I don’t know. The research all goes into the book, and I don’t want to take it along with me when I’m finished. I want to empty my mind for the next piece of research.
CB: On your desk here are stacked the works of Goethe, along with a big German dictionary. You are presently learning German to read Faust in the original. You are an old dog who learns new tricks. Learning for you is connected with imaginative expansion.
NM: The mind is like a muscle. If you exercise your brain, it stays more in working order, as you get older, than if you don’t exercise it. I once wrote: “There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.” That’s near the end of The Deer Park. Generally, when you write a good line, it is for others to lead their lives by, because you’ve already discovered the meaning. This line is something I live by. Whenever I’m getting lazy, this is the line I whip myself with. “Stay lazy, buddy.” I tell myself, “and you’ll be gone pretty quick.”
Painted shortly after Gauguin’s arrival in Tahiti, Street in Tahiti captures his fascination with the island’s natural beauty and its people—filtered through a distinctly Western, post-Impressionist lens. The scene is tranquil yet vibrant: a dusty path lined with swaying palms and native figures walking in quiet rhythm beneath the tropical sun.
Gauguin’s color palette—lush greens, soft earth tones, and warm pinks—reflects both the exotic allure he sought and the stylized symbolism that marked his mature work. This painting embodies his search for a "primitive" paradise, though viewed today with a critical awareness of colonial romanticism.
THE MOWERS
Adam can mow a field in 1 hour, in the same time Bob can mow 2 fields. If they work together how long does it take them to mow a field?
20 minutes
Re: Software Development Cycle
Spot on. Back when I worked on MacOS, the number of open bugs as reported by RADAR (Apple’s internal bug tracking system) was in the middle five figures. I’d bet a signed dollar bill that it’s well past six figures by now. I’m not pointing to Apple as an outlier, it’s a problem across the entire industry that is only getting worse. Expect the feedback cycle inherent in AI training coupled with its misuse by the pointy-haired minions of management to amplify the number and severity of bugs to the point where new software releases will be unusable. See Windows 11 as a prime example.
I see a vibrant market for releases of software from before the AI-era on the horizon.
As bug-ridden and difficult as this “software development cycle” is, it’s only a small part of a major software development project. So there’s much, much more.
First there’s the original idea and outline by a non-coder.
Then there’s the “softward development cycle.”
To that is added changes and added features, many of which re-start the testing process.
Then there’s documentation.
Multi-platform versions.
Updates
Training
When I was involved in software development for simulators years ago we used the following semi-humorous estimating method for “software cost.”
1. Ask the programmer for the time involved.
2. Raise it to the next unit of measure and double it.
3. Tell management what that amounted to.
4. Have management tell programming that they don’t have time or money for the real cost.
So, for example, if the programmer said 2 weeks, that was 4 months. If the programmer said a couple of days, that was a few weeks. Etc. Of course, management didn’t want to hear the true total cost so budgets were routinely blown. Features were unceremoniously deleted. Programs became subroutines to large collections of other code. Progammrers griped and grumbled every time they were asked to modify someone else’s code (e.g., the original programmer quit or got promoted to supervisor of the person who took over the code), which in turn raised the time and cost even more.
I once developed a bill of materials breakdown (BOMP) program in a now-obsolete detabase programming language for a special manufacturing project. Being a self-taught and newish programmer, my code was crude and took more lines of code than a pro would have taken. But it worked well enough for its purpose. When a real programmer came behind and cleaned it up using my concepts there were many fewer lines of code, but by that time we didn’t need it any more.
I could go on. It was another lifetime entirely.
All Greek to me. I miss the pen and paper, but my handwriting has gotten so bad I’m happy for a keyboard as well.
I have been an Apple customer since 1997 (my first “two-piece”), writing this on my 5th laptop. The last two “system” updates have introduced a few strange “behaviors” and annoying ones at that. The device is great for all the new “streaming” sources and “social” media, but word processing tools are way too complicated. “Information” sources and “platforms” are now tied to my “smart” phone (which I barely use, but medical enterprises require for “communications”), and required for “access” to government functions (Medi-Cal, for however long that lasts). Dozens of unique passwords and user names, plus the mystery of AT&T as the ISP tied to my land-line telephone. Pulling about $150 a month from my Social Security “income,” on top of astronomical purchase prices. However, as a “home-bound” disabled relic, all these systems comprise my primary (almost only) “interface” with the “digital” world, filled with unimaginable atrocities and bilious blather. The AVA is my solace and comfort, Kuntsler and Taibbi notwithstanding. Special thanks to the Kalantarians and Falcon and others who “share” the wordless beauty of life with us. Beam me up, Major.
Ah yes, Betsy, well-put. You speak here for many of us folks.
Betsy,
No matter where we go, there we are.
Teen mobile is fixin’ to move in with USCellular.
And, ATT is woven through it all, for better, or for worse.
Journey to the past…
The Dating Game 1967
https://youtu.be/_LEKWRSJ230?si=y16q96yGBACVG3n_
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT CYCLE
This is why I am skeptical anytime someone claims a new computer system “will solve the problem”. That includes in our county government, and the IRS. But I must say, I just received a new passport and was impressed with the USPS, and the State Department’s service and professionalism. I filled out an online form, printed it, took that to an honored time specific appointment at the USPS office in Mendocino, was processed in 15 minutes, and went home. The new passport come in the mail in two weeks. Wow!
The State Department had installed a new computer system to make passport processing more efficient. The new system made the processing worse. The new system was then withdrawn, and reintroduced in phases to work out the bugs. That worked.
That’s good to hear, a new procedure, complicated in the past, that works quite well, and can be done locally. Thanks for the story, George.
There is a very good article that discusses the situation in the Middle East as it pertains to international law, both there and around the world.
You can find a link to it here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/jul/06/destruction-of-palestine-is-breaking-the-world
Loving the art. Art is so important especially in times of turmoil, whether personal or national. It can refocus your center, calm your spirit and take you to another place in your mind (if only for a moment). Please keep sprinkling it amongst the news, it’s a life saver.
It’s a shame that there’s not a freeloaders place available for Craig. Argh, I meant an apartment, that’s rent free and a short busride from downtown Ukiah. Sorry about that spellcheck error.
Re: Gauguin. Gauguin walks into a bar and he sees his friend Van Gogh. He orders a beer and he says to Van Gogh, “Can I get you a beer?” Van Gogh smiles, lifts his glass and says, “No, thanks, I’ve got one ‘ere.”
Omg that’s the best joke I’ve heard this month