Speaking with the Tongues of Angels: Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1821-1881

Before Starbucks took over the world, I spent my youth in the kind of coffee shops that played Ella Fitzgerald, talking over the finer points of existential angst with my cohorts. Dostoevsky’s work, filled with all the big questions of God and madness and free will and exile, was pressing stuff. So pressing, indeed, that we stayed up half the night at Chez Cappuccino, mulling over Notes from the Underground. You couldn’t be literary; you couldn’t be a writer, if you didn’t dissect every minutiae of meaning (or meaninglessness, as it were) from the Russian writers. I recall that one of my colleagues, an African, shook his head wistfully over Crime and Punishment. “Dostoevsky ruins it for all the other novelists,” he said. “How can you read anyone else’s work after these masterpieces?”

Well, maybe Tolstoy would make the cut- the two Russian writers are widely considered the best novelists of all time. Intellectuals have been gathering at cafes the world over to discuss Dostoevsky’s notions of suffering or suicide or freedom of expression for a hundred years. “The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture,” Virginia Woolf wrote. James Joyce said the writer had “created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens…”

Indeed, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s dark whirlpool changed the face of literature irrevocably. His themes of human suffering, madness, sin, exile, guilt, redemption, evil, God, corruption, power, poverty, and the limits of human nature resonated deeply in circles far and wide, and every generation to follow. Inside the volatile thunderstorm of man’s search for meaning was truly “something for everyone.” From pop reading groups to the highest academia, Fyodor’s novels are on the ‘best of all time’ lists- at least one of The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov- and usually all three. Every oeuvre painstakingly pries apart the soul and mind of humanity, swimming into the furthest depths of human behaviour. The writer’s explorations and explanations analyze human psychology brilliantly from every angle. Nietzsche would later call him “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.”

But Fyodor didn’t become the bulwark of world literature by dropping a few well-mapped characters into winning plot formulas. He earned his bragging rights the hard way- through Russian political repression and oppression, through imprisonment and torture for defending freedom of expression, through a volatile relationship with his father who was murdered, and through madness, which he cherished above all else.

It was 1821 when Fyodor was born in Moscow. His father was a famously temperamental alcoholic, a retired military surgeon. Work doing gruesome amputations was not exactly ideal for a man prone to depressions and rage, and most biographers note that Mikhail was also exceedingly religious- likely to the point of delusion, as he was certain he was a special chosen one of God, and that his tribulations had special significance, like those of Job. Though Dad was a harsh master and jealous husband, his relationship with his children was not loveless. And Fyodor’s Mom was very nurturing and quite the opposite of her spouse- she was cheerful and loving. She taught Fyodor how to read early on, sharing stories from the Bible with her sons.

Fyodor’s environment was influential, of course, to the work he would do later on, contrasting human temperaments and beliefs. He was drawn to people’s stories early on, devouring the strange and beautiful and gory Biblical narratives. Contemporary struggles were even more fascinating- the boy prowled outside and spent hours listening to the stories of the poor and sick. There was plenty of fodder in his neighbourhood, among the worst in Moscow, located near a criminal cemetery, a lunatic asylum, an orphanage and so on. The boy was forbidden these travels, but more often than not failed to heed the rules. His curiousity got the best of him, and he craved sunlight instead of being indoors at all times.

In any event, both senior and junior Dostoevsky may have had more in common with the poor and crazy than Senior cared to admit. Exactly the nature of Dad’s headaches, rages, addiction and depression are unknown, but Junior had epilepsy and was prone to seizures and religious visions from his youth.

Though the hospital neighbourhood was squalid, the family was not poor. Far from it. Indeed, Fyodor was around ten years old when his father bought a hamlet and a village. This was the era of Russian serfdom, when rich landowners owned the peasants who lived there. Mikhail was a brutal landowner, but Fyodor did not take after him. Instead, as in the city, he listened eagerly to the stories of the lives at the lower rung of society’s echelon, and concluded that the poor were the truly nobility.

Country life was a short stint, however, as Maria died of consumption when Fyodor was fifteen, leaving dad to fend for a handful of young children and his broken heart. He sent Fyodor and his favourite brother, Mikhail, to boarding school, and took out his grief on his peasants, beating them whenever he wished.

And so it was that the motherless became fatherless a few years later- Dad was found dead on the path between his two villages. His horse and driver were reportedly missing, as were several of his serfs. The seemingly obvious explanation that he met his fate at the hands of his furious underlings has never been proven, though it is widely believed. It may have been a stroke. Some reports suggest suffocation by the carriage cushion, and still others suggest a bizarre murder method: drowning by enforced vodka administration. The latter derives, perhaps, from our insistence at reading Dostoyevsky’s work literally, for it appears in Notes from the Underground. Regardless, murder is very likely, for motivations abound, including reports that Dad was diddling the prettiest young peasants, sadly common among those with power then and now.

In any event, Fyodor was an orphan at sixteen. His troubles had just begun.

He completed studies at an academy of military engineering, but was far more interested in reading and writing. He was a lieutenant but escaped his work by reading obsessively, and obsessing about death. Both would be lifelong fixations. It’s not hard to imagine Fyodor, hunched over Pushkin in the late light of afternoon. He left the army in 1844 to write fiction and hang around literary and intellectual circles, including the St. Petersburg Petrashevsky Circle. Mikhail Petrashevsky was a follower of utopian socialism and organized a discussion group of writers and poets and other free thinkers, and they talked about books and politics. Most were opponents of the tsarist autocracy.

Fyodor was 24 when his first novel, Poor Folk, was published. Somewhat unexpectedly, he was hailed as the “new Gogol”- Gogol being a writer who satirized the corrupt Russian bureaucracy. And so the writer became a minor celebrity and he began to bravely publish political essays, even though he knew it was dangerous and illegal. He also decided to establish an underground press. He spoke out loud against censorship. Perhaps he was certain he could effect change, or perhaps he believed he should suffer for his art. And suffer he did. In 1849, Fyodor was arrested, along with other members of the circle, and taken to a maximum-security prison reserved for the most dangerous criminals. He was charged with owning an illegal printing press, and plotting to murder the tsar, among other things. The murder plot was outrageous- Dostoevsky was a revolutionary of ideas only. But his pleas fell on deaf ears. The writer was sentenced to death.

It was October 1849 when Dostoevsky and his partners in crime were marched toward the gallows, where they would stand in shooting range of soldiers. An order was given to lower the hoods over their faces. After an excruciating silence, the soldiers were commanded to shoot.

By now we all know that nothing happened- this mock execution is one of the most famous in history. A staged execution is among the most effective methods of psychological torture. While torture in general is, well, torture, this particular form usually makes you a basket case for life. Indeed, at least one and reportedly two of Fyodor’s friends went stark raving mad. Fyodor felt he’d been given another chance at life, and praised God for it. The torment led to later religious experiences while serving the next eight years of his sentence. Half of the sentence was spent doing hard labour in exile in Siberia, and the other half in the army.

Of his experiences in prison, Fyodor wrote, “I consider those four years as a time during which I was buried alive and shut up in a coffin. Just how horrible that time was I have not the strength to tell you…it was an indescribable, unending agony, because each hour, each minute weighed upon my soul like a stone.”

Yet Dostoevsky had never before felt so alive. He wrote in a letter to his brother, “When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul – then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness.”

In those moments before he was to be shot to death, Fyodor had a revelation that “unconditional love” was the only salvation for humanity, something God had for the world, manifest in the gift of Jesus Christ. The writer committed to spending his life sharing this kind of love. These thoughts brought him tremendous strength through the continual hardships of his life, yet in eventuality, he despaired at the fruitlessness of convincing others of life’s joy.

We’ve all had the writing teacher who tells us, “Write about what you know.” And Dostoevsky did- so much so that we too often surmise it happened exactly as it had in his novels. Nonetheless, the events and emotions the writer described, sometimes decades later, often came from his personal suffering and redemption stories. Following his release from prison, he wrote The Insulted and the Humiliated, followed by House of the Dead and Notes from the Underground. House of the Dead showcased tales of murder and suffering among hardened criminals in a labour camp, for example. It was nearly a decade after Fyodor’s release that his masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, was manifest, in 1866.

Fyodor had married- during his army sentence, he courted a married woman who was miserable with her abusive husband. She didn’t marry him until her husband passed away. Their happiness was brief- Maria took ill and died a few short years later, in 1864. The profound emptiness and despair Fyodor felt was multiplied when his life’s anchor, brother Mikhail, died shortly after.

Fyodor descended into a deep pit of depression and crippling debts. In honour, he committed to caring for his brother’s widow and children, yet he didn’t have two dimes to rub together. This deadly combination of debt and despair led him to become a hopeless gambling addict. Anything he earned, he’d throw on the tables, hoping his luck would change. It did not. When he was penniless and in danger to his debtors, his publisher came to his aid and promised to give him a formidable advance if he could produce a brilliant novel in a month. And so, we have The Gambler.

Crime and Punishment was also to be generated quickly to meet insurmountable debts. It began as a short story, and then took on a life of its own. Though Fyodor had to deliver by January, he wrote to a friend confessing he’d burned the novel the previous November. “I didn’t like it myself. A new form, a new plan excited me, and I started all over again.” Fyodor’s unyielding perfectionism paid off, and Crime and Punishment turned out to be one of the greatest books ever written.

But Fyodor’s punishments were not over yet. In his mid-forties, he fell in love with a 21-year-old stenographer, and they married. With Anna, he had four children. The first died a few months after birth, and the fourth, his favourite, was three when he died during an epileptic seizure. Dostoevsky’s misery was now at its absolute peak, for he believed he had killed his beloved child by passing on his disease.

For throughout all of these trials, Dostoevsky was also ill. Since boyhood, he also had epilepsy. He had to endure humiliating fits, seizures and headaches. He was haunted for life by horrifying dreams of evil and terror. Yet the transcendence he experienced in the seconds prior to the attacks fueled his writing and his will to live. (The writer reported that the fits began after the staged execution. Many historians believe he’d had similar issues since childhood, age nine specifically, when he had some kind of seizure.)

“For several instants I experience a happiness that is impossible in an ordinary state, and of which other people have no conception. I feel full harmony in myself and in the whole world, and the feeling is so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss one could give up ten years of life, perhaps all of life. I felt that heaven descended to earth and swallowed me. I really attained god and was imbued with him. All of you healthy people don’t even suspect what happiness is, that happiness that we epileptics experience for a second before an attack.”

The writer records similar passages in The Idiot and his other works that feature visionary spiritual people- epileptics. These brief splashes of paradise in the grisly misery of existence were understandably cherished. Dostoevsky seemed certain that God was really coming through him. In fact, he referred controversially to the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, as epileptic.

Scientist Clifford Pickover writes: “Dostoevsky, another famous epileptic whose works are filled with ecstatic visions of universal love (and terrible nightmares of uncanny fear and radical evil), thought it was obvious that Mohammad’s visions of God were triggered by epilepsy. “Mohammad assures us in this Koran that he had seen Paradise,” Dostoevsky notes. “He did not lie. He had indeed been in Paradise – during an attack of epilepsy, from which he suffered, as I do.””

What’s fascinating is that Dostoevsky knew that his visions and ecstasies were caused by his illness. And yet he was still dead certain that the symptoms revealed something real. It’s also interesting to note how interwoven religious delusions are in mental illness. Though human beings are hardwired to faith- atheism is rare and always has been- it’s undeniable that extreme religiosity and visions, delusions, voices, and so on are linked with schizophrenia. It’s common for mental health patients to report, and to believe in, messages from angels, Jesus, God. These messages are often beautiful and sometimes terrible, and they may come out of a hair dryer or out of the words of the newscaster or show up in a wallpaper pattern. It’s also a fact that most cult leaders are enigmatic, charismatic visionaries.

There are arguments over organic mental illness- epilepsy, for example, which produces electrical impulses that push against the brain- versus “mental” mental illness, or emotional instability. But the body is the mind is the spirit. Indeed, science knows that schizophrenia and depression are in fact imbalances of brain chemistry that CAUSE emotional problems, just as weak bones might cause knee problems. Are they the same as epilepsy, a seizure disorder? They aren’t the same, yet effective treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar are the same medications used for epileptic patients.

When big shot headshrinker Sigmund Freud came along, he lambasted Dostoevsky’s work as simpering sentimentality and wrote at length about how the writer’s particular form of epilepsy was hysterical, not organic. It was caused by his hatred of Dad, apparently, and that’s why it showed up most after stressor situations like a mock execution. (To be fair to the good doctor, he was certain that organic epilepsy was incompatible with razor sharp intellectual faculties, and so he assumed Dostoevsky had something else. Today we know that mental illness is often arm in arm with brilliance and creativity.)

Today we are coming closer to understanding that chemical and emotional are two sides of the same coin- each is causal of the other. We also know that high stress situations understandably involve severe emotional response- and that the cascade of motion in the brain’s network can ignite dreams, visions, fit, episodes, depressions, hallucinations, ecstasies, manias, whatever you want to call them. Sex, drugs, physical pain, and other triggers of emotions and endorphins can indeed incite a range of pleasant or terrifying effects, often both.

As modern science delves further into the unknown reaches of the brain, things get more and more astounding. The link between epilepsy, mental illness, religiosity, and creativity grows, as we enter the age of the God machine. Neurobiologist Michael Persinger has created a helmet and various scans and probes that are causing and examining religious experience networks in the brain. The science is in its infancy, but there’s already considerable evidence to show that déjà vu, ghosts, and other similar spiritual phenomenon goes hand in hand with electrical seizures in the brain- and diminishing oxygen brings on the white tunnel of near death experience. It’s the same reason kids hold their breath to get high and why some people prefer the strange practice of asphyxiation, by which they apparently experience visionary sex.

Atheists are quick to jump here on proof that God is all in our heads. Yet this “sickness” fueled the brilliance of Dostoevsky’s work, and gave him courage to endure unbelievable hardship. And he, for one, perceived it as God within us- is that the same thing? For millennia, the visionary was doped up and caged, or else he was the special shaman of society. The world over, humans ingest all manner of plant and pill in order to glimpse this world of paradise Dostoevsky describes- and then we wonder why it’s hard for the addict to give up drugs? Recall that the writer would give ten years of his life for that slim second of peace and harmony before his seizures.

And so, it can be understood why so many schizophrenic and bipolar patients prefer to avoid medication, the single biggest obstacle to treatment. But the light may disappear with the dark. Many schizophrenia patients report that they like the voices, feel close to or comforted by them, or of course, they are dead certain it’s ‘real’ and that they are afforded special insights that others can’t see.

The religious or supernatural connection to these kinds of visions extends way beyond Dostoevsky and his opinion about Mohammed. Fyodor writes in The Idiot about epileptic Myshkin, who is a Christ-like figure. But what about Jesus himself? What about Oral Roberts, who saw a 900-foot Jesus in the sky, who believes he raised people from the dead? What of The Book of Revelation, just one of hundreds of apocalyptic books that didn’t make it into the Biblical canon, all describing wonderful and terrible religious visions? What about Ezekiel and the chariot of fire? And what of Saint Paul, and the vision that inspired his conversion?

St. Paul spoke of a bodily affliction, a thorn in his flesh. Theories on this have abounded- was he gay? Deformed? Migraines? It was common before we had cures for infections for high fevers to damage the brain, and Paul had had malaria.

Of course, one accepts the prophecies and miracles of their own faith as God manifest, but prophecies and miracles of other faiths are surely mere insanity at best, and at worst, the devil incarnate. Joseph Smith receiving the golden tablets that only he could interpret is sheer lunacy to most of the world- yet millions of extraordinarily intelligent people called Mormons base their faith on this idea. Many Christians or Muslims would consider reincarnation beliefs heresy, yet millions of Buddhists are convinced and comforted when their leaders recount visions of their past lives. Yet paradise is sometimes hell- children are more often than not murdered by well-meaning parents, not by pedophiles- God was telling them to do it, to rid the child of demons or some such parallel.

Alien abductions and astral projection are an historically consistent fascination. Then there’s déjà vu, and jamais vu- the feeling you’ve never before been in your own house or yard. What gives?

Molecular biochemist Dr. Clifford Pickover says, “Temporal lobe epilepsy is caused by unusual electrical activity in the brain’s temporal lobes A significant proportion of people with TLE report that their seizures often bring on extraordinary experiences of transcendent wonder, luminous insight — or, at times, harrowing, uncanny fear.”

In The Vision of the Chariot: Transcendent Experience and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, he says, “(Alien) abductees feel mild, epileptic-like symptoms just before they are ‘captured.’ Some abductees feel heat on one side of their faces, hear a ringing in their ears, and see flashes of light prior to an abduction. Others report a cessation of sound and feeling, or an overwhelming feeling of apprehension. All of this is typical of certain kinds of epileptic seizures.”

Whitley Strieber is arguably the most famous alien abductee in history, and he has written several books about his experience, most famously, Communion. He runs a website called Unknown Country, a support group for abductees. Pickover observes that Strieber documents TLE symptoms when describing the abduction- jamais vu, formication (crawling bugs on skin), “vivid smells, hallucinations, rapid heartbeats, the sensation of rising and falling, and partial amnesia.” Strieber was in fact diagnosed with epilepsy, but he refutes the diagnosis because polygraph and brain tests show that he isn’t lying- yet you’re not lying if you believe it was true! Just like others who have had visionary experiences, Strieber cannot be convinced the experience didn’t happen. In his case, it was not just a ‘window’ to the other world, but literally took place.
Mohammed shared the alien abduction theme in his vision, particularly the medical experiments that most abductees report. “Two men in white raiment came and threw me down and opened up my belly and searched inside for I don’t know what,” the prophet told his foster parents when he was five years old.

In Varieties of Religious Experience, psychologist William James warns us not to dismiss mystical events just because they came from electrical impulses. He reminds us that every single thought, however rational, anyone has, comes from the body.

Indeed, about a third of us have had religious experiences- can this be accounted for by some misfiring of the brain? Or is this exalted state actually the real deal, the divine, whereas the normal states are earthly ones, just as the visionaries profess?

September 7th, 1880, Dostoevsky’s journal reads: “This morning at 8.45, interruption of my thoughts, transported into other years, dreams, dreamy states, dreaminess…” It was the same year that his favourite child died, the final burden the writer would have to bear. The novel The Brothers Karamazov was underway, and much of it examined epilepsy, though the work was overall a culmination of the great psychological questions Dostoevsky wrestled with. Reason versus faith, doubt, the spiritual struggle, the question of free will, belonging, murder, family, fate -and indeed, the validity of epileptic experience, whether spiritual or organic- all the questions that science and psychology is examining today.

Dostoevsky said he’d be happy if he finished his book before he died, having great difficulty in writing it after the tragedy of losing his son. However, he wrote his son into the book by naming the hero after Alyosha.

A few months after The Brothers Karamazov was published, Fyodor Dostoevsky died of epileptic hemorrhaging. It was 1881. The novel was a supreme masterpiece, the writer’s crowning achievement.

It’s a gorgeous spring day, 128 years after Dostoevsky’s death, thousands of miles from political oppression and turmoil. Sitting on a Starbucks patio with The Brothers Karamazov and a friend, I wish the great writer were here today. We’d like to discuss a few things with Fyodor- one of them my central belief that mental illness isn’t mental illness, but what I like to call mental is-ness. Anger, delusion, sorrow, fear- just because something is unpleasant, doesn’t mean it’s sick. And conversely, the deep religious convictions we’ve had, and indeed the deep psychedelic experiences we’ve embarked on, are not sick just because joy doesn’t usually extend so far.

I’ve long believed that the chemical soup of which we are made is not a reduction of the human spirit or soul, but that it IS the human spirit or soul. My own bipolar life means torrential creativity even as it means frustration for idea cascades that never see completion. As a writer, I am, like Dostoevsky was, attached to my experiences of beauty, and accept the dark damnation that often follows in long depressions. Like most manic-depressives, I fear losing the exalted states and though the despair is hell, it teaches me the truth about the world.

Moreover, my benign and delightful belief in the magic of objects and the presence of spirits gives me profound connectivity. My grief is assuaged toward certain losses, when I feel my dead friend’s presence through an object he has left for me. How could I be a writer at all if it weren’t for my beautiful unquiet mind? I can’t shake the feeling that the meaning of life is indeed imbedded in the mystery of the mind, and the most intimate contact I have with a mind is with my own.

Dostoevsky suffered to show us a mirror to ourselves, to those sleepless nights inside us where the heart cries out to God for love, where we struggle with the big questions on the nature of man. And yet, sometimes, we glimpse the heartbeat of beauty and love and it keeps us going, whether or not it is a delusion.

If you like art, literature, madness and interesting people, you’ll love Lorette C. Luzajic’s books. Her first book is “The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.” Her second is “Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World.)” Her poetry and her collected blogs, musings, reviews, memoirs, notes, eulogies, requiems, interviews, profiles and more both devastating and hilarious romps through one woman’s wild mood swings- proving there’s life after death, even for manic depressives. “Think Courtney Love meets Margaret Atwood,” says Donnarama, Toronto’s premiere performance artist.

Visit the author’s link at Amazon to order your copies today!

The Haunting of Skip James

Everyone knows that the mysterious and fleeting Robert Johnson left an indelible mark of genius on history; his hexed virtuoso has inspired tremendous imagination. Johnson famously sold his soul to the devil in a secret hoodoo ritual, and though these things are commonly understood as folklore, I can’t help believing it might be true.

But there was another man in those times who also came from Mississippi backwaters, a man who also spent his life running from the devil. He was a master of piano and guitar, but he stopped playing blues for more than three decades. On his deathbed he renounced the blues, repenting for playing the devil’s music. Skip promised never to touch them again, if God let him live.

God didn’t relent, however, but he had let Skip James live considerably longer than poor Robbie. Skip’s first recording- and last for three decades to come- was Devil Got My Woman, the inspiration for Johnson’s Hellhound on my Trail. Skip’s eerie, mournful falsetto is the voice of a haunted man. That afternoon in 1931, in a stifling attic in Grafton, Wisconsin, Skip recorded for Paramount Records some songs that would soon become rare collector’s items and earn him respect as one of the very best bluesmen now and forever. But the Depression forced Paramount into bankruptcy and Skip skipped off to sing a new tune, becoming an itinerant preacher throughout the south.

As an outside observer to the blues scene, not terribly knowledgeable but drawn in by the stories, I was touched and educated by a film by Wim Wenders, Soul of a Man. The gorgeous tribute from Wim Wenders paints a romantic hero, innocent of the small fame that blooms from him even in his absence. He put down his guitar to preach the gospel after poverty defeated him.

And yet I sensed that the darkness in the man’s voice was not simply poverty robbing an artist of his passion. Skip James was a hard living loner who said he always carried a gun, and he was known to use it. His daddy was a bootlegger and a preacher and like father, like son.

Skip roamed the backwoods and highways of the south working like a dog and gambling and sampling the hookers. Seemed he never feared God’s wrath for these biblical sins- sex, murder, pimping, playing cards- but nonetheless, he feared God because he was playing the Devil’s music.

Stephen Calt’s biography, I’d Rather Be the Devil, written from taped conversations with Skip by a friend and blues writer, merits the criticism it garners from irate Skip defenders- but only for its melodramatic prose. The biography insinuates and even proclaims all manner of madness- whoring, gambling, and shooting sprees, but some blues aficionados want to believe, as Tom Jacobson wrote, that Skip James was a “softie.”

Tom also said, “Stephen Calt has written a pathetic book. It will go down in the annals of blues history as an act of great betrayal and deceit.” He shares his personal witness of an elegant and kind man who wrote him gracious letters after Tom helped him with some money.

With all due respect, no. Understandably, sympathetic fans want to make Skip a hero. Like Tom, I want to believe that I can touch Skip’s blues, or speak for him, but in reality, his blues stem from what I don’t have. I have blues of my own, but I can’t know hardest poverty and racism, backbreaking work, life on the run as a gambler, drunkard and murderer. If Skip’s songs were just about twisted love or wishful thinking, they would be tepid melodies of debatable depth, and they wouldn’t be the blues of Skip James.

Now, I can’t say that every word of Calt’s work is true, and Jacobson’s worry that Calt exploited his friend for money may or may not be founded. Calt is an affable and respected, if adjective-heavy blues writer, and I doubt he made any kind of ‘fortune’ from his taped conversations with Skip. He waited politely until 25 years after Skip’s death to publish. I am certain he meant for serious seekers of Skip’s music to find some of what they were looking for, harsh though what they found might be. It’s clear, too, that he retained a love for the mysterious man, even if he did, like his subject, have a penchant for melodrama.

It’s understandable that dedicated blues aficionados and historians like Jacobson want to make sure the things that are being said are true, and to be concerned about the reputation of their blues idols. But even as an outside spectator, I know that sanitizing history may ultimately detract and dilute what the blues are all about.

The kind of grief and bitterness and agony inside the blues didn’t come from a warm and fuzzy place. The rebel drifter artists were not pretending anything- the grim reality of poverty, racism, dehumanization, slavery, grief, loss, crime, hatred, fury, despair, love, fear, whisky, murder was reality indeed. There is no reason whatsoever to doubt that Skip James was at least a few of the things he is reputed to be.

That said, despite his fame, this figure is still shrouded in mystery and totally obscure. In this regard, he is much like his fellow Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson, who made no secret of his devotion to Skip, paying homage by experimenting with his style. Johnson’s premature death at the age of 27 may always remain an enigma- voodoo, murder, poison? But it is Skip James’ life and not his death that we have so little window into- Nehemiah was named Skip because he was always skipping town. He is a man who did not particularly want to be found. And so for those decades between his first recording and finding him in the ‘60s, we have little to go on.

Skip James didn’t like people, and so he didn’t hang around with other musicians more than was necessary. He died with few friends and no family, and fathered no children that he or we know of. Some connections have been made to other artists who knew him, peripherally or otherwise, but there’s not much.

We can be pretty sure of a general picture, however. Skip was born Nehemiah Curtis James and grew up on a Mississippi cotton plantation. His mom was the cook and his father was reputed locally as a low life. He was perpetually on the run from the law, a bootlegger and a preacher, too. Most of the time, Skip’s grandparents raised him. They had been brought in from Virginia on the slave market.

Skip was a proud and articulate man, so he said he had earned his high school diploma though this wasn’t true. Skip was proud of his wide vocabulary and wanted some recognition for his intelligence. He was singing and composing early on, after his mother gave him a cheap guitar as a gift when he was around eight. “My mother made me put that guitar down to eat meals,” Skip said in Calt’s book. “I was just that interested.” Soon he took up piano, too.

Skip drifted around, doing hard labour in levee camps or road construction and so on. Life meant backbreaking labour- the work was hard, but the living was harder. The men drank a lot, and gambled and made money renting their favourite women out to other men. Skip never trusted women, but his early exposure in these environments certainly wouldn’t contribute to a positive image. These women plied their trades because they needed to earn a living, too, and couldn’t labour in the camps like men. Skip became known as a skilled gambler, and sometimes he would risk his whole week’s pay and earn ten times as much.

He had love affairs with some of the ladies, but they weren’t happy ones. “My love is like ice water,” he said. “Once you fuck ‘em, it’s like you never knew ‘em.” He always carried a pistol and there’s no real reason to conclude he never used it. “I never draw a gun unless I pull the trigger,” Skip reportedly said.

He married the daughter of preacher man, Oscella Robinson, the first relationship he had with a woman who was not a prostitute. But his happiness was short-lived. He found his wife having an affair with a friend of his. She was starving emotionally, others said, and observed that Skip wasn’t faithful to anyone except the bottle and the betting. It was this experience that likely fuelled the desolate heartbreaking masterpiece, Devil Got My Woman.

It’s easy to dismiss the devils and the voodoo underneath blues stories as myth, rumour, or even as racism, but that would be an unfortunate erasure of history. Not every blues singer used words like “mojo” and “conjure” man just for effect. To the best blues scholars, this is a large part of the picture and history. I will never understand the secret history of Africa, but it had tremendous power to keep some of the slaves from going insane or going extinct. The rituals and magical beliefs were common threads for broken communities, tying their spirit to Africa. To people who had no possessions, the voodoo objects that outsiders think of as bizarre or frightening or silly became especially important. Any objects could be sacred if they were the only few things you owned.

Whether or not voodoo was practiced, it was in the blood of the slaves and their children and is still going strong today. You didn’t have to practice voodoo, though many did. It was in your blood. And while descendents of Africa layered Christianity onto their own traditions, seeing no disparity between the two, some had the fear of the white God beaten into them. The lingering terror that their own music, rituals, beliefs, and skin colour were from the Devil himself was impenetrable. And that could be a tremendous comfort, the only link to your displaced ancestors. Or it could be cause for a lifelong haunting.

Matt R. Lohr describes the sound of Skip’s blues: “James’ vocals are delivered in either a pure, keening falsetto or a flat, affectless tenor, both tones almost supernatural in their melancholic detachment and both expertly complementing the chillingly pristine tone of his guitar playing. This voice, eerily ethereal … high-pitched and ghostly … conjures nothing so much as the wailing of a tormented Deep Southern banshee.”

Town like Bentonia, Mississippi, population 170, towns like the ones that Skip and Robert Johnson were raised, well, that was voodoo country. It’s not a stretch for me to consider that spiritual turmoil was a prominent element in the lives of many southern blacks. And sometimes that spiritual turmoil showed itself like a hellhound of the trail.

Of course I don’t mean that Satan traded a guitar with Robbie at the crossroads- that’s a metaphor, and a good one. But Robert and Skip both surely wrestled with those demons, alongside all the other bleak, dark, crazy, hostile, wretched, dangerous, violent things- by life so hard, their blues could be born. Skip was still singing and playing music after he split from his wife, and he had developed a very distinctive style that Robert Johnson and other Delta bluesmen tried to adopt and never quite pulled off. His sinister depth felt like voodoo indeed, born of the seesaw torment between God and Satan.

In his essay, Can’t Find No Heaven, Lohr describes beautifully what it is about Skip James. He “is frequently recognized by musical aficionados and critics as one of the most creative and distinctive in the blues canon. Not only are these works notable for their uncommon utilization of blues conventions and precise, disciplined musicianship, but they are also remarkable in the uncanny feelings they conjure within the listener, feelings of unease, foreboding, and soul-dead dread unlike that produced by anything found in the blues before or since.”

He quotes David Harrison. “”[James] didn’t come across as someone with whom you could enjoy leaning on a bar; his songs are unremittingly gloomy and devil-ridden, and if his 78s were the only ones to have survived, the myth of the blues as a depressing music would have been fully justified…[the songs] hint at anger and lurking madness…If the blues can really be said to have a genius, then Skip James is the sinister contender for the title.””

Finally, he describes for those who listen but can’t play what makes that sound so distinct. “When a guitar is tuned in the open-string “Bentonia” style, the resulting pattern is E-B-E-G-B-E, which, provided the G string is not raised to G sharp, creates an E minor tonality. The result of this “cross-note” tuning (a term coined by James) is an off-centre sound with an unmistakably dark undercurrent, a sound that can be heard most vividly in the bottom-scraping bass notes and chilling ascending treble figures…”

James picked his guitar with his fingernails for the effect that Giles Oakley called “icy precision.” He used three fingers, isolating fierce notes. Furthermore, his genius on guitar is so legendary that often his piano prowess in overshadowed. But he used a wooden box at his feet to emphasize thumping and stomping and got totally lost in the notes and rhythms. Lohr comments, “His keyboard work is distinguished by its almost avant-garde utilization of irregularly spaced breaks, helping to create within the music a gripping fits-and-starts tension, and his 1931 piano recordings possess a heavily percussive quality thanks to his complex, syncopated foot pounding… James was also skilled at using runs, fills, crescendo, and diminuendo to create musical power within his piano pieces…creating the gut-shot effect of thudding rapid-fire bullet hits…”

It was in 1931, after leaving his wife, that a talent scout heard these wonders and got Skip that now-famous record deal. He bought a ticket to Wisconsin, and recorded over a two day session for Paramount Records. He was paid a few bucks for his work, but with the Depression stretching before them, Paramount went bankrupt and Skip became an ordained traveling minister like his father. Varying accounts, including his, attest to continued drinking, gambling, womanizing, and wandering. Unbeknownst to Skip, those who had bought the few record pressings Paramount had sold before folding considered the mysterious and absent singer one of the greatest they’d ever heard, and a cult bloomed. That no follow up appeared for decades heightened the hunger and allure for this elusive genius’s work.

There were also rumours that Skip was on the run from the law. Mumbles and murmurs of murder were common- Skip’s music had been full of murder, and he himself had already bragged about how many times he used his gun, how many people he shot- though he was always careful to say he didn’t know what the outcome was of the bullet wounds. But whether Jesus or guns and gambling or women or all of the above were taking place, they were taking place apart from the public eye. If Skip had never recorded that ill-fated record, his blues would have been totally lost to the world.

And then the legend comes full circle. In 1964, a group of blues enthusiasts discovered Skip James in a hospital in Mississippi, and convinced him to appear at a blues revival, the Newport Folk Festival. His strange, reclusive, haunting performance blew everyone’s mind. And for these last five years of his life, years spent in poor health, he recorded for various labels, revisiting some of his 1931 songs as well as making new ones.

“Skip James’ strikingly singular music was a product of his surroundings, musical iconoclasm, and bizarre psychology,” Lohr says. The music was affected by “the damaged psychology of James, a man whose paranoia and misogyny spawned edgy, violent songs that rejected society, race, and gender roles, and whose life was a constant battle between the influence of the church and the dangerous blues lifestyle, a battle which James never resolved and which lent his music its distinctive anxiety and fearful pleading for peace in the next world. The life of Skip James was not a happy one, but the sadnesses and angers that fueled his existence were distilled into his music, allowing him to create accomplished, emotionally devastating work that will let his name live on.”

“The one great fear that marked his existence,” Lohr writes, was “the possibility of dying before receiving the opportunity to make peace with God. While on his deathbed, James denounced his past, acknowledging the “sinful” nature of blues music and announcing that he would perform only spirituals if God would let him live.” But before turning 70, he died of cancer. The torment of damnation was something he never reconciled, never able to shake the belief that blues were straight from hell.

It’s worth going back to the beginning of the story as it relates to me. My first encounter with Skip James was a subtle and unforgettable scene with Thora Birch in the teen angst flick Ghost World. Enid was dying her hair back from green, depressed, and listening to a random record she bought from a blues fan out of a milk carton.

I found it spellbinding to see the darkness descend on her like a wave of heat, the intensity in her eyes, as the strains of Skip’s guitar mesmerize her. The film is worth watching for this brief and brilliant scene alone. I felt the strange and solemn sharpness of desperation in a song that stood alone in the world of music.

When Enid went back to ask Seymour, the blues guy, for more records like that one, he shook his head and said, “There aren’t any more records like that one.”

The scene was my personal invitation, a portal into a part of history I know nothing of. It’s the world whose spectre I glimpsed when I was a braver woman, drifting in my youth. The Mississippi Delta marked me, it made me hungry for its stories, and the houses and stores and gas stations and cotton fields felt like relics, a world that time forgot.

Skip’s heavyweight delta voodoo was completely transcendent, summoning the sick weight of love’s grief into the belly, into the throat. I was suffocated by it; choked- it was the feeling of drowning. I was haunted, by love, by Skip, by the devil himself.

It’s unlikely that Skip knew even a few moments of happiness in a harsh and bitter life, and more than seven decades later, the weight of his blues feels like a stone tomb, the darkest room.

There is nothing I could understand of that weight, but I felt it once traveling through the Delta, and tried to capture the haunting in a poem. I was “hitch-hiking down a slow hot Mississippi highway. The crimson sky stained the cotton fields bloody on either side of that dusty ribbon. I was weaving past scattered porches. Someone was wailing the blues.”

If you like art, literature, madness and interesting people, you’ll love Lorette C. Luzajic’s books. Her first book is “The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.” Her second is “Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World.)” Her poetry and her collected blogs, musings, reviews, memoirs, notes, eulogies, requiems, interviews, profiles and more are both devastating and hilarious romps through one woman’s wild mood swings. Lorette proves that there’s life after death, even for manic-depressives. “Think Courtney Love meets Margaret Atwood,” says Donnarama, Toronto’s premiere performance artist.

Visit the author’s link at Amazon to order your copies today!

Hating for a Living: American Psycho Fred Phelps

If you’ve ever been close to a speed freak or meth addict, you may have witnessed some terrifying paranoia, fury and hatred that came right out of nowhere. Too much at once makes a user jump at his own shadow, and think every noise is the CIA breaking down the door. Too much in general might damage the centres of the brain that process aggression and other important emotions. The addict may forever feel followed or persecuted- a drug induced paranoid schizophrenia. Sometimes he feels invincible at the same time, perceiving constant threats, yet feeling infinitely superior and godlike. The megalomaniac.

Sound familiar? Most people don’t know that Adolf Hitler was a methamphetamine addict, with numerous daily injections fuelling his rage, paranoia, hatred, and insomnia. Speed and superspeed do not always lead to such cataclysmic events in the macrocosm, of course, but families affected by them may recognize some of the above terrors in their microcosm. Too many are torn apart by the deleterious effects of speed, which can turn the gentlest of persons into unpredictable, tormented souls who believe they see demons everywhere they turn.

Most of you have heard of the Reverend Fred Phelps, the world’s most notorious hater- you know, the backwater Kansas hick of God Hates Fags fame. Not many people know that he was a speed addict. If too much speed or a very little bit of meth can turn a good man bad or dead in no time flat, what might it do to a man who is already unstable, angry, volatile, and paranoid?

This twisted old fuck who pickets funerals with his bitter blend of bible truly believes he is one of the only people ever born who will make it into heaven.

You all know the peripheral gist of the Fred Phelps story- some hick Baptist church in Topeka, Kansas filled with crackpots who really, really hate fags. The leader of this bastion of inbred lemmings is a crazy kook pastor named Fred, some idiot whose I.Q. borders on retardation.

You don’t pay him much mind, except for the occasional purpose of entertainment at how anyone can be such a pathetic loser. The spectacle entered your consciousness when gay teen Matthew Shepard was tied to a fence like a scarecrow and left to die, a decade or more past. The Phelps’s created a stink by picketing the funeral with their hostile signage and making the now famous website that marked count for each day poor Mattie was burning down under.

What you may not know is that American gays are still struggling for equal rights in the workplace, a basic human right that apparently curtails Christian freedom, while the Westboro Baptist Church is an untaxed nonprofit protected by the First Amendment. You may not know that the bizarre believers also hate blacks, Jews, Muslims, Americans, soldiers, and even Sweden. They hate everybody. You might not know that Fred is far from feeble-minded- he is a law graduate with a high IQ, and terrific fitness into his old age, ever since he gave up the drugs. Talk is cheap so few of us take this yokel seriously- but sticks and stones have broken bones, though names indeed can hurt me. This monstrous man has established his reign the old fashioned way- by beating his subjects into submission. It is his God-given right to batter his wife and thirteen children, who make up the population of the church- along with their children. Few of Fred’s offspring have gotten away. It has been ingrained from birth that if they leave, the pit of hell will open up and swallow them whole, for an eternity of burning torment.

“If you’re preaching the truth of God, people are going to hate you,” Fred said in Jon Michael Bell’s Addicted to Hate, several years before the death of Matthew Sheppard would make him a household name. Still, he and his kids had already been on talk shows, magazine covers, and radio spreading their feel-good brand of God. And that is this: nearly everyone is going to hell, everyone, that is, except Fred himself and hopefully the most loyal in his family.

The difference between Fred and most other evangelists is not the hate- many others hate. It’s that Fred doesn’t really care if you come to repentance. God either chose you to be saved or he didn’t. Nothing you can do about it now. It’s peculiar to preach without the ol’ soul solicit, the high emotion of devotion, the feeling of healing. But it’s nothing new in Christianity. The idea of predestination is as old as Calvin, the father of Protestantism.

Later Wesley announced that it is by grace you are saved (did you think that went back 2000 years? Nope. Just 500 or so, despite what Paul wrote in the Good Book…) Before Calvin, it was baptism, adherence to the Catholic church’s commandments, and confession. Calvin taught that God picked out in advance whom he wanted, and the rest he just made so he could torture them later through all of eternity. Rest assured that Calvin was on that heaven-bound list, funny that.

Predestination is still a cherished doctrine among many modern churches- ain’t nothing you can do, even if you accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal saviour, when the roll is called up yonder, your name won’t be on it.

But not even the New Calvinists have taken it to Phelps’s extreme, which sees anyone outside of his bloodline as the depraved “Adamic race.” Fewer still feel any need whatsoever to spend every spare moment of their life either beating their children or holding up signs that say Thank God for AIDS or Thank God For Dead Soldiers. Phelps and his cult of followers, mostly his family, vindictively picket sacred events like funerals, disrupting solemnity with their putrid spew. At the 9/11 for example, inexplicably they gathered to mock the victims, taunting them as they were pulled from the rubble, and shouting that those still living should be left to die. After all, this terrorist act was God’s punishment for homosexuals in America, who are of course, the only sinners doing the only kind of sin.

The cult distributed flyers after the Space Shuttle crash, explaining how the disaster was caused by the astronauts, who had not taken it upon themselves to speak out against queers. It just wasn’t at the top of their agenda, sort of like mechanical engineers or frozen yogurt salesmen aren’t always thinking of those awful homos when they’re just doing their jobs.

“Brethren, they can lock us up, but we’ll still do what the Bible tells us to do. Either our wives are going to obey, or we’re going to beat them!”

“Military funerals are pagan orgies of idolatrous blasphemy where they pray to the dunghill gods of Sodom and play taps to a fallen fool.”

“Mexicans worship a bloody fag rectum.”

“Catholic churches, seminaries and monasteries are nothing but sodomite whorehouses filled with unnatural brute beasts and devils. We warned that the very leprechauns of Ireland are likely to be fags!”

“The Catholic Church became the CHURCH OF THE HOLY PEDOPHILES and sodomite feces and semen replaced bread and wine.”

“It is a sin NOT to rejoice when God executes His wrath and vengeance upon America”….”Pray for more dead bodies floating on the fag-semen-rancid waters of New Orleans”….

“Shut up you Christ hating Jew, I wish Hitler had finished the job. You and your children had better watch your back when you get out of temple. This is not a threat but a promise.”

“Topeka is a city of whores.”

What in the world?

Phelps is not the only person in the world who feels this kind of hate. And he’s not the only person in the world who runs a cult. And he’s not the only person in the world who beats his wife and children. And he’s not the only one who is obsessed with the nether regions and ejaculations of men. He’s not the only delusional guy, or the only megalomaniac. But if he is not the one and only, he is a rare breed indeed- he who is all of the above.

As reported by Joe Taschler and Steve Fry in The Transformation of Fred Phelps, it all began in 1929, in the deepest south, the Mississippi. That Phelps family was widely respected: his dad worked in security for the railroad. Fred was only five when his mom died of cancer, and her pallbearers were the town police and judges. His neighbours and classmates recall a respected and smart kid who spent all his time studying. He was involved in all kinds of youth leadership in church, school, sports, and Junior State Guard. He won umpteen awards. He was an Eagle Scout and he played the cornet and base horn.

Intriguingly, everyone the reporters talked to said Fred had a normal southern upbringing. His father did not beat him. He was loved and cared for, and though any child would face difficulty losing a mother, millions have, without turning into a monster. Relatives and neighbours and classmates all said that whatever it was, it came from Fred himself.

In college, Fred “had a profound religious experience,” he says in his site bio. That experience was the delusion that he was plucked by God to be a rare survivor of the lake of fire. He veered direction from college into a fundie Bible seminary. The first time he made it into the news for hate was there- in 1951, Time reported that he preached zealously against the sinners who studied with him. The next year he married poor Margie, and today has 13 children, and to date, 54 grandkids. The whole damn tribe lives in a compound, right inside the Westboro Baptist Church.

Nate Phelps, one of the few escapees, said his dad’s drug abuse began when he decided to go to law school. (Nate’s first memory, he says, is watching Dad shoot the neighbour’s dog, in front of the child who loved it, for pooping in the yard.) The preacher already had work, a wife, and a bunch of kids, and yet he was insistent on reaching the top of his class. Soon he was taking speed, drinking himself into a stupor, and downing barbiturates so that he could get off the speed. Fred did graduate in the top tier of his class, but almost immediately, ethics skirmishes and suspensions began, and Fred believed “they” were trying to destroy his church. The battle against the enemies had begun full swing. His temper heated up and he became increasingly violent.

Margie tried to flee with the ten kids they had so far in the mid-60s. There wasn’t anywhere for 11 people with no resources to go to, and so they returned home. Brutality increased exponentially as Fred began teaching his wife her proper place in submission. In 1968, Fred attempted to shot himself, and failed, unfortunately. Later, he drugged himself into a coma, but upon his release from the hospital, Fred had another epiphany. He swore off drugs and alcohol and resumed his youthful interest in athletics. Later he ran triathlons, even in old age. But he did not swear off his violence. He was just getting started.

Margie couldn’t make it on her own financially, but with the cost of so many kids, legal school, and his recent expenditures on drugs and alcohol, Fred could barely feed them and sometimes didn’t. But he did send the kids out to sell candy, with kids as young as seven marching into seedy bars and strip clubs. The shifts often began at five in the morning, driving into nearby cities, and ended late at night. Many candy companies said they were scammed by the reverend who never paid for the orders. The man of God was also a con man.

Throughout his legal profession, he was constantly running into reprimands, until he was disbarred in 1977 for perjury. He lied to the courts about gathering witnesses on his behalf, when none of the names he listed had even been contacted. The whole brouhaha that initially landed him in hot water started when a court reported dared to emasculate him by failing to complete a transcript at his whim. He called her a slut on the stand, cross-examined her for days, attempted to subpoena ex-boyfriends to testify to her wantonness, and accused her of any number of depraved sex acts, which of course had everything to do with her job in the courts. Incredibly, after this spectacle, he continued practicing law in federal courts! By 1989, he was permanently disbarred for further rabblerousing, making false accusations against judges.

But it wasn’t all talk and no action- though his tongue was like a viper, his sword was sharp, too. He regularly beat his sons with a mattock (sort of like a pick axe.) Once, Nate and Mark showed up at school covered in welts and blisters and in shock, but refused to talk about it. Fred was investigated by social services, but as adults both boys said they had been threatened with death if they talked.

Fred also threatened the school staff, social services, and the individual police officers dealing with the case. He filed a lawsuit charging the school staff with beating his children! Some attendees of Westboro Baptist have reported Fred hitting babies who cry during his sermons. Though most of his kids, those who remain within the church, loyally claim they were only spanked, they freely admit to beating their own children or wives. One son Jonathan spoke about it in the Topeka paper. They have publicly taunted the police, challenging them to do anything about it, stating their God-given right to discipline their subjects.

Though Fred denies child abuse beyond his rightful role in discipline, his escapee son Nate was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and both he and Mark have medically diagnosed injuries such as damage to muscle and tissue in their thighs and butt, scarring, bone chips, and Nate has severe muscle damage to his knees. Wife Margie has bone chips and muscle damage that the sons say happened when she was thrown down the stairs. She suffered (suffers?) continual abuse, emotional and physical.

Nate recalled recently in a speech at an atheism convention that Fred cut of all of Margie’s hair. He taunted her soul in eternal damnation, for a bible verse that said women should have long hair. He told her the verse actually meant hair that had never been cut, so growing it back was to no avail. Nate also recounted how Fred would rip Margie’s arm out of its socket, refusing to allow her to seek medical treatment. When he was angry, he would re-injure that same bad arm.

The kids had to run marathons of 15 to 20 miles even when they were very young. Sometimes they were barely fed a few scraps of cabbage. The children were whipped to no end, and when one instrument ran out, a new one was introduced to the children. Fred would shout bible verses in justification for the beatings.

Few have made it out from the cult, and none have left unscathed. Nate became a methamphetamine addict, before becoming a devout Christian- not his father’s kind-before becoming an atheist. Another sister, Kathy, left before she turned 18, and Fred hunted her down, forced her home, beat her and broke her.

Mark recalled for Jon Bell in Addicted to Hate that Dad would push the kids, kick them regularly, yelling and swearing all the time. “He threw and broke anything he could get his hands on,” Mark said. He would destroy all the dishes and throw everything in the fridge against the wall in rage. His tirades of screaming and violent psychosis could last for hours on end, literal marathons of rage that should land anyone in the mental ward as dangerous.

“Goddam you, you worthless piece of shit of Goddam fucking shit… God Damn You! How dare you, you asshole bastard prick turd. You turd. You lying, mother fucking stinking piece of fucking shit. Fuck you, you lying sack of shit, you. Get the fuck out of my face. Go to hell. I hate you, you bastard. I hate you, you asshole. You Goddam prick asshole bastard, dick, piece of fucking rank stinking fucking garbage that’s as full of shit as anyone could ever be…Didn’t I tell you to not make a fucking sound? You think you’re so Goddam smart thinking for yourself, when I told you what the fuck I wanted. Keep those Goddam kids quiet or I’m going to beat the hell out of all of you, you bitch. You bastard. You bitch. Fuck you. Fuck you, God damn it…You no account little bastard. In the old testament they used to take kids like you out and stone them to death. That’s what you deserve. You ought to be taken out and stoned. At least parents in that time had some Goddam solution to a problem like you. That’s what would cure you. You’ve been nothing but Goddam grief to your mother and I since the fucking day you were born. I wish you were dead. I hate you. Jesus Christ, I hate you. I can’t stand you. I can’t stand the sight of you. You’re sniffing after some whore, for Christ’s sake. You got your dick wet and now you’ve just gone crazy sniffing after that fucking whore. You hot blooded little bastard. Keep your Goddam pants on and keep your fucking dick inside. Horse piss, bullshit, balderdash, crap, lying bastard, son of belial, reprobate. ballamite… Fuck you. Go to hell. You’re going to hell…I can see it with every hit of this Goddam mattock…”

The abuse grew even worse from here, during the amphetamine addiction. Speed can add extra fuel to rage that is already present, giving fury marathon superpowers where it might sooner run out on exhaustion. The neighbours were afraid to intervene, though they witnessed Fred’s savage anger and tight control. He intimidated them to silence.

The pharmacist later denied supplying Phelps with anything except some skin cream, and then conceded he had been filling prescriptions for “Margie.” But not speed. Downers, allergy stuff. This was the same doctor who delivered all of the Phelps kids, according to Mark. He was later arrested for trading illegal prescriptions to patients for sexual favours.

Prescriptions for speed.

Was Fred whoring his wife for amphetamines- or himself? We’ll never know. Fred won’t ever tell, and the good doctor shot himself to death in a parking lot.

And then there is another story- the mysterious life and death of 17-year-old Debbie Valgos. Fred Sr. was enraged when Fred Jr. dated a girl named Debbie whom he had met on a candy drive. Fred preferred to arrange marriages for his kids, but Fred Jr. was smitten. He brought Debbie to church, where Fred made bizarre accusations about the kind of sex acts she apparently enjoyed. The couple took off after attempting their relationship for quite some time in the church with the family blessing. But Fred Sr. spewed perversion talk nonstop. He also assaulted her physically at a roller rink, causing her to have an epileptic seizure.

Fred Jr. reportedly eloped with Debbie, but whether they actually married or just ran away together is uncertain. Either way, Phelps tracked the pair down at gunpoint and kidnapped Fred Jr. back into the church against his will, threatening death to him and his new wife. Fred ran away again at the first opportunity.

Debbie was so traumatized by what she had lived through in those few months with the Phelps, and by losing Fred, that she began attempting suicide- a total of four times, twice by jumping out a window. She hung around a military base doing heroin and speed with soldiers, until she successfully overdosed on bad drugs. What we know for sure is terrible enough, but how else might the reverend have tortured her to lead to this?

She was only 17 when she died. Fred Jr. was never the same. He loved the girl, and they’d never had a chance. “I remember getting home from school the day it appeared in the papers,” says Mark in Addicted to Hate, “and my dad came dancing down the stairs, swaying from the knees and clapping his hands, singing: ‘The whore is dead! The whore is dead!’ “He paraded around the house, singing and laughing with that maniacal giggle he has, ‘the whore is dead!’”

Years later, Debbie’s mother told the press she was certain Phelps played an active role in the death of her daughter. Then she mysteriously disappeared.

How is a delusional and violent psycho who thinks he is God, beats his children and wife, brainwashes them, and spews obscenities in the name of the lord, who disturbs funerals for soldiers and other church services, allowed to go free?

We let him get away with talking like a monster, yet condemn our teenagers for saying “shit.” Clearly, he runs an incestuous cult where members are subjected to mind control due to physical abuse, battery, emotional abuse, brainwashing, the Fred Phelps Religion programming, starved, forced into exhaustion, and sent out to earn money for the only cause he has- to let other people know he is the only Saved- that he is God. A psychopath disrupts our most solemn occasions, interferes with human rights, and spreads hate and violence through his minions, and we allow it? Who is going to step in and force these worker ants away from him, deprogram them until the whole story comes out, and free the children? Who is going to put this bastard in jail?

Fred has been arrested over and over again for assault, battery, threats, trespassing, contempt, disorderly conduct and assaulting a police officer. He has avoided prison every single time, often countersuing or winning through a technicality. For example, once he avoided charges because his right to a speedy trial was infringed upon, taking place more slowly than he defined “speedy.” And in 1996, the Topeka police chief had to resign after it was found that he held a ‘no arrest’ policy for the Westboro church family. Phelps could even drive a seasoned cop into intimidation.

Note that most of Fred’s children are also trained as lawyers. One almost wonders if Fred studied law simply to verse himself in legal loopholes and procedure in order to ‘license’ himself to carry out God’s orders to abuse and vindicate and beat. It’s amazing that the old coot is not locked up for life in prison, and I pray he will be, that he will spend his twilight years, his weakest time, facing his puny worth. Let him in old age finally be punished with a few restrictions, shitty food, and the violent sodomy he has so obsessively accused everyone else of. Those will be the only hours in which I utter, praise God for AIDS.

What do you get when you mix a messiah complex-ed delusional man with religion with power with amphetamine abuse with skillful understanding of laws and loopholes with a violent madman? A Molotov cocktail named Fred Phelps.

When will we stop finding this man’s tyranny entertaining? When will the law do their job and intervene? Is it because we don’t care much about ‘fags’ either and think its funny? Or have we also fallen under the spell of a very intelligent and dangerous man who plays the jester to elude our deepest suspicions? After all, he’s not killing anybody. After all, his absurd name-calling makes his family into a laughing stock, and we turn up the news when they are on it, shaking our head at the antics of this Kansas kook.

And then we turn away.

“We basically grew up in this and we came of an age and realized this is exactly where we want to be, serving God. And so we stay, serving God. I”d rather the whole world go to hell. It’s just as fine with me. Whatever God’s will is fine by me. Soldiers dying, hurricane Katrina, this is just God’s wrath. This is an outpouring of wrath, and we love it. Mini foretaste, appetizer of what’s to come. It’s our duty to love it. Dying time is truth time. These people make an idolatrous worship out of dead (soldiers). They’re in hell already. All that person wants is to see his family again and a drop of water on his tongue. You’re going to hell. Then end.”
-two of Phelps’ granddaughters

http://natephelps.com/10801.html

If you like art, literature, madness and interesting people, you’ll love Lorette C. Luzajic’s books. Her first book is “The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.” Her second is “Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World.)” Her poetry and her collected blogs, musings, reviews, memoirs, notes, eulogies, requiems, interviews, profiles and more are both devastating and hilarious romps through one woman’s wild mood swings. Lorette proves that there’s life after death, even for manic-depressives. “Think Courtney Love meets Margaret Atwood,” says Donnarama, Toronto’s premiere performance artist.

Visit the author’s link at Amazon to order your copies today!

The Other Heiress: The Marchesa Luisa di Casati

I was fourteen when I fell in love with a mysterious redhead I met at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I fancied myself a seasoned intellectual, a young lady of literary tastes and culture, despite my blue-collar country upbringing. And so I would take the Greyhound into Toronto, and dressed in something as obscure and outlandish as a girl could muster on a babysitter’s income, I would visit the gallery. My heart beat faster when I saw her. Her eyes were daunting, piercing through an alabaster visage, set afire with a mop of carrot curls.

We never spoke, because my redhead haunted me from a canvas painted by Augustus John. From her backdrop of sea-foam green, she never flinched, but held my gaze with her own, and an expression of both curiousity and haughty disdain. I was sure she was eccentric, that she must be a writer like me, a woman of outrageous tastes and interesting lovers. She was the woman I wanted to be when I grew up.

The famous painting is one of the Toronto gallery’s highlights to this day. “Luisa Casati should be shot, stuffed and displayed in a glass case,” is what the artist Augustus John said of the Marchesa.

John was not the only artist to paint this captivating femme fatale. Indeed, her whole celebrity was based on her lavish extravagance and eccentricity, which made her muse for the artists and literati of Europe in her time. Born in 1881, she reigned supreme over the imagination of anyone with a heartbeat for the first three decades of the 1900s. Her estate archives suggest she may be the most “artistically represented” woman after Cleopatra and the Virgin Mary. Sculptures, photographs, sketches and paintings preserve her spirit long beyond her death in 1957. She posed for Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Kees Van Dongen, and Jacob Epstein. She captivated Erte, Jack Kerouac, Jean Cocteau, Tallulah Bankhead, Tennessee Williams, Ezra Pound, Colette and Coco Chanel. Her pets inspired the famous Cartier Panther design. Later, she was played by silver screen legends Vivien Leigh and Ingrid Bergman.

But who was she, and what was all the hoopla about? Was she beautiful? What talents did she possess?

Luisa, born in Milan in 1881, was the daughter of a wealthy Austrian cotton manufacturer who was made count by King Umberto the first for his contributions to the cotton industry. Luisa was born rich, but she was an unfortunate looking child, with bulging alien eyes on a harshly chiseled face. She was also very shy. But she was fiercely intelligent and curious about arts and culture, and her passions were encouraged with visits to museums and art galleries. Very early on, Luisa became enchanted with eccentric royalty or outrageous theatre figures, a fascination that was to continue through her lifetime.

Luisa’s mother died when she was just 13, and then the Count died two years later. Luisa and her only sister were the richest women in Italy at the time. The girls moved into the care of an uncle, but a few years later, Luisa married Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino, Marchese di Roma. They had one child a year later, and Luisa soon found that wedded bliss was stifling her style, and the pair took up separate residences. Though she’d picked up a fascinating with the mystical arts and the macabre from her husband, she soon began an affair with the famous Italian lover, poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. The affair lasted decades, and the friendship a lifetime. It was at the time of this relationship that Luisa began to explore her deepest eccentricities and vanities, becoming a truly Gothic heroine and dandy. She artfully blended the macabre with the outlandish in her demeanor, surroundings, and fashion- the freakier, the better. She engaged in scandalous love affairs, with both men and women. Her decadence was supreme and captivating. Disregarding her childhood insecurities, she seized the tall, ghostly androgyny and accentuated it wildly, powdering her face whiter, circling her eyes with black kohl, smudging her lips in vermillion. It’s a look that reappears on fashion runways every few seasons even today.

“The face was that of a sinister Pierrot, utterly white, the thin mouth a slit that seemed to be of the same black as the rings encircling the eyes. The high cheekbones, the forward-thrusting chin, the long neck bespoke the apparition’s class,” said Philippe Jullian. “Was this the vampire Nosferatu in drag or the daughter of Dracula turned grandmother?”

The Marchesa had a penchant for outrageous luxury. She went to Paris, Rome, Capri, buying palaces! She loved to lavishly and bizarrely entertain guests of artistic or aristocratic temperament, hostessing grandiose masquerade balls. She painted her Nubian servants gold. She had wax mannequins made to populate her rooms- legend says they were modeled after her lovers. And like fellow eccentrics Lord Byron, Josephine Baker, and Michael Jackson, the Marchesa had her own menagerie of pets.

She could be seen in her skintight long velvet gowns walking her greyhounds- or her pet cheetahs. She wore live, gilded snakes as necklaces. Isidora Duncan recounts her experience as Luisa’s visitor. A parrot greeted her with a tirade of vulgarities. A while bulldog snarled. A cobra hissed from a cage. The walls and floors were covered in white bear skins and tiger skins. “There was a gorilla, showing its teeth.” The Marchesa drove in a carriage fronted by twin leopards. She carried a monkey in a cage. Others complained of the stench, but she gave him a sprig of lilacs, which he flung about, scattering the petals. “Now do you see why I have a monkey? Don’t you think that’s beautiful?” Luisa asked her detractors. “Isn’t it like something in a Chinese painting?”

Her biographers Scot D. Ryersson, Michael Orlando Yaccarino, Quentin Crisp, in Infinite Variety, tell the above anecdote. They also recount how her palace gardens were filled with a veritable zoo, and that she sometimes sailed the canals with her selection of primates, tigers, and exotic birds. There were white peacocks, ocelots, boa constrictors, and albino blackbirds.

“She was the most flamboyant and dramatic character to flit through the early 20th century European beau monde,” writes Michael Mattis at www.dandyism.net.  “They simply don’t make her kind anymore: richer than God, gloriously semi-sane, with outrageous taste in friends, art, décor, clothes, houses, pets and lovers. Guests of Casati’s boudoir were a veritable who’s who of the aristos, aesthetes, artists, bons vivants, poets, dancers and dandies that made the early 20th century’s art scene what it was: totally, utterly, and delightfully mad.”

A Polish sculptor named Catherine Barjanksky once said, “She was so different from other women that ordinary clothes were impossible for her.” The artist described Luisa’s ensemble of one occasion as something out of Thousand and One Nights. “Long Persian trousers of heavy gold brocade, fastened tightly…. held by diamond bangles…feet encased in gold sandals with high diamond heels…she smoked cigarettes out of a long black mouthpiece studded with diamonds.”

The Marchesa has been criticized for the bottomless well of her vanity. Would she have been so outrageous if she attracted no attention? Furthermore, she had hundreds of portraits made of herself in ink and oil and photograph. Her motivation, hardly original, yet clear as a bell, was simply this famous statement: “I want to be a living work of art.” Luisa wished to make herself immortal, and so she made herself memorable, with portraits that would bring her to life centuries after her passing.

Luisa was also criticized for being a showy, flamboyant personality despite contributing no art or literature to society. Her talents were mere shock value and superficial veneer.

But this is hardly a fair critique when one considers not only the inspirational value of the muse, but the monetary injections her estate provided for endless artists, sculptors, photographers, costumiers, designers, dancers, actors, musicians, writers, theatres, even puppeteers. Her high profile cemented their stature in some cases, and others had a chance at a career because of her. Her lavish splurging boosted the productivity and importance of the arts in Europe after the turn of last century.

Just as important as her money was the attention she brought to the arts and literary affairs. People flocked in droves to events just to see the living work of art, and thus the arts themselves gained considerably in both finance and audience. The importance of this role cannot be understated. This was a vivid time in Europe for arts and culture, with other eccentrics like Ballet Russes superstar Nijinsky and opera/theatre artist Erte and a whole host of others mingling around salons and galleries. But the roots of these geniuses and most of their company were humble. Luisa’s grandiosity fuelled the development of greatness.

Today we depend on the fickle and disinterested government arts grants and listen to other taxpayers complain that they could care less about opera or oil painting. Or we watch artists and writers live their passion very nearly in the gutter. The Marchesa was a patroness extraordinaire who valued the arts above all else, even, I believe, above her own image. I am certain that the meaning of her vanity was rooted in her absolute devotion to the creativity of the human imagination. It takes tremendous vanity to fuel the salons and cafes and theatres of Europe, and this was the Marchesa’s fate.

But alas, even for a filthy rich heiress, the bottomless well of gold runs out after one too many monkeys. By the early 1930s, the Marchesa had spent more than everything, overdrawn by some 25 million dollars.

Even her penitence was the height of elegant soap operatics. She appeared before the Parisian archbishop to seek his forgiveness, dressed from head to toe in white, carried by four valets, holding white flowers and an albino parrot on her lap.

Her estates were sold to pay off her debts, and the lady Luisa spent 25 years in England in humbling circumstance. But she lost none of her pluck, apparently- legend holds that the Marchesa could be seen strolling the alleyways, dumpster diving for feathers and other accoutrements with which to decorate her bonnets.

Luisa’s long-term lover, the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio wondered, “By what fire did she transmute the substance of her life into the beauties of such moving power? She demonstrated how true it is that all enchantment is a madness induced with art.”

Today I stood at the renovated and spectacular new Art Gallery of Ontario. More than two decades have gone by since I was first astonished and seduced by the portrait. Now I know that Augustus John was her lover, too, and that the effect she had on me was precisely the one she wanted to have on anyone who laid eyes on her. Amazingly, this picture was purchased for a mere 1500 pounds in 1934. It is said to be the best loved work in the gallery. Clearly, her ability to make an instant audience wherever she goes has prevailed long after she died. She was indeed the living work of art she wanted to be. Immortal.

Every portrait of the Marchesa shows another side, another layer, and John’s is disarming for its near-softness. He avoided the Gothic, macabre, darker incarnations and focused on the shock of her orange hair, flaming against a grey-green backdrop. She is pale, almost vulnerable, turning guardedly to her observer, yet unflinching. She shows that her intensity is still present even when undressed of her carriages and strange pets and vampiric gowns, never having been dependent on those things after all. Here, as ever, she does not flinch. She makes no apology for the fact that she is everyone’s lover, and not just mine. There is enough of her to go around, and always will be.

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
- Shakespeare, on Marchesa’s tomb, 1957

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Back to the Future: Ray Bradbury’s Pulp Fiction

Ray Bradbury has been old for as long as I can remember. Nearly 89, the wheelchair is new to his octogenarian years, but he’s had the mad scientist’s white shock mop and those bottle glasses for decades. He’s been writing for 77 years.

“Live forever!” a strange carnival wizard once told Bradbury the boy, knighting him with his magic sword.  Did Mr. Electrico give Ray eternal life?

I hope Bradbury needs no introduction. The writer is an institution of America, a sort of literary Abe Lincoln. His boyhood was built on Tarzan comics and penny candy, on pulp short stories and freak shows. With nothing but an American dream, and no education but his imagination, Ray began filling the pulp mags, morphing into a prophet of techno- doom as his first novels came out in the early ‘50s. I’ll assume all who are literate have read the stunning quintuplet of early Ray: The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, and Dandelion Wine. A half century later an asteroid has been named for him, as has a park and a crater on the moon. He has dozens of prestigious awards. Add a Science Fiction Writer’s Association Grand Master designation, and an induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Then there’s the special Pulitzer citation for a “deeply influential” career in science fiction/fantasy.

For all that, Bradbury doesn’t like being known as a science fiction writer. “I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it,” he has famously said.  His stories feature space, creatures, dinosaurs, and time machines, but Bradbury’s conjure is genre-less. He writes novels, plays, poems, and short stories, but in a way, they’re all short stories. His novels gather related stories tied with poetic threads, or bloom from a story. His prose sings with gorgeous detail. He has hundreds, maybe thousands, of stories.

Ray spent his early childhood in the Waukegan, Illinois Library. Escaping with the Wizard of Oz or Tarzan, or with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells stoked his imagination. He thought about being a writer, or a magician.

Labor Day of 1932, fate intervened. Dealt an early blow by death, Ray’s beloved Uncle Lester was shot through the liver by a thief. Ray saw a carnival tent by Lake Michigan and sought to forget his sorrows in the magic tricks of Mr. Electrico. The magician introduced Ray to the oddities of the carnie circus- The Illustrated Man, the fat lady, the human skeleton, and other sideshow freaks we all get to revisit in Dark Carnival and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

“Live forever!” the magician said. Ray “felt something strange and wonderful had happened.” He DID want to live forever, and a few days later, he began to write each and every day, a habit still today, nearly 80 years later. Of that weekend, Ray says, “I was running away from death, running toward life.”

That may be, but teen life for a sci-fi geek proved unpopular. High school was hell. Ray was homely, with pimples and boils. He spent his spare time with a typewriter instead of girls. The other boys played sports and drove cars.  But Ray was furiously penning at least one short story a week, ambitiously sending them to top markets. He graduated, unpublished, in the same suit his uncle had been shot in.

Graduation was one rite of passage, but for most teen boys, hardly the most important one. Shy about his acne, Ray didn’t have a girlfriend, so he and a friend enjoyed a traditional deflowering at 16. Ray’s lady of the evening was a chubby redhead. According to biographer Sam Weller, the long-awaited transition into manhood was over in three minutes.

Bradbury did not pursue college. He sold newspapers- and stories. By 1947, the stories about sideshow freaks became woven into his first book, Dark Carnival.

This year was also significant because he married. Ray met Marguerite in a bookstore. He invited her for coffee. Later, their first kiss “broke my eardrums.” They did it like rabbits on the floor until one day her dad caught them. “We made love underneath every pier along the coast,” Ray said in a biography by Sam Weller. They were married for an astonishing 57 years, with four girls. Death did them part in 2003.

As a writer, and a huge fan of Bradbury’s work, I can’t help but notice that there’s much lauding, mythmaking and hero adulation going on. Yet few have been bold enough to say some truths out loud. Here goes: Ray Bradbury is an uneducated, inflexible, pretentious, cowardly old crab who has been set in his ways since 1937. And he’s afraid to use a computer.

I await the shots to ring out, but if I once went on record with the audacity to say that Henry Miller was an overrated bore who knew nothing about women, I can stand my ground on this one. Ray shuns the science fiction establishment while soaking up all of its highest accoladesy. “I don’t write science fiction. I’ve only done one science fiction book and that’s Fahrenheit 451,” he told Devin O’Leary, a statement so ludicrous that the South Park satirists should have gobbled it up. Ray prefers “fantasy” writer, because, he says, his stories are as enduring and rich as Greek mythology or Old Testament stories. “It’s my ability as a teller of tales and a writer of metaphors. I think that’s why I’m in the schools,” he told writer Joshua Klein.  No one can argue the fact that Ray’s books have changed the world. But the ones that did were all written over 40 years ago, the same ones still read in schools.

Nor does Ray read what’s being written today in the sci-fi fantasy genre. He’s too busy listening to “mainly the Russian composers: Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky.” He slams the cyberpunk genre: “This kind of crud” looks boring to him, though he doesn’t “have time to read these books.” Nor does Bradbury learn about craft from reading his contemporaries’ work, as that is “incestuous.” This from the man who famously said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

I have to wonder which will endure: Quicker than the Eye, or Snow Crash? From the Dust Returned or The Fionavar Tapestry? Hmm.

But I admit it was this was what got to me most, said to Joshua Klein: “There’s a lot of junk around… they sell in the millions… There have always been soap operas and summer-reading books. That goes back 100 years. Look at Gone With The Wind. That was a big bestseller 60 years ago. But, you know, it’s very shallow. It’s a woman’s book.”

Clearly, Ray’s never read Margaret Mitchell’s classic, a work so far from the shallow end that readers need a life preserver. The great Biblical and Shakespearian themes of love, war, deception, truth, slavery, identity, roots, race, gender, class, social mores and values, grief, loss, faith, materialism, and spirituality weave seamlessly together in this detailed and riveting depiction of survival during the social upheaval of the Civil War, a book whose threads of characterization are never lost or left untied, even after 900 pages. Frankly, it’s not a book that our short story master could pull together. Ray must have seen the romantic movie, but he couldn’t have read this tome before commenting. If he had, he’d know why these people who never existed- Rhett Butler, Melanie Wilkes, Belle Watling- are as real as anyone born of flesh and blood. Now what was that kid’s name in Dandelion Wine?

Perhaps if he had read the book, he would have known more about women- and men- and never have committed adultery. That Maggie had expressed discontent in their marriage in 1968 meant “I couldn’t trust her anymore” and so Ray went on to tryst with a woman decades younger who of course hunted him until he was weak from refusal. Five years of lusty romance went by, until another woman called to wish Ray a happy 54th birthday. He invited her up to his office and began another four-year infidelity. He loved his wife, and believes Maggie never knew. I sincerely hope she had secrets of her own.

It’s not just his wife who played the fool. All of Ray’s contemporaries in fiction, in filmmaking, are idiots. Though he’s never been to university,  “All the people at all the studios are stupid.  They’re so goddamned dumb…They’ve all gone to college, and they think they know how to write…” When asked by the Smithsonian to pep up a planetarium presentation, they critiqued his factual errors. Ray didn’t feel those were important, as long as the audience felt the excitement of the solar system.  Seems not even scientists know better.

Then there was the skirmish with Michael Moore, who “stole” Ray’s title by naming his film Fahrenheit 9/11. The Oxford English Dictionary dares to use the word, too, but Bradbury railed against Moore’s robbery of his intellectual property. I’m assuming a man with a Pulitzer citation and honorary doctorates knows titles aren’t copyrightable, and that Moore could have called his movie Gone With the Wind if he’d wanted to. I’m also assuming that Ray knew he was making literary allusions when he used titles like The Golden Apples of the Sun and I Sing the Body Electric. But that didn’t stop the old codger from calling Mike Moore a “screwed asshole” in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.

The writer is also so busy listening to Russian classical and reading Shaw that he’s had no time to learn computers. He’s not a Luddite, though- it’s just that “I don’t do Windows.” Everyone on the computer writes nefarious junk. “We are multitudinous lemmings driven by wireless voices to hurl ourselves into the Internet seas where tides of mediocrity surge, pretending at wit and will but signifying nothing,” he writes in Bradbury Speaks. I would protest that just like the magazine and book industries, there’s plenty of pulp fiction along with the real deal. John Kumpunen, an online commenter, said it better. “About writing: Reality is that 99.9% of writing is terribly bad. Uninspiring, dead, clumsy, and just stylistically awful word vomiting like Bradbury’s … ‘multitudinous lemmings driven by wireless voices to hurl ourselves into the Internet seas where tides of mediocrity surge…’ Now, THAT is bad. Salieri waving his baton to drown out Mozart.”

But aside from that, computers “make mistakes,” Ray told journalist David Boyne. “I don’t make mistakes.”  I see.

“Ray Bradbury has been dusted with so much glory lately that it’s high time his reputation got a good sullying,” wrote Bryan Curtis for Slate in 2005. He laments his lost “pulp god.”  “So now that Bradbury has officially been accepted into the halls of Literature, can we lesser life forms please have him back?” he asks. For him, “It’s the pulpy, childlike terrors that stick.” Bryan believes in Ray the fabulist, in the stories of dinosaurs and giant reptiles, of time machines and aliens and magic elixirs and things that go bump in the night.

You can read all the dang Dickinson and Edith Wharton you want to, but you can’t take the Tarzan out of the boy.

Maybe, just maybe, the remarkable achievements, the prolific works, the recognition, the magic- maybe none of these have ever obliterated the earnest, pimply boy who couldn’t get a girl or be a writer, the boy who sold papers on the corner and penny stories to pulp magazines. If that’s the case, then the very human Bradbury is much like the very fiction Adrian Mole. Sue Townsend’s brilliant, zitty creation fancied himself a writer and an intellectual, but his poetry, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland! never got accepted by the literati. If this is indeed the case, then all of Ray Bradbury’s blustery self-importance and maniacally driven productivity is just a young boy’s bravado after all.

Notes from Inside Waylon Smithers Closet

Who’s the President of the Malibu Stacey Fan Club and has the largest collection of Stacey dolls in the world? Well, good guess, but it’s not Lisa Simpson, who is most likely to burn her Barbies along with her bra as soon as she begins junior high. It’s Waylon Smithers, who also staged “Malibu Stacey, The Musical.” Poor Waylon Smithers is also the proud owner of just about every other stereotype of queer middle age.

Montgomery Burns may seem oblivious to the hints of undying love from his good and faithful servant, but The Simpsons‘ audience has known all along. In 2004, when a clever marketing gimmick announced that the show would be ‘outing’ a character, bets all around were on the obvious closet queen. But it was Marge’s sister who came out. Waylon Smithers never did come out of the closet- it’s just not in his character…

read the rest of this issue’s Fascinating Queers at Out Impact

http://www.outimpact.com/features/news-features/spotlights-news-features-features/fascinating-queers/notes-waylon-smithers-closet-2028

The Accidental Artist: the Story of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo spent most of her 47 years sick and confined to her bed, but that didn’t stop her from having torrid erotic affairs with both men and women. She was an intense, passionate, fiercely intelligent woman with a formidable unibrow. She wanted to be a doctor but fate intervened, and she became an artist, literally by accident.

read Frida’s story at Fascinating Queers at Out Impact

http://www.outimpact.com/features/news-features/spotlights-news-features-features/fascinating-queers/accidental-artist-story-frida-kahlo-2157

Larger than Life: the Tragic Story of Anna Nicole Smith

Anna Nicole Smith loved to be naked, and being naked is what she did best. Anna was like a parody of her own stereotype, the Texas stripper, a big blonde blow up doll, dumb as a post, the laughingstock of Hollywood. She’ll forever be seen as the train wreck gold-digger who wasn’t sure who fathered her child. The fat jeans model junkie who took advantage of an 89-year-old man, married his money, was unfaithful, gluttonous, and voracious for drugs, food, and sex.

Her overdose death in 2007 shocked no one, and nor did the infant grab that brought a bunch of Baby Dadas and a grandmother out of the woodwork. Of course, these people cared about Anna’s child,, and not at all about the possibility she could be worth half a billion dollars. The saga of Anna’s fated fortune, from her second husband the oil tycoon, had been going on as long as we could remember. By the time she died, it was just another event in a long saga of her tabloid stories.

In 1994, New York Magazine featured a picture of the world’s dumbest blonde in cowboy boots and not much else, digging into a bag of cheese puffs. Anna had no idea that  the words White Trash Nation would be emblazoned across the page. She’d been under the impression that she’d be shown as an all-American girl, and the magazine argued that yes, she had. It wasn’t a nice trick to play on a dimwitted bimbo, but the fact remained that nothing could be closer to the truth. It was a few months after her wedding to octogenarian J. Howard Marshall, or rather, to his fortune, or so they said. And when  she fled the honeymoon bed for a trip with her bodyguard lover, her motives were absurdly transparent.

Or were they? To the day she died Anna was big, blonde and stoned in court, fighting for her money. J. Howard’s son was trying to keep it from her- or, more realistically, keep it for himself.

Maybe no one cares for my two cents on the issue, but too damn bad. Aside from a few million men with their pants around their ankles, a few bewildered exes, and a daughter who will never know her, there’s no one left to speak Anna.

And it’s my job to ask this: why does everyone feel sorry for poor J. Howard? Is the public so sexist  that they think a billionaire oil tycoon, a Yale law professor, no less, was the hapless, helpless swindle victim of a simpleminded stripper? J. Howard is not the first and nor will he be the last man to throw his money at a naked woman. Why in the world would anyone assume that a big shot lawyer wouldn’t know that the wife young enough to be his great granddaughter would be good for half his money? Certainly he didn’t expect to live forever, and he was clearly old enough to decide for himself whether to marry. The man was not a fool, and I doubt her extracurricular activities were a big surprise to him.

The truth of the matter is that J. Howard was a man who frequented a peeler bar on a daily basis in his wheelchair, threw thousands of dollars around, was nearing death, and had his heart set on heaven on earth. He  lavished Anna with flashy gifts, plied her with hundred dollar bills, and begged her to marry him.

This was no shotgun wedding- Anna turned him down repeatedly, because she wanted to make a name for herself in, er, nude modeling. Though he dangled his billions in front of her for nearly three years, she ran off and landed the Playboy photo shoot that would catapult her to celeb status. She lived the playbunny life of fancy clothes and champagne and drugs and boys, but she talked to J. Howard on the telephone every night out of the kindness of her heart. Finally, she decided why not make an old man happy? Who could say that that, in and of itself, is not love? And if she loved him for his money, did he marry her for her brains and her soul?

Anna’s detractors wonder how they practiced intimacy. None of our business. Did she have to formally have intercourse with him to ‘deserve’ the money? It is not for us to determine what did or did not go on. Marriage takes place all over the world for many different reasons- arrangements, political unions, convenience, immigration, dowry, retaliation, enforcement, bla bla bla. If a brilliant law professor is not capable of deciding to marry, then who is? And why wouldn’t Anna want to do a sweet turn for a nice rich man’s dying days when he spoils her rotten?

Consider the cesspool of trailer trash she inherited in the genetic lottery. It’s easy for us to poke fun at her repellant stupidity and repetitive nudity, but should we? Drugs and alcohol are certainly rampant in Hollywood, where everyone wants to party. But the tragic hot mess of Anna Nicole Smith has its roots a long way from glamourous hedonism. Recall that one of the old-school staple reasons for self-destructive drug use is childhood abuse, the desperate pattern of escapism from grim reality. It goes above and beyond the lure of hot tub parties. Its seeds are planted when your daddy is planting his seeds in your garden, uncommon nowhere, and extremely common in the kind of world Anna grew up in. Don’t you all wonder why she so cruelly and consistently refused all contact of her children with her mother? Classic- mom said nothing. Moral morons wrote all over the net about poor maligned mom Virgie, and how Anna’s drug habit separated them. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Anna was born in 1967 in backwater Texas, the second child to Virgie Arthur. Virgie at 14 had a son with her brother. Oh, sorry, her stepbrother. That’s right, a very merry brady bunch and the ensuing bundles of joy. It’s likely she was also the victim of abuse, as the cycle goes, and maybe forced to have her brother’s baby. Later, he was allegedly convicted of child molesting for something else. Though Virgie was the deputy sheriff and worked in law enforcement for most of her life, her private life was not exactly law and order. She had a long string of husbands, perhaps six? and most of them were sex felons. Anna, nee Vickie Hogan, was fathered by Don Hogan. There was some kind of rape scandal involving this man and Virgie’s ten-year-old niece. Dad was exchanged for another Donald, this time Hart, whom Anna maintained raped her from ages nine to 14. She escaped from home to live with a relative.

We all know what happens next in tragic stories like these- Anna became pregnant soon after. She married the boy, Billy, and they had a son named Daniel. He was the true joy of Anna’s life and the most normal player in the trailer trash saga. The rapist step dad had children with another mom- one of those sons was later convicted of kidnapping a paraplegic and using her as a sex slave. Train wreck? It gets worse.

The story from here was the same as every other inbred trailer queen’s story, up until the implants, anyway. Still named Vickie, she failed most of high school and worked in a fried chicken joint, following her story’s stereotype with uncanny precision. And that’s where she got knocked up. Now, Anna wasn’t playing with a full deck. But Billy- he was lucky if he had one or two cards. He was 16, a year younger than Anna, when they married. She left with baby Daniel for Houston not long afterwards.

The pages of the stereotypical drama turn predictably still. Anna- well, Vickie- worked at Wal Mart and Red Lobster, trying to make ends meet for her and her very beautiful baby. One day she passed by a nightclub flashing a neon dancer in cowgirl boots. Anna went in, showed her assets, and began dancing. This was her calling, and her true gift, and her patrons were dumbstruck by her big blinding blonde beauty. She was sweet, stupid, and sensational without her clothing. Sadly, she felt insecure with her pert B cup boobs, and decided to take her career to the next level with massive breast implants.

Enter J. Howard Marshall, barely able to sit up in his wheelchair. Every day he came  to watch the mesmerizing Anna. He paid her hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars just to sit topless near his wheelchair and they talked and giggled the day away. He drowned her in gifts. Not every stripper is even lucky enough to make a living, and Anna had never seen so much money. She was still a total hick, with no idea how to manage what was coming in, and she blew it on baby and on bling. J. Howard was begging her to marry him before he died, but Anna had other beaus and other plans- she wanted to fulfill her lifelong dream.  She wanted to be a playboy bunny just like Marilyn Monroe.

Like many little girls, and like most raped and orphaned girls, Anna looked up to spectacular sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, who was a molested orphan who became a legend. An unconscious empathy takes place between victims, but Anna couldn’t have understood how Marilyn was deeply intelligent, because she herself could barely read. She did see the rags to riches, the glamourous transformation. She wanted to be a breathless blonde bunny, and a famous actress-model.

Now the early ‘90s in fashion was a long way from bodacious, and the kinder of Anna’s cronies advised her to abandon embarrassment and continue to entertain in Texas, where everything was bigger and better. Ironically, it was J. Howard who encouraged her dream of modeling. Though he wanted to provide for her, she wanted to make it on her own. And so Barbie put her five-inch stilettos on and stormed into the offices of Playboy magazine. Against all odds, she strode out with a contract.

In fact, the photographs of Vickie- this was still her name in her first magazine appearance- were of that breathless blonde beauty that had seldom been seen since her idol Monroe, or Jane Mansfield. Anna was unbelievably photogenic and loved the camera. She was larger than life, and stood out from the other models by more than her big Texas hair. Layout schedules were bumped so that Anna’s nudie pics would be featured sooner than planned. J. Howard had been wooing an unknown stripper- now he was begging for America’s flavour of the month.

Her celebrity was instant, and in keeping with the stress, Anna’s drug and alcohol use went up. So did her consumption of food. She went from big boned to bigger, and gossip started. Anna could also guzzle several bottles of champagne and her lack of decorum and daftness quickly became as legendary as her helium ta-tas. Though she filled out her Guess Jeans with unending bootyliciousness, stunning her naysayers with a wildly popular and fully clothed modeling contract, her life had begun to spin out of control. By then she had known J. Howard for almost three years, and spoken to him every night on the phone, even at the peak of her fame. And she thought he would be a calming and sweet force in her chaotic life, and that she would make an old man a happy one.

Their wedding stirred a media circus, of course, as he sat crumpled in a white tux, shriveled in his wheelchair, and Anna dwarfed him in voluptuous white, endless yards of it, massive puffed sleeves, with her legendary mammaries going down the aisle before her.

Anna did make him happy for the last year and a half of his life, though by now she was a razor’s width from the edge. J. Howard couldn’t even get out of his wheelchair, never mind save her from the overdoses, excesses, and pain that her past and her exposure brought her. She was far too unsophisticated to handle the press attention for Goldie gold-digger, and too damaged not to take all the media fat jokes personally. Anna’s career, reputation, and physical peak tanked miserably. She was out of her mind, and when J. Howard died, she dramatically wore her wedding dress to the funeral. Depressed, she watched TV, ate, and took drugs. More scandals ensued, including bankruptcy, the war with J.’s family because she wasn’t specifically mentioned in his will (neither were they), and the alleged sex abuse of one of her employees, which may or may not have been just a case of drug regret. Anna was in and out of court, fighting for her estate, and in and out of rehab, and in and out of her mind.

Later, Anna was savvy enough to realize in her broke and hazy fugue that if the public loved to laugh at her, then she would let them, and she started her own reality show. The Anna Nicole Show was the highest order of pure campiness, in god-awful taste, featuring endless boring dioramas of the train wreck crashing, the blimp getting bigger, and an arsenal of queens attending to their reigning trash heap. She stumbled, drooled, and devoured her way back into the public eye, because she desperately needed to pay her outstanding debts for the lifestyle she’d never been able to afford on her own.

Anna had never made a decision to ‘clean up her act’ but unexpectedly and miraculously, she lost 70 pounds and landed a contract with Trim Spa, the diet aid. And although the nature of her strange ongoing relationship with her lawyer slash lover will never be fully understood, she left with the other Howard Stern for Bahamas, to be out of the public eye, and was soon photographed by tabloids with a natural beauty we had never seen before- straight hair, tailored but sexy clothing, and nearly no makeup. She announced with great joy that she was pregnant. The buzz was instantaneous- another bastard heir to the billionaire.

Though Anna’s bewildered boy toy, the jaw droppingly gorgeous and totally effeminate Larry Birkhead couldn’t understand why she took his offspring to be to the island, he understood that she was deeply confused and needed time to put the pieces of her shambles together. Anna was so broke by the time Dannielynn was born, she sold photographs of herself in the hospital, looking exhausted but strangely stunning, with her brand new bundle. Daniel, her handsome son, came from the States to spend the delivery days with Mom, and the broken and bizarre bunch was clearly blissful. Her lawyer Howard Stern was there, too, standing in as the proud new father and caretaker of the newly cleaned up Anna Nicole.

The rest of the story is even weirder. The cheery family reunion was ripped apart when out of the blue, the strapping and healthy 20-year-old Daniel died at his mom’s bedside, right there in the hospital. At the moment of their deepest happiness, embracing a brand new sibling and new start, he was torn from his mother in a mystery overdose of antidepressants and methadone. It would be no surprise that Daniel was taking prescription antidepressants, given his tumultuous heritage. But even a pill popper has no use for multiple Zolofts.  Still, Larry Birkhead said he noticed strange behaviour from Daniel in the few months before his death. Daniel allegedly stole some of his mother’s methadone, and he had hired a private investigator for unknown reasons. (Later speculation buzzed that a Svengali was poisoning Daniel, and that Anna was under his control as well.  The truth is, nothing is farfetched when we are talking about a potential half billion dollars, and now one heir was out of the way.)

Anna’s surfacing to sunlight from the maelstrom was brief, and she submerged again into the twilight world, popping more pills than ever before and mumbling to herself, seldom making sense. When she was led zombie like in front of the cameras for a ‘commitment ceremony’ with Howard Stern, the waves began of who was Dannielynn’s real father. The birth certificate said Howard. Anna’s trash talking sister said she had frozen the oil tycoon’s sperm. Larry insisted baby was definitely his, and some said Anna had never had a romance at all with Howard, that she was just his mannequin and his motives were unscrupulous. Others said the commitment ceremony was just to make a few bucks from paparazzi pics, because she was so desperate.  Regardless, after Daniel died, Anna was completely emptied, roaming blankly wherever she was prodded. She was way out of it, sick, crazy, strange. Why she was not in a mental hospital for rest is unclear, and many still wonder if it was all in Howard’s plan, if that’s why he took her to the Bahamas, away from the laws and the friends who might notice she was fucked.  Most of the time, Anna could barely hold her infant, and she was cruelly photographed passed out and dribbling vomit. She was simply the living dead.

The ending of the story was no surprise to anyone.  Five months after Danielynn’s birth and Daniel’s death, Anna, while sick in bed, overdosed for the last time.

The DNA circus began full force. Suddenly, Anna’s mom was a glowing picture of maternal concern. Virgie had never been around to help her daughter through the vicious struggles she had bequeathed to her. But now she accepted cash handouts to be photographed sobbing at the grave, and used her law background to move full force into custody battle for the billion dollar baby. And Anna’s grieving ‘husband” seemed remarkably composed in the aftermath, even as it turned out that most of the eleven drugs in Anna’s body had been prescribed in his name, not hers! Immediate speculation began over whether he had eliminated the oldest heirs and now had sole custody of the , conveniently his own flesh and blood. And to be fair, there was nothing outlandish about such theories: Howard’s presence was certainly mysterious, and his role of power over her money and health were obvious starting points for conspiracy.

But that blew up in his face, of course, when it turned out Larry had been telling the truth all along and Dannielynn was his baby. Virgie was outraged that she didn’t get custody of the baby.

Perhaps the details of Anna’s life and death are just the tragic outcome of destiny, larger than life because of her celebrity status. But it’s also clear that wherever there is money, drugs, and sex- and here were all three in spades- there is potential for drama of every kind. Add to that the fact that Anna was easy to take advantage of, an easy target for ridicule, and not in any semblance of control of her life, and you get this brutal tangle.

We may never know, and perhaps no one cares. Society, after all, cares little for whores. The Internet is oozing comments that Anna was nothing but a selfish set of tits and ass who only cared about partying. Does no one care that a girl was in trouble? Never mind that she may have been a victim. One can get away with swindling, target, murder, drugs, and blackmail, as long as the victim is a whore, not a human.

In the end, it is only fitting that little girl lost followed in the footsteps of her heroine, Marilyn Monroe. They had little in common but their trademark red lips, va va voom curves, Playboy cover, and then, cruelly, the circulating photographs of each of them, their bodies blue on the morgue gurney. And so it is that the big boned girl with the big smile and big bank account, larger than life, went from this world. The blow up doll deflated. The end.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

The Young and the Reckless: George Gordon, Lord Byron

http://www.bookslut.com/fascinating_writers/2009_01_013977.php

Visit the link above for this month’s Fascinating Writer, Lord Byron, one of the first ‘celebrities.’ Incest, vampires, scandalous gay affairs, murderous relatives, and a pet badger….

Suze Orman’s Cents and Sensibility

I vowed a long time ago not to argue with people about Madonna. But there I was, at a pop art exhibit, ripping into the wine and calamari with gusto, when an unknown actress and I got into it over the Great Mother. “Yes, she is brilliant, a genius,” she sneered. “I’ve got to admire anyone with such a glaring lack of talent, who made it there on self-promotion alone.”

You know what? No one ever made it on talent alone. There are millions of talented people who no one has ever heard of. On top of talent, you need either luck or pluck, and usually both.  Madonna has candidly confessed that her voice is not extraordinary. But she IS an extraordinary talent in dancing, choreography, masterminding sets, video stories, outrageous ideas, and running a multibillion-dollar business by the seat of her panties. How is it that a woman’s marketing genius, her staggering business acumen, is dismissed as lack of talent?

Financial guru Suze Orman is often criticized in the same way. It’s not her financial advice, critics say, that made her, but her marketing flare. Those old boys’ clubs  can’t accept that there’s nothing wrong with being smart, pretty, AND popular. Ten years ago, Forbes grumbled that Suze used too many self-promotion tactics, including charitable participation. “A plug for charitable giving earns her huge amounts of free publicity,” lamented William P. Barrett in a story he called Sizzling Suze. “Too bad Orman didn’t include a chapter [in her new book] on “How to promote yourself without spending money on promotion.””

read the rest of Suze’s story at www.outimpact.com

look for Fascinating Queers by Lorette C. Luzajic