Word: shit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...same bitterness, powerfully expressed, lies at the heart of nearly every conversation John Gwaltney has recorded in his new book, whose title means "ordinary" in one American Black argot. One man, a coal miner, says this of whites: "Just thinking about them makes me feel like I have swallowed shit. I mean, a rat or a maggot is better than the best white cat who ever drew breath. Just looking at those things makes me want to spit up. Everything they do is rotten." Or this from a cook: "These people hide their dirt or make everybody...
...follow it in any sort of literary sense is ridiculous. They talk about Shepard writing in dream language, and the bearded wunderkinds at NYU write introductions to his plays that speak of ritual Indian drug use and the tradition of the shaman--and all of them are full of shit. You can't follow Shepard from word to word, because his transitional sentences are emotional. His characters are suffering from psychotic jet-lag and even though the fact that their minds have been careening from one end of the cortex to the other cannot really count for travel anymore...
...they'd land on the back wheel, cackling. Stop for a beer, watch a few others come up, and then go right back down and start over again. "Do you practice this much?" I asked one man, who stood at the top in his cycle club colors. "Practice? Shit, man, this is for fun. Why would we practice...
...through the midnight movies or eat ice cream on Bailey's shaky chairs. There are only so many people reading poetry by the Charles you can stand--especially if you're working in a wheelchair factory. It behooved you to make the hundred bucks. You have a shit job and after a while you feel like shit. One afternoon in Hamilton, someone came by under the palm trees muttering and shaking his head. My friends thought it might be another assassination--it was that kind of muttering. When we found out it was Elvis who died, we didn't much...
...wasted life." Or this soldier, on his first battle: "I kept thinking, 'If only I could talk to the cocksucker firing at me, we'd get along, everything would be all right.' I just had this overwhelming feeling that...we're just pawns in this fucking thing, throwing the shit at each other." These soldiers seem to distinguish something about Vietnam that set it apart from other wars. Unfortunately, they don't explain what it is. So we must be tantalized by the idea (probably correct, I think) that the ugliness of Vietnam was unique for those who fought...