I'm reading Albert Murray. You know him? Black writer. Except I never liked to distinguish. Except now do I have to? Because of Obama? I'm not thinking of Obama as black like I think of Albert Murray as black. I feel a brotherhood with Albert Murray that I don't feel with Obama, but then I know how Albert Murray thinks and I don't know how Obama thinks. I can imagine, but then I'm imagining from too far a'left field angle for it to be even half-ass predictive. Murray on the other hand...the more I know about him the more I know what I really am myself, myself as the other side of the growin' up down south drama. I can't compare my down south drama with the DEEP south one Albert Murray grew up thinking in. We were thinking alike...then I slam on the brakes in my thoughts and remember that Albert Murray is 92 years old, which means there's miles of difference in our ages, I'm way behind Murray in time, knowledge, experience--but I'm parallel to him in terms of living in a literary context--and how difficult it is for one so trapped in the literary context to understand so abstract a thing as the political context. Murray says he hasn't got time to waste on the political context except to put it into a literary statement in a novel or poem or short story or magazine article or filmscript. Makers of myths. We are makers of myths. Murray and myself agree on books, on writers, on the imagination, on a certain moxie a writer must have in having to write no matter the occasion in terms of what's going on outside the library or study windows--like, now, a novel about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, that debacle--you see what I'm driving toward--like Stephen Crane wrote Red Badge of Courage without having a lick of military experience--but after a lot of looking into that horrible war from the literary context, Crane was able in his imagination to put on a private's uniform and put himself right in the middle of a bloody charge, the Union charging against a countercharging Rebel force--and old Stephen did such a good job that I read Red Badge with fascinated thrill. It was real enough for me.
And one book Murray mentions throughout all his literary content is The Golden Thread by one Philo M. Buck. And Murray keeps mentioning this book in the couple of conversational interviews he reprints in Briarpatch. So my curiosity got the best of me and I Googled Philo and the first thing up was an eBay listing for a 1936 copy of the book. $4.95, so I bought the damn thing. As I bought it, I had a little dialog with Albert, you know, "OK, Albert, I'm gonna check you out on this Buck dude." Albert nods and tacitly implies, "You'll see...and remember, read it like you would be reading it in college, back in the stacks." Murray was lucky like me to go to a college with a good library--a wonderful quiet place away from the reality of the classrooms and the campus and the jive of the political context. Oh, and how it easy it is to remember all those good times I had as a college freshman in that 6-story architecturally dull but bulky building that had a couple of floors of big open windows through which you could look up from the street and see into the general stacks. My favorite place in that library was up on the reference floor, back in the back, in a little cubicle with a library lamp with a green glass shade--and under that light such wonderful literary context opened unto me, the little wide-eyed laughing boy from the excessive space of land and sky called the lone prairie--a furthest extension of that down south--though Lyndon Johnson specifically declared when he ran for President in 1960 against JFK that Texas was no longer a southern state--it was a WESTERN state--and the lone prairie I come from verifies that more than it does its down home south aspects, though I was reared for five years in Dallas, Texas, and my father's family were from the deepest southern part of coastal Gawjah via covered wagon through Alabanana, into early-turn-of-the-last-century East Texas, staying around there building schools before moving on out for a final stand on the lone prairie. (Greenville, Texas, back when I was a kid had a big sign across its main street, Lee Street, and I mean it was a colossal sign that declared Greenville had "The blackest land and the whitest people." The ironic thing about that: Greenville probably at that time had more black residents than white due to that blackest land on which was grown the whitest of cottons picked by the blackest people overseered by those whitest people.
Greenville, Texas, back in the "good ole days"
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thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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