Sherry Chandler

My inner ear hears Davis McCombs’s work as stately lamentation but this video tends to give that impression the lie.

I’ve heard McCombs read and I could swear he wasn’t this edgy. But circumstances were different and it was several years ago. He seems to be with his homeboys here.

At least he explains why that poem is called “Ninevah,” a thing that puzzled me. I thought I knew the story of Jonah, but I guess all my Sunday School teachers stopped after the whale vomited the penitent Jonah up on the shore near that wicked city. Having made the big point, I guess they didn’t sweat the details.

P.S. I love this reading.

Eugene Deb’s most famous saying is probably this one:

While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

So I found this portrait of him in Moundsville prison, from Democracy’s Prisoner, telling:

Prison offered certain mind-expanding experiences for Debs as well. For decades he had been preaching about the problem of crime. Criminals were not evil, he had argued, but were the victims of social conditions created by capitalism. Always a champion of the underdog, Debs now lived among some of society’s most disenfranchised men. “I belong in prison,” he told [the journalist] Karsner. “I belong where men are made to suffer for the wrongs committed against them by a brutalizing system.” Though Debs had promised the warden he would not talk socialism to other inmates, he spoke through the power of practical example. From across the country hundreds of well-wishers sent him presents—flowers, cakes, books, and boxes of fruit. Keeping little for himself, he spread these gifts among the other inmates, white and black, who were delighted to be “smoking high grade cigars and eating choice candy, the like of which they had never before tasted.” …Some of the most hardened convicts still suspected that Debs was some kind of “schemer and palaverer,” but most were won over by his kindness. Sitting on the hospital porch in the evenings, he was surrounded by men who wanted his advice and sympathy, or his help writing letters home. With growing admiration, the warden conceded that Debs was one of the few men he had ever known who “practiced absolutely what he preached.”

Debs was very well treated in Moundsville. Not only was the warden taken with him but he also knew that many of Debs’s supporters would be looking for cause to protest. Debs was given light duties in the prison hospital, to help out “when he felt like it.” And he did have a bad heart so there was some reason for this treatment. But he also had a room of his own that looked out over landscaped prison grounds and he was allowed to take his meals in his room. His bending of the rules about mail privileges was also winked at. Nevertheless, he was in prison and he considered himself one of the prisoners.

By the way, Moundsville prison features in Davis Grubb’s book Night of the Hunter as well as in the film of the same title. It is in Moundsville that the preacher meets the young bankrobber and learns about the hidden money.

Moundsville was decommissioned in 1995 and is now a tourist attraction with a haunted house theme.

And one more aside. Eugene Debs reportedly also said:

It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.

I guess you’ll need Liquid Virgin.

Pucker up, gals.

(Think alum.)

via

of the Great Flydini!

Hattip to Charlie Hughes.

It’s Saturday night. I have a glass of merlot. Time to unwind!

nothing is sacred

or

women do everything and men steal it

Here from the NYTimes:

Generations of recovering alcoholics, soldiers, weary parents, exploited workers and just about anybody feeling beaten down by life have found solace in a short prayer that begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

Now the Serenity Prayer is about to endure a controversy over its authorship that is likely to be anything but serene.

For more than 70 years, the composer of the prayer was thought to be the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of modern Christianity’s towering figures. Niebuhr, who died in 1971, said he was quite sure he had written it, and his wife, Ursula, also a prominent theologian, dated its composition to the early 1940s.

His daughter Elisabeth Sifton, a book editor and publisher, wrote a book about the prayer in 2003 in which she described her father first using it in 1943 in an “ordinary Sunday service” at a church in the bucolic Massachusetts town of Heath, where the Niebuhr family spent summers.

Now, a law librarian at Yale, using new databases of archival documents, has found newspaper clippings and a book from as far back as 1936 that quote close versions of the prayer. The quotations are from civic leaders all over the United States — a Y.W.C.A. leader in Syracuse, a public school counselor in Oklahoma City — and are always, interestingly, by women.

Not, mind you, that I’m accusing Reinhold Niebuhr of stealing. It’s all a little more complicated than that. Most things are.

Read the article.

Speaking of the braiding of cultural threads, I’ll give you this version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in a tip of the hat to Lance’s open thread discussion of Bonnie and Clyde, which will take place tomorrow night, either at the New Critics site or over at Lance’s place.

I’m sure he’d be pleased to have you join the discussion. For me, I fear, the most memorable thing about Bonnie and Clyde was the Bluegrass soundtrack.

Meanwhile, you might enjoy Lance’s post on Bonnie and Clyde in Nixonland.

I love it when the threads of my cultural interest braid into a single wonderful item, like this version of June Carter Cash’s “Ring of Fire” with Earl Scruggs and Billy Bob Thornton. The Sling Blade edit’s sort of fun, too. The song is from Earl Scruggs and Friends.

Update: I was reminded of this cut when I ran across my Oxford American Southern Music Sampler #5 (2001), which may be the best one they ever did. In addition to this cut, it also has Bob Dylan and Ralph Stanley singing “The Lonesome River,” Kevin Gordon doing “Down to the Well” with Lucinda Williams, Ann Peebles doing a pre-Tina version of “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” (here, too) and Jim White doing a really spooky thing called “The Wound that Never Heals.”

because I outsmarted myself.

Care to try?

How smart are you?

Let me also recommend that you check out my Twitter anthology of favorites.

Ah yes, and Black Bert for a catblog:

Are you bored at work?

Play Boomshine.

And if you figure out how it works, please tell me.

Courtesy of Harry.

Well, since we’re about words here, we’d probably better do this one, too. I found it at Via Negativa

While I’m stealing memorials to George Carlin, I’d be remiss in not pointing you to Lance Mannion’s George Carlin is Safe at Home. Lance gives us one of Carlin’s sports routines:

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park.The baseball park! Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying.

In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.

Football is concerned with downs - what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups - who’s up?

In football you receive a penalty.
In baseball you make an error.

I am not into sports but this one is fun, and touching in the context. Click over and read it all.

I can’t claim to have been a big George Carlin fan but he has been part of the cultural texture of my life for a long time and in losing him we have lost the voice of an era, a voice of my era, a speaker of truth, and his passing grieves me.