Old Folks and Brenda screened a copy of
Deconstructing Harry he rented from Netflix, through the mail.
Having
a library of DVDs to rent was like going to film school.
That is, if you
could rent the DVDs, you didn't need to go to film school.
In Deconstructing
Harry, Harry Block, a blocked writer, is honored by the old school that threw
him out, and drives upstate for the ceremonies.
Philip Bosco plays a professor
and Paul Giamatti plays a professor, although he doesn't have a speaking part, or
get to empty a spit bowl on himself.
It reminded Old Folks of the Jim Gabour
film Demo, where Duke Bardwell tries to help Butch Hornsby get his shit together
to make a demo tape so he can make it big in Nashville. Did Giamatti know that Sideways
was in his future when he worked on Deconstructing Harry?
In the
credits for Demo, Ron Cliburn is listed as an actor.
Cliburn is staying
with Suzette. Duke used him as a helper last week, repairing hurricane damage, for
pocket money.
Sunday at The Red Bar Old Folks asked Duke how Cliburn did,
and he said, "As good as he could, with the emphysema."
Cliburn
sat in with Dread Clampitt, and sang several of his songs.
One song reminded
Old Folks of driving to Breaux Bridge to eat crawfish on top of the levee beside
the Atchafalaya River. Before I-10 went through, you had to drive on top of the levee
to get to Breaux Bridge, from New Iberia.
That was when Old Folks was digging
the slave quarters at Shadows-on-the-Teche, in New Iberia. Where Henry Miller visited
Weeks Hall in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
* * *
Deconstructing Harry was about Harry Block driving to his alma mater
with his kidnapped son, a black hooker, and a dead man, but along the way, characters
from his past, real and fictional, come back to haunt him.
Old Folks is being
honored as a headliner at the Philly Zine Fest, or the ULA is horning in on the Philly
Zine Fest, using Old Folks as point man, but characters from his past, real and fictional,
will come back to haunt him, so he sees parallels there.
Block was kicked
out of the university that is now honoring him.
Old Folks wasn't kicked out
of Tulane, he quit before they could kick him out.
In fact, he saw the handwriting
on the wall, signed up for thesis, so he could draw his stipend, stayed at home,
and taught himself to write.
He gave himself a DIY grant.
He stole
the last year of his NDEA fellowship Tulane to teach himself to write.
* * *
What did Old Folks write, in a year?
He finished two books and started
a third.
All three featured the same repertory cast, at least they featured
a campus cop and his inamorata, who worked in the university library, mending books.
He no longer remembered what he called the characters, in the books.
He didn't
remember what happened, in the books.
They were about being graduate students,
anthropologists, archeologists, on a dig. He and Brenda had been on several digs
together. They had been graduate students at Florida State and Tulane. Brenda worked
at the Tulane library, mending books. Old Folks was at home, writing.
Old
Folks's first book, OVER THE TRANSOM, combined fiction and autobiography, first person
and third person, past and present, in interesting ways.
It started with
a novella, went to a memoir, about how Old Folks had become a writer, what he hoped
to accomplish, in his book, and how he felt about what happened to the book (it was
rejected), and ended with a dialogue between the hero of the novella, the campus
cop, whatever he was called, and the hero of the memoir, Old Folks.
Old Folks
is my current nom de plume.
* * *
Back then Old Folks loved black music, black cuisine, the black outlook on
life, a combination of fatalism, resignation, and gallows humor. He thought black
people would accept him as a white person who was not prejudiced against them, simply
because he had grown up white, in a segregated society.
He was for the civil
rights movement, for black pride, for affirmative action, for racial quotas. He thought
that black people had been discriminated against, that they were as naturally smart
an anyone, that if black children had the educational opportunities white children
had they would blossom, thrive, radiate into niches formerly denied them on the very
real grounds of unqualification, but an unqualification resulting from oppression.
Had his opinion, or had his feelings, changed? In 34 years?
Yes, they had.
He was aware now that many black people never would like him, or accept him, or even
grant the possibility that he admired them, for their long struggle, their dignity,
their philosophical approach to dealing with injustice.
Also, a certain amount
of reverse discrimination was necessary, to level the playing field, and that meant
Old Folks, and his children, were penalized for being white. They were given a taste
of their own medicine, as if they were the ones who had exploited black people, all
those years.
Seeing black people swap high-fives in the end zone, gloat,
and lord it over the newly victimized white person got old, when you were a white
person.
Especially since many of the black people lording it over you weren't
qualified for what they got and didn't do what was expected of them once they got
it. What were you going to do--take it back?
* * *
How did Old Folks get from admiring Charlie Parker, Mingus, and Thelonious
Monk, to saying that he was beneath the jazz musician, and, however hard Mingus had
it--Mingus called his autobiography Beneath the Underdog--Old Folks had it
harder?
A Professor of Cracker Studies, without portfolio, in today's America,
had it harder than a jazz master. A vernacular writer had it harder than even a folk
artist or a roots musician.
There were no masters of vernacular writing,
no master classes for a vernacular writers to teach, no documentary films on Old
Folks: The Art and Life of a Master Vernacular Writer.
No genius grants,
no think tank positions, no public intellectual status.
* * *
But Old Folks was hot, and he had a regular outlet for his work.
The Daily Bulletin: A Newsletter on the State of the Culture, or, How To Write
World Literature from Parker, Florida.
It was electric to write something
in the morning and see it on his web page in the afternoon.
Complete with
color pictures.