Not long ago I saw one of my former professors on some cable program about California’s north coast, where my alma mater, Humboldt State, is located. The prof was posed by a wall of liquor bottles in a bar, projecting the romantic image of the drinking poet, decked out in a tweed jacket with the obligatory leather elbow patches, a turtleneck sweater and a thatch of carefully coiffed Robert Frost hair. The narcissistic son of a bitch had even taken to using all three of his names, like the poet William Carlos Williams, although he was not even close to being in Williams' league, and here he was national television droning on about the late poet and short story writer Raymond Carver. Carver had been a student of his. So had I.
Carver graduated from Humboldt with an AB in English several years before I enrolled. By then he had transferred to Chico and later Sacramento State for graduate studies, supplementing his meager income with minimum wage jobs, one of them as a janitor. "See what a bachelor's degree in English from Humboldt State gets you?" he wife at the time sneered.
Then the New Yorker and the literary press began publishing his poems and stories. That led to grants, paid speaking engagements and a gig teaching poetry at Sacramento State. As JFK once said, "Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan."
Well, Carver succeeded as a writer, and here was this pretentious twit of a professor claiming literary paternity in a public forum. That prof's only real claim to attempted paternity was confined to frosh girls who fell for his poet manque nonsense. Oh, he had male acolytes too; struggling student poets working in bowling alleys, tending bar and writing arcane verse for each other, all of them making me consider changing my major from English to something more functional like diesel repair, as suggested by a Marxist friend of mine.
My commie pal was Jim McEachron. Jim was over six feet tall and probably weighed 250 pounds. He worked on a ranch and wore a straw hat and bib overalls with pockets stuffed with radical screeds about the evils of capitalism.
Jim was the only self-proclaimed Marxist I knew who had a sense of humor, which did not sit well with the radical elements on campus -- or with the administrators of the community college we both attended before moving on to Humboldt State. They paled at his proposal to start a chapter of Tom Hayden's Students For A Democrtic Society on campus. The year was 1968. Not a banner year for favorable press about college students, radical or otherwise. The school, College Of The Redwoods, was funded by bonds voted on by the conservative local electorate, many of whom thought all college students should flogged by hags and sent to Siberia, and Jim was not the kind of student to mellow their view. Permission denied.
Jim shrugged and renamed his group the Semi-raspertorious Discussion Society, his idea of a camouflaged derivative for SDS, which he referred to as Cowboys For Communism. He even had letterhead printed with a big red star at the top of the page, and took another run at the college administrators for permission to meet on campus, thinking an endorsement from John Wayne might help.
"I wrote to John Wayne asking him to be our honorary chairman," Jim said, "but the Duke must be very busy. I haven’t heard back yet, but I should any day now."
The school administrators were quicker to respond. Permission denied. So Jim changed the name to the Chess Club. Then the administrators relented. Jim and his troublemakers were allowed to use college facilities, if for no other reason than to shut Jim up. Besides, chess players weren't known for taking over campuses, trashing offices and courting televised coverage of their mass arrests.
No matter. Jim gave up radical politics when the Jesus movement smote college campuses in the early 70s. He adjusted to the changing times and claimed to be forming a congregation of Cowboys For Christ. The Jesus faction on campus got huffy in a most unchristian manner and the idea fizzled. True believers are never much fun.
I ran into Jim as he was walking out of the local Sizzler steak house a year after we graduated. Gone were the bib overalls. Gone was the straw hat. Gone were the radical paperbacks bulging from his pockets. He was wearing polyester slacks, a polyester shirt, and a clip-on tie.
"Jim! You sold out!" I said with mock horror.
As a matter of fact, he had. Big time. He was working as a reporter for a weekly newspaper so right wing that it made the Hearst papers look like Pravda. Jim took a toothpick out of his mouth and summed up his political conversion with a single on-the-mark question:
"Mike, do you know there are forty-nine ways to make macaroni casserole?"
Ah yes, hunger trumps politics every time. I'm not sure Jim was really a radical anyway. He was more of a satirist, and satirists are often conservative. From Jonathan Swift to George Carlin, satirists have used a personal conservatism to satirize the world as they see it. That does not mean actual conservatives are intentionally funny. They aren't. But they sure provide a lot of comic material. Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh come to mind.
Even so, radicals, conservatives and satirists have one thing in common: they all have to eat, as my friend Jim McEachron so trenchantly observed with his question. Even tweed bedecked English professors who give interviews on national television have to eat. I just wish their diets included a few slices of humble pie.
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Comments & Indictments
Raymond Carver's lover was my poetry teacher at my university. Wild Irish woman. I hear they're making another movie out of another of his stories. -- Tab
Was your poetry teacher Tess Gallagher? Last I heard, she was living in Port Angeles, Washington, and If there is a sequel to the 1993 release of Short Cuts, directed by Robert Altman, I hope it's a good as the first: Short Cuts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Nice blog. Unfortunately, I read satirist as satanist the first him thru....caused a double take. -- Doc
A lot of satirists’ targets would agree with your first reading.
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