New Songs

Unelectric, unmixed, unmastered, unpolished, unmetronomic, and completely one-track-one-takes. Excuses out of the way... there are five new songs of mine off to the side. Just my humble contribution to the wide world of artistic expression.

Spring Is Coming

It is coming, and you can tell when the sunny side of the roof starts to clear.

The Female & The Frontier - Now I Get It

Janice Hocker Rushing, in her essay Evolution of "The New Frontier" in Alien and Aliens: Patriarchal Co-optation of the Feminine Archetype, from the book Screening The Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film, edited by Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwalt Jr., (take a breath), enlightens me with her analysis:

"Despite the relegation of women to the periphery, however, the frontier myth has never lacked for rich imagery of the feminine. As Annette Kolodny points out, the land in the frontier myth has typically been imagined metaphorically as female. In The Lay of the Land, she documents the connection between the two in male frontier literature, concluding that 'the American landscape has not been experienced as something similar to, or merely comparable to, but as the female principle of gratification itself, comprising all the qualities that Mother, Mistress, and Virgin traditionally represent for men.'"

Now you know, and now I know, that is why I like reading Louis L'Amour.

Understanding O'Connor

"We are not living in times when the realist of distances is understood or well thought of, even though he may be in the dominant tradition of American letters. Whenever the public is heard from, it is heard demanding a literature which is balanced and which will somehow heal the ravages of our times. In the name of social order, liberal thought, and sometimes even Christianity, the novelist is asked to be the handmaid of his age."

(The Grotesque in Southern Fiction from Mystery & Manners, page 46)