I hope you’re wrong about your misgivings on grabbing a bunch of bizarre good photos and creating an essay as my latest endeavour is to somehow create an essay for Burn by doing exactly this. So I head out everyday and let fate either smile or frown at me.

soul searching afternoon, talk with mrs. b after rereading your critique……you’ve hit the nail on the head, my writing from now on must be reserved for writing, not for commenting, …time, as dima said to me in SC, for silence…you guys have at…

for me, better to help BURN financially and focus on my photowork and writing rather than stoking over extemperaneous typed up words, especially when received as such….

thanks for the insight

all the best
b

So you provided me with some good listening entertainment.

Now I really must get back to work. No more posts for me today.

Likewise: much respect.

We might be talking past each other here. I appreciate your attempt to clarify, so now let me reciprocate.

I’m surprised to say the least that you thought my first comment was somehow mocking hunters or rural folks in any way. I thought it was pretty clear I was saying that “weird” was relative. That everyone has their comfort level and that that comfort level is not better or worse than anybody else. I didn’t read anything in these comments that warranted your remark. (and maybe I read too much into that) The use of the word weird was fairly benign in my opinion. And my comment about hunter/gatherers was indeed snark. (little smiley face and everything. sorry if it didn’t come across that way)

Lastly, as the photo I posted in “blowin’ in the wind” aisle would suggest, I too am personally well acquainted with the folks I think you are trying to defend. My family and friends. I am also well in touch with people unlike them and with rare exception never have heard (nor would tolerate) them mocking the other. (that goes both ways.)

Anyway, thanks for clarifying and hope all is cool. Much respect.

(Also, apologies to Rowan for this little diversion.)

For perspective, my entire career has pretty much unfolded among hunting people… completely modern people, but hunting people. People who put up to 80 percent of the protein they eat on their table with gun, net, and harpoon; people who must constantly contend with those from the larger world who refuse to understand and who would like to bring an end to their hunting way of life. Yet, the folks from the larger world who would put an end to their world would themselves cease to exist if somewhere, everyday, someone was not killing an animal on their behalf.

Oftentimes, when I am sitting in an airport somewhere, or in a restaurant, I will hear people bring up the folks among whom I work and speak of them in mocking tones, and it outrages me because many of those same folks would literally die if left alone to fend for themselves in the world of the people whom they mock. They just wouldn’t be knowledgable enough, resourceful enough, or tough enough to cope with the environment.

Your first words kind of reminded me of that. Perhaps I misread your intent a bit.

I should make it clear that in my above comments I do mean to lump everyone from the outside world into the above categories. No, to one degree or another, I think most people do not feel that way and do appreciate that there are others who still live this way. But those who do feel this way can sure cause pain and heartache.

Now, like Sidney, I am laboring under a tight deadline. I come here and type out rambling comments to momentarily escape the pressure of that deadline, but, somehow, the pressure only grows and gets worse. I really must discipline myself, and quit doing this.

One short paragraph from me a day – that would be enough to keep the connection. I love the Burn connection, and that includes with you, Michael. I do not want to lose that connection. But I’ve got to stop this rambling. Too much to do – he argues as he rambles on.

thanks, i guess ;))>.

as i’ve ‘written’ many times before, at Burn, every time i ‘write’ here (a comment) it is just that, a comment, written without editing as if i’m talking out loud, talking with the author (and maybe that is the problem, for both the length and overindulgence)…i don’t edit, or re-write but simply type direclty into the comment box after viewing the work….i always see the comments (including my own) as simply a part of the conversation, albeit often filled with both purple and sanctimonious prose, because i ‘write’ comments here the way i speak, or rathe, i riff…

as a writer who has been published in the non-web world, i am also horrified when i re-read something i’ve written here, but i let it go…this is not a story, an essay, a book, etc…i’ve published all those things, by the way, and as i explained before to you, i don’t write here as if a literary blog, rather a place where thoughts come pouring out……if you wish to see my writing and critique that, fair enough:

please begin with the piece i wrote for BURN01…a section of which, btw, was nominated for the CBC Literary poetry award…and that piece i worked on for a while…

but if necessary, i can send you a list of publications. i don’t strain over and re-write/edit a response first as text on Word and then copy/paste it here. all the poverity and failure of my comments, in terms of writing, are really about spitting out words….while you correctly judge its worth as prose, you misjudge the nature and intent..

if i were to write my responses here, i’d never write, because i actually spend a long time on those bits of prose i do publish and by then, we’d be onto a different photographer, etc…
.
but fair enough, if Loomings is published, critique the statement.

cheers
b

While I would be the first to acknowledge Bob Black’s brilliance, passion, sensitivity, and depth of feeling, I am often not among those so eager to praise his outpourings as nonpareils of the writer’s art… the prose is often excessively purple, the editing and self-restraint non-existent, the typos and bad grammar irritating (yes, I know, some of that is intentional… just makes the rest of it more irritating to me), and there is often something lopsided or disproportionate… Maybe I am overly-critical because others are so full of praise, maybe because he represents himself as a writer and so I think he should be judged as a writer… but all that aside, sometimes he really cuts through his own self-indulgences and offers up a truly beautiful and inspiring statement, and the paean to the South that is his first comment under this essay is perhaps the best pieces of his I have yet read… credit where it is due, Bob, you really hit it perfectly this time. Lapidary prose.

I don’t find Rowan’s pictures all that weird… looks pretty much like a number of places I know. But I don’t find them particularly profound or eloquent either… but there are some nicely crafted images here. What is interesting to me is that they seem to have set off a number of people and sparked an interesting dialogue, and Rowan certainly deserves credit for that.

Wish I could expand, but one of my oldest clients who is also a good friend is waiting anxiously for me to finish translating his very long essay under the wire… I’ll be back when the dust settles.

Alcohol consumption is up here in our happy little burg, if the DUI statistics are anything to go by. I can’t explain why this should be so, only that is. The local gendarmes detained some fifty-seven people for driving under the influence within the city limits this past year, which is fourteen more than they stopped last year. So there are either more drunks on the road or the local Finest are getting better at catching them; proficiency in this area, unlike baseball, for example, is hard to measure statistically.

Still, the presence of such a trend is somewhat disquieting, to say the least. The mixture of alcohol and almost any field of human endeavor you care to mention is almost universally disastrous, unless that field of human endeavor is making an ass of yourself. If that’s your aim, then by all means, top off the twenty Jello shots you’ve had in the past fifteen minutes with another one and a couple of beers for good measure, but before you do, give your best friend the keys to your car, this always assuming that he’s not just as crocked as you are. Otherwise, whatever it is you’re trying to do whilst under the influence, stop trying to do it; you will not succeed.

One of the many things you should not do while under the influence is watch public television. I’m not speaking here of the children’s programming, which is fairly harmless even when combined with heavy drinking, although the hopelessly intoxicated will want to sing along with big birds and purple dinosaurs, or the political, news, or cultural programming, which alcohol makes even more soporific than it already is, putting the inebriated to sleep and keeping them off the road, thereby serving the greater good by promoting the cause of highway safety. No, I mean public television’s nature and science programming, which no one should watch unless completely sober.

I bring this up because, as you may know, deer season recently ended here and my brothers, having killed, gutted, butchered, and otherwise disposed of one male deer, decided afterwards that reassembling the deer’s skeleton might be a good idea. They decided to do this on a Saturday afternoon after watching college football and gulped down enough beer to keep a team of Clydesdales scooting back and forth from the brewery for a couple of weeks, give or take a day. With the games over, they apparently turned to public television and watched a program about the deer problem now afflicting those of us here in the northeastern United States (I realize that deer afflict other areas as well, but we also deal with their attendant problems: our county’s leading export is Lyme disease, which we have more of than anyone else in the United States). Having watched the program and come to the conclusion that reassembling the deer’s skeleton would be a good idea; it’d be educational, one brother opined, although we all know what deer look like and don’t need any further exegesis on the subject.

And as I said, they were in really no condition to tie their shoelaces, much less reassemble a deer. With the courage of their DUI convictions, however, they went out to the garage where the remains of the deer remained and set to work putting Bambi’s dad back together again. As you might imagine, if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put a simple egg back together again, then how much more difficult must it be for a troop of drunks on an educational binge to disunravel a disassembled deer.

At first, they thought they ought to try to put the meat back on the bones but that failed as they kept slipping in the offal mess they made on the garage floor (yeah, that was bad, I admit it) and then decided to just putting the skeleton back together again. For this purpose, the brothers and company (mostly drinking buddies) cracked out the scotch tape, the glue, and a thousand yard ball of twine that my brother keeps in the hope that someday he might get some use out of it. He bought the ball about five years ago, I think, and I think since then he’s used about forty yards of the stuff. There are only so many things you can use twine for, you know.

Well, killing a deer is a lot easier than putting one back together again. I know this because my brothers called me down to help them, for reasons I’m pretty sure I don’t understand, since I know absolutely nothing about the anatomy of the white-tailed deer, and I found them in the middle of the garage with large numbers of bones glued together at odd angles and held together with twine and tape. I tried to make some heads or tails of the skeleton because I’m pretty sure they couldn’t, even though I’m no expert. A deer’s skull does not rest on its pelvis, I’m reasonably certain of that, and I am also sure that a deer’s ribs do not emanate from its front legs, but from the spine, the same as other vertebrates. There were also bits I didn’t understand at first, like the use of beer cans for the bones they couldn’t find or had stashed in the refrigerator with the meat still on them, said beer cans being reinforced with sticks and golf clubs. I’m no golfer, but I’m fairly certain that one of the buck’s front forelegs was a five iron.

“So what do you think,” the brothers and their cohort announced grandly. I was not sure what I thought, or if I should tell men so far in a drunken stupor that they could actually ask me what I thought of their skeletal recreation. I tried to be diplomatic, but I couldn’t think of anything right off the top of my head, which is something that happens to me way too often, I think. In this case, though, the lucky entrance of a wife saved me from having to tell a none too convincing lie. I don’t have a wife, so this is not something I can prove with facts and figures, but it seems that most wives object to trying to clean clothing drenched with deer’s blood. And the brothers and the friendly cohort were dripping with deer’s blood; at least, the parts that hadn’t already dried to their skins dripped. One of the reasons I don’t have a wife is that loud, high-pitched scream that emanates from them when they see something like their husbands covered in deer’s blood, following by ferocious swearing and nagging of a fairly intense nature. I don’t spend a lot of time wallowing in deer’s blood; wallowing as a recreational activity has never really appealed to me, but I think I’ll skip that whole screaming thing, if it’s all the same to you. On the positive side–well, it might be positive; it’s purely a personal opinion, I think; they did manage to use another fifty yards of my brother’s old twine.

I bring this phenomenon up because it is now deer hunting season here. To celebrate the season’s arrival hunters (and men who want everyone to think they’re hunters but couldn’t find the business end of a rifle if it was pointing right at them) throughout the not very great length and breadth of our little burg are getting their rifles out and cleaning them in happy preparation for the beginning of the hunt, wherein they will take their weapons out into the forest primeval that surrounds us and, like our earliest hunter-gatherer ancestors, get away from their wives for a while and drink extraordinarily large amounts of beer in peace and quiet. In the course of all this gun cleaning and beer drinking and traipsing about the countryside with high-powered weapons a deer occasionally expires from something other than natural causes, however implausible that may seem to the casual observer. That the rounds fired off at the local fauna hit anything other than large topographical features is something of a miracle; anyone with that much beer in them shouldn’t hit anything at all.
This is yet another from the archives, 2004, to be exact, for those of you who like to be exact about such things, but as it seems to have some relevance here, I will include it in the debate:

In any case, people have strange ideas about wild animals, especially people who have lived their entire lives in cities. There are no mice like Mickey Mouse, no grizzly bears like Yogi Bear, although grizzly bears may indeed be smarter than your average ranger, and there are definitely no deer like Bambi, but you can’t tell these people such things. They love animals, they’ll have you know, all animals, with the single exception of rats, but they prefer the cute, furry ones most of all. And they think the people who hunt these animals are among the most loathsome wretches that ever walked on two legs.

I know this because a friend of the family came visiting over the Thanksgiving holiday. She is a very nice woman, a lifelong resident of the great metropolis to the south of us, but not someone at all familiar with strange local customs like shooting animals for fun and profit. After all, this is a place where the municipal shelters and local charities encourage the wholesale slaughter of the indigenous wildlife in order to feed the hungry and homeless. So there’s a bit of a culture clash right there, but a bit of a culture clash does not really describe what our family friend got when she walked into my brother’s garage for something or other after Thanksgiving dinner and saw Bambi’s dad hanging from the rafters with a bullet hole in his side, just waiting for the brother to gut and butcher. She took one look at the buck and then had a conniption of epic proportions. Well, conniption is not really the adjective I’m looking for here and an appropriate one is not coming to mind. The word I’m looking for needs to display some combination of screaming temper tantrum, sputtering hissy fit, and screeching moral outrage blended together with high volume in one very toxic emotional and etymological brew. Conniption doesn’t quite make the grade on this one, I think. As such a word may not exist at all, let’s just say that our metropolitan visitor was unhappy to the nth degree. It’s not everyday that my brother is called a murderer by someone who’s known him all his life, and when my mother tried to explain that deer hunting is not, by any stretch of the imagination, culpable homicide, except to other deer, and that there were entirely too many deer anyway, our visitor looked at my mother as if she were crazier than the love child of Norman Bates and Anna Nicole Smith and said that there were too many kids running around but no one goes around shooting them, do they? This is the remark that caused the previously alluded to state of psychological stasis; not too many people around our happy little burg would think of equating kids with deer.

I suppose you could make the mental leap; there are times when I know I want to throttle annoying youngsters just for the fun of it, but, on the whole, kids seldom eat your mother’s geraniums, a well known deer delicacy, or saunter out into the middle of the highway at three o’clock in the morning and then stare bug-eyed at the oncoming traffic as the frightened motorists perform automotive acrobatics trying to avoid smacking into them. You may want to run down some cute little tyke anyway; some kids just have it coming. There is also the problem of our local constabulary, who, as officers of the law are wont to do, take a dim view of the whole idea of child hunting and will spend an inordinate amount of time and energy arranging government subsidized housing for those who indulge in this hobby.

And then there is the problem that my mother spoke of, that of deer overpopulation. This may come as a surprise to many people, but deer inhabit a Malthusian universe: they reproduce to the limit of the food supply and when the food shrinks the population must shrink as well, which, in the wild, is caused by predators and starvation. Well, there aren’t too many natural predators in this neck of the woods, although I do have a swarm of relatives who are always asking for money; that’s the next best thing, I suppose. But unless someone wants to reintroduce timber wolves and mountain lions to the area, which is not going to happen; this is an idea whose time has come and then will go just as soon as the big bad wolf and his friendly neighborhood wolf pack decide that hunting deer, who may not be among the brightest minds in nature but know how to run like hell when something bad is happening, is just plain stupid when they can snack on little Susie Creamcheese playing hopscotch down in the schoolyard. So mountain lions and timber wolves are out, and if they’re not going to do the hunting then humans will have to take up the slack and do the predation thing. The alternative is letting the deer starve to death en masse during particularly bad winters. I am sure that no one wants that to happen, although I must admit I find the idea of turning hungry wolves loose on annoying bands of kids curiously appealing.

I understand, but i guess EVERYONE is weird when its unfamiliar and often others (not you of course or commentators either) imply weirdness as some kind of ‘abnormal’ freakish behavior…it’s all in what you see, cause honestly all folk are pretty damn deranged, we merely get accoustomed to our own sense of we’re not OTHER ;))..and for me it is really true about many people’s perceptions about the South…the cliche, when in truth, grits and garclic shrimp in the morning looked pretty weird to my son, just as fish soup and kimchi for breakfast looked weird to me at first too (my korean students), but we just have to see that ways of living are just that: umbilicus….

the south (at least in the US) for too long has always been papered in the same song from non-southerners, when the richness of the south comes from (to me) its acceptance of the way of life, rather than its rejection (for good and ill)….

we all like to feel a bit superior to others, alas and unfortunately…

what makes Rowan’s story so strong (to me) is not only the choice of pictures (talking now about the connection between that road and the magnificent morning tree bathed in tongues of light) and their relationship with others (deer/taxidermy/back of head/spit)…it’s that equality of choice that is so beautiful to me…

that is Southern storytelling: the sublime with the profane, ….

its a generosity of vision and acceptance that transcends the darkness, lets say, of Lynch….

a wide and giving heart and a wide and giving eye :))

I do love 6, 7, and 8.