Courtroom Impressions

This is a response paper I did for a criminal justice class I took last spring

On Wednesday, April 5th I attended the proceedings for a capital murder trial in Guilford County courtroom 4c. The defendant in the trial is Fantoine Cummings who is charged with first degree murder committed on December 15th, 2003. The trial was in its third day when I attended, and the jury was still in the process of being selected. I stayed for the questioning of four jurors, only one of whom was picked for the jury. This process took about four hours, with a twenty minute break at midmorning. During the process many interesting events occurred, and any preconceived notions I had about how this process takes place were either confirmed or dispelled as I watched the real life procedure of arguing for a man’s guilt or innocence and, ultimately his life, unfold. I was ready for all of the ingrained preconceptions I had about how the court system works to be dispelled, but I found out that many of the events that are depicted on television actually happen in a courtroom as well, just without the high drama. The main overall impression I got was that the courtroom is a bureaucratic, impersonal place, but that the attorneys add a high degree of personality to the room while arguing for a conviction or an acquittal. This is one impression that, for me, was unexpected coming from what I knew about courtroom procedure based almost solely on the modern media.

The first time I can remember being enthralled by a dramatic depiction of courtroom events was watching Twelve Angry Men with Henry Fonda when I was about ten. I got wrapped up in the argument over the guilt or innocence of a young man and Fonda’s stubborn refusal to take the easy way out and convict the defendant. To Kill a Mockingbird also helped form my opinion about how the justice system worked in our country. Movies such as these made it seem that the justice system was capable of gross errors, and that strong individuals were needed to stand up to a system that might be faulty, misguided, racist, or all of the above. The reason these movies are popular is because the hero can be depicted as a champion of the underdog, or even an underdog himself as in movies like The Rainmaker and The Verdict. There would be no reason to write a screenplay about a man who murders his wife and the evidence is so overwhelming that the man pleads guilty and is sentenced to life in prison. There is no plot there. So our ideas about the justice system are based on depictions of circumstances that are rare, because there is a much more compelling story if there is an underdog or a social issue involved.

There is another element to what we may think the justice system is and what it really is. This is the time element. This was demonstrated to me on the day I went to court. What was hard for me to understand until I experienced it first hand was that justice takes much longer than fifty minutes (that’s allowing time for the Rogaine commercials). I realize that Law and Order takes place in a time lapse chronology but the way everything gets tied up into a neat package before you have time to eat half a bag of Doritos really makes it hard to conceptualize the real time involved in processing a criminal case. The fact that the case goes from the criminal investigation to the prosecution in about twenty five minutes really gives a warped idea about the time and work an investigation and prosecution takes. But I do realize that this is T.V. and that the producers are not trying to give us factual depictions but are trying to get us to tune in next week so more sponsors will buy advertising.

I have to say that the craziest thing I’ve seen on a recent courtroom drama is a mute woman who was a concert cellist, giving her testimony on the witness stand by playing her cello. For an answer of “yes” she would play a high note, and for “no” she would play a low note. I flipped the channel and have never watched that show again.

An actress playing a cello on a witness stand on T.V. is so far removed from what I experienced in the courtroom in Guilford County on April 5th that it is hard to believe that the two are related in anyway. The courtroom was all but empty, although it is a large room, with seating for what looked like over a hundred people. A few groups were seated in various places around the courtroom and I assumed they were family members of either the defendant or the victim. On the left was the defense team, Dwayne Bryant and Bruce Lee, and seated next to them was the defendant looking at one moment bored and the next attentive. On the right side was the prosecutor, Kelly Thomas. At the time I entered the courtroom, a juror had just been dismissed, and after a moment a new juror entered by a door on the right hand side of the courtroom and took a seat in the juror’s box. The Judge, Judge Davis, asked the juror, who was a young woman, a series of questions in a perfunctory tone. The questions ranged from whether the juror knew any of the witnesses to whether the juror could vote yes to the death penalty. This particular Juror said she could. I couldn’t help noticing a smirk on her face as she said this, as if she somehow thought she and the state were part of an understanding. It’s hard to explain but I found it unsettling. Fortunately she was dismissed after voir dire.

The next juror to be questioned was a man of about fifty. After the Judge asked him the same set of questions as the juror before him, the prosecution took over the questioning. Ms. Davis asked the same questions about the death penalty and if the defendants age of twenty-seven would cause the juror to form an opinion. The juror said no. The questioning was then turned over to the defense.

Mr. Bryant did all of the questioning of the jurors for the defense while I was there. To me, while it seemed that he was being overly detailed and precise about all of his questions, I also felt that with this type of attention to questioning was in the service of his client—for the most part. The one question I had about his tactics when interviewing potential jurors was when he was asking about heinous crimes and the juror’s willingness to give the death penalty to defendants convicted of these crimes. He actually described a heinous crime with attention to detail in order to demonstrate what would be considered a heinous crime. To me, it seemed, that if he was defending someone accused of murder he would not want to put any violent or heinous images into the mind of a potential juror. It almost seemed, as he gave his example, that he was arguing for the prosecution. I think his strategy was to force the juror to commit to being in favor of the death penalty so he could dismiss him, but I think it was risky for him to take that line in his questioning.

I wasn’t expecting to be so caught up in what was happening in the courtroom. I guess I had the idea that if television made courtrooms exciting, then the actual courtrooms themselves were going to be boring. While there was no table pounding or shouting, there was enough happening in just the jury selection that my interest was kept throughout my time there. Mr. Bryant was a compelling attorney and I couldn’t help getting the champion of the underdog feeling from him I had formed early in life. But I know that four hours isn’t enough to get a concrete impression of any situation, much less a capital murder trial, so I will withhold judgment on the ability of the defense team.

At one point, the proceedings far exceeded anything I had seen on T.V. Mr. Bryant had just asked the second juror a series of uncomfortable questions involving the death penalty. The questioning had left the juror squirming around in his seat and stuttering a little, and it was clear that he was a somewhat agitated. Bryant asked the juror if he watched any crime dramas such as CSI. The juror said no, he wasn’t really into those shows. Bryant then asked him what shows he did like. The juror thought for a moment and blurted out “Amos and Andy.” Then he quickly realized he had made a mistake and corrected himself and said “no…that’s not what I meant. What’s that one with Barney?” Bryant helped him out, “Andy Griffith?” “Yea, Andy Griffith, that’s what I meant.” Bryant nodded his head and said, “Yea, I like Andy too.” The juror was dismissed.

Right before the break, Judge Davis sent the juror who was being questioned out and had a few words with Mr. Bryant. He claimed that Bryant was setting a trap for the jurors by forcing them to commit to being for the death penalty. Davis claimed that at this rate, it would take a year to select a jury. Bryant’s partner, Bruce Lee (his actual name), shook his head and the judge became agitated. “Don’t shake your head at me, you’ve been sitting on your hands all morning.” he told Lee. During the break, the defense team pulled out some law books and tried to argue that their line of questioning was correct, but finally a concession was made that Bryant would not go so far in his questioning again. Never-the-less, by the time I left, it seemed that Bryant was using the exact line of questioning he had used all morning.

I think what surprised me the most was that I was as enthralled, if not more enthralled, with what was happening in the courtroom as any courtroom drama I had seen. I wasn’t expecting to be this interested, although I do find the justice system interesting. When I walked into the courtroom and saw the cold governmental décor and heard the monotonous questioning from the judge I felt like this might be a long morning. But as a continued to listen, I realized that there was a standard of procedure taking place that was intricate, nuanced and compelling despite the formality of the process. After all, underneath the formality, a human beings life was at stake and the entire careful, lengthy process is in place to ensure the defendant his rights to a fair trial. By going to the courthouse I was able to see that process in action and it made more of an impression than the numerous hours I have spent watching the media’s depiction of the American Justice system. The trip to the courthouse gave me a much better understanding of what our justice system represents, and I feel more positive now about that process.

Waxing Deadstalgic

On Monday I made a marked change in my life that I think I should try to get down on paper. I boxed up my Grateful Dead tapes and put them in the closet upstairs. This is a bit of a sea change for me, as those tapes have been sitting on racks, which I carefully built in my office, for several years. I enjoyed the sight of them—I could see them from the living room—and knowing that I had far more music than I could possibly make time for was somehow comforting to me. There were maybe four or five hundred of them, and they now sit, neatly boxed up in cookie dough boxes, in the closet of my bedroom.

I’m trying to avoid the “end of an era” approach to this because that would be inaccurate. The Grateful Dead graciously allows streaming of the majority of their shows from a website called archive.org. I can hook up my computer to my stereo and twirl around the house any time I want to—don’t worry, I don’t twirl. I usually crank the volume and continue the never-ending-battle with “pet smells” that persists at my house.

My first Dead show was in 1986. I was home from Africa for six weeks during a particularly unfettered time in my life. The show was at the old Redskins stadium, RFK in Washington D.C., and I was interested in seeing Bob Dylan, who was headlining a bill which also included Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. By this time, I had already bucked up against deadheads who snubbed you if you claimed “Sugar Magnolia” as your favorite song and rattled off set-lists with transparently self-conscious nonchalance. I was not going to see the Dead. I was going to see Dylan!

I went with my friends-since-grade-school, David and Michael. We met my roommate from Christ School, Bowles, in the filthy-rich northern Virginian town of Middleburgh. One of Bowles’ neighbors was the grandson of Jack Kent Cooke (the former owner of the Redskins) and we had the opportunity to watch our first Dead show from Cooke’s box at the stadium. This was sort of like letting the country-cousins into the Louvre. I was on a Tom Collins kick at the time—there was a VIP bar right outside the box—so things were a bit blurry and inappropriate, I’m sure. I remember, at one point, sitting down on the front row of the box and right before me, on the rail, was a fresh hot dog and a coke. The day was brutally hot, and I was hungry. I took a bite of the hotdog and started slurping down the coke when I felt a tap on my shoulder. The apparent owner of the dog was behind me and none-too-pleased. Jack Kent Cooke’s grandson ended up bailing me out of that one.

That first Dead show had me hooked. You can look it up online and most reviews of the concert have one thing in common, they all talk about how hot it was. Hot, with a happy community throng, and friendly strangers and a little weirdness, and some scariness, and some more friends and dancing and sweat and music. Sounds like Africa. I felt euphoric.

I went back to Africa with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty planted firmly in my cassette deck. I listened to that tape, each album occupying a side, for months and months. When I returned, I bought more official releases on vinyl and cassette. I had not yet started trading tapes, but I knew that at the core of this cultural undercurrent there was an exchange of currency going on that had more value than the products you could buy at the record store. Tape trading.

I really got into it because a boss of mine was a Deadhead. He was an original actually, having seen them at the Boston Tea Party in 69, and he would bring me examples of good quality tapes that he owned, and make me listen to them on a little walkman while I was trying to prep for dinner. He came up with the idea that we start trading nationally, using his collection, and anything he traded, he would make copies for me. We put an ad in Relix Magazine under the name of “Speeding Arrow Tapes.” Within a month I had a folder bursting with tape-lists from as far away as Honolulu. We had to pick a few good people to trade with, people who were serious and would come back with your requests, and this took a few months. But after a while we had established three or four good trading relationships and it was a happy day when I would get a yellow slip in my mailbox telling me that I had a package at the post office on Patterson Avenue. The package would usually contain about eight tapes, and, if the package was from a particularly competent trader named Uncle John, the quality would be excellent. I drove a little pickup at the time, and I would drive into the counties, doing a large loop around Winston, in order to listen to the tapes. This would often get me close to the feeling I felt at that first show.

There was a kind of holy-grail that we discovered during this time. It was 5/8/77. That is the date of a concert at Cornell in Ithaca, New York. I remember getting this tape in the mail, and I had probably heard it was good, but I had heard that about a lot of Dead tapes. It is still one of my favorite pieces of recorded music. There has been a great deal written about this concert, and it still is quite controversial in that some philistines claim it is overrated. It is not overrated. I remember having this discussion with a blowhard at a bar in Black Mountain. He had obviously had way too much to drink, and I left him spouting out concert dates to a non-dead-head, who looked confused and a little frightened.

After a while, I traded with one person exclusively, and my collection began to grow so much that I could no longer fit them in Kiwi Fruit boxes. I built racks for them and they lined the back of my office like little soldiers of peace, love and understanding. I also bought the massive three-volume Taping Compendium that gives detailed reviews of every show the Dead ever played. Yea, I had it bad.

Now, as I am nearing the finish line of school, books are invading our house like never before. I buy them for school, I buy them for enjoyment, and I want them to be visible throughout the house. I want to be able to find the book I need when I need it, and I want the books to act as a bulwark for my own writing. I am also craving a clutter-less work space. This is too much to ask for the whole house, I know, but where I do the most of my work I want the light that comes in from the northwest window to be free from little trinkets that I can’t seem to throw away. So the precious Dead tapes are going into hibernation.

I believe that one morning, when I am free of responsibility for a moment, I might venture upstairs and start digging for 5/8/77, or another concert I remember. It turns out that boxing them up and putting them upstairs was not the traumatic experience that I had feared. They are still here, in this house, and after all, they are right inside the closet door.

Thing Theory #1

Would You Still Love Me If I Had Crab Pincers?

My girlfriend and I have been together for about fifteen years. It's been long enough so that calling her girlfriend doesn't quite seem accurate, but we have never tied the knot, so wife isn't particularly true either. I try to stay away from the jargony terms that have come up lately, like life-partner or significant other, although sometimes I like to make up some of my own--terms that would be more accurate--like "remote-control-adversary" or "political-diatribe-recipient." These terms don't quite denote endearment I know, but, by this time, those things go pretty much understood, and humor of this sort goes further than anything else in keeping us bonded.

Margaret owns a Restaurant. It’s a pretty difficult business, calling for long, long hours and a great deal of physical labor combined with diplomacy and organization. She usually works from eleven-thirty am until eleven-thirty pm Tuesday through Saturday and from nine to five on Sundays. With my school and work schedule, our paths don’t cross at the usual times for most couples. We usually get the pleasure of each other’s company in the morning. I get up relatively early, and she gets up an hour or two later. This means the coffee levels are way off balance, I having five cups already and she having none. So it’s the good mood/bad mood phenomena for about an hour, as I hunt and pound on my keyboard doing school work, and she holds a cup of coffee up to her mouth like a sacred chalice. Then, suddenly, she is all action, jogging upstairs, stomping around, jogging back down (dog following her the whole way), microwaving that last cup for the trip in, shouting that she has acupuncture today, stopping by my computer room and asking how its going, hearing me grunt or say fine, giving me a kiss, and then she’s gone.

She returns at night—often we arrive home at the same time—and we spend a couple of hours watching the news, or Charlie Rose, or Letterman, or something. These evenings can have different tones, which usually depend on my mood. I am a person who is very susceptible to suggestion (imagined or otherwise), and, having attended a liberal arts college for three years, I often bring the lofty ideals regarding man’s inhumanity to man home with me and apply them to the eleven o’clock news, Keith Olbermann, or, in some cases, re-runs of The King of Queens. I also believe this is somewhat hereditary (or at least learned), because, as a child, I listened to the same sort of abuse being hurled at a wavy black and white image of Richard Nixon every night by my father for about three years. All of this gets channeled through Margaret’s eardrums—unfortunately. But she is not a passive recipient. Her protests (against me, not the proponents of man’s inhumanity to man) usually start with, “Would you be quiet, I’m trying to listen to this.” Then it moves on to, “Hush now, please!” then “would you SHUT UP!!!” This has been going on for years, and deters me very little. As annoying as it is, I like to believe that I am inviting discourse, however banal, with these provocations.

So this was going on the other night in the same pattern as always, except it was Sunday, which is always worse. On Sundays, after watching my football teams lose, we watch 60 Minutes. Something happens to me when I hear that familiar stopwatch ticking. I may have been in the most lethargic of moods after witnessing my team’s place kicker miss a twenty-yard field goal to lose the game, but as soon as I see Mike Wallace’s embalmed features, I am instantly primed to be outraged and disgusted at the unjust and often illegal activity reported on the show. I, by now, have realized that an automatic digging in on the topics might end with Margaret stomping upstairs to watch QVC, so I try to control the heat with a well placed “bullshit,” or “that’s a load a…” or “liar.” I can feel the alert level rise in her when I say these things, so I’ll wait another ten minutes to insert my next, “fascist,” or “sleazebag.”

We were watching a report about a particularly controversial issue in the news these days, and I was maintaining a very self-controlled, “open-minded” view of the subject. This time, it was actually Margaret who began a discussion about the issue, and she started firing off questions about the topic—what did I think, was this person lying, how much were they telling us, what did they mean by that—so that before I could even form the first answer she was asking another question. “Well, I think it has to do with…” I would venture, and she would fire back “and who was that other guy, what was his motive?” After about three or four minutes I got so muddled that I just shouted “I don’t know… you know, everything isn’t a conspiracy!” This was met with dead silence.

I knew I had crossed a line, and I also knew it would be okay, but I felt bad. I wanted to say I’m sorry, but those words have lost their relevance in this long relationship. It had been a long time since I had pushed her to this kind of silence, and I was trying to remember how to deal with it. 60 Minutes became irrelevant, and I sat, staring at my hands, wondering if I should try to say something, or let it pass and let it stay with her, benign perhaps, but there none-the-less.

I started making shapes with my hands. I remembered seeing a show about a cruel alcoholic sideshow performer nicknamed “Lobster Boy.” He had deformed hands, like claws, and I positioned my hands in this way to see how it would feel. I raised them up and started opening and closing them. Then I looked at Margaret and said. “Honey, would you still love me if I had crab pincers.”
“Hmmm…”she thought a second, still giving me a stern gaze. “No I don’t think I could still love you if you had crab pincers.”
“You couldn’t?”
“No, that’s asking a bit much.”
I returned my hands to their natural state.

We continued watching TV, and the next morning, as she was rushing from the kitchen into the living room, probably looking for her keys, she asked me what I was doing. I told her I was writing for the blog. She stopped, thought a minute, and then said, “you should do a piece called Would You Still Love Me if I had Crab Pincers.” She laughed a little at her idea, and I, always looking for a reason to believe this, felt like a genius.

Thing Theory

So we are half way through the semester, and last week in my English 400 class we read an article by University of Chicago professor Bill Brown called Thing Theory.The article was extremely dense, and what I could grasp as it passed noisily over my head was that Brown is trying to help define the word thing, which we use as a substitute for the unknowable or undefinable. I started doodling in the margin in order to visualize the concepts, but, as usual, my drawings deteriorated into crass--crude actually, cartoons that helped very little but amused me nonetheless. I am seriously considering starting a comic strip called Thing Theory based on these doodles. Here are three of the drawings I did while I should have been concentrating on some of the more abstract points in Brown's article.


This was the first drawing I did. The "thing" is what happens when our relationship with benign matter--every day objects--is changed. I tried to show how the chair feels like he is taken for granted. The joke? The Chair is an object.


Same concept with this one. The chair has gotten the subject's attention now.First he tries to return to being an object and after this doesn't work he blames it on the "thing."



I have to thank my sister Lindsay for this one. I showed her the first two panels and she suggested I take the point of view of a toilet paper roll. Crude, but effective.

So I want to set up a premise around these, and other, house hold objects. I also want to create another environment in the yard, with the yard tools taking on the role of socialist proletariats and the house objects being more like spoiled bourgeoisie. The "thing" is this mysterious non-entity that possesses the objects to break the subject/object barrier and confront the clueless subject in various ways. I don't know if anyone is like me, but for a split second, when I stub my toe or bump my head, I feel as if the object meant to do it. That's around the level I'm sinking to with this idea.

Booker and Guitars

This is a sample picture from my hard drive. I'm trying to figure out how to insert pictures into my blog again. Nice view, huh?

Performance Anxiety

With this post I will combine two themes that have already been prevalent with many of my posts. I will combine the subject of music with a self-depreciating tale of mishap and farce. Here we go.

In my first freshman year in college (I say first freshman year because there were two, or maybe three, so we’ll split the difference and just say 2.5), I was still a bass player. I owned a six-string guitar, and had played six-string for a couple of years, but I was still being recruited by slick guitar players to be the dork of the band because I also owned, and was relatively proficient on,the bass guitar.

My roommate was a friend from Clemmons named Joey. He had a set of Ludwigs and could do a pretty mean Charlie Watts. A bass player and a drummer who were comfortable playing with each other was a pretty good selling point. We were recruited not long after the semester started.

The guy who put the band together was named Lorenzo. He was rumored to be the son of a famous professional musician, but, if he was, he guarded this secret well and I never found out who. I always thought it was George Benson for some reason.

He came to our room one morning with a guy named Keith, who donned a mullet. (The mullet was a stigma-free hairstyle in those days.) Keith was to be the lead guitarist. Both Lorenzo and Keith brought their guitars with them and we sat on the beds and worked a few songs up. By the end of that session we had agreed to become a foursome and enter the UNCG talent show. Joey on drums, Keith on lead guitar, Lorenzo as vocalist and rhythm guitar, and yours truly, holding down the original instrument of love, the bass guitar.

Lorenzo came up with the name. Actually, Lorenzo came up with everything about the band. He called us The Phillips Heads. Phillips was the name of our dorm, and I think the “heads” part was a loose reference to drug use, which possibly meant Joey, Keith and myself because as far as I could tell, Lorenzo didn’t even take aspirin.

We started practicing in the rec-hall in the basement of the dorm. Joey and I were less than thrilled with the set list. The two of us were beginning the habit of meeting after class, getting to the dorm room, meeting our friends Michael and Eric, (Eric was only seventeen and had already been to dozens of Dead shows), putting a towel under the door, cranking the Velvets and—well let’s just say, imbibing. A set list that included Tommy Two Tone’s 867-5309 and Brian Adam’s song about the six-string (that I don’t want to waste time trying to remember the name of) was definitely not cool man. It’s possible that there was an Eagles number on the list too, and I think its one of those psychosomatic situations where the trauma of actually covering an Eagles song has been erased from my recall because it is simply too painful to remember. At times, during practice, Joey would just stop playing and scream, “Noooooooo” at the top of his lungs. The trauma was getting to my compatriot. But Lorenzo wanted to win this thing, and a twenty minute version of Walk on the Wild Side wasn’t going to get us there. It would have to be Brian Adams. I think Lorenzo even picked out what clothes we wore.

I don’t really remember the talent show, although I think it was in Ackock Auditorium and that friends had had the foresight to stock a cooler of beer backstage. My parents came—and seemed genuinely impressed, but I don’t remember winning or not winning. Maybe it was just the idea of playing those bad songs. Maybe by the end of it, I was just happy to have it over with.


All during this time we were aware that there was a sort of local celebrity, a rising star, in our midst. He was a guy from Winston-Salem who had played drums in a local band and was making noise around Greensboro and Winston and even Chapel Hill by this time. He lived down the hall from us, and as we passed on the way to the cafeteria or somewhere he would look up and nod, somewhat shyly, as if embarrassed to be noted and revered. He was really looked on as a prodigy. This is the only time that I can recall where a local musician seemed to wear the look of someone who was really going to make it. Not just make a scene large enough for the country to take notice of our area, but someone who was going to go outside and really make it. To New York or Nashville. You know, the real thing.

His name was Ben Folds. And he did make it for a time in the 90’s. His band, Ben Folds Five, scored a great deal of radio airplay during the alt-rock avalanche. But at that time, our time, he already seemed to be being pulled apart from the rank and file, the flat-footed running up and down the dorm hall, the towel whipping, the gatherings for A Nightmare on Elm Street viewings, the hooting and hollering. Folds wasn't into it. He was a pretty serious dude.

I believe it was Michael, who had gone to high school with him, who set up a meeting where I would get a chance to play bass for him. The whole thing felt like an audition. I really felt pressure about this for some reason. I mean sure, the guy looked like he was destined for greatness, but it hadn’t happened yet, and this couldn’t be any worse than playing for a hundred or more dizzy undergrads who had nothing better to do than go to a college talent show. The guy had such a rep though, he was always playing gigs. Best drummer in Winston. Pressure, pressure, pressure…

I wanted to play my best thing for him. I had a blues run that was pretty good. It was about sixteen bars or something, and I had made it up out of some tab pieces from a Jimi Hendrix bass-for-morons book. I would start with this one, and, if it went well, I would get into other runs I knew.

What I can recall is that I went to his room and he played a couple of demo tapes for me. He seemed very bored. I couldn’t tell if it was because he thought I was boring or because he was just bored generally. Maybe he was stoned. Maybe I was stoned. I looked at the box he was getting tapes from and it seemed like it was filled with literally hundreds of demos. I could not believe this. I think I must have started to get a deer in the headlights look because he abruptly said, “well we can listen to demos all day long.” The way he said it made me feel like he was saying “I’ve shown you what I can do, now what can you do?”

I sat on his roommate’s bed, and was literally shaking. This guy had gotten—excuse the cliché—in my head. I picked up my bass and it felt extremely awkward and heavy in my hands. I played the first note, then the second, and maybe the third and then, I completely choked. I mean, it was as if I had never even heard of the concept of the bass guitar before. I started the run again and the same thing happened. And again. By the third time he was saying, “That’s alright man, that’s alright.” “No, I’ve got it this time,” I would say, and try again, and again—nothing.

I left his room humiliated and embarrassed. Just like I don’t remember the results of the talent contest, I don’t remember his attitude when I left his room. But I try to remember this instance whenever I’m suffering from stage fright. Just don’t, I tell myself, fuck up like you did with Ben Folds.

At some point after this occurrence I was playing guitar in our room. I might have been playing one of those complicated compositions I had made up when in walked Ben Folds. He said what I was playing was good, and it helped a little to know that. He seemed less bored, more open, maybe he felt bad about something. Anyway, I’m glad he had his success.

Post Script: I have to add an ammendment to this post. This post was meant to be semi-intentionally allegorical, as the title implies.But the more I read it, the more Freud seems to apply to almost every word, and I am almost at the point of embarrasment over it. Oh why did I ever take that postmodern lit. class? Go easy on me you armchair psychologists.

Ramble on Prose

So it’s been almost a month since my last post, and while I’ve been pretty slack on the blog front, I’ve been pretty busy on the everything-else-in-my-life front. School and work have kept me swapping hats consistently, and now I can kind of catch a brief breather because its fall break and I don’t work again until Friday.

I’m hoping to get a good chunk of Truman read by the time school starts back. David McCullough is coming to speak at Guilford in November and I’ve been picked by the history department to go to the pre-speech reception. This means that there is an off-chance that I might meet him, and I want to get some of his work under my belt before blurting out whatever inanity I’m going to blurt out. Reading Truman might temper the blurtation a little. I read 1776 a couple of summers ago. I just picked it up—it holds a place on my desk (next to Doonesbury)—and its amazing what a well made book just feels like when you flip through it. The pages have that rough unevenness when the book is closed, and the picture inserts are slick and full of period maps and portraits. I’m getting all-a-flutter just looking at it. But seriously, I remember being riveted by his description of the hauling up of the cannons by the rebel army to Dorchester Heights, overlooking Boston. I’m looking forward to being in the presence of McCullough. He is supposed to speak about Nathanial Greene.

Tobias Wolff

So this leads me on to another theme that I’ll try to bridge with the famous author meeting the admirer theme. Actually no bridge is necessary because it’s the same subject. Or, that subject leads me to another. Lindsay was here on Thursday to go to a reception, and she happened to leave a back issue of the New Yorker lying around. She must have picked it up to read while she was waiting for something. Anyway, I picked it up and flipped through it and soon found myself engrossed in a fiction piece—this post is on the verge of becoming “quaint”—by Tobias Wolff called Class Picture. There were different reasons why this story drew me in; first and foremost, it is so fucking funny (there, just erased the quaintness). It also takes place in a boarding school, which reminded me of my boarding school experience, and how, in my senior year, I moped around in a heavy wool overcoat hoping Zelda Fitzgerald’s ghost would spring up with a martini shaker and proceed to seduce me.

The story is about a visit to the school by Robert Frost. There is a poetry contest in which the winner gets to spend time with America’s poet laureate the morning after Frost gives a speech in the school chapel. The humor comes from Wolff’s description of the contenders for the honor, who all have a kind of unformed, neophyte brilliance, but not without the self-consciousness and mood swings that betray their age. Wolff describes two characters, heavily under the influence of Hemingway, speaking in that jilted, short, Morse code style—about making their beds. I almost rolled off the couch.

But the story was also very true to me. A few weeks ago in English class, we had been talking about what theorists can do when they analyze a piece of fiction. We agreed that the process was like an archeological excavation, in that as you remove layers to reveal more of the excavation you also destroy that particular site forever. Same with literature. It was with this idea in the back of my mind that this quote from Wolff’s story jumped out at me. Wolff is speaking of the reverence that the English teachers at the school commanded.

How did they command such difference—English teachers?

Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or novel strewn about in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They would put it back together with history and psychology, philosophy, religion; even, on occasion, science. Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequences for you, too.

How beautiful. And it is true.

I’m going to end this post now. After that quote, I don’t feel that my ability is up to anything else insightful right now, and I would hate to ruin it by prattling on further.