You Big Dummy

A couple of weeks back, while on the Upper East Side of Texas,* we were leaving the largest and finest Wal-Mart in Wood County just as an intense-looking, muscled-up 30ish black man was heading into the store, pushing an empty shopping cart. As we drew closer, we noticed the guy, who had a faint resemblance to the actor Tim Reid in his younger days, was wearing only a T-shirt (in addition to pants and shoes, of course, and possibly socks), even though it was, literally, 23 degrees F outside. Then his T-shirt registered: On it was emblazoned a picture of Red Foxx-as-Fred Sanford, and underneath Red/Fred’s familiar mug was one of Fred G.’s signature epithets/catchphrases, either “Dummy” or “You Dummy” or “You Big Dummy” (we forgot our notebook and memory subsequently has failed us). We drew down on our storehouse of stereotypes––it is quicker, as George Clooney said in that movie––and a couple of quick orienting thoughts sped through our mind: “This guy must spend all his free time pumping weight––he’s gotta be a fireman,” and, ““This guy’s too young to remember seeing Sanford and Son, except in reruns.” As we passed into the man’s proximate space, the sheer frontal absurdity and classical timeliness of the message caused us to smile a friendly smile and let loose with an audible snort of a laugh, but the guy just shifted his eyes ever so slightly and shot us a look that we interpreted, probably wrongly, to say, “Not up for any BS today, my man” or, “I’d just as soon stab you in the heart as contemplate your continued existence.”**

We doubtless were way off-base, and it’s possible, even likely, that this hardy dude wasn’t aware of our presence and was actually looking off into space, yet the cognitive dissonance brought on by the guy’s hard look and the fun-stering T-shirt message caused us to immediately abandon plans to politely inquire about what we were dying to know: “Where can we get a shirt like that?”***

Instead, we kept on pushing out into the cold, bearing our White Man's Burden.

*A coinage we have ripped off, wholesale, from County Line Magazine.

**Come to think of it, Foxx’s schtick-in-trade, before TV rounded off his rough edges and transformed him into the lovable but irascible junkman, was full-frontal hostility, as we learned from brief but sustained exposure to his pre-Sanford “party records” while in high school. These were then deemed “adult” or “off-color,” although they more aptly were referred to as “dirty” and might even still be “dirty” by today’s lapsed standards. It’s unlikely, though, that Foxx’s Sanford banter with the comedienne La Wanda Page would be permitted these days, since it was premised on dark-skinned and extremely unattractive Page’s Aunt Esther being hectored and insulted (“You belong in the zoo!”) by Foxx, who of course was light enough to be known as “Red.” Who says humankind has made no progress?

***As we suspected, it is available on the Internet. Where else?

One Hundred Years of Sugar-tude (Or Maybe Half Of That)

"Ain’t no more cane on the Brazos,
They ground it all down into molasses."
-- Traditional song by anonymous, long-dead author

As you may not be aware--especially if you’re one of those high-hatted types who never ventures beyond the confines of Houston’s Inner Loop--this year is the 50th anniversary of the incorporation of the rapidly metastasizing suburban burg of Sugar Land, and to mark the occasion the city fathers have planned many special activities: In addition to the always-popular “Butt-Naked Women’s Gator 'Rassling” (ummm ...) tourney, residents can participate in a special “Sugarland Express” competition in which they will be allowed to track and capture specially outfitted “escapees” from the city jail (only inmates being held for the alleged commission of non-violent crimes will be “set free” for this family fun run).* The country-poppish duo Sugarland, which may or may not be named after the city (we dunno), may or may not be on hand (we dunno) at the “finish line” to play their shimmery-slick version of that hallowed local favorite--the one you and I learned at the knee of Johnny Rivers--Leadbelly’s Midnight Special.

But seriously: We occasionally find our self in and around Sugar Land (it took us many years of corrections by the copy desk before it dawned on us that the city’s name consists of two words), usually lost and searching for some elusive residential or commercial address and disoriented not just by the lack of identifiable natural or manmade landmarks aside from the Brazos (usually a “sign” we’ve “gone too far”) but also by the sheer overwhelming newness of the place (Houston being ancient Athens by comparison). Of course, the “new” has just been tamped down atop the “old”--we always get a chuckle out of those posted signs across from the shopping centers warning motorists not to pick up hitchhikers 'cause there are prison units in the vicinity. (It must be hell to be an actual non-escapee hitchhiker in Sugar Land--perhaps Sugarland, the musical combo, would like to record a song about such an ordeal, and it so happens that we’ve written one just now, although we’ve never been hitchhiking in Sugar Land and never intend to.)

Then there’s the ghastly, traffic-choked Town Center (Or is it Town Centre? No, it’s Center.), with it’s indistinguishable buildings--that big, fine, pillared City Hall looks to us like a slightly more substantial version of the la Madeleine across the street--and all of them brick and stone and bearing that same light dusty red color (is it ocher?), a likely result of the same mildly cypto-fascist impulse toward uniformity that led to all those little frame houses around the Inner Loopy Menil Collection being painted the same shade of grey. The last time we were out that way we came across some godforesaken newly built subdivision--they looked to be still bulldozing the nearby former cane fields into tract-home-ready flatness--entrance to which was framed by a looming faux-suspension bridge (or so it looked) with giant COLUMNS built over some piddly little fake manmade LAKE (“Awww, mama, can this really be the end?” is what we were thinking).

But lest you mistake us for some SWPL snoot who actually cares about old buildings and such shit--we’re not; well, not too much--we must acknowledge that Sugar Land is WHAT THE PEOPLES WANT. And not just the white and black middle classes, who began their migration Sugar-ward years ago, but also the many, many--beaucoups!--Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese and Vietnamese who seem to be skeedaddling away from Houston and into Sugar Land by the veritable busload. Sugar Land has become the default destination for southwest Houstonians, particularly newly or nearly affluent immigrants who first settled into the cheap housing of the Great Southwest and then saw the handwriting on the wall (it usually said “Southwest Cholos” or “Los Tercera Crips”) and headed further southwest for more residential square footage and better schools, mostly the latter.

We recently had several conversations about this New Face of Sugar Land with one of those new faces, a lad we’ll call Abdul (not his real name, but close enough). A Pakistani Muslim by birth, if not practice, Abdul has second-generation written all over him: He’s restless and bored (particularly by school); somewhat dismissive of his old-country parents, who, according to him, sell “fake” merchandise out of an “import” shop off Harwin; knows everything there is to possibly know about the NBA and bristles with a sort of mock rap-artist hostility--talking a lot with sharp jabs of his hands, the way rappers did 10-15 years ago, and employing ghetto-centric locutions such as “Where you stay at?” (Meaning “Where do you live?”, to which we answered “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” to which he replied “Oh.”) We had occasion to speak on the phone with Abdul’s sister, who teaches high school physics, and when we mentioned the conversation to Abdul the first thing he said was, “She sounds like she’s white, right?” In other words, Abdul’s assimilated, if maybe not to the things we used to think of as constituting “assimilation.” Anyhoo, Abdul, a recent graduate of a Fort Bend ISD high school, is highly conscious of racial, ethnic and class differences out in the New Territory subdivision, where his family moved to escape the Cholo-choked Alief school district. “Yeah, you know,” explained Abdul, emphasizing his rap with short chops and forward thrusts of his open hands, “it’s like, you know, the Indians live with the white people, y’know, or right next to ’em, and then us”--meaning the Pakistanis of New Territory--”all live together, with nobody else. So it’s the whites, the Indians, and then us, by our self.”

We’d rather not think too much about what this may bode for the future, although we do hope that Abdul takes up our suggestion that he embark on the study of sociology when he enters community college. In the meantime, and in honor of the 50th anniversary of the city of Sugar Land, we hope all residents, whatever their skin tone and no matter which deity they declare allegiance to, join hands and sing together that great ballad of yeaning and escape: “Let the Midnight Special/SHINE ITS EVER-LOVIN' LIGHT ON ME.”

Praise be to Allah and amen.

*Just joshin'.

Orwell Avenue, a Street We Visit in Our Mind (Or So We’d Like to Think)

While recently performing deep-dish research on that alleged movement to rename a portion of Houston’s Hillcroft Avenue after Mahatma Gandhi—we’d be surprised if we hear of this proposal again, but we’re usually wrong about these things—we had occasion to re-read Orwell’s “Reflections on Gandhi.” Orwell viewed Gandhi with some ambivalence: While he admired his political skills and shared his hatred of the Raj—has there been another Westerner who wrote with such a cold eye of the soul rot of imperialism?—he was baldly contemptuous of the old boy’s “otherworldliness”—his sandals (Orwell really, really disliked such unmanly footwear), his vegetarianism, his pacifism, and, mostly, his attachment to “non-attachment” (we know folks who would say Orwell misunderstood the concept; we know others who would say he understood it too well). We had forgotten this choice bit, regarding Gandhi’s, and others’, pacifism:

Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: "What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?" I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the "you're another" type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer's Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.

In other words, Orwell recognized that Gandhi seemed to have the courage of his convictions, and was willing to see others die for them, even if those particular convictions were, to Orwell’s mind, abhorrent.

Orwell was writing in 1949, just two years after Indian independence and the outbreak of the still-simmering Hindu-Muslim hostilities, and in the end was moved to voice his admiration for Gandhi’s particular genius:

One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi's basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

All of which has nothing whatsoever to do with the misguided effort to rename part of a well-traveled Houston thoroughfare after Gandhi, but we're feeling lethargic today, and Orwell is always timely.

Pynchon at the Ship Channel: Another Unsolved Houston Mystery

Some weeks back, before we were forced to temporarily suspend blogurbatin’ here at Slampo’s Place due to a, um, conflict with the tax-collecting agency (and other crazy-making but passing vexations), we posted, in conjunction with the publication of a new biography of Donald Barthelme, a choice passage from an appreciation of Barthelme penned in the early 1990s by Sr. Thomas Pynchon. The Pynchon essay appeared as an introduction to a posthumous collection of Barthelme’s works and spoke rather poignantly, we thought, to what Pynchon described as his fellow scribbler’s long “love-hate affair” with Houston, where he was reared, grew to adulthood (a ’hood that included a stint as a critic on the long-since-expired newspaper out on the freeway, before it was out the freeway, the same publication whose other illustrious alumni include seminal local blogger Banjo Jones) and to which he returned, at least part time, before his death in 1989. We discerned a larger truth in Pynchon’s take on Barthelme’s “affair” with Houston, because we don’t know anyone with at least half a brain (arbitrary percentage) who’s lived here longer than, say, 5 years (arbitrary length of residency) who isn’t at least deeply ambivalent about the place (that is to say, has come to the realization that Houston has its charms, aside from the cheap cost of living [which, of course, stems from the town’s historical reliance on cheap labor], although these things are usually unadvertised and make themselves known over time, while also recognizing that Houston can be a colossal pain in the rear, not only on a grand damning metaphysical scale but in the mere day-to-day gettin’-along sense).

Anyhoo, it had occurred to us when we first read the Pynchon essay many years ago that Pynchon possessed more than a cursory knowledge of Houston, like he had spent some time here in the ’60s, visiting a girlfriend, perhaps, or maybe he had used Baghdad-on-the-Bayou as a port of call on his way down to Mexico, where he reportedly was known to hang. Whatever the case, his essay on Barthelme exhibited a pronounced knowingness about the town. Shortly after the above-mentioned post we received an email from our pal Il Pinguino, one of the city’s most accomplished belle letterists, mentioning that he had been told by a professor acquaintance that Pynchon had actually lived for a spell in Houston back in the ’60s. On further questioning, Il determined that the notion was set in proximate motion by Larry McMurtry and was mentioned in his recent non-fiction book, Books, a run-through of McMurtry’s days as a book dealer in Houston, the Bay Area, D.C. and now Archer City. (The prof also pointed out to Il that Buffalo Bayou is mentioned in one of the sing-alongs that punctuate Gravity’s Rainbow; this would have meant nothing to us when we read the book 35 years ago during the many slack hours in our seafaring days with Arthur Levy Boat Co. of Morgan City, La.)

We checked out Books from our fine Houston Public Library System---it is, by the way, an oddly flat and joyless tome, but perhaps only in light of our stereotyped expectations of the eccentrics who trade in the antiquarian book racket---and sure enough, the Pynchon-in-Houston tale is told therein by McMurtry, albeit in a curious, tossed-off manner. We have returned the book, not wishing to fall into arrears with another public agency, but if we remember correctly the highly inconclusive story went something like this: McMurtry writes he "may" missed his chance to meet the publicity-shy (which is a whole different thing than “reclusive,” the usual adjective applied to Pynchon) writer, who was "said" to be living "somewhere near the Ship Channel" when McMurtry was teaching at Rice in the mid-'60s (McMurtry’s Rice-area residence being the site of an infamous 1964 visit by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they wended their way to the New York World’s Fair on their psychedelic bus, a visit immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, during which an acid-addled Prankster whom Wolfe called “Stark Naked” streaked nude from the bus and maternally pressed her “skinny breast” to McMurtry’s young son, future distinguished singer-songwriter James, whom Ms. Naked had mistaken for her own spawn*).

So where were we? Yeah, this story of McMurtry’s: He also relates that that Pynchon was "said" to need work and that he had sent Pynchon a "note" mentioning that he might be able to arrange something for him in the local grove of academia, but Pynchon replied with a "note" of his own declining the offer (and thank Baby Jesus for that). Why they didn’t get together for aperitifs is left unexplained, but it couldn’t have been that difficult, since the distance between West U and the Ship Channel is not that great, at least miles-wise. McMurtry apparently did not keep the note from Pynchon, the auction of which today might finance the purchase of a sizable lot of used books. Then again, McMurtry rounds out the story by saying it's possible that neither note was actually sent. Hmmm. Maybe it was all a dream, or he misremembers.

That was pretty much it---no explanation of why Pynchon might have been living by the Ship Channel, or where, or what year(s) specifically this might have been. If it was in ’64 or ’65, then Pynchon wouldn’t exactly have been a struggling unknown, as V. had been published in 1963 and won that year’s Faulkner Prize. Next up, in 1966, would be The Crying of Lot 49---is it possible that Pynchon wrote some of the small classic American treatise on paranoia while holed up in some sailor-man’s boarding house on Navigation?

We are a Pynchon fan, not a Pynchon obsessive (we plan to get around to reading the 1,000-plus-page Against the Day one day, most certainly if we find our self with a lot of time on our hands while pulling a prison stretch for tax evasion), so it’s possible that the Pynchon-in-Houston story has been well-hashed over on the Pynchon mailing list, or elsewhere that obsessives electronically gather to obsess, and we simply were unaware of it. The only other mention we can find of a Pynchon-Houston connection, and it’s a fleeting and obscure one, is in this tongue-in-cheek (we think it is, anyway) essay that appeared in Harper’s in 2001 and links Barthelme to the bizarre “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” attack on his fellow former Houstonian, Dan Rather, on a New York City street in 1986.** This mention predates the McMurtry book but appeared long after Pynchon’s essay on Barthelme, so who knows:

Donald Barthelme is one of my literary heroes. Thomas Pynchon—no stranger to Houston, I might add—described Barthelme, lovingly, as “perhaps a species of anarchist curse.”

(The author of this piece, Paul Limbert Allman, appears not to have written much else in the way of paranoiac literary/crime theory but seems to be or was a writer of books for young adults, including one whose description sounds downright Pynchonesque. Hmmm.)

Other wispy emanations suggest that Pynchon is “no stranger” to Houston: the epigraph from 1990's Vineland comes from a song by the late Houston bluesman Johnny “Clyde” Copeland (“Every dog has its day, and a good dog just might have two”) and, as the authoritative PynchonWiki puts it, the author is “known to be a fan of Roky Erickson.” Maybe Pynchon saw ’em both, back in the day. The mind reels with possibility … it do!

Our own theory is that Pynchon, a Navy veteran who has always seemed deeply knowledgeable in the ways of the water, may have hung his hat here briefly while working as a deckhand or as a crew member of some vessel, perhaps an ocean-going one or one that plied the Ship Channel (as the late Sterling Morrison*** did some 20 years later), possibly to get away from the encroaching fame his first novel was bringing, or possibly to woodshed and write (and what better place to hide away than the east side of Houston in the 1960s!). We wonder whether Pynchon, who supposedly underwent orthodontic work in the 1960s, may have visited our Uncle Ansley the dentist, who made a modest living for many years fixing the teeth of longshoremen and seafarers out of his small office on Broadway.****

True or not, the Pynchon-in-Houston mystery nicely reflects the elusive nature of both the man and his work, and if he even lived here for just one cold, lonely month, that seals the deal: This is one World Class city! (We expect the first 3-day “Pynchon Festival” to get under way at Discovery Green by 2012, at the latest. BYOB.)


*"Everything connects," or so declares this Pynchon obsessive, whom we knew slightly back in '70 or '71 before he got a high lottery number, joined the Army and was sent to Korea, where he pulled duty in a typing pool, we believe.

**Everything connects!

***Everything etc!

****Everyth ...

Pynchon on Barthelme and Houston

Reviews of the new biography of Donald Barthelme (Michael Berryhill had one in Sunday's Chronicle, but we can't find it online so here's one from the Washington Post and a nice appreciation of the writer himself in Time) sent us back to the introduction Thomas Pynchon wrote for a posthumous collection of Barthelme stories that was published about 10 years ago (if we remember correctly). Pynchon’s essay was helpful in calling our attention to the general pissed-offedness that pervaded Barthelme’s works---a sense of grievance tempered by his “hopeful and unbitter heart,” as Pynchon wrote. (We are certainly no expert on Barthelme, having left unfinished many if not most of his pieces that we waded into, although some thrummed a deep chord---we’re thinking especially of that exquisite sentence Barthelme titled Sentence, which is in some collection or another of his stories.) But the essay is most notable for the way Pynchon bullseyes the Houston of the 1950s and early ’60s and the mark if left on Barthelme, who was unable to shake free of his hometown until he was past 30 and was to return here later, and die here (Pynchon's off on a "fact" or two but nails the essence):

On the principle that you can take the boy out of the country but not vice versa, Houston, Texas, his hometown before New York, must have caused Barthelme some lively internal discomfort over the course of a love-hate affair with the place that went on, it seems, for most of his life. From what I remember of Houston at about that same time, it could have provoked the one emotion just as easily as the other, and in Texas-size quantities, too. The Astrodome was brand new in those days. Air conditioning in the city was ubiquitous. There were schemes afoot to put a dome over part of downtown and air-condition it, creating what today we would call a mall. Entire boulevards were dedicated to churches, side by side, one after another, allowing you to drop the family car in low and actually cruise places of worship. The nearest venue for dope, sex, and rock 'n' roll, then as now, was Austin. The new NASA space center out by Buffalo Bayou was hiring heavily, while from the marshlands around it, mosquitoes were busy spreading an encephalitis epidemic. Sir John Barbirolli had fashioned of the Houston symphony an exquisitely first-rate instrument, while teenage musical heresy focused on California surf culture -- though the Gulf only had surf during hurricanes, all kinds of kids could still be observed driving around with some stick in some woody, flaunting boards that never caught a wave, as if trying to make it all be California. Anyplace but what it was.