The Big Tent Review

Number Two, 9.15.23

INTRODUCTION

Here we are again. At least, here I am, ha ha. This still very fresh territory, so much so that the above photo evokes ‘ancient history’ from 2009, feels like a frontier that I am exploring as I amble along. This second installment of the Big Tent Review contains four continuing elements and five new components, the persistent quartet, as things work themselves out, the initial four items here in Number Two.

As those who know me will attest, I derive almost immeasurable enjoyment from the most routine activities. One occasionally close acquaintance had her ‘ah ha!’ moment when she realized that describing me as an Epicurean amounted to a key epiphany in ‘figuring me out.’

Then again, I obsess constantly about Mass Collective Suicide, especially as an inevitable outcome of humanity’s Hydrogen bomb habit. Many friends and colleagues will roll their eyes at this admission. Two of the new portals below delve different aspects of our apparent inclination to toy with our utter elimination from existence.

I’m not playing Debbie Downer here. At seventy, I’m so happy that I could pop, happier by far than the slobbiest pig in slop. I’m merely donning my cape as the ‘realest White man in America,’ as a good Savannah friend described me to his cohorts in Savannah’s inner city neighborhoods.

I can’t help myself. I care about human survival, even if I can’t likely have a great impact in its favor. Despite any particular actor’s overall inconsequential contributions, we each have a duty to try to leave a positive mark on history; that’s how I see things, anyway, though some might say that such a view amounts mainly to a rationalization of my writing habit, ha ha.

Whatever the case may be, how can we go about fulfilling such a monstrously intricate duty? Part of any credible answer is the simple nostrum to ‘seek understanding’ both of particulars and processes, as it were. In particular, therefore, I elected to talk below about the ‘Odd Beginnings’ of my coverage of Ukraine, while as a process orientation to the centrally placed Modern Nuclear Project, I’m writing about Uranium mining not that far removed from the first Rus, which was in Kiev.

Of course, we have multiple additional duties. To converse, to act, to collaborate, to build community, to work for peace, and blah blah blah. In other introductions, we’ll be going into all of that. For the moment, for today, in regard to this litany, I’ll only add that, as attractive as the notion is of ‘working for peace,’ for example, doing so without understanding is tantamount to one of my favorite shticks, with which I’ll close this second Intro.

This is my ‘How Do I Get to Portland?’ bit. We imagine that a close friend is encountering unparalleled distress, that he or she might call, desperate for support, at any time, so that we leave our cell phone charging close at hand while we sleep. In time, the predictable three in the morning call comes.

The voice at the other end of the line is frantic. “You gotta help me, you gotta help me, you gotta help me!”

“Yes, yes, tell me what you need!” We are, after all, the sort who really want to try to help out.

“You gotta tell me how to get to Portland!!!!!”

We might miss a beat at this hint of the bizarre in the deep of the night. Yet we are game nevertheless. “Okay, where are you?”

The response is instantaneous. “I don’t know, but you gotta tell me how to get to Portland!!!”

This whole dialog emerged from a dream that I had one troubled night over twenty years ago. I laughed at the absurdity then as I wrote it down.

Yet, trying to find peace without knowing the causes of conflict is tantamount to finding one’s way to Portland without knowing where one presently is standing or driving or whatever. This sort of conundrum—so far as I can tell anyway—is a ubiquitous element of American life in the here and now, the only reasonable approach to which is the aforementioned dutiful search for comprehension.

Thus, in a sense, bon appetit to readers for the smorgasbord of commestible nuggets that follow today!

Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits

In yet another unexpected development in my present passage, Alicia has offered, or invited herself to consider, doing rendering for the diminishing stacks of Marshall Arts’ most emblamatic items. I welcome the possibility but couldn’t resist a reading about the matter, for which a Past-Present-Future rubric seemed ideal, posing the question ‘How should I think about working with my ex on art?’

Letting my heart flow through my fingertips, more or less in any event, I pulled another trio that just blows my mind: how can these things come down so aptly, so in tune with intuitive and analytical understanding? Did the Goddess peek? The Past position, quite simply, encapsulated one of the top two reasons that Alicia had to end things between us: the Ten of Wands is the card of too heavy a burden from some creative venture’s ‘success,’ achievement that brings with it such a weighty load of duty and responsibility that creativity itself can no longer flow freely. Whoops, and there went a fifteen year marriage.

The Present Passage too, in the form of Penelope’s Queen of Wands, appears almost a mirror image of the reality of the past couple of months in my relations with my ex. Penelope’s message, of a sustaining commitment to a creative vision even when existence’s slings and arrows might lead to very different inclination, is one way of seeing the manner in which Alicia’s help in moving—assistance which all and sundry advised her not to offer—was the difference between success and failure in the sale of 227 Lawson Street, while at the same time the decent wages that I paid for her efforts meant that her visit to her Dad in Chile was mostly a carefree instead of an impecunious adventure.

Two out of three is pretty good results for almost anything. Obviously, the future is not possible to portray with the same certainty, let alone accuracy, as past and present;(continued below the PayWall)…

All God’s Cousins(continued from #1)

CHAPTER II— — —*** “J'espère que tu sais qu'est-ce que tu fais.” Of course, Danielle wasn't the least bit certain, except that she definitely wanted to do it, whatever it was. Monet bore the burly and proletarian Lou no ill will. But her scowl purveyed her practical French, and more particularly Alsatian, petty bourgeois suspicion like a stove’s red coil indicates its readiness for the kettle.

For her part, she also wasn’t absolutely certain that she wanted this glowing young woman who was her last offspring, and only love child, to reconsider. Then again, no one had even mentioned marriage yet. “Grâce à Dieu,” she thought to herself with a small smile.

“Monet! C’il vous plait.” They had less than an hour to say their fare-thee-wells and, in a very real sense, launch Danielle’s adulthood.

Mother and daughter always spoke French in their everyday communication. Danielle was completely comfortable in French and Spanish along with English, having both lived in Tangiers till she was eight and had as much input over the years from her bon companion and erstwhile nanny, Monica, a stout and practical woman from a farm in the hills above Barcelona, as she had had from her mother, whose tight-fisted elegance and formal commitment to maintaining standards had been part of what she had carried from the home country when her medical doctor husband had, just barely, escaped a collaborationist’s noose to live in the Algerian colony in 1945.

“I love him, mother.” Danielle was grim; his refusal to fly with her, even after Monet had shown uncharacteristic generosity and offered to pay for his ticket—Danielle had called it “miraculous,” and hence a case of “looking in the mouth of a gift horse” that might never canter along again—had frazzled her brain.

Nevertheless, in that instant, in her still-very-pink bedroom on the second floor in West Roxbury, on Henry Thoreau Place, she was stalwart. “I’m sure of that much anyway.”

Louis had explained his point-of-view pragmatically. “She didn’t say she’d give me the ticket.” He licked his lips and shot his sweetie the wry glance that he used to imitate others’ mannerisms. “She said, ‘I weell be ever-so-‘appeee to loan zhou money for zhour teekit.’”(Continued below the PayWall)

Marshall Arts’ Most Iconic Ponder Panel: Wood Words Essays

A friend of my brother and me bought “Terrorist Babies!” Inasmuch as I had convinced myself that this eventuality, someone’s paying five hundred dollars for a small panel and its words and images and wild coloration, would never happen, I’m still in a state of bewildered befuddlement, so to speak.

The back story on this purchase might form the basis for a Netflix series, but for the most part we’ll leave that for another time. As the above image illustrates, this powerful piece was central to Marshall Arts’ work of sharing ideas, bearing witness, taking a stand, and all of my blah blah blah about manifesting meaning and deriving purpose from the work of stringing together words.

The message speaks for itself. Its ideas may very well summarize essential elements of human thriving and survival. Without Exception, Every Human Cousin Starts As an Infant: Every Single God Fearing Christian; Every Allah-Loving Muslim; Every Torah-Toting Jew; Every Non-Attached Buddhist; Every Reincarnated Hindi; Every Wild Wiccan; Every Godless Atheist; Every Single Terrorist, & So on & So Forth, Establishing a Ubiquitous, Indisputable Biosocial Context, the Dire Daily Reality of Which Ought to Require All Inquisitive Minds, With the Utmost Urgency & Diligence, to Inquire, ‘What Would Need to Happen to Induce the Far-Flung Members of Our Fractious, Factional Clan to Treat Each Other With Amicable Regard & Mutual Respect?

I’ve probably told the tale of this piece of art’s inception a thousand times. How I found it on the Laurel River Trail, at the pool below the first big waterfall, in February, 2016; how when I fished it in and cleaned it up a bit prior to loading it in my pack, a little chilling miracle took place.(continued below the PayWall)…

New Fiction Series

Mad Cows and Englishmen(continued from #1)

PART TWO(Picking up where the narrator is listening to his mandatory host’s unctuous drool of introduction)

'Nice teeth,' I thought incongruously, at approximately the same time as the buff third member of our trio let out a roar and leaped for the man in the white coat.  Quick like a cat he may have been, and as strong as any bullish man I'd ever shared a padded cell with, but before he was barely clear of the bench where a minute before he had been clearing his head, he pretzeled into a shrieking, writhing mass of anguish on the floor, grabbing at his throat and clawing until the raw skin oozed.  Unlike me, his markings had nothing to do with allergies to synthetic fibers.

"I tried to tell you," commiserated our still apparently jolly host, when our man union Jack's cries had subsided into whimpers, "ground rules."  He bobbed in place as he spoke, his hands dancing uncertainly in front of him as his strangely affectless smile pressed on relentlessly through every rumble and "hmmm" that he emitted between sentences.

"Now, let me see," said  this psychotically composed caricature of the 'mad scientist,' whom I dubbed 'Dr.-Whoa,' turning to what appeared to be a basket of biscuits on a table behind him.

'Jackie Jumpstreet' though was apparently a glutton for punishment, because at this withdrawal of attention, he groaned through a kipper to achieve an attack stance against the seemingly defenseless doctor.  He got no further than the stance itself however, when unholy howls screeched from writhing guts as fists batted at a head that 'Jacko' whirled like a mace.

I smelled the singeing flesh before I saw the smoke, while my unintentional mate's cries keened like a cat under a clumsy knife.  As he slumped to the floor in a heap, I wondered if his hair would ignite.  Needless to say, disorientation, ratcheted up into the realm of discomfiture at the surreality of this unfolding scene, was now well on its way toward blubbering panic.  My eyes flooded and my throat blocked even a semblance of respiration, let alone a nice, clearing gulp.

"Don't you worry there, Mr. Hawkins."  Our host sought out my eyes, reassurance dripping from his clipped speech.  "That is right, isn't it?  Thomas Hawkins?"  Dr. 'W's' solicitousness just about made me hurl; he'd not even bent to take 'Jack's' pulse.  "Norman there will come around directly.  These things almost never kill a healthy specimen."  The rictus smile gleamed, unflappable.  "I don't know if you remember;" the good Dr. again hunted eye contact, continuing, "the American film director, Hitchcock?"  Only the English could ask a question like that.  “Our own Mr. Bates, ha ha.” I wretched involuntarily.(continued below the PayWall)…

Old Stories & New

“I Want to Play Too”

Part One—

"It makes me boil to think of her, of them together in that house." When Ann says this, she looks like a cartoon teapot about to let off a little cloud of steam. Tiny sweat beads protrude delicately from her broad forehead. She reddens several shades brighter than normal, and her jaws, neck, and shoulders remind me of a cornered predator before a lunge. "I found that house for him and me after he got beat up so bad, after I took him in at that shithole little apartment I was in."

Her lazy eye unbalances her face, so that her look becomes both more plaintive and slightly comic. When she sobs, though, thoughts of humor disappear. A trampled heart and ego fuel her tears, becoming racked, racking howls of pain. She compresses herself against me like a wounded little girl.

'Starr Mason' is the object of Ann's bereavement; to me he seems as fake as his new name, with which he replaced William James after attending a weekend Werner Erhardt seminar on how to like yourself while abusing others. But he possesses a combination of rugged and pretty good looks, is a dream lover, and has money he inherited when his parents died before his third birthday. The most noticeable thing about him is a smile which seems engraved on his face, something he would need to cover up at night in order to sleep. At both a practical-sensual and a deep psychological level, Ann adores the creepy bourgeois cretin.

The fact that I look like this guy's subversive brother does nothing to endear him to me. 'Is this sweet hunk of woman capable of loving me under these circumstances?' I wonder to myself daily. Even when she comes with gasping screams, with cries of "Oh, Jim" that make me feel tender and virile, I ponder the fact that "Starr's" friends sometimes call him James, as a result of his former last name. Is Annie responding to me or the remembrance of the one who let her go?

All of us work at the Tripacteia Institute, like Jalapeno bedding down with Szechuan and Cayenne. Even Mason's new bedmate and rumored fiance, Wanda, recently became an 'assistant psychiatric counselor.' Starr, God that name pisses me off, is a lead counselor for the adolescent program, while Ann runs the staff childcare facility. I am the monitor of corporate information for our little looney bin, a librarian actually.

A muted, and yet slightly hysterical, nonchalance characterizes the response of other staff to any pair of our little tryst gathering in one spot.(continued below the PayWall)…

New Folk Fables

Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss—I

Not so long ago in Ireland, a happy son of Gaelic dirt, well-endowed with all the attributes that make of life a fortunate journey—meaning that he was fair and strong, and his legs were long, his wit as sweet as thrush's song—so combined the favour of the deities both local and far afield, that he roused the ire of petty peers and the hatred of local gentry. These sort of lowly, hopeless angry men joined to wish 'Quiet Jack Higgins' dead, and but for our lad's light heart, fair wit, and fortune's smile, his enemies would have had their way with him. In the event, the tale, as wholly as it is of whole cloth woven fine, unfolds as follows.

Approaching his fortieth span of seasons full of tasty tart and testy trial, in which the thrush's song was much more prevalent than the beasty's bile, our good lad had many nicknames: 'Quiet Jack,' for he seldom spoke more than a sentence or two in a chat with another, save to convey a recipe or proffer directions; 'Jack the Whistler,' for, though he foreswore ever raising his voice in song—his parents had laughed and called him their 'beasty screech owl' during his long gone youth—he not only rivaled the wind in making all sorts of music, but he could also imitate birds from Ireland and, through his good offices with many travelers passing through, the avian speech of all the world; and 'Silent Jack the Sweet Tongued Lad,' for despite his reputation for demurring from oratory or pronouncement, he had a way when he did open his mouth, for speech or other purposes, of swaying those who received the output of his oral ability, particularly when the recipient was a female who had taken a fancy to our dear Jack. "Forty candles for my cake," Jack had begun to think to himself, "and not a one I'd blanch or break."

That year, 1613, of a lord that all must acknowledge as powerful, even if, with Jack, they worshipped a luminosity both more local and more feminine, had already turned frosty and gray when old Jack, already blessed to be blessing the local Viscount's mistress, Molly O, with his "c'untry touch," that never failed to please nor ever yield a lady who'd say, 'enough, enough, enough, I've had enough of that," also happened to garner the attention of Viscount Thompson's middle daughter, the nimble Eileen,(continued below the PayWall)…

Nerdy Nuggets

To paraphrase the bard, ‘What’s in a nerd? That which we name geeky would seem as OCD bizarre whatever phonemes we affixed to his person.’ Ha ha.

What will show up in this section will be what Paul Harvey—rest his soul—once styled “the rest of the story!” Today, that factual and research background concerns Uranium, about which Frederick Soddy famously wrote, at least for nerds, in his Interpretation of Radium.

Most people, perhaps, shrug at the idea of ‘interpreting an element.’ They’d rather examine a cute cranium than spend much effort pondering Uranium. The very idea that trans-uranic could be something other than an examination of urination among the uniquely gendered, instead defining a critical concept to comprehend if humanity is to survive, sounds wildly implausible, to the point of absurdity, yet Plutonium, now ubiquitous, essentially didn’t exist eighty years ago, a substance that in at least a few ways—from rapid and relatively painless to draconian and torturous—could engender the end of the entire human project.

We might refer to the iconic Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer to make this point. He died at sixty-three, and most folks would look to his pipe as the culprit. A few points in that regard are useful to note, however.

First, while the cancer that killed Oppy was pharangeal or throat cancer, which may not track Uranium or the byproducts of its fissioning, rising cancer rates in relation to radioactive commodities must ever remain a focal point of human attention, unless, of course, some perverse segment among us truly prefers ‘meeting the challenge of more cancer’ without any deeper reflections.

That ionizing radiation causes cancer increase is beyond debate; the operative issue about this fact probably hinges on what one does with this knowledge. Some folks may respond with a shrug. Obviously, I am not one of them. I have to ask,(continued below the PayWall)…

Happy Union Grammar Nerds

More nerdishness? Yes, actually.

Reporting the Real Meaning of Things

Speech, Writing, and the Default Choice of Passive Voice

AN OVERVIEW

Why do we report on things? The obvious answer is that we create our narratives because conveying knowledge is a useful act; also, people truly do want to know, generally speaking, what is going on in the world around them. Thus, at a very basic level, we fulfill a service and meet a demand when we create journalism.

That’s pretty simple. We might dig a lot deeper and discover all sorts of interesting subtexts, so to speak—about power, propaganda, facts, interpretation, and almost infinite additional concepts and components.

For the series that begins with this article, however, we needn’t delve to the lower depths of philosophy and deconstruction, reaching to the level of the lit-crit-shit that is popular now in academic and interpretive circles. Nevertheless, just examining the most transparent elements of reportage does confront us with another question: ‘How do we go about preparing a report?’

This Happy Union Grammar Nerd sequence of articles will focus on one way of answering this question. These posts will develop a ‘style-guide’ that, if followed, arguably will help our work be correct, clear, and forceful. The two parts that form the core of these efforts concern stylistic selection, on the one hand, and usage choices, on the other.

One could easily assert that inclinations as to style should not be an issue. After all, accounting for taste is notoriously difficult, perhaps impossible. Why can’t we just leave this matter well enough alone?

And one answer is, “We can.” Still, in this first of up to a dozen ‘starter’ essays on this inherently amorphous topic, I make the case for choices that embrace a simple rubric, one that advances three guidelines for producing excellent reporting:

#1—Death to the Passive Voice;

#2—Death to the Second Person;

#3—Death to Indirect Construction.

The remainder of this first installment, as well as the next piece or two in the sequence, deals with this first rule—Death to the Passive Voice.

WHAT IS THE PASSIVE VOICE?

Almost everyone has both heard of the passive voice and learned that it is bad, bad, bad, really bad! But having taught innumerable people to write, I’d feel comfortable in wagering that, even among such sophisticated scribes as we have assembled here on Substack, at a minimum plus-or-minus half the participants couldn’t clearly define what this phenomenon is.(continued below the PayWall)…

Odd Beginnings, New Endings

What can I say? The twists and turns of my life have been so strange and, constantly, coincidental, that a daily dose of the topical territory here would not be adequate to manage everything along these lines. For this first episode, we’ll be considering how in hell I became a grassroots expert about Ukraine, the conflicted state of which could easily inaugurate the Mass Collective Suicide that I loathe and abjure our embracing with the enthusiasm of Plutonium Profiteers and other thuggish cretins.

I wrote a version of this article for the online and print journal, Social Policy, that now sits squarely behind a paywall, LOL! The report remains more or less totally accurate and as arguably germane today as when I penned it in 2014, at a juncture during which truly astonishing things were showing up, eventualities that continue to the present pass, to make my intersection with matters Ukrainian seem utterly inevitable.

Most amazing of these linkages with ‘Little Russia,’ very close acquaintances indeed received financing from their Ohio church to travel to Kyev and adopt not one, but two, HIV positive children, both of whom had been living in an institutional setting for over a decade. One, the girl, is still part of that little ad hoc family group, though the young male is now institutionalized here instead of in his homeland.

I couldn’t help myself. I had no choice but to examine these matters more deeply. When several former colleagues also threw money at me to write about the devolving Maidan meltdown in Winter 2014, I went all in a came up with three separate accounts, of which the following is the first.

Past As Prologue in Ukraine: Communism & Reaction, Fascism & War, Finance & Community in ‘Little Russia’

PREFATORY NOTE

One of the little pieces of art that my wife and I create has this inscription on it: “The Needle of Consciousness Will Penetrate Next to Nothing If Our Thirst for Knowledge Does Not Outweigh Our Fear of Honesty.” In particular, when we investigate the intertwining of geography, history, culture, and economics in some definite conflicted place, we must ask—and be willing to discover without fleeing—“At what point can we pinpoint the inception of patterns similar to those currently present?”

Do organizers pose such questions? I know that I have. Perhaps, often enough though, faith that people themselves know this background and the press of the present combine to make a shrug an easy enough answer.

The current moment’s crushing weight is irremediable. But, at least on this side of the Atlantic—and throughout that portion of Europe that the United States ‘freed’ through the Marshall Plan and other means—most folks are unaware of anything akin to nuanced Ukrainian reality. They see pictures of death raining from on high. They hear repeated imprecations that what Reagan hypocritically called ‘Evil Empire’ has again ascended to the political pinnacle. They have little other than horror or distorted nonsense to guide them, in other words.

The intention of these pages is to provide some context in this context, as it were. I tell my students, “Context is king.” And the only way to grasp such underpinnings is through examining the past.

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Commitment to historical grounding provides the foundation as we search out scraps of understanding about why things are unfolding among the monumental complexities of Ukraine as they are. For whether one relies on Consortium News’ excellence or on writers who cover this ‘beat’ for Global Research or other ‘progressive’ outlets, or instead gravitates toward the Times’ drivel or other ‘establishment’ non-sequiturs, the litany of reportage makes no sense of what’s taking place.(continued below the PayWall)...

Last Words For Now

Comes now the culmination of issue number two of the Big Tent Review. The first installment was probably about the average amount of material. This number presents just a bit more; sometimes a little less will come to the fore than what Number One’s narrative presented. The broad reach and range of our collective existence provides the rationale for such an extensive breadth of material in these pages; I’ll hope that both entertainment and elucidation will result therefrom.