Another award for Howard Bahr

Howard Bahr has received the Mississippi Governor's Award for Literary Excellence! And that makes me glad--Howard is one of those writers who quietly works in solitude and semi-obscurity, devoted to the beauty and power of the muse.


He is also one of the most charming correspondents in the whole great multi-verse, and he still writes on paper! A letter in the mail from Howard makes the day brighter, more adventurous. I am lucky in my pen pals, but Howard is almost unique among them in his aversion to email--my stash of letters is a visible reminder of his artfulness and heart.


Howard may strike you as a writer cut from bolder cloth than most.  He was a gunner's mate during the Vietnam war, and he was a brakeman and yard clerk in the South and West.  That doesn't mean that he doesn't have graduate degrees; he does, and he teaches at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi. He is also the former curator of Rowan Oak, Faulkner's home.  Howard is the author of The Black Flower (Nautical & Aviation Press, 1997), The Year of Jubilo (Henry Holt, 2000), The Judas Field (Henry Holt, 2006), and Pelican Road (MacAdam/Cage, 2008).  He also has a children's book, Home for Christmas, also from Nautical and Aviation.

Howard suffered a setback when MacAdam/Cage toppled shortly after his last book was published, but the company has a bit of the phoenix somewhere in the bones, and is struggling up from its own ashes.  Pelican Road is still available for purchase, and so if you don't have a copy, please consider buying one from a legitimate source. (Readers need to remember that when you buy the book of a "mid-list" writer, you cast a vote in his or her favor that matters and is counted--and upon which the publication of the next book may depend. People often think that our "votes don't matter" in the political realm, but in publishing they matter a great deal.  In a publishing world where marketing departments have the most power, sufficient "votes" make a great difference.)


I'm glad to say that A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is dedicated to Howard, and it offers a quote from Pelican Road on the dedication page. It's good to give thanks for those who stand against the meretricious and the trendy and stand for the shapeliness and beauty of a made thing.  The Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts are only given to those who have made significant contributions to our culture through their work. Like Howard Bahr.

Wroth, wroth with Ted Hughes

Dear, dead, evidently-irresistible Ted Hughes, there I was sailing along, enjoying your unscabbarded lines, the force of your word-twisting, your leaps like a salmon who tosses up rainbows. And you broke it! You broke my reading! Why on earth did you write that poem? No, no, I know why. Not a good reason. But why did you keep it?

With luck, I shall be an old woman in the future. Ideally, I shall be a spry, creative, generous, and busy woman like my mother, who is almost 83 and just bought a new 4-harness loom. She is spunky and creative and beautiful, my mother.

And what did you go and do? You made up a horrible, silly pastor and had him preach nonsense to group of old ladies: "to the old women's faces / That are cold and folded, like plucked dead hens' asses." Even aside from the fact that you had to point out that a plucked hens' ass would be a dead hen (yes, I could see that, dear sir), I am ticked. Well ticked. I know no old woman in the universe who deserves for her face to be compared to a plucked (dead--you liked to pluck them living, did you?) hen. I resent your poem and your preacher and your old women.

Hey, I even resent it on the behalf of poets. This is not satire; it is just mean-spirited. You are supposed to love the world, you poets! Love it. Cherish it, even when it is buffalo-headed and obtuse. Do your best by it. Don't turn a bunch of old ladies into a pack of hen butts because of some idiot pastor that you make up when you have an axe that needs grinding! Don't grind axes! Don't even turn old ladies into hen butts if you didn't make the poor man up! Leave him and them some dratted humanity, will you? Love them, love them, love them: be a Flannery O'Connor if you have to and show their inner freak before you give them the sword of your illumination. But love them!

I think I will have to wait until tomorrow to read any more of your poems. Or at least a few hours. Did I tell you that I like a lot of your poems? Maybe I will just reread this little one called "Welcombe."

But don't tick off a future old lady by lovelessness!

There is more.

I also resent this on behalf of the chickens. Chickens and I go way back. I am fond of chickens. I have a chicken pact with Howard Bahr (although I'm afraid I may have broken it now and then.) The chickens do not want their plucked-naked butts stuck up on old ladies' shoulders as faces. (They are said to dislike surrealism. I believe this is true.) They do not! I speak for the chickens!
There, you see? The future old woman speaks.

She's a little strange, but she knows whereof she speaks.

I think maybe she will have to go work out some energy in a poem now. Good-by.

* * *
Photographs courtesy of sxc.hu. 5 chickens and a cat by Tijmen van Dobbenburgh of the Netherlands. Convocation of Bantams by Loretta Humble of Malakoff, Texas. The chickens were from Tennessee.

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Questions for Mrs. Nose

This is for my friend Robbi, who asked.

Nobody else ask! Consider yourself asked in turn if you want to be asked.

1. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE?
Yes, my mother, Mary Sue Morris Youmans. She was probably not completely pleased because she never admits to "Sue." Of course, as a child in south George she was called "Mary Sue." My father named me.

2. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED?
Do tears in the eyes count? In that case, I think it might have been reading Yeats.

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3. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING?
You can find out the curious truth about my handwriting here: http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2007/09/little-man-of-letters.html. Today my hand has relaxed considerably from the Palmer method and is more eccentric and more itself, but people tend to admire my handwriting all the same. Of course, good handwriting is not a virtue and helps nothing much.

4. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE LUNCH MEAT?
The words "lunch meat" disgust me. I refused to admit to having eaten such a vile phrase.

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5. DO YOU HAVE KIDS?
No to young goats, yes to children: three, two sons and a daughter ranging in age from 11 to 19. Children are more important than writing. I can't say that about much.

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6. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU?
Hard to say. Yes, I think so. After all, I love being with my daughter, and we are much alike.
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7. DO YOU USE SARCASM?
Seldom. I was too domesticated by my Southern ancestors. If I do use sarcasm, it generally refers to a child's midden or personal heap of debris, otherwise known as a bedroom.

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8. DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS?
Yes, and doctors always report that they are Guiness-record size.

9. WOULD YOU BUNGEE JUMP?
I rebound. That's close enough for me.

10. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE CEREAL?
I'm on a narrow-minded diet, thanks. No cereal. Don't even mention foods not on the list to me.

11. DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF?
I haven't the slightest. Probably I'd have to say "no" because I only have one pair with ties, and they vanished into a child's midden long ago.

Usually it's "13" that is missing. WHY IS 12 MISSING?
12 has evidently been excused. It was probably WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE WISH? or WHAT HARRY POTTER CHARACTER WOULD YOU BE? or WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE CELEBRITY?

13. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ICE CREAM?
Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. Didn't I say not to mention foods not on The List?

14. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE?
Whether they feel "like me" or where on the spectrum of interestingly different from me they appear.

15. RED OR PINK?
Red is no longer my color. Pink, which I like less, is. Pink: a pale pink, the inside of a shell, perhaps.

*

16. WHAT IS YOUR LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT YOURSELF?
A deep-seated conviction that I am a fool and that the word "Fool" will someday appear in golden, beautiful letters on my forehead: perhaps that is true; perhaps it is a fiction. You pick.

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17. WHO DO YOU MISS THE MOST?
My dead.

18. DO YOU WANT EVERYONE TO COMPLETE THIS LIST?
That is a terrifying idea. I do not want everyone to do anything. Nothing in this world appears to be exactly right for everyone. I do not even want everyone to read my books, for pity's sake. I wouldn't mind if they all bought them and gave them to a beloved friend, though.

19. WHAT COLOR PANTS AND SHOES ARE YOU WEARING?
Barefoot. Grey shorts for rebounding--just yo-yo'd up and down and about for an hour.
*

What happened to #20? First 12, now 20. It's not a bad idea. We could get rid of a few more...

21. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW?
Birds craking against the dull sky and snow. The hiss of this computer. The small crik of a branch.

22. IF YOU WERE A CRAYON, WHAT COLOR WOULD YOU BE?
Verdant green. (Happily "verdant green," not as in the famous poem wherein grasshopper's "verdant green" becomes "green ice.")

23. FAVORITE SMELL?
My mother's cooking, my husband's cooking, violets in bloom, gardenias in bloom, sea salt in the air.

24. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE PHONE?
A fat man with blue hair. A lama. A storytelling liar.

25. DO YOU LIKE THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU?
Yes, and I wouldn't bestir myself if I didn't! She is my longtime friend Robbi Nester, a tiny woman of 4'11" who is a poet and college teacher and mother and wife and reader and much else. She is a woman of vim and energy. She blogs at Shadow Knows.

26. FAVORITE SPORTS TO WATCH?
Anything that my son of 11 plays. As he was the lightest person in the entire football league last year, I watched those games on tenterhooks--uncomfortable seat, tenterhooks.

27. HAIR COLOR?
I was born blonde and slowly darkened to brown. Now I have a splot of less desirable color, hidden by the usual magic.

28. EYE COLOR?
Green. You knew that.

29. DO YOU WEAR CONTACTS?
I am quite near-sighted and have sensitive eyes, and contacts make my eyes not green but green and red. Most unattractive except during the Christmas holidays, when I might consider them festive, worn with a holly crown.

30. FAVORITE FOOD?
Utterly impossible. I grew up with a great Southern cook and married a man who became a great cook because I wouldn't eat anything that wasn't good. (That's what he claims, anyway.) I have a great weakness for all kinds of Southern things, especially okra and lady peas and black eyes. I also have a weakness for chocolate, Asian food of all sorts, fiery dishes, TexMex--I just like good food, though I'm not a huge carnivore. I could easily give up meat, were it not on the menu. Among game, I prefer antelope. Probably if I had to make a wish right now, I'd wish for a bowl of hoppin' john (fresh black eyes, though, none of your dried-our rubbish) garnished with scallions and hot peppers. Now that's comfort.

31. SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS?
If it's me, I'll take the happy ending and hope there's not a thing scary about it. Yes, yes, I know what the question meant! Okay, I refuse to answer. Stupid question, really. I prefer whatever it is to be good of its kind.

*

32. LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED?
Last re-watch: Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle."
Last first-time watch: Lotte Reiniger, "The Adventures of Prince Achmed," (1926, I believe). Utterly lovely and strange silhouette animation, very complex and detailed and surprisingly emotional: this is a movie definitely worth digging for. My penpal Clive once worked for somebody who owned Reiniger puppets: how scrumptious!

33. WHAT COLOR SHIRT ARE YOU WEARING?
A skimpy blue top for rebounding with a white shirt pulled over.

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34. SUMMER OR WINTER?
I detest being cold (as any proper Southerner in upstate New York ought to do), but adore Yankee autumns with colored leaves and blue cobalt nights with snow falling and the northern lights pale over the frozen lake. On the other hand, there's no spring to speak of here. I'll pick spring. Yes. Spring: a long Southern spring with redbuds and flame azaleas in the mountains.

35. HUGS OR KISSES?
Yes.

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36. FAVORITE DESSERT?
Impossible when you live with cooks. There are too many wonderful dinners. All sorts of chocolate desserts. Then there was the three months when my husband became obsessed with baking cheesecakes of all sorts, and cheesecake turned out to be something different than I had ever imagined... And when he did homemade croissants. I think those took three days and were some of the best pastries I've eaten. I like poached pears fixed in simple ways with creme, and little pear and nut tarts. I could write a little book about this topic... It would be a fan letter to my husband and would probably also explain why I'm going on a brief little diet.

37. MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND?
To this?

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38. LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND?
A pebble.

39. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING NOW?
Just finished Jedadiah Berry's The Manual of Detection and am currently reading Derek Walcott, Selected Poems and Geoffrey Hill, Selected Poems, and a brand new book of poems, Elegies for the Water by Philip Lee Williams. I just pulled it out of the mail basket and so have only read two poems. My husband is engrossed in a book about Stalin and reading me terrifying, astonishing bits. We don't know nearly as much about those times as we ought, I think: some of the saddest stories in the world.

40. WHAT IS ON YOUR MOUSE PAD?
A roof. I'd hardly call it a "pad" though: more a rural bungalow.

41. WHAT DID YOU WATCH ON TV LAST NIGHT?
Nothing, same as usual. I do not have t.v. connection, though I have one to watch movies.

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42. FAVORITE SOUND(S)?
Katydids, cicadas, bells, mockingbirds (oh, I miss mockingbirds! though not at 4:00 a.m.), Southern drawls, my children singing, the words "I love you" and "I just cleaned up my room," Taverner, etc.

43. ROLLING STONES OR BEATLES?
Sure.

44. WHAT IS THE FARTHEST YOU HAVE BEEN FROM HOME?
An airplane over Iceland, maybe? Vancouver? I've missed a lot of good spouse-trips because I stayed home with children. However, this year I'm supposedly going to Thailand and some adjacent country or other as well.

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45. DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL TALENT?
Yes.

46. WHERE WERE YOU BORN?
Aiken, South Carolina. I think the hospital is now county offices.

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47. WHOSE ANSWERS ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO GETTING BACK?
Anything from another world. Okay, I know what you meant!

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48. HOW DID YOU MEET YOUR SPOUSE?
I was bending over a desk, wearing purple wool pants. A smallish purple bottom caught his eye.

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49. IS THE CUP HALF FULL OR HALF EMPTY?
My cup runneth over, thanks. Sometimes I don't notice, though...

50. IF YOU COULD SIT DOWN TO DINNER WITH FIVE PEOPLE WHO WOULD YOU CHOOSE.
Well, I shall have to ask Robbi, who inflicted this on me, but in revenge and friendship I shall make her the hostess. I'm assuming that the five people have to be alive and walking or wheeling around on the planet at this very moment. It would be interesting and amusing to have dinner with some of the people who have corresponded with me but whom I have never met or have only met once. How about: Clive Hicks-Jenkins, the painter; Howard Bahr (I have met him once and written about it on my blog, and I would like to see him again) the novelist; Ingrid Hill, novelist and short story writer, Philip Lee Williams, novelist and poet and essayist; Laura Frankstone, painter. However, that is quite a mishmash and would give the hostess quite a lot of work...

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Probably it would end in tears and a food fight.

*

So I'd be perfectly content and happy sitting down with my family: we are five, and I would ask my mother to make me-plus-five.

The Food Fight Party:

Clive: http://www.hicks-jenkins.com/

Howard: http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2006/07/palace-storeroom-memory-from-after.html

Ingrid: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_07_005950.php

Phil: http://www.philipleewilliams.com/

Laura: http://www.laurelines.typepad.com/

PICTURE: Think my husband took this one; it was taken at the same time as one that is at Mezzo Cammin. I don't sit still for a snap often. I think these are two years old... Different hair, different glasses.

A story, a prize, a summer

PHOTO: "Cloistered Assemblage" paperweight by Paul Stankard, glassblower and lover of words. I'm drawn to his floating orbs and tiny root people (look carefully at that tangle of roots) and mystical blossoms. For more, go to http://www.paulstankard.com/. Yes, you may send me one!

BRODKEY'S CEIL

The house had very large windows that went down quite close to the floor. These windows had drawn shades that were an inhumanly dun-yellow color, a color like that of old lions in the zoo, or the color of corn tassels, of cottonwood leaves after they have lain on the ground a while—that bleached and earthen clayey white-yellow.

Some time ago—I don’t remember when—I thought to rid myself of this sort of repetition of metaphor, rhythmical and hypnotic but redundant. It seemed to me a sort of tic of our time. The more metaphors one piled up, the more detailed and yet more diffuse the original subject became. They had no function; there was no adequate reason for their existence.
But in Harold Brodkey’s story, “Ceil,” that sort of repetitive piling-up of detail that cannot finally lead one to a single clear vision is the whole being of the story—structure, goal, impossible desire. The narrator’s struggle to bring into focus the mother who died when he was a baby is a heaping up of detail that cannot call her into being. It is all “useless significance.”

It seems that all flaws are usable.

By the end of the story, one finds that even living women are difficult to know. The narrator's gleanings, quoted from the woman who raised him, give way to a comments about her by a third woman. Ultimately, the truth about women—or, indeed, about any human being—proves slippery.

One of the things about the story that I find interesting is the way Brodkey moves from two tiny paragraphs: “I was born in her bedroom, at home” and “I feel her, I feel her moods” to a thing that the narrator believes to be a memory. A train passes and shakes the house.

One thing that interests me here is inheritance. The description of the train with its build-up and falling-away strikes me as one of those passages that owe their existence to Mark Twain’s famous description of the arrival and departure of a steamboat in Huckleberry Finn. In part that may because I’ve written a description of a train that reminded me of Twain. But if you are an American writer, you very likely can’t help remembering Twain when any human conveyance arrives with great bustle and departs, leaving a lull in its wake.

I think of Hemingway’s claim that all American literature descended from Mr. Mark Twain.

The long train passage appears to have some sort of correspondence with the simple statement that the narrator was born in the house. The steady shaking that moves with “quickening rhythm” toward “unremitting noise,” “battering waves,” and a state where the house “throbs in an aching shapelessness” is an analogue to his mother’s body and the uncontrollable rhythms of childbirth. All these details—so clear when placed together—are submerged in the larger description of the train. Afterward, in the next section, he remembers the country smell of the house. Then he recalls his mother’s torso in a print dress. The next section is the one quoted above, beginning with “the house had very large windows.” Juxtaposition makes one read the country house as a parallel the country-loving Ceil. Likewise, the closed-in house suggests an analogue to the “isolated” mother.

People are link-making creatures. The less “bald” the links are, the more satifying it is to leap the chasm.

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SHAARA FROLICS

My penpal Howard Bahr has won The Michael Shaara Award for his novel, The Judas Field (Holt, 2006). Since most news on the literary front is discouraging—the decline of book review sections and the death of reading and poor sales seem to be the focus of book-related headlines these days—I feel very glad for this piece of news. It’s curious that Howard, my penpal Philip Lee Williams, and I have all won the Shaara. We’ll have to chalk it up to good taste and put up a clubhouse sign; I’d like a treehouse somewhere.

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"MY SUMMER VACATION"

Summer has flown. Among other things, B and R experienced a certain amount of gainful employment. N attended a prodigious number of day camps and one away camp. While he was there, I went with R to the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. She was under their age limit, so I served as chaperone and sushi provider for a week—went to Steve Bissette’s movie night but otherwise kept my head down except at the end of the day, when I popped in to look at the work done. We stayed at the down-at-the-heels but pleasant Hotel Coolidge, just down the street. After it rained, a fire hose hung off the roof, discharging water in great arterial bursts. It was my easiest week of the summer. I worked on a book, walked, and had picnics.

At the end of the summer, the children and I zoomed off to North Carolina—to Cullowhee and afterward to Aiken, South Carolina and then to Sunset Beach, all with my mother; I regret that I didn’t make it to Chapel Hill, as I wanted to see many people. But it was lovely to spend time with my mother and one of my cousins, and my husband flew down for a stay at the shore. R was stung by jellyfish. How long does it take for that irritation to go away, I wonder? I had two especially grand days for poems at the beach, and came home with six new keepers. Good fishing!

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FAE MALANIA

For those of you who were interested in Fae Malania and the reprint of her book, Fae is in the hospital. She is 88 now, a time when hospital visits are not so much of a surprise. Yesterday she seemed much better. I smuggled N over for a visit, as he is good for spreading cheer.

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AT HUNTINGTON LIBRARY

Is it possible to talk about books and do a reading without meeting some young, aspiring writer? Only if he or she is shy and doesn’t speak, I suppose. I like talking to them but also feel a kind of sadness, since the path through publishing can be so thorny. One wants to warn them about peril and black slough and promises that are only a fine glitter. Perhaps their way of publishing will be altogether different from mine, given the flux of things.

This is Not a Post: New Books Alert!

No, I'm still taking a blog-sabbatical until after Labor Day. But I need to say that my friend Howard Bahr has sent me my very own copy of his brand new book, The Judas Field. Jump on the skateboard and fly down to your favorite independent and buy it! And if you hurry, you can be the very first soul to say a word about the novel on the Amazon River of book sale web sites. I met Howard via the horrid institution of The Blurb Request, but our penpaldom has brought me much pleasure, in and out of books.

In addition, another friend has a new nonfiction book that will be out at summer's close: In the Morning: Reflections from First Light, to be published in September by Mercer University Press. "This book of quiet essays is a very personal look at morning from many aspects—scientific, artistic, philosophical, and religious." I was supposed to meet Phil Williams at the Nashville Festival of the Book, but fate put his back out of joint. But we've been loyal penpals since then. Oddly enough, NFB is where I met Howard with his famous professor pal, Randy Cross.

Meanwhile, somebody I 'met' through magazine acceptances--the editor of Argosy Quarterly--has the first in a big fat series of young adult books coming soon: Apocatastasis, his livejournal blog, contains many of his pictures for Here, There Be Dragons. His plethora (and I mean plethora) of enterprises is featured on his Coppervale web site. You can even find Argosy there. I'm expecting that the dragons will bring him treasure and further issues of Argosy. That's James A. Owen, projector on a grand scale.

Oh, and be sure to go by Laurelines, where Laura Murphy Frankstone has moved on to the most delicious glass and silver and vegetable still lifes. Above is July 21st's watercolor, and you can even read what I said about Laura, Hawthorne, the Other, and the mysterious and infinite replication of artists--or something like that! Just don't take my story seed. Pilferage is mine!

And confetti and happy July 22nd birthday to B, my eldest! He's six-foot and seventeen, fresh home from Turkey and Greece.

The Palace Storeroom: A Memory from After the Fall

Summer rerun: a post from March 25, 2005, about a memorable day in 2001, not long after the fall of the twin towers.

Now and then somebody finds this needle in the haystack--hours with Howard Bahr and Randy Cross, plus airplanes and bomb scares--and sends me an email. The post is from the very first month of The Palace at 2:00 a.m., when time had not yet solidified, and it was sometimes afternoon or evening or even Giacometti's The Palace at 4:00 a.m., and the Palace itself was less than a house of cards.

The "last news post" refers to two stories Howard and I wrote as an interlocking pair, later published in one of the MacAdam/Cage Blue Moon anthologies. Mine was too much like his, seen through another lens, but it was an interesting thing to do and seemed to say how very different women and men are.

It all seems so very long ago. The world and the land of letters and the kingdom of publishing have changed irrevocably since that weekend in 2001. But here, the hours are e-retrievable.

6 July 2006

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After the last news post, Howard Bahr was on my brain, and I dug up a diaryish note about my expedition to Southern Festival of the Book in 2001. I had gone there to read from The Wolf Pit, a book of mine that won The Michael Shaara Award despite the misfortune of coming out just after 9-11 (and, for that matter, not long after The Corrections, a book that killed off Oprah's book club and overshadowed everything else on the FSG list that fall--and, for jolly good measure, just after my editor had left the house as well.) Sometimes Lady Luck rules the realm of books. It's curious to look back and see the start of airport mania; I remember that Elizabeth Spencer told me that she had tweezers in her purse but that what she carried "wasn't any of their business," so she didn't 'fess up.

* * * * *
Nashville bulletin, including a notable encounter with a writer and one of his characters:

I arrived after many repetitions of my mantra ("Turbulence never killed anybody; turbulence never killed anybody...") and restrained myself from kissing the Tennessee earth. Alas, I missed the person named Zan holding a sign, and she missed me, and she answered no page. Not an auspicious start. And it was drooling rain.

More rain the next morning, and my breakfast arrived three hours late. Then I finally scooted off to theHermitage Hotel to meet various folk; there I bumped into Elizabeth Spencer, who promptly sat down to chat, and then came over to hear me read. Which was a perfectly lovely thing to do and just like her. And I did read with Karen Essex a.k.a. "Kleopatra"--quite nice--then signed in the colonnade, a.k.a. Rain and Wind Tunnel of Tennessee. Signed the new book, the prior one, posters, and innumerable rain-specked copies ofMichael McFee's This is Where We Live anthology from UNC. And I saw writer Bill Starr--I met him years ago in Chapel Hill--we yacked a bit, and he said that he'd do a review in the Columbia paper.

Earlier Howard Bahr had arrived mid-reading with his friend Randy Cross--a model for one of his characters--and after the signing, they whirled me off to Franklin. (On the way I glimpsed the enormous and memorably bad silver and gold equestrian statue ofGeneral Nathan Bedford Forrest.) We tromped around the Confederate cemetery and mansion next door, plus the Carter house, complete with hundreds of bullet holes and one distracted chicken; then they took me out to dinner. The sky drizzled and mizzled and wept and poured the whole time, but I won't forget that hilarious and grand afternoon. It is a very curious thing to be shown about a place by a person who has written a book about it--and by one of his characters! In fact, the afternoon was so special that I don't want to tell any more about it, for fear the magic might evaporate. That evening I waded through small lakes to reach the library, dripping my way through the party, but I saw almost no one I knew from North Carolina, alas, thoughI'd hoped to see lots of people--talked to Elizabeth Spencer a bit more, and I met Michael Parker and had a talk with him. Then I went back to the Sheraton and saw that a white powder had been found on a U.S. Airways plane, so I promptly shut off the television, went to bed, and missed the bomb scare--evidently a huge pajama-clad contingent from the Renaissance Hotel trooped up to the Sheraton and hung out in the lobby downstairs for a good portion of the night. Next morning it was still raining, although by the time U.S. Airways bucked and bumped its way into the sky the sun was out. I was not terribly impressed with airport security--I expected my suitcase to be ravaged and my fountain pen inspected by hordes of beret-capped soldiers, but it never happened. Anyway, I read most of the Psalms (my other air habit), and I met lots of talkative and nervous flyers. And drove home to Cooperstown through the hills and red and yellow trees, all luminous on a cloudy afternoon. And that was that, a pellmell but memorable occasion.

* * *
That was the day that led to the Secret Chicken Pact with Howard . . .