Birth Day

I was born into a much different America on this date in 1946. There were half as many people in it, and these days it seems they were also about half the size of people today. Since I was the first born of my generation on both sides of the family, there were a lot of relatives who came to see me. My grandfather Severini was just 53, and he had survived poison gas in World War I in Italy. If there was anyone who was 85 year old among my visitors, that person would have been an toddler when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

1946 was a miserable year in Europe, but a good one and a hopeful one in the United States. I was born less than a year after Hiroshima, and there was still an international consensus--including the U.S. government and U.S. military--that atomic weapons would have to be banned. A couple of weeks before I was born, the United Nations Commission on Atomic Energy met for the first time, and discussed proposals for international control of atomic energy put forward by the U.S. and by the Soviet Union. Even two years later, U.S. General Omar Bradley would observe, "The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants."

That hope probably died the day I was born--with the first big postwar atomic bomb tests in the Pacific, called Crossroads. And indeed it was the crossroads. America and the Soviet Union would pursue nuclear supremacy, and soon Omar Bradley would be lobbying for the U.S. to develop the hydrogen bomb. The world has been living on borrowed time ever since, though that was much more a part of conscious life, and the national unconscious erupting into sudden panics and bug-eyed monster movies, when I was a child, adolescent, student.

As for my personal history, it seems I almost did not live beyond my first week after my birth on that Sunday afternoon. Some ten or so years ago, when I first researched what might have been wrong based on the few clues I'd had over the years, there wasn't a whole lot readily available. Now there's so much more on the Internet. And I found a book in the university library entirely devoted to the research on what came to be known by various names, most simply as Rh Disease.

This disease generally occurs when the mother has Rh negative blood, and the father Rh positive. (The - and + after the ABO blood types indicate this separate Rh Factor.) The cause is somewhat complicated. If the mother has been exposed to Rh positive blood, through a transfusion or a prior childbirth, her blood may develop antibodies to fight off Rh. If a subsequent child is Rh positive, these antibodies may then attack his or her blood.

The result is often catastrophic. Some die in the womb or are stillborn. This may have been a major cause of stillbirths for centuries--Hippocrates mentions something like this disease. But it can attack after birth as well, usually within hours. I knew that babies die of this--some say up to 90%. What I didn't know was the effects some children who live may carry with them, which includes severe organ damage and severe brain damage.

I am missing quite a bit of specific information about my "case," including the mystery of why I was part of a very small minority of first-borns to have this affliction. But the family legend is very clear on one point: everyone was exclaiming on my appearance. My skin was golden. Only my grandmother understood that this meant something was wrong. The golden color is often the first sign of Rh Disease: it indicates jaundice. And things get worse from there.

I know that I received a blood transfusion. I know that the appropriate blood wasn't on hand, and my mother kept a list of names--I think there were six--of possible donors, including the one who donated the blood that was soon placed in my veins.

What I don't know is what kind of transfusion this was. Various kinds were tried for this disease over at least a decade, with limited success, but the most effective ones weren't developed until 1944 and 1945, even 1946. They were various methods of "exchange transfusions," in which nearly all the baby's blood is removed while new blood is dripped in. Standard transfusions had limited success; exchange transfusions were much more effective, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before a preventive vaccine was developed in the mid 1960s.

Few people now even know of the existence of this disease. But it was once a very, very serious matter. It led to suggestions that Rh incompatible couples should not be permitted to have children. Various states introduced legislation that came close to this eugenics approach.

The research to find a vaccine led to many other innovations. Before this, there was no fetal medicine or fetal research. It was considered too invasive. The amniocentesis that's become standard for pregnant women today was developed as a direct result of Rh Disease research.

But it's especially striking to me that so much happened regarding this condition around the year of my birth. The Rh Factor itself had been discovered only in 1940. Blood Banks in general wouldn't be routinely testing for it until 1950. It is just barely possible that some form of exchange transfusion was being done by the end of June 1946 at the western Pennsylvania hospital where I was born. I hope to find out whether that's what I received. It could be that my case was mild enough to respond to a standard transfusion.

It's very rare for a first-born to have this, unless the mother had a transfusion with Rh positive blood earlier in her life. But it wasn't unknown, and the theory was that an even more rare trait of the father's blood was responsible, but these cases usually were comparatively mild. So I might not have been in such mortal danger.

I've pieced together enough to be pretty sure that I was transfused with Rh negative blood. It was probably done over three days. The only effect of the disease that's shown up so far is probably my one deaf ear. I don't know if this exactly qualifies as borrowed time. But it does seem that from the beginning my life was very much embedded in its time and place.

Waters Rising

We were about an hour from Burlington, Iowa--the first photo, pictured today--and I went there a few times when I was a student at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Out of the five years I was in the area (there and at the U. of Iowa in Iowa City), I can recall going out to fill sandbags and so on during three springs.
That's sandbagging this week in Iowa City in the second photo, and part of the flooded U. campus in the third. It was never this bad when I was in the area. I was a freshman at Knox stuck on campus during spring break when I went out with a few other students to help on some levees in the hot sun. A Red Cross truck came by with food and drink, and that's still one of the best meals of my life. Another year we sandbagged at Acquaca, after which we repaired to the Blue Parrot bar. Never anything like this. My thoughts are with those folks today.

Update 6/27: Flooding has been widespread and it continues. I remember being out there on the levee where we were told to fill up muskrat holes. I thought that was kind of silly. But not today--when a single muskrat hole in Winfield, Missouri led to a levee breach, and a town flooded.

Sports Update

Tiger Woods held off Rocco Mediate in a marathon U.S. Open. How Woods did it, while dealing with knee pain, for an extra 18 holes and then a sudden death hole, is quite an epic story. But so is Rocco, at least where I come from. He's from Latrobe, PA, about 10 miles from where I grew up, and where one of my sisters and her husband have pretty much always lived. Latrobe was also the hometown of golf legend Arnold Palmer (the Latrobe airport is named after him now) but though he's cultivated a western PA image, he's more of the Rolling Rock Country Club set than the Rolling Rock Beer plant guys. But a guy named Rocco Mediate, that's more like it. Rocco is 45, pretty old to be out on the tour, and he's made a life for himself playing golf, despite the fact that he rarely wins a tournament. This was his big, big chance. I suppose it satisfies some working class hero dynamic to come close, but not be the winner. But if he had won, that would be quite a story, too.

I've begun watching the Lakers again, who got into the finals with the Boston Celtics. I started watching NBA basketball in the first place when these two teams played each other in the finals just about every year, and the games were tape-delayed and shown late at night. Magic, Kareem, Bird. Some really great games. This year's Lakers looked good in the western semis and championship, but once again they aren't measuring up to an Eastern team that had less formidable competition and had a tougher time with it. The Lakers lost two in Boston, although they came back from 20 behind to almost win the second. They won the third at home, and had a huge lead early in the fourth, but Boston came back to win it, the biggest collapse in NBA history. They got a big lead in the fifth game (also at home) and almost lost that. In his postgame interview, Kobe said the cocky words about going to Boston and winning both games, but I could see he didn't believe it himself. LA has a good team but they're inexperienced, and for the Celtics Doc Rivers is a very good coach, with more seasoned players. I don't see this going past the sixth game.

Father

My father and I had a difficult and incomplete relationship. Now I'm in the decade of my life that was the last of his.

There are times that I am astonished by his life. He came from a coal patch, growing up in a company owned house. By then the coal was about played out there. He was young in the depths of the Depression, when people in such places were starving. The only story I know about him as a young man--which I heard as a child, told by his brothers around a card table with their wives, as well as my father and mother--had him driving somewhere, perhaps West Virginia, looking for work, sleeping in his car, washing his socks in a stream or maybe a gas station rest room, and hanging them on the car windows at night. The socks hanging from the car windows--that's the image that remains.

But he did join the Civil Conservation Corps, and several times during his life I remember him extolling the virtues of the CCC. He was also editor of a camp newspaper, something I don't remember him talking about--but I still have the mimeoed copy of one of these stapled-together, magazine- like periodicals.

He worked all his life, although from a few years after my youngest sister was born, my mother had to work as well, to support the family and our home. He lived long enough to have several grandchildren, although his relationship with them was as distant as it was with his children. Still--supporting a family, buying and maintaining a home, going to a job every day, children and grandchildren--I have done and had none of these. However grudging his support was at times, I always had a roof.

His final illness was ugly and humiliating. At the end he was in the condition of a crippled infant. Although ALS is not supposed to affect the mind, I think it diminished his substantially.

Not long after he died I saw him in a dream. His eyes were very blue. He was smiling; he glowed. He looked at me as if to say, this is the real me.

I remember times in life when his eyes looked almost as blue as that. Is the potential the real? Perhaps after death it is, or in dreams.

After his death, the corneas of his eyes were taken to be used by someone else. Now perhaps someone else in the world is looking out from my father's eyes.

Origins

Why did human beings need religion? Most attempts to imagine origins of human behavior in pre-historic times are remarkably uninformed. People make suppositions based on imagining the thousands of years when we became human about on the level of a Flintstone cartoon.

I don't claim deep knowledge but thanks primarily to reading Paul Shepard I can do better than that. So my answers may be a little different. I surmise that our ancestors at the dawn of humanity had to find ways of dealing with these perplexing observations:

1. I who am alive will die. All living things die.

2. Beings live by the death of other beings, other living things. The animals we admire and learn from, the animals we fear and strike us with awe, we must kill in order to live.

3. In the human realm, people can be good, generous, honorable, just and reasonable. And people can be cruel, vicious, unjust, and their victims are often innocent.

These are basic problems of human existence. They are the more pressing and practical conundrums, although the cosmic questions may have also soon arisen: How did everything get here? Is there anything beyond what I can see? Is there knowledge that can reveal the truth of all this?

Dealing with these paradoxes can be seen as the root of human civilization as well as religion. How they both developed is another story. Perhaps with its root in primate behavior, both civilization and religion became centered on authority figures, on kings. But apart from gods and kings, dealing with these paradoxes is fundamental to human life and human civilization.

Moments

We partake of timelessness even in the rushing flow of time. What is “the moment” but a piece of timelessness? It cannot be measured. Once it is perceived, it is over. Yet we return to certain moments all our lives, even unconsciously. How are they time? And how are they not? Neither apart from time nor of it, the moment stands in for nearly everything else of significance in our lives. Its nature is saturated with shifting multiplicity, and therefore mystery.

The Cruelty of Hope

In 1968, this was a happy day. There weren't many that year. But the night before, on March 31, President Johnson ended a TV address with the words we thought we would never hear, "I will not seek, and I will not accept" the Democratic nomination for reelection to the presidency.

I watched it on the nearest TV set, which was several doors down First Street in Galesburg, Illinois, at the home of my writing professor (who was married, with two young daughters, and not more than 5 years older than me.) It was literally shocking, the kind of statement that displaces time: you feel you started to hear the words before he said them, and then afterwards you can't believe that he actually said them.

LBJ was stubbornly expanding and prosecuting the Vietnam War, and the demonstrations that were growing in size and emotion routinely included the chant, "LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" But now, in an instant, he was not going to be there, and the only two declared Democratic candidates were running to end the war: Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. We were really going to end the war!

Of course, I knew that in some ways it wasn't going to be soon enough for me. I'd already had my pre-induction draft physical, and despite total deafness in one ear, and to the complete shock of several sets of draft counsellors I saw in Chicago, I'd passed. (They were already telling me about how to appeal.) I was a senior in college, and in a few months, my student deferment would end, and with draft calls still very high, I'd probably be drafted. I still hadn't decided what to do, except I knew what I wasn't going to do--I wasn't going to kill any Vietnamese. There was a lot of talk about options, but in the end no one else could really understand this decision--not parents or teachers, friends or certainly girlfriends. You were alone on this one.

But that was a couple of months away at least. I was about to direct a play I'd written, with its own statement about all this, and after that I could probably tie up the draft process long enough to somehow work for Robert Kennedy's campaign. And it was April--spring was short but intensely beautiful in Galesburg--and the barrier of LBJ was gone.

There'd been dancing in the streets on campuses across America the night before. There hadn't been anything that public on our small campus, but we'd probably celebrated enough to be seeing the first April morning through a slight fuzz. There was hope now-- the war might end, and that immense burden on every single hour of every day.

April 1--April Fool's Day. Before the month was out, Martin Luther King would be assassinated, and hardly more than a month after that, I would spend my graduation day watching Robert Kennedy's funeral. Then would come the hot shambles of the Chicago convention, Humphrey, Nixon and more war--much more war. "April is the cruelest month," T.S. Eliot wrote, as we students of literature well knew.

Another North Coast variation--instead of buying
and/or cutting down a fir tree, we use the pruning
of a redwood tree in the yard. This is last year's.

Christmas Past Present

We had a quiet but good Christmas. We visited with our far-flung families by phone: I talked with my sisters in western PA., Margaret with her mother in Virgina, son in New Mexico and daughter in San Francisco. They and their families, and the rest of our families, all are healthy and solvent, so that's a good Christmas right there.

Our Christmas dinner included wild salmon, a very North Coast dish. My childhood Christmas memories also include fish, but on Christmas Eve at my Italian grandparents. They both came over from the same village in Italy (they'd grown up on the same street) in the 1920s (my grandfather first, then he sent the money back to bring my grandmother and my mother, who was not yet 4.) There were a number of families from their village who came at around the same time to settle in the same town, or a nearby one. In fact much of the substantial Italian immigrant population in our western Pennsylvania county came from the same region of Italy, the Abruzzi.

Theirs was the tradition of the meatless Christmas Eve--or vigil--dinner. Many Italian regions shared it, with variations. There were a variety of seafood dishes--different kinds of fish and other seafood (including squid), prepared in various baked, broiled and fried ways, served in the meal or just passed around as appetizers and complements to the main dishes, plus pasta with a fish sauce.

This tradition seems all but unknown where I am now, along with other food connections to my Italian family past. There are Italians here--including our nearest neighbor, who was born there--but they are mostly northern Italians who came here as diary farmers. Their food is much different. They would think of us as southern Italians, although geographically the Abruzzi is about dead center on the boot, on the Adriatic side. Sort of how San Francisco is called northern California, though we are almost as far north from the Bay as SF is from LA.

On my own, I tried to maintain some of the vigil tradition when I lived in Pittsburgh, where it was much easier. The fish dish I liked the best as a child was the fried smelts, and when I tried to find smelts here in Arcata, at first nobody had heard of them, and then someone told me, "around here, we call that 'bait.'" So I didn't ask for them again. (But it looks like the lowly smelts are about to have their environmental revenge.) These days the most I do to stay somewhat connected with those days is bake some jumbalone, which is a family recipe for a rather simple but tasty cookie/cake kind of thing.

Beginning with my generation, family in western PA has mostly lost the vigil meal tradition, as have others removed from the direct immigrant experience and no longer living in the old towns and neighborhoods. But I was pleased to see in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that there's something of a revival underway---only now it requires a course in how to prepare this meal, known as the feast of the seven fishes (a name I hadn't heard before.) Calamari, Baccala and sphagetti with tuna sauce--I remember those, and more.

But I do occasionally make sphagetti with fish sauce--my mother often made it on Fridays, back when you went to hell for eating meat that day. But when I make it it's not with tuna sauce. I use salmon. I got the idea from a friend. Since he's Karuk (an Indian tribe indigenous to this place), I'm an immigrant in his country. But it's nice to share traditions, especially when they're tasty.

Big Ben earlier this season in an old-style Pittsburgh
Steelers' uniform, celebrating the team's 75th year.

Them Steelers 2007

Last night the Pittsburgh Steelers broke a two game losing streak in St. Louis, winning 41-24, but losing their star running back, Willie Parker, for the rest of the season with a broken leg. It's been that kind of season, in an odd kind of year.

The year is odd because there are several teams with exceptionally good records, and a number of teams with very bad ones. With three games left in the season, Miami became the last team not to have won a game. On the other end, several teams have lost only two or three, and the New England Patriots are undefeated, with a strong chance that they will end the season that way. For the uninitiated, this is pretty unusual.

So the Steelers, in their first year with new coach Mike Tomlin, seemed to be having a very good year by ordinary standards. They in fact led their league in several key categories, Willie Parker being the league-leading runner at the time of his injury. Several players, notably quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and receiver Hines Ward, broke single season and all time team records. They started well and at one time had a 7-2 record and then 9-3.

But their first losses of the season were to weaker teams, which suggested problems in the long run, especially with the dominance of New England, and the near-dominance of Indianapolis in their conference, with Dallas and the surging Green Bay Packers piling up wins in the other. So despite their record and statistical dominance, by mid season I had the feeling they weren't quite up to the standards of at least New England and Indianapolis.

Then they lost to a team that had only one win (the New York Jets in overtime), barely won against Miami when it was winless (though under horrible field and weather conditions), and then the past two games, fell hard to New England, and were outplayed in a close game by Jacksonville.

So their victory last night was important, though it hasn't on its own gotten them into the playoffs yet. The Steelers lost late season games and almost didn't get into the playoffs in 2005, when they became the first wild card team to run the table on the road and win the Super Bowl, defeating New England and Indianapolis to get there. That's less likely to happen this year. At this point in the season, the very good teams with the fewest injuries have the advantage, and in 2005 the Steelers were just getting injured players back in the lineup towards the end of the season, so they were able to peak at just the right time. Now, especially with the injury to Parker, that's not so true. Besides which, New England has been healthy all season, and they still are. It's unlikely anyone is going to beat them in the playoffs this year, as long as they stay that way.

But when they are playing well, the Steelers are still tremendous fun to watch. I could watch only the highlights of this game, since as a Pittsburgh exile sans satellite hookup, I am nowhere near a broadcast. (But it was exiles like me that comprised an estimated half of the crowd in St. Louis--when you hear the crowd roar on the Steelers' big plays, it sounds like a home game.) Big Ben has become a big play threat: backed up and throwing from the end zone in his first play of the game, he threw a pass fifty yards in the air and completed it for an 80 yard gain.

Right now, the Steelers have big time players in the skill positions, but uncharacteristically are weakest in the offensive line and lately in the defense, partly due to injuries. So while you can't count the Steelers out of any game with Big Ben and Hines Ward on the field, they may just have to survive this season with a taste of success and a hunger for it all next year.

Between last season and this, I spent a couple of weeks back in western PA, and even though it was late spring, the Steelers were always a presence. A bus boy in a cafe started a conversation with me about them. I accompanied my two best friends to a bar, where I was the surprised participant in a conversation about the Steelers as I used the urinal in the men's room, with a voice in the one stall, a complete stranger who I never saw. He was probably having a running conversation with everyone who came in. There was also a woman in the supermarket wearing a t-shirt that said, "If you ain't a Steeler fan, you ain't worth s--t."

So I could hardly be surprised when I read on a sports blog the reaction of a young woman who flew in to Pittsburgh for the first time, to see the Seattle Seahawks (the Steelers- 2005 Super Bowl opponent) play at Hines Field. She remarked that the first person she met on arrival was a knowledgeable football and Steelers fan. She doesn't encounter that many in Seattle. But within her first few hours in the 'burgh, she realized it wasn't a lucky coincidence: it is the norm. (And the Steelers won that game, 21-0.)

This season also marks the 75th year of the Steelers, one of the oldest teams in professional football, and a source of local pride and identity for much of that time. I suppose in every place that is a place, there is a point where the vulgar and the exalted meet, and where the present extends the past. For Pittsburghers wherever they may now be, it's the Steelers.

Update 12/26: As a result of games they didn't play, the Steelers are in the playoffs as their division champion, and their first round opponent will most likely be Jacksonville at home, a team they just lost to. But they're pretty evenly matched, and in that case, it's hard to beat a team twice. So it should be an interesting game, and if they win it, New England would likely be next. The Steelers play a now meaningless game this Sunday, while the New England Patriots could break the NFL record for the longest perfect regular season on Saturday. Meanwhile, Big Ben of the Steelers was named NFL Player of the Week on offense, with a "perfect" quarterback rating (whatever that means) in the Rams game.

A Book Sale and Sadness

I recently attended a book sale at the Humboldt University Library, and not for the first time. They sell books that have been donated, and books the library is discarding. I have complex feelings about both categories, and the sale itself.

I don't mind buying books that have been donated, though when I donate books to the library, I mean for them to wind up on the library shelves, not in a jumble sale. On the other hand, I sometimes find myself buying discarded library books just so they won't be thrown away.

The whole idea of discarding books chills me. I mean discarding books that aren't going to be replaced with new copies. I suppose it makes sense to get rid of technical and scientific texts that are no longer useful except for historical documentation and interest. But other choices bother me. I noticed at this sale they had evidently cleared several shelves of books on the work of Henry James, as well as books on and by William Dean Howells. James does not happen to be an author I'm much interested in, although it's possible that I'll live long enough to develop an interest. One of several comments made by Norman Mailer (may he rest in peace) that stays with me is that a book and a reader have to be ready for each other, and that can change over time.

I am also reminded of a line in Wallace Shawn's play, The Designated Mourner, to the effect that a certain person who'd just died was the last expert on the poetry of John Donne. These days that's entirely possible.

So now where will I go for books on Henry James? I use this library a lot, and once I did encounter on the shelves, among the books I was examining for one of my personal quixotical research projects, several volumes with little pieces of paper sticking out of them, indicating that they were scheduled to be discarded. Scheduled for demolition! It's gotten so that I continue to renew several books I have just so they can't discard them.

Of course they need the money from the sales--especially because of budget cutbacks. This library bought no new books for several years, and buys few this year. I'm not sure if I were a prospective student, I would even consider coming to a school with a library that has stopped buying books.

And I'm no saint about the sale either. I usually go in the afternoon, make my selections, and wait for the closing bell when you get a grocery bag full of books for a buck. At which time I rescue as many books as I can. It's partly book greed, of course. It's been my major addiction for years. I have many more books than I will ever read.

Including one I got at this sale--a 1912 copy of Modern Instances, a novel by William Dean Howells. I got it as a helpless gesture of respect for the author. It's not the first time I've done that, although this is probably the one I am least likely to read. I have found books at this sale that I've read and enjoyed, books that I just enjoy owning, and books that have been helpful. Though I once actually found an obscure book I was looking for, I more often found helpful books I hadn't known existed. Serendipity has always been a good research method for me. This sale has helped build the house of books that shelters me, so I can't complain. But I do wonder just what it is I'm witnessing.

from the Knox Magazine

Captain Toothpaste Returns


WHO IS CAPTAIN TOOTHPASTE? asked the bold print on the last page of the Knox Magazine spring 2007 issue. That’s easy. I am.

Or I was in 1968. I cut a record under that name, which was included in an issue of the Knox College literary magazine. The song was called “Nightdove.” Thanks to Knox Magazine, you can hear it yourself, right here. That’s me singing and playing guitar. I also wrote it--my real name is on the label as well, paired with a “J.Rider” as co-author. That was me as well.

I was also the co-editor of the magazine, with Wendy Saul. It was called “The Siwasher” then. Knox College was known as “Old Siwash” from stories written about it using that mythical name. It also turned out to be something of a racial slur which Native Americans found offensive. Our Spring 1968 issue was the last one with that name. Some years later, the school officially dropped references to Siwash, and adopted a new name for its sports teams.

The magazine had followed the same format for the years I was there: student stories, poems and reproductions of art works. After publishing such an issue in the fall, we decided to go multimedia. We broke out of the book with 8x10 reproductions of the work of four photographers, plus an art poster suitable for hanging. We talked a lot about how popular music in the 60s was a vital and representative art form for our generation, so we wanted to include records. We kept to our budget for all this by collecting the usual stories and poems in a booklet with a generic cover. And we put it all—book, photos, poster and two records---in a manilla envelope, with a poem by Howard Partner on the flap.

The record with the hot pink label (both were small but played at 33 1/3 format) featured Rick Clinebell’s rendition of the Joni Mitchell tune, “The Urge for Going,” on one side, and three cuts on the other side: a piano duet of an original work by Karen Janecek, a tune by the Knox folk group, Four in the Morning, and a rock tune by the Bushes.

The record with the yellow label had three tunes by the bluegrass Stoney Hollow Boys: Rick Lindner, Tom Stern and Mark Brooks, all from our class of '68. And on the other side, “Nightdove” by Captain Toothpaste.

Rick Clinebell was our music director. I was about to take the tapes of all the music to a record company in one of the Quad Cities (Davenport?) when he rushed me into a practice room in the Fine Arts Center with his guitar to re-record “Nightdove,” because something was wrong with the original tape. So I played and sang it just once, messed up the lyrics a little, but that was all the time I had. That’s what’s on the record now.

The recording studio where the tapes were turned into masters and then into records was run by an older gentleman and his wife. She loved the name “Captain Toothpaste.” She said she thought of it at night when she brushed her teeth and it made her laugh. While she was telling us this, her husband was at his mixing board, and asked me if I’d like some echo added to my song. I said sure. I was there with Wendy and Barbara Cottral. It was a sunny spring day. Later we had sandwiches at a little airport, watching small planes take off and land.

The print part of that last issue of the Siwasher were stories by Barbara Ann Cottral (now the famous story writer, Barbara Bean) and Jeremy Gladstone, a play by Sherwood Kiraly (now the famous novelist, Sherwood Kiraly), and poems by Nicholas Brockunier, Harvey Sadow (the world famous ceramicist), Wendy Saul (the famous writer,) Anne Maxfield, Bob Epstein, Phil Ralston, Linda Pohle and me. The next fall the magazine became “Catch.” I had a story in that first issue, too.


I don’t really remember but the whole multimedia thing was probably my idea. Influenced partly by Marshall McLuhan, I was fascinated with the idea of creating interrelated works in various media, specifically of publishing a novel that would be packaged with its own movie and soundtrack. It was barely practical then, and of course it’s much more doable now. I did something like it in the mid 1980s, when I recorded two songs (“The Malling of America” and “Mall Rats”) in the studio with musicians and backup singers, etc., to go along with my book, The Malling of America. The songs were a big hit at my speaking engagements for awhile, and actually got some radio play.

The “Captain Toothpaste” identity was very 60s, of course. Although there’s a homage in there to Howdy Dowdy, too, who was sponsored by Colgate toothpaste, creators of Happy Tooth and Mr. Tooth Decay. Also some satire on commercial culture that included the music industry.

Especially with that little echo added, “Nightdove” turned out to be kind of country surrealism. It reflects a lot I was feeling and thinking about at the time, especially in view of the world we were being drafted into a few weeks later.

Of course I’ve long since left such youthful preoccupations and pretensions behind. And I’m much too mature to call myself Captain Toothpaste. These days I’m known to readers of Daily Kos, Soul of Star Trek and everywhere on the Internet as Captain Future.

It is as Captain Future that I was invited to chair a panel this fall at the 40th anniversary Star Trek convention in Seattle, where I met some of my readers, including Walter Koenig (Chekov) and Jonathan Frakes (Riker). I’ve met Leonard Nimoy (Spock), Marina Sirtis (Troi), George Takei (Sulu), Levar Burton (Georgi LaForge) and Nichelle Nichols (Ahura), who introduced me to Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on ground not on this Earth. But Captain Future is not all about space. The Climate Crisis on the only world we’ve got is a primary preoccupation of my main site, Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily.

But Captain Toothpaste is a part of me, too. Save the nightdove, save the world.

Update 9/9/07: Just got the fall issue of the Knox Magazine, with their follow-up. I don't know why they won't mention blog addresses, especially since they basically got their information from a link to this post. They did add some information about the Stoney Hollow Boys. I don't remember Rick Lindner ever being called "Willy," but they name him and Tom Stern, but also Peter Schramm, former professor of biology, and Ken Pahel, another faculty member, as the string bass player. No mention of Mark Brooks. I distinctly remember him playing a washtub bass, the first I'd ever seen. I wonder whose memory is faulty here. I suppose I can be forgiven for forgetting Peter Schramm, since he failed me in a course which led to my never graduating. It was a course in evolution--pretty ironic, since failing the course selected me as not among the fittest, and doubly ironic because I've written a lot on the subject of evolution since, and have become the go-to guy for reviewing books on it--and science in general--at the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. I also created the official web page for one of his predecessors, Paul Shepard, one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, about evolution and so much more.

I also see that our 1967 anti-war poetry reading got into the history of Old Main, and that the post-Kent State/Jackson State takeover of the deans offices in 1970 is described as "peaceful," which it was, apart from the rock band playing in the hall. It was scheduled to be less peaceful, when the college decided to call the cops and have me arrested (or so I'm told.) But we left before then--specifically we declared victory and went home, which was our solution for how to get out of Vietnam.

Though Knox likes to give "credit" for leading that action to former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta, it was actually me. He wasn't even my chief of staff! Though they did get the name we called ourselves right--"The Students Are Revolting." I ask you, who else but me would have come up with that? I was reading about Dada at the time--and reading our generation's dadaist, Abbie Hoffman. But more about all that another time.

Shakespeare's Birthday

April 23 is designated as Shakespeare's birthday. It's also the date of his death. There's some factual basis for this date--William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, when it was the custom for that to happen 3 days after birth. But there's some evidence his family celebrated April 22 as his actual birthday.

However it is parsed, it's appropriate for the greatest known playwright to have his birth celebrated in spring, for the springtime festivals from time immemorial were the wellsprings of theatre. So much of Shakespeare's theatre is related specifically to the festival tradition in England.

Back at Knox College when I was a student, the English and Theatre departments threw a Shakespeare's Birthday party on the closest weekend. When everyone was sufficiently lubricated, scripts would be passed around, and classic scenes performed. I recall doing the Porter scene from Macbeth one year. These festive readings all led up to the main tradition of the party: our shy, older English department chairman (though I suppose he may have been only in his 50s then) would read Romeo in the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, with one of an endlessly renewed selection of lovely female students.

The Shakespeare's Birthday party was a rite of spring at Knox, where the winters on the Illinois prairie were long and hard, and spring was short but spectacularly green and beautiful.

One of Shakespeare's greatest plays, As You Like It, begins in a harsh winter and ends in a magical spring. In honor of the day, I've posted extensively on it, over at Stage Matters.

R. I. P.: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

He survived Pall Malls for 84 years, and it was a fall resulting in brain injury that led to his death. Kurt Vonnegut has been part of my life and close to my soul since the 1960s, when my fiction writing teacher who'd been his student at the Iowa Workshop got us reading his early novels, just a few months before the world discovered him big time with Slaughterhouse Five. Of contemporary writers, I felt closest in ways I can't explain to two: Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

His New York Times obit is here.

Vonnegut was one of the voices we clung to in those bitter years of the late 60s. His voice was so distinctive that it was something that writers attached to rhythmic mimickry had to get loose of. No sooner had you broken the habit of writing like J.D. Salinger, Hemingway and Joseph Heller, along came Vonnegut. So it goes.

He was a countercultural voice who came by it honestly; he earned it. His use of science fiction motifs was part of it, especially for me. In later years he took on the appearance as well as the mantle of our 20th/21st century Mark Twain.

I've known so many people who knew him, and I've seen him on various screens and of course read him, so I feel I did know him, in that peculiar way in which he didn't know me from Adam. I encountered him in person at least three times I can recall. He spoke in Pittsburgh, where the U.S. Army had once sent him to study engineering. His speeches, especially at colleges, are legendary--even the ones he didn't actually deliver. They were full of wit and practical wisdom, and lots of provocation of thought and feeling, worth any 20 political or academic talks.

Before that, he passed through my mind as I was walking in Boston one afternoon, idly thinking I might run into him. Late that night, while sitting in an unprestiguous, noisy, overlit restaurant with members of a rock band I was supposed to be writing about (the drummer lamenting the absense of the groupies he had been promised), I glanced across the room and saw Kurt Vonnegut looking at us, and not real kindly. Such a coincidence is common in Vonnegut's fictional universe, where there are "leaks" between worlds and time is permeable. It actually happened to me twice within a short time; the other time I was in O'Hare airport thinking about Paul Simon, and a minute later there he was. It was weird enough to be a little scary, and so it's never happened again.

The last time I remember was in Manhattan. It was on the street and I saw him walking towards me, wearing just a comfortable indoor sweater on a cold coat-and-scarf day. I recognized him and smiled; he looked at me the way I was often looked at in New York--that ' are you somebody I should know?' look--and when he'd concluded I wasn't, he looked away. But I have that picture of him, walking the midtown streets as if from one room of his house to another.

I was talking about a short story of his just the other day. Someone, I forget who, has recently written a satire in which the suggested solution to social security and medical care shortfalls because of aging baby boomers is to kill them--humanely, I assume. Apparently this idea is striking a chord, which doesn't surprise me. Vonnegut wrote about it in the 1950s, in a story called "Welcome to the Monkey House" (also the title of his first story collection.) Because of overpopulation, old people were encouraged to visit their government sponsored Ethical Suicide Parlors. It was a wicked idea, but what makes writers cherish Vonnegut is his imagination, his detail. These Parlors were housed next to Howard Johnsons, their purple roof next to the orange roof of HoJos. They all had Hostesses, stewardess-like young women who humor the old folks but efficiently hurry them along to take their injection and die peacefully in the Barcolounger. You absolutely know that when these places are established, this is what they will be like.

I've only quoted him here once, from a 2006 speech in which he said: “The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected.” That's Vonnegut in a nutshell: vivid, combative, funny, outrageous, passionate, pushing at the edge but with wit and meaning.

Vonnegut often wrote about Kilgore Trout, his alter ego--a version of who he might well have been if it hadn't been for the sudden success of Slaughterhouse Five, a poor and obscure science fiction writer. In Vonnegut's last novel, Timequake, Kilgore Trout dies. He was 84.