1. Jail is always a possibility. If you believe Jack Kerouac, he never meant to hurt a fly. Or, more specifically, a mouse. It was a lesson he learned from older brother Gerard, who died at the age of nine and was revered while living by all who knew him, including the nuns from nearby […]
It started simply enough. This past Thursday evening on Facebook, Ron Cooper, novelist and Philosophy prof, posted a link to a Washington Post piece that begins this way: “Friday morning, America’s great poets will wake up to find that someone has TP-ed their trees and scrawled ‘COWARD’ on their doors.” To be clear, the Washington […]
You know this one. Once upon a time, you go on a date. It’s been a while. Too long. Like that stretch of desert that gives way to hallucinations that give way to death and vultures that descend and strip your bones of the sad meat you thought set you apart from others. The date […]
Some nights Whiskey Tub gets drunk rereading books it loves. Sometimes the cause of drunkenness is the hole someone thought to put in a bottle. Dangerous, beautiful thing, that opening. Sometimes Whiskey Tub gets drunk on love. How reliable is Whiskey Tub when drunk? And which obstacle, corn whiskey or the brainwashed heart, is more […]
Tonight’s Whiskey Tub, obscured by Painter’s Ladder (constant companion), rereads two first books by native-born American Bottom writers, both of whom are seldom associated with the region. To be fair, Eugene B. Redmond, Poet Laureate of East St. Louis (St. Clair County) and Emeritus Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (Madison County), is […]
Gasoline Lake, depicted in this old National Enquirer piece, is my Jefferson, and American Bottom my Yoknapatawpha. Those in the know recognize in these references William Faulkner, who signed the hand-drawn map that he included in Absalom, Absalom! (my favorite novel) “Sole Owner & Proprieter,” which you’ll see me using on the home page of […]
It’s the latter months of 1972. I’m a freshman at Eastern Illinois University. So is John Malkovich. I doubt that we ever met, and we both transferred soon enough to other schools and continued on our separate paths, his lined with millions of dollars, mine with pages. Twenty-seven years later, you could enter, as I […]
