Hard To Classify

Sunday, August 1

Q: What's the Curse of the Pharaohs?

A: I dug up a dead Indian. Disturbed his grave. In fact, I robbed his grave.

His battle-axe and jaw bone are in a cigar box in a lab somewhere at FSU with an accession number on them.

Not even a museum. A lab.

Q: It was in the name of science.

A: I don't believe in science. Science is witchcraft. The best science once believed the sun revolved around the earth.

Q: What do you believe in?

A: Literature. If I say this is the way it was, and get it right, who can dispute my version of what I saw? If I'm an honest reporter. Or how I felt about what I saw.

Are you going to tell me I didn't see it, or didn't feel it?

Q: Not religion?

A: Religion is witchcraft trials. But so is science. Scopes trials and Lysenkoism. Prohibitions on stem-cell research and Nazi doctors making lampshades out of human skin. Doctors spreading puerperal fever and vilifying Semmelweiss. Removing women's wombs to cure hysteria. Giving electric shock treatments to mental patients.

Q: James Wood calls long novels with offbeat characters and frenetic activity hysterical realism.

A: I counterpose imperturbable realism. I use literature to make sense of the confusing, the worrisome, and the bizarre. I am a root doctor.

Root doctor, heal thyself.

Root it out, root and branch. A thousand are striking at the branches of evil for each one striking at the root.

Q: And digging up that Indian caused you 33 years of bad luck.

A: That is my conclusion.

That or freak-luck chance.

Luck is involved, either way.

Bad luck or freak luck: you pays your money and you makes your choice.

People used to tease Owen and Balder about Brenda wearing GI boots, but they knew how cool it was to have a mom who could hunker down in front of a casting of a raptorial bird, or a pile of small mammal scat, pick around in it with a twig, and tell you what the animal had been eating, by the bones and fur or feathers.

Sea Breeze Winery
13201 Hutchinson Boulevard (Middle Beach Road)
Panama City Beach, FL
10 - 5 daily, closed New Year's Day and Christmas

Sea Breeze Winery has 40 acres of muscadine vines "struggling to produce modest yields of intensely flavored grapes" in "the deep sand lands of an ancient beach," 35 miles north of the winery in Bruce, off Highway 20.

The winery, at the west end of Middle Beach Road, near the intersection with Front Beach Road (Alternate 98), is compact, and clean, with an elegant showroom and tasting bar.

Their selections include dry red and white table wines, blended with imported grape juices, the traditional, sweeter muscadine wines, a sherry and a port.

The dry red and white wines are called Horizon, and sell for $8.50 a bottle.

Grapes are harvested around Labor Day.

I was invited to come in on Saturday to see the vintner bottle blueberry wine, but I have to go to Wausau, for Possum Day, and cover that.

I thought the Chautauqua label had a crisper, cleaner design. The Sea Breeze label contains a palm tree that makes it look like the Royal Saudi flag, without the crossed scimitars underneath, of course.

Jonathan Demme remade Charade as The Truth About Charlie.

The DVD had The Truth About Charlie on one side and Charade on the other. Which took guts, because the remake was not as good as the original.

Now Demme has remade The Manchurian Candidate, a movie that was pretty good itself. I haven't seen the remake yet, so I don't know if Demme kept the scene where the ladies garden club lady turns into the Chinese Communist brainwashing doctor, or kept the karate fight between Frank Sinatra and Henry Silva, and I'm not even sure you can rent the original version at your video store, but if you can, you can compare them, and read Richard Condon's book, and read discussion of the movies, and the book, on the Internet, and buy a CD of David Amram's original soundtrack, so what do you need to go to film school for, or writing school?

Do it yourself, at home.

Then put the movie review you write in a book with prose vignettes, interviews with yourself, accounts of trips to Possum Day, in Wausau, wine-tastings, a photography exhibit, maybe you and Brenda go to Possum Day, then eat at the Chinese-redneck buffet in Vernon, Florida, maybe screen Vernon, Florida, if you can find it at your video store.

Amazon sells it used for $42.98. Out of stock.

Once I took Owen and Balder to Possum Day, in Wausau, and Dempsey Barron, the dean of Northwest Florida pork-chop legislators, was greeting voters with a firm handshake and a shit-eating grin.

"He looks like a possum," Balder said, and all three of us laughed, like laughing at the shitty music at the Grammy Awards, which Owen compared to a seven-hour basketball game (Madison Square Garden) with music you don't like.

Me and Brenda might go tomorrow.

She wants to show me her Vernon, where she used to eat, when she visited Holmes, or Washington CI. One of them prisons.

And of course Brew used to throw packages to the various correctional institutions when he worked in the hole as a Christmas casual, in the Panama City post office. A cake with a file in it.

Mail art from the processing and distribution end.

One time I went to see Barfly, in a mall cineplex, when it opened, and nobody laughed.

If it wasn't funny, what did people think it was?

How do you classify Tristram Shandy?

Hysterical realism?

What about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or John Dos Passos's U. S. A.? Or Moby-Dick?

Or Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days, and Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden?