Cherries and Overripe Bananas

W

hile I was at the pet store today, buying food for wild birds and our domestic serpent, I stopped to look at a red iguana in one of the containers there. He (or she) seemed lively and alert, though not looking his best, as he was about to shed and his skin looked dull in consequence. Honestly, I would have liked to take him home with me, but I’m not up to taking care of another pet, and anyway, the way I’m feeling I worry that any creature that joins me may well outlive me.

It was forty-eight years ago today that my pet iguana Molly Bloom joined me. I had wanted an iguana for years, and in honor of my graduating from high school my father decided to give me one. I had a habitat already set up and ready to go, and we went to select my new pet together. The lizards were active and lively-looking, which was reassuring, in that it suggested they had been well-treated and not “damaged in shipment” as one pet supplier had described an episode that resulted in dead reptiles.

After looking at the bright-eyed little creatures in the container, I selected one that looked alert and healthy, and the lady in charge reached in to pick her up and place her in a container for me to take home with me. As she did so another iguana seized her chance. Running up the woman’s arm she made a wild leap into the center of the store and headed off at high speed for points unknown. My father, the saleswoman, and I then fanned out in a sort of circle surrounding the escapee, who was moving from point to point at blinding speed, visible to the unaided eye only when stationary.

Finally the woman crept up behind her while I stationed myself on the floor in front of her, my hand palm upward on the floor. The woman made a sudden grab for her, and the lizard vanished in a flash, shooting across the empty space and coming to a stop on my hand. I curled my palm around the small green creature, picked her up, and announced, I’m going to take this one too. And so it was that Molly became part of my life.

She was a surly creature, unlike my other iguana, my first pick. She was fond of bananas, so long as they were overripe and mushy, and when I gave her assorted fruit she would always pick the cherries out and eat them first. When I had to move her she would do serious damage to my skin, leaving me with scratches up my arm that refused to heal quickly, so I bought a thick glove to wear when I had to move her. She quickly identified the glove as her enemy, and would attack it on sight, biting it and whipping it with her tail. In later years, when she lived in my bathroom on a perch that ran a foot under the ceiling from one end of the room to the other, she managed to open the cupboard where I kept the glove, pull it out, and rip it apart. When I told my father about it he remarked, Well, at least she knew who her enemy was.

She eventually grew to be just under five feet long. She went through several containers as she grew, breaking out of the last one in a memorable moment. I was out in the backyard at the time, when I heard one of the dogs barking—I forget which one now. I came in to find that somebody—I’m not sure who, though I have my suspicions—had overturned the garbage and spread it out over the kitchen floor, and now my iguana was digging through it, while the dog virtuously called my attention to her misdeeds. At my appearance Molly took fright and ran for the bathroom, climbing up a towel rack and installing herself on top of a cabinet. She seemed to like it there, so I let her stay, and she made it her home for about a decade.

She lived over twenty years, a good life for an iguana I guess. One day I walked into the bathroom to find her posed in a position as if she were about to leap off the tall cabinet, her back feet on top of it and her front feet on its side, her head down. I thought at first she’d just frozen there for a moment, as she sometimes did when startled, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that whatever it was she had been doing, she wasn’t going to finish it. I buried her body alongside the north fence, and went on with my life without her. She had been a part of it throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, and I had enjoyed her presence.

Not everybody felt the same way. Visitors expressed their pleasure that I no longer had that creature living in my bathroom—but I missed her.

Bloomsday

T

oday is Bloomsday. You know what that means. No, not that we’re going to have a special guest—that’s more like Talent Round-Up day anyway. No, it means that people are going to celebrate a novel (I guess you can call it a novel) that most of them have never read about a handful of characters who wander around aimlessly on 16 June 1904 and accomplish very little in a massive outpouring of words that chronicle their inner lives and (especially) the pre-war Irish world they lived in. It’s a hell of a book, and there’s nothing else out there quite like it. Like Pale Fire and Tristam Shandy it sits in a genre of its own—and like them it is all too often unread.

Lemmings Lament [2009]

[Originally posted 15 June 2009]

Are you put upon by powers?
Are you restless for release?
Death just might be that final rush you crave.
We all believe in flowers
And we all believe in peace;
There’s endless peace and flowers in the grave.

Freud, Marx, Engles, and Jung

Somewhere during my high school years, the late sixties maybe, I had a vision of a sort of parody pop album, an anthology that would do for the excesses of the day’s music what Rejected Addresses had done for Wordsworth and Walter Scott. I called it something like Plastic Sole in my mind, and I wrote a Bob Dylan parody, a Simon and Garfunkel parody, a Doors parody, and a Rod McKuen parody for it. I think maybe I had a Bobbie Gentry-style ballad planned for it too. The Dylan was particularly mean-spirited, as I recall; I had him attacking a Mr. Jones-like character who (it becomes obvious) the singer is sponging on, the singer finally ordering him to get the hell out—but only after he’s forked over all his spare change.

Of course I never did anything with it; it was just something to occupy my mind when I should have been coloring maps for Contemporary World Problems. I would have loved it if somebody else had done something like that, however, especially if it was done well. But as far as I knew, nobody else even seemed to be thinking in that direction.

Had I but known a group of jokers at the Harvard Lampoon were thinking along the same lines, maybe a bit diagonally from my take. In June of 1969 an album appeared entitled The Surprising Sheep and Other Mind Excursions and it was an album at least superficially matching the general description of my own mind excursion, Plastic Sole. I wonder what I would have thought of it if I’d stumbled on it at the time.

I think I would have liked the Bob Dylan parody, “Seventeen Miles from Waukegan My Cantaloupe Died.” The takeoff focuses on the surreal aspects of Bob Dylan’s imagery; my main objection now would be that while it is surreal enough, it just isn’t that Dylanesque. “In the Palm of My Hand” is a very broad parody of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” though taking the imagery in quite another direction. “Little Miss Muffet” reworks the nursery rhyme as a Wilson Pickett track, with a touch of Otis Redding thrown in. (I doubt that this one would have meant anything to me at the time, to be honest—though years later when I first heard it on the National Lampoon Radio Hour box CD set I instantly got it.) “Recipe for Love” targets Dionne Warwick, and I see by it that that same instrumental riff that irritated me also irritated its composer. I might have got a kick out of it.

But the one piece I feel fairly confident I would have liked is something called “Welcome to the Club,” a Lovin’ Spoonful parody written by Christopher Cerf. This one took that ghastly scene that unfolded in 1968 Chicago and turned it into a light-hearted “Daydream” spoof, with pun-filled lyrics:

If your life is a bore
And you’d like to get more
Of a boot out of people you meet,
Well forget your self-pity
And come down to a city
Where the folks will positively knock you off of your feet

With the police riots in Daley’s Chicago fresh in our minds, the clubbings and stompings and gassings and all that, this piece would have had a special poignancy then, or so I imagine now.

On behalf of each judicial
And executive official
We promise you a smashing good time.

On the whole I think I would have been disappointed, though. Too many performers crying out for parody were missing, and the execution was distinctly on the sloppy side. And Bob Dylan—the guy is ripe for parody, and yet till this day the best efforts fall short. Maybe Paul Simon’s “Simple Desultory Philippic,” or John Lennon’s untitled takeoff come the closest, but, well, I’m sure it’s possible to do better. Well, the moment has passed, I suppose.

But Bob Dylan (played by Christopher Guest) was featured on the next major excursion in that direction, a record entitled simply Lemmings, featuring a show put on by the National Lampoon. The first act was a series of sketches somewhat in the style of the future Saturday Night Live, and none of that appeared on the album. But the second act was a stunning parody of Woodstock, complete with takeoffs on Wavy Gravy and Max Yasgur. This is what appeared on the album, slightly abridged. (A Joan Baez parody that had already appeared on the album Radio Dinner was omitted, for example. And later incarnations of the show featured parodies of Donovan and Joni Mitchell that had yet to be created at the time of this recording. Anyway.)

The opening track, “Lemmings Lament,” sets the stage by parodying Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” as performed by CSN&Y. It sets out the theme later made explicit by Farmer Yassir—“This here mass suicide of all you young people may just be the best goddamn thing ever happen to this country.” Next up Bob Dylan casually repudiates the protest movement he helped to launch:

You say I was your leader,
You say I turned you on,
You’re starting to suspect now
That it was all a con.

Then, after an excursion into early 1960s death rock that seems a bit out of place here, there’s the stunning John Denver takeoff, “Colorado.” Chevy Chase did Denver about as well as he did Ford, but the song is funny enough to survive even that, with lines that came back to haunt me when I did spend a winter or two in Colorado:

Oh, Colorado’s calling me
From her hillsides, to her canyons, and her rivers and her trees;
When blizzards snap the power lines, and all the toilets freeze
In December in the Colorado Rockies.

The song has moments of lyric intensity, usually followed by a thumping anticlimax:

The wind sang us a lullaby;
The snow was thick as cream,
And icicles were chandeliers
Like crystals in a dream,
And the streams were strips of diamonds,
And the hills were white as snow
And a bear ate all our soybeans in the night.

The James Taylor parody, “Highway Toes,” had previously appeared, at least as far as the lyrics went, as part of Sean Kelly’s “Swan Song of the Open Road,” which featured takeoffs on Walt Whitman, Richard Brautigan, and Pete Seeger (not “Well-Intentioned Blues”) as well. The music, by Christopher Guest, however, sounds more like Gordon Lightfoot than James Taylor. But the Joe Cocker (John Belushi) parody is dead on, if a little overlong.

The basic idea of linking musical parodies by framing them with a Woodstock satire was absolutely brilliant, and even if the “Festival of Death” thing is a bit over-obvious, the execution is solid. To quote Farmer Yassir again, “Long hair, short hair—what’s the difference once the head’s blowed off.”

If I still had my files and notes I probably would have pulled out my old high-school outline for Plastic Sole (or whatever I really called it) and looked it over one more time. There wasn’t anything in it worth saving, probably, but I did enjoy planning it so many years ago, and I probably would have enjoyed the recollection. The Rod McKuen parody, for example—I remember working on it gleefully (I detested Rod McKuen for whatever reason)—but I don’t remember anything else whatsoever about it. I imagine it was embarrassingly bad—but I don’t know, and now I’ll never know. It’s not important, but it’s irritating.

Bear with me folks; I’m having a difficult time adjusting. But I should be off this black nostalgia kick in a day or so. I hope so, anyway.

The Voices in My Head [2006]

[originally posted 14 June 2006]

M

y eyes are swollen and red and have been for the past several days—allergies I suppose, but it's difficult to focus on the screen. I’ve written nothing for the past several days, not that it matters I suppose, but it feels frustrating. Today I got one thing off my list of things to do—I got most of the front lawn and parking strip mowed, wh …ich makes the place look less abandoned, or at least so I fondly think. The internet runs sluggishly for me today. My head buzzes with random quotations—“It’s all very strange and mysterious and I’m sure it’s leading up to something,” (Mrs. Drudge in The Real Inspector Hound); “What’s the bird’s-eye lowdown on this caper, whatever that means?” (Nick Danger); “If you didn’t know the difference, you couldn’t tell the difference” (a long-forgotten advertisement); “There aint much you can do with a bag of shit except bury it” (Huck Finn’s pap according to Seelye)…. It’s like one of those scenes in old movies where voices from the past echo in some guy’s mind (or at least on the soundtrack) except that these voices mean nothing. Brusha brusha brusha, get the new Ipana … You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse … I can’t believe I ate the whole thing … You hate that cat, don’t you?

Do they even make Ipana any more? Then what is the point of having this loop stuck in my head? It’s talent round-up day, folks, or maybe we’re going to have a special guest.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when Lucky Strikes brings you The Lone Ranger and his faithful Indian companion Tonto—or was it his Japanese valet Kato? Well, the Shadow knows. And the Death March of a Marionette means it’s time to go to bed.

Swamp Gas

T

oday’s big excitement was washing the dog, who has been overdue for a bath for some time. He was not happy about it, but then, he never is. My energy is gone, so that took a good deal out of me, and I didn’t get to the laundry and other chores I was planning on carrying out during the course of the day. Maybe tomorrow will be better, always assuming that it ever comes.

Coherence seems beyond me at the moment, and even the effort of pulling something out of the files proved too much for me this thirteenth day of June in the year 12017 of the Holocene Era. I keep hoping for better things, but my heart isn’t in it. Or up to it, for that matter.

Corrupting the Kids [2009]

A

lthough I didn’t set out to pick on children it happens that in the course of running down some fake quotations attributed to various founding fathers of the United States I used as my starting-point two pieces allegedly written by schoolkids. One of them was a prize-winning essay written by a junior in high school; the other a prize-winning speech composed by a home-schooled ten-year-old.

The essay, entitled “Time for Change” and written by Lauren Harr, was a response to the question “What do you think needs changing in the world and what can you do to make that change happen?” The speech, which supposedly won first place honors for 6th grade at the 13th Annual Christian Heritage Speech competition, was given by Edward A. Allen and entitled “How the First Great Awakening Influenced Our Founding Fathers” (this was the assigned topic). Harr used quotations from Washington and Patrick Henry to support her point that church-state separation was not envisioned in the Constitution. Allen used quotations from the same two plus Jefferson and Franklin as his main illustrations for ways the First Great Awakening influenced the founding fathers. He also threw in a Madison quotation to show that this influence extended to the Constitution itself.

The trouble with these quotations—which are central to the theses of both pieces—is that all of them are fake. And by fake I don’t mean, please note, that they had a word off here and there, or that they were a popular misquoting of something Washington or Franklin actually said or wrote—I mean that they were out-and-out fakes, words put into their mouths by somebody else with an axe to grind. (And even worse—a number of them were actually misquotations of the original fake quotation.) Here are the seven, in all their glory:

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ! [anonymous 1956 statement falsely attributed to Patrick Henry]

It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here. [the same anonymous 1956 statement falsely attributed to Patrick Henry]

He who shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world. [a hostile statement by Jacques Mallet du Pan falsely attributed to Benjamin Franklin]

The reason that Christianity is the best friend of government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart. [a modern statement falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson]

The future and success of America is not in this Constitution but in the laws of God upon which this Constitution is founded. [paraphrase of an 1958 statement by Clarence Manion falsely attributed to James Madison]

It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. [an 1893 statement by Howard Hyde Russell falsely attributed to George Washington]

It is impossible to rightly govern a country without God and the Bible. [a misquotation of the same 1893 statement falsely attributed to George Washington]

The Pseudo-Franklin quotation is the oldest of the bunch, going back to 1793, and was actually written (in French) by Jacques Mallet du Pan as part of a summary of views he attributed to Franklin. The Pseudo-Washington quotation goes back to 1835 through various permutations, and was originally part of an argument attempting to show the existence of a supreme being which was attributed to Washington on the authority of an anonymous gentleman. (Both kids get this one completely wrong, by the way; the original quotation reads “It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being.”) Pseudo-Henry’s quotation comes from a 1956 periodical, and was only relatively recently mis-attributed to Patrick Henry. The Pseudo-Jefferson is a very recent concoction, first appearing in print in 2001, and the Pseudo-Madison is merely a clumsy paraphrase of the earlier Pseudo-Madison fake “ten commandments” quotation, to which it is almost always attached. (This one is odd in that Allen's speech was delivered in 2003 while Google books records no earlier appearance in print than 2004.) The fake “ten commandments” quotation can be traced back no further than 1958 and was no doubt concocted at that time.

The thing I’m struck by here is not so much the ignorance of the two kids involved—who expects kids of say 10 and 16 to know anything? No, the thing I’m struck by is the seeming mendacity (or extraordinary ignorance) of their teachers, their parents, and the contest judges, who all rewarded them for behavior that would never fly in a college paper, let alone in the real world. Dress it up as you like, the use of fake quotations is nothing but lying. Had it been merely a matter of illustrating an essay or speech with a lively quotation it wouldn’t matter that much, though it’s still very bad form. But when the quotation is essential to the thesis being argued, as it is in both cases here, it matters very much indeed. Without the four fake quotations he used to support his point, Allen is left with absolutely nothing to show how the Great Awakening influenced the founding fathers. And this is the central point of his speech. Somebody should have caught this early and sent him back to the drawing board to fix it. And without the two fake quotations used to bolster her untenable claim that church-state separation is not inherent in the first amendment, a key paragraph of Harr’s essay is left in ruins, a fact that should have precluded the essay winning any kind of prize at all, unless all the other contestants contributed really crappy stuff. (At least neither of the two honorable mentions used fake quotations to bolster their theses.)

Again, I don’t blame the kids half as much as I blame the adults who let them get away with it. Presumably Allen and Harr got these fraudulent quotations from sources they trusted—and apparently nobody around them could be bothered to tell them that a little more research might be in order. How are they going to feel, I wonder, when they realize that these trusted authorities were lying to them?

[The Harr essay, “Time for Change,” appears to be no longer available on the web; at least the link is now dead. The Allen speech is still available via the Wayback Machine.]

The Hospital Dream [2003]

[A dream recorded 11 June 2003]

I

 dreamed that I was going to have an operation of some kind—what exactly it was wasn’t specified in the dream. I think. For a big chunk of the dream I was scurrying around trying to borrow the first edition of Shakespeare’s Lives from the library before the operation began. The first edition was a reference work, but I thought I could persuade the library to lend it to me for a few days. My brother announced that he’d solved the problem, but the copy he’d got was the second edition. It was too late to do anything so I headed back to the hospital for the operation. I asked the physician (who seemed like a very nice guy) whether there would be much pain during the recovery process. He said that he didn’t think I should be worrying about that; it probably wouldn’t be a problem because there was very little chance that I would survive the operation anyway.

Screw It

S

crew it. I have nothing for today. Although I’m feeling a bit better than I have been since the heart incident, I still feel like crap, and typing onto the keyboard is slow business. I see that I had my final piano recital on 10 June 1964; I played the “Russian Dance” from the Nutcracker. (My teacher was disappointed; she had wanted me to play a Grieg piece I never did master—at least, not while I was taking piano lessons—and we fell back on a piece I had mastered the previous summer. She said I should take the summer off and return when I had regained my focus; unfortunately I never did.) And on 10 June 2000 I finally got a Hee Bee Gee Bees album—this one from Australia. It wasn’t the British album I’d been looking for since 1983, but still, it was nice to have. My favorite track was probably the Supertrash song. And I see that Adam West, perhaps best known as the Mayor of Quahog (or maybe Batman) has died. If I were feeling up to it any of these might be a reasonable topic for an entry, but I feel like crap, and I’m going to let sleeping dogs lie for the moment.

Changing the Face of the World with Dr. Ben Franklin [2009]

[originally posted 9 June 2009]

T

oday, I took it into my head, for whatever reason, to run down the source (if possible) of a fake Benjamin Franklin quotation: “He who shall introduce into the public affairs the principles of a primitive Christianity, will change the face of the world.” At least that was the first version of it that I found. A more usual form is “He who shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world,” or “He who shall carry into politics the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world.” In any case the Franklin doppelganger proposes to use the principles of primitive Christianity to change the face of the world somehow.

Now this time I started off with what proved to be a completely false hypothesis. While the words didn’t sound much like Benjamin Franklin, it crossed my mind that they might have come from Dr. Benjamin Rush. Perhaps the less familiar Benjamin had somehow become confused with his more famous contemporary.

I don’t usually write about the dead ends and wild goose chases I end up following in pursuit of one of these things, but this time it seemed like it might be interesting. At least it gives a picture of the irritating things that can send you off on a wrong direction in the search for information.

I quickly found the same quotation actually attributed to Dr. Benjamin Rush in a 1907 book by Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts, Ph.D., called Practical Christian Sociology. Well, that was promising—but the hypothesis failed quite quickly on the delivery front. If Rush had said it, I couldn’t find it.

My next approach was more fruitful. I went back to the Franklin hypothesis and tried to strike out on a new trail. One of the place I’ve seen the alleged quotation before is in the first volume of the Ante-Nicene Christian Fathers, page 552, towards the end of Irenaeus Against Heresies. The editor there gives his source as “Bancroft, Hist. U.S., vol. ix, p. 492.” And sure enough, there it is, in the 1866 edition of George Bancroft’s History on the United States, exactly as promised.

All right, that gets us a bit further back, but not nearly far enough. What next? In real life I took a break somewhere in here to see whether—armed with this new information—I could now find somebody in the vastness of the world wide web who had already run this quotation down to its lair. I had no more luck this time then on previous attempts, unless you define luck as the absence of success.

I next chanced upon a variation of the quotation in a footnote in an 1866 edition of Martin’s History of France, as translated by Mary Louise Booth, volume ii, page 442. Here’s what Henri Martin had to say:

The presence of Franklin at Paris, personifying the republic under a form so worthy of respect, exercised a great moral influence. Our philosophers, in discussing with him at Paris the American Constitution, prepared themselves to discuss the future laws of the French Revolution. A royalist publicist, Mallet-Dupan, has preserved for us a great saying, which Franklin, he says, repeated more than once to his pupils at Paris: “He who shall carry into politics the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world.”

Now I have to say that the name "Mallet-Dupan" meant nothing to me—less than nothing, actually. But good old Google came to my rescue here; a search on Mallet Dupan immediately brought up several items about Jacques Mallet du Pan, French royalist, journalist, and pamphleteer. A visit to the online Britannica Eleventh edition filled me in a bit on my quarry and I was off again.

The next step: a quick search of any available works by Jacques Mallet Du Pan. Even back when I still had my library I am quite positive that it didn’t include anything by this royalist propagandist, but fortunately several of his books have been posted online, either in the original French or in English translation. And in one of the latter, Considerations on the Nature of the French Revolution, I found the following passage:

Franklin often told his disciples in Paris, that whoever would introduce the principles of primitive Christianity, into the political state, would change the whole order of society. An absolute equality of condition; a community of goods; a Republic of the poor and of brethren; associations without a Government; enthusiasm for dogmas, and submission to chiefs to be elected from their equals,—this is the state to which the Presbyterian of Philadelphia reduced the Christian Religion.

Now this is from a 1793 English translation of a French original, and the French original doesn’t seem to be posted anywhere online. (But the Web is huge, and my French is small, and I may have managed to miss it all.) There are several things worth noting here—

·         This passage is not a quotation; it is somebody’s summary or paraphrase of something Franklin is alleged to have said.

·         The saying is at least third-hand. As Mallet du Pan was not one of Franklin’s “disciples in Paris” it follows that he either has to have received the alleged statement from a disciple, or from somebody even further down the transmission chain.

·         The material in question cannot be separated from the rest of the mishmash attributed to Franklin—the ranting about “absolute equality of condition; a community of goods” and so on. This stuff doesn’t sound like Franklin, and does sound like a hostile caricature of the movement he represented. Similar sorts of stuff turned up in the Anti-Jacobin.

·         The passage is a translation.

In other words, this is not even as good as one of those quotations attributed to a man long dead by an anonymous gentleman in a letter written many decades after the alleged event. This is a translation of a paraphrase of something Franklin is supposed to have told somebody else as alleged by an opponent of his views.

Historical scholarship has adopted rules to keep the process honest. One of these is that you don’t put words into somebody else’s mouth. If you quote somebody as having said something, you need to be able to show exactly where and when he said it. (And by the way, this is not some new standard, as I saw David Barton claim in a video. It could be considered a “new” standard only if you think the bicycle and electricity are new-fangled inventions.) Sometimes it is appropriate to use material that comes from further afield. When a popular story about a historical figure is especially striking, and the views that figure allegedly expressed in it are congruent with his known speeches or writing, it may be appropriate to use it for color, with an appropriate caveat. If a particular author has left us nothing in her own words on a topic of interest in her day, what her family or friends or colleagues say she said about it may be our best source of information—though again, such data must be used with caution. But something like this, so far removed from Franklin himself, is really only suitable as evidence for what his opponents said about him. It can tell us nothing, by itself, about the man, or his beliefs.

So to sum up:

1.       This passage was written by Jacques Mallet du Pan, not by Benjamin Franklin.

2.       It is a hostile paraphrase of something other people allege that Franklin said.

3.       It first appeared after Franklin had died and so was no longer in a position to dispute it.

4.       This passage should not be cited as a Franklin quotation (which it is not) ever, and probably should not be used as a representation of his views—certainly not without additional support.

[For more information see “Fake Quotations: Franklin and Primitive Christianity” at Fake History.]

Trying to Maintain [1980]

[Journal passage, 8 June 1980]

I

’m writing this while waiting at the Pomona train station. The train was due at six-forty-five but it won’t be in (of course) until eight-thirty. I’ve been amusing myself by reading the baggage restrictions (no pets, typewriters, radios, cameras, inflammable liquids, records, tapes, record players, television sets, transmitters, guns, bombs, priceless antiques, coins, artefacts of value, tape recorders, video players, motion picture projectors, internal combustion engines, motor-cycles, bicycles, unicycles, epicycles, shopping carts, time-machines, space-warp engines, dead sea scrolls, or itinerant peddlers—sometimes I wonder just how one is supposed to transport one’s goods. (Unlike the bus restrictions, however, Amtrak will carry musical instruments if suitably cased—though not (to judge by the other restrictions) electronic musical instruments.)

Ah, well—onward I guess. Time marshes on and it’s almost eight o’clock. A sign across the street—Modoc Sheet Metal Sales—reminds me [of] my Modoc MS. I haven’t had time this semester to get any further with it, but I’m hoping to have time this summer to get it finished and out.

Let’s see if I can write. Yeah, I guess I can, if I go slowly. For some reason my arms hurt like hell and I feel like I was trying to lift against about three gees. Further, I seem to be on a train to Portland I guess—at least a guy just took my ticket without comment—but I don’t have the slightest idea just how I got here. A little bit ago I was on a quite different train to LA—yeah, and I remember arriving at Pasadena, and then somewhere in there I suddenly realized I was on a quite different train with quite different people and my arms hurt. Also my back. I’m trying to maintain, but I wonder if I’m losing my reason. Or—could this be a dream? It seems real enough—a little too real—but then so do most dreams. God, I hate to think that I’m about to hear that goddamn alarm go off and have to get up and go. I hope this is real. I’d rather have it be real than have to do it over.

Terrestrial Squares Continued [1982]

[Continuation of “Terrestrial Squares,” (from Cellophane Visions) written 7–8 June 1982]

CLICK

Steve: Well, just what the hell was Pete doing selling acid?

Sheila: He said it was a favor.

Steve: Some goddamn favor—selling acid’s a felony, and it’s stupid to boot, unless you know what you’re doing. Jesus, what’re we going to tell Lije and Lydia?

Sheila: I don’t know, Steve.

Steve: That’s the trouble with you two kids—the first time in weeks I get a chance for a hot bath, and you two have to get yourselves busted. Why?

Sheila: I didn’t—

[door opens, off]

Lydia (coming on screen): Hi, kids, it’s been a hell of a day; just let me unwind a little, okay?

Sheila: Uh, Lydia—

Lydia: Oh, god, it feels good to sit a minute; I wish I could stay a little, but I’ve got this meeting with the NAACP tonight and—say, where’s Pete?

Sheila: Well, it’s like this—

Lydia: Look, Steve, did you get the skins for the egg rolls—I didn’t have time. Can you do the Chinese food without—

Sheila: Mom!

Lydia: (startled) Yes? What is it, Sheila?

Sheila: It’s about Pete. (pause)

Lydia: Yes? What is it?

Sheila: Well, er, we went to the park to-day, and, well, Pete and I were sort of arrested? You know?

Lydia: And?

Sheila: They let me go and took Pete off to jail or something, I guess.

Lydia: But what for?

Sheila: For selling acid—L.S.D., you know?—in the park.

Lydia: For selling drugs? Pete?

Sheila: To a minor.

Lydia: Pete?

Steve: I told you she wouldn’t believe it.

Lydia: But that’s a felony.

Steve: Only since 1967.

Lydia: Where’s Jeff? In the hospital?

Steve: He’s over at Rod’s. Should I—

Lydia: Go fix your egg rolls. (pause) Let me think—Sheila, was it city or county police?

Sheila: County, I think—

Lydia: Okay, good—that’ll give me time to spring Pete and still make the NAACP meeting. Now look, Sheila—you stay here and look after the phone while your brother cooks supper. I’m going to the jail—do you think you can stay out of trouble while I’m gone?

Sheila: Should I tell Lije anything—

Lydia: Now don’t go worrying your father—he has enough troubles as it is. Do you understand?

Sheila: Okay, but—

Lydia: Now just be careful, okay? I’ll be right (& she exits, still talking)

Sheila: But—but—(she produces a bag filled with white tablets from her handbag) what do I do with the rest of the acid?

(fade to)

Chorus: Twenty-one great tobaccos
Make Twenty Wonderful Smokes
Twenty-one

CLICK

Get in the Biz Bag

CLICK

coffee tastes like sheep urine. Can’t you

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no more Armpit Odor—with Anthrax

Announcer: And now, back to our CBS Movie—Strange Rina, Strange Land, starring Mick Jagger and Goldie Hawn.

Ben (played by Robert Wagner): Look Jubal, I’m worried—

Jubal (moodily): You’re worried, my boy? You should have my worries. Look at this place—three gorgeous secretaries, a mansion, a pool the size of a football field—do you have any idea at all how much all this costs?

Ben: Jubal, listen—

Jubal: And the taxes—state, national, and federal. It’s enough to drive a man to drink.

Ben: Look, I just got back from Valentine’s church and let me tell you, I don’t like what I saw one bit. Did you know

CLICK

Moderator: new contestant! And where are you from, Mr. Lucifer?

Lucifer: You might call it Hell.

[studio laughter]

Moderator: Ah, yes, I’ve been there. But does it have—

Lucifer: another name? Sheol, Texas.

Moderator: Let’s have a big hand for Lucifer, from Sheol, Texas!

[studio applause]

         Now, as the challenger, Lucifer, you get to go first. Which of our “squares” do you want to—

Lucifer: I’ll take—Master Kung.

Kung: I doubt that, Honorable

CLICK

Ben: sort of thing is moral, Jubal?

Jubal: Free love? Free money? No guilt? My boy, if only I were twenty years younger—well, then

CLICK

King: lost dauphin of France!

Duke: Yes?

King: The pore suffrin’ rightful heir to the throne.

Duke: I see.

King: You do?

Duke: The rightful heir to the throne.

King: You do see.

Jim (emphatically): I don’t. An’ whut’s mo, I doan

CLICK

Friday: as you a few questions.

Woman: All right.

Friday: Do you know what your son is accused of?

Woman: Obviously.

Friday: Are you aware that drug abuse is the most serious scourge afflicting our young people: Do you realize—

Woman: Excuse me—are you aware that entrapment is illegal?

Friday: I’m not talking about

CLICK

Sheila: to do with the stuff.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s a problem too. We could sell it. How come Pete was selling the stuff, anyway?

Sheila: I don’t really know. He said he was trying to get some chick off his back.

Jeff: Pete?

Sheila: Yes—I guess she’d been calling up, hasseling him to sell her some acid, so Pete did.

Jeff: That figures. What a dope.

Sheila: What?

Jeff: He was set up. Who’d he buy the stuff from?

Sheila: Some guy called Saruman. I think.

Jeff (grins): Saruman. Okay—let me (He gets to his feet in one fluid move and starts to phone) make a call—hello? (pause) This is Jeff—you know? (pause) Yeah. You know my brother—Pete—just got busted. (pause) What do you mean what for? You know. (pause) You haven’t seen him for two weeks? You’re sure? (pause) Yeah, okay, thanks. (He hangs up.) He didn’t get it from Saruman. (He examines the bag.) I wish I knew if this shit was any good.

Sheila: You think Pete got burned?

Jeff: Well, I’m sure not going to sell the stuff if I don’t know where it comes from. I think we’d better flush it.

Sheila: But—

Jeff: No, better yet, I’ll take it to Saruman. He knows what’s going around. And he can do an analysis if there’s any problem.

Sheila: I’ll go with you.

Jeff: Yeah, okay, let’s get on with it. (They both head for the door, just as it closes, Steve comes to door opposite, entering.)

Steve: Supper’s on, gang—where is everyone?

(fade to)

(Scene is Saruman’s pad at Perelandra House; décor is Late Decadant Hippy, real 1969. Heavy sitar music drones in the background. Saruman is sprawled on some cushions, staring at the ceiling, more or less entangled with two Hippy Chicks. Miscellaneous lights strobe at random. The doorbell rings. There is a pause. Then the doorbell rings again.)

Saruman: Oh, wow, I got to get that tape fixed.

First Hippy Chick: What?

Saruman (as doorbell rings): Dig that discord—real uncool, you know.

First Hippy Chick: Yeah. It’s a bummer.

Second Hippy Chick: (slowly, spacily) That’s not a discord. That’s, like, your doorbell.

Saruman: Oh, wow, that’s heavy. (He rises vertically to his feet, as if pulled by invisible strings, and staggers to the door. He opens it, revealing Sheila.) Well, hello there. Is this Christmas?

Jeff: (pushing on in) It’s July. This is my sister, Sheila.

Saruman: Yeah? Where’s she been hiding?

Jeff: (handing Saruman the bag) Here. Take it.

Saruman: (suspiciously) What’s that, man?

Jeff: That’s what we want to know.

Saruman: (reaches in the bag, pulls out a tab, looks it over, sniffs, etc.) Shit, I don’t know. It could be acid. Some amateur outfit looks like. Where’d you score it?

Jeff: (shrugs) Pete scarfed it somewhere.

Saruman: This is a lab case—I’ll have to, like, call it in for testing, all right?

Jeff: Uh, yeah, sure. Give me a call—

Saruman: No way. In my book, all phones are tapped.

Jeff: Just yes or no, okay? Yes if it’s acid or something; no if it’s a burn.

Saruman: Yeah, okay. I guess. (He is rapidly losing interest.) I gotta sit (he collapses in a heap on the rug but continues talking as if nothing had happened) down before all the blood rushes out of my head.

(fade to)

Announcer: we filled one dishwasher with ordinary bleach and the other with New Chlorox 2 and

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Mr. Spock: think it was wise, Captain, for so many of us to leave the ship?

McCoy: He does have a point, Jim. Who is in charge up there now?

Captain Kirk: Uh, just a second. Let me check the duty roster—

Mr. Spock: I believe you’ll find that Assistant Master Mechanic Third Class Juarez is now the highest ranking officer on board.

Captain Kirk: Ah—yes. Now that that’s settled, gentlemen, shall we go forward into the un

CLICK

Chorus: brite toothpaste
The taste you can really feel
New Ultrabrite gives your mouth
Sex

CLICK

Chorus: grok around the clock tonight
We’re gonna grok grok grok
From dawn to night
We’re gonna grok around the grokkin’ clock tonight.
When the

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Duke: cons for all occasions, come one, come all—cons by fraud, cozenage, deception both grotesque and subtle—the truth indirect, or the outright lie. You sir—you look like a dupe.

Man from the Crowd: Why, thank you kindly, sir.

Duke: Step right on up here.

Man: You want me to step right on up there?

Duke: That’s right. Right on up here.

Man: Up here?

Duke (pointing): Up here.