Welcome to my literary litter box…

I think you should grapple with the world as it is and not how you wish it to be.

That simple idea has not proved popular with either right or left. So I find myself alone here in the wilderness of ideas.

I habitually wrestle with Gaugin questions: Who are We? Where did we come from? Where are we going?

Think of this place as a rough-cut trail where I drop breadcrumbs on my journey to Wrestle with aforementioned inquiries.

I think it’s weird that book bloggers feel obliged to insert themselves between prospective readers and authors. It’s bizarre and desperate. I don’t want to be anyone’s crutch for making decisions about reading material. Nor do I want to explain things to people in this context. You have to cut your own way out of the jungle. Read accordingly.

To that end, I belong to the western tradition.

Not that sad-sack, wrangler-wannabe, Coors-Crushing, man-baby-in-a-mullet, Nashville-shrink-wrapped, country-culture-as-costume western thing, but the four centuries of poverty, violence, and intermittent isolation dead-ending in the broken promises of industrialized extraction and urbanization western thing.

I’m a Washtub Woodson with one cousin in the Immortal 32, another cousin on the dollar bill, and yet another cousin name-checked in “Coyotes” by Don Edwards. My great-great-great is the oldest man buried in the military cemetery at Dodge City and another died on the Sod-House frontier. Two other Great-Great-GreatS FOUGHT ONE ANOTHER AT THE FIRST BATTLE OF NEWTONIA IN 1862. One great-grandmother died of pellagra running a janky road house in Eastland County, Texas, and another practiced folk medicine at a Receiving hospital serving the miners at Telluride.

I embrace the bitter majesty of my challenging past and seek a transcendence rooted in this foundation—the gothIC dream epitomized.

HENCE: FRONTIER GOTH.

NOW A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS:

“the ancients had visions, we have television. But the civilization of the spectacle is cruel. The spectators have no memory; because of that they also lack remorse and true conscience. They live tied to what is new, and it doesn't matter what it is so long as it is new. They quickly forget and scarcely blink at the scenes of death and destruction of the Persian Gulf War or at the curves, contortions and tremulos of Madonna and of Michael Jackson. Commandants and Bishops are condemned to suffer the same fate: they also await the Great Yawn, anonymous and universal, which is the Apocalypse and Final judgement of the society of spectacle.
    “We are condemned to this new version of hell; those who appear on the screen and those of us who watch. Is there an escape? I don't know. One must seek it.”

-Octavio Paz, “The Media Spectacle Comes To Mexico,” 1994